“Where are you a bishop then?” she asked, eyes darting around his drawing room, drinking in the fur and velvet, taffeta and silk.
“I’m tempted to say Bath and Wells,” he chuckled, perched earnestly on the armchair. His guest had slipped off her shoes and, cat-like, tucked her feet comfortably away.
“Baths and wells? Because they’re both water symbols? Is that how it works? Like the star signs? There’s a bishop for fire and earth too I bet.”
“Sort of, only it’s more complicated. That’s why the Church exists; to make the transparent grey. Well, the Church of England anyway.” He patted a cushion with the two forefingers of his left hand, then got up to pour.
“I’m Scottish. Well, half. My dad was Scottish. My mum too,” she said as he handed her a cup of tea, milky grey and sickly looking.
“Doesn’t that make you entirely Scottish?” he asked, stirring his spoon around his delicate porcelain cup, even though he hadn’t added any sugar, in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner. His fingers, three of which had once been broken in a youthful amateur boxing bout, were trembling.
“That’s a beautiful cup,” she whispered. “And no, he wasn’t my real Dad,” she replied, returning to normal volume. “Just passing through.”
“What do you like about it?” he said, raising the fine china towards her.
“The cup?” she said. “It’s pretty, all tidy.”
“It’s Willow pattern,” he said. “And when I have finished drinking from it, you shall have it.”
“I don’t accept that sort of payment. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry my dear. You shall be paid in full. This is just a … a token of my affection. And perhaps one from you?” He closed his eyes and pursed his lips.
“Can’t kiss you I’m afraid. If I made an exception for you I’d have to make one for all the other bishops.”
“There have been other bishops?” His eyes glanced at the large volume of Crockfords Who’s Who of Clergy nestled in the oak bookcase behind his guest’s head. “Do you remember their names?”
“A John. A couple of Peters. What’s your name?”
“Martin.”
“You don’t seem the type to call a girl like me. So why? Why now?”
The bishop put down his spoon in the saucer. It tinkled then lay to rest. At the end of the handle was a tiny golden eagle, wings raised, claws gripping the silver, eyes the size of sugar grains.
“There are three reasons.”
Outside the French windows, a dunnock skirted across the paving, shyly seeking crumbs. A lush rhododendron bloom fell on to the path at the neck of the drive and the carmine petals scattered. The sky brooded as clouds coughed past but decided not to spit out their rain.
“Firstly, a parishioner has approached me asking for sexual guidance and I feel incapable of providing it as I am a virgin. Secondly …”
“Hang on,” she said. “A virgin?”
“Yes.”
“As in, you’ve never had sex before?”
“That is correct.”
“How have you avoided it?”
The face of a woman rose, unwelcome, to the brim of the bishop’s memory, a face he had yearned to touch and to savour. A face that was now a skull.
“Well, for many years it avoided me. Perhaps not all women find a paunch and beard attractive.”
“All women would like that spoon though,” she said, suggestively.
“My dear, you must have the spoon as well as the cup. Secondly, despite years of searching, I cannot find anything in the Bible that forbids intercourse between consenting adults for the purposes of pleasure alone.”
“Not pleasure alone.”
“Yes, payment is unfortunate because the Bible does forbid prostitution. Yet Jesus himself shed kindness on a woman of ill-repute and I have justified it to myself with the white lie that my payment to you is in fact a generous gift.”
“So, sex before marriage is OK now for Christians? It’s just that I have a friend who has to keep getting engaged to men in order to shag them. What’s the last reason then?”
The bishop rubbed his nose and pondered whether he should polish his glasses. The woman in front of him, she was early forties, he estimated, had just a shadow of make-up illuminating her face and a decorous short-sleeved floral dress, most appropriate for a mock-Tudor bishop’s mansion. He had never filled his home with enough flowers; another regret. He had spent too many hours reading proofs for the existence of God (surely, he thought, it would be easy for an omniscient, omnipresent and really rather popular God to make it clearer He exists? An advertising campaign around Christmas didn’t seem quite enough. The dinosaurs had done much better on that score. Skeletons. Teeth. Footprints. Yes, a sandal-print of Jesus could have been useful. Or a postcard he’d sent to Mary from his travels). A fearful amount of hours in his clerical life had been spent listening to complaints about fabric and gravestones and female vicars. He hoped he had been a sympathetic ear. On the other hand, perhaps he should have told them all to bugger off.
“Ah, the third reason. I don’t have long to live. Perhaps only a few months.”
“What sort of ill?”
“Nothing catching.”
“Do you mind if I know exactly?”
“No of course not, my dear. Entirely understandable. Cancer. The boring one.”
“Where?”
“Liver.”
“Nasty. You look alright though. Up to the job.”
“Yes I think so.”
“It’s all working then? Down there?”
“I assume so.”
“What else is out of bounds then?”
“Adultery.”
“Oh.” The guest unfurled her legs, placed them on the floor and smoothed out her dress.
“You’re not married are you, my dear? Because then I’d be committing a sin.”
“He’s dead.”
“You seem young for a widow.”
“Married young.”
“May I ask how he died, if it isn’t too troubling for you?”
“Motorbike accident.”
“Is that how you came to be a prostitute?”
“No, he was a punter.”
“Is that common?”
“Marrying a punter? No, it doesn’t make any sense, money-wise. Still, it wasn’t a bad way to go. Quick. You afraid of death?”
“No, most people aren’t actually scared of death any more. With all the improvements in palliative care it’s not even terribly painful nowadays. It’s probably just a pause, a slipping away. Sleep unburdened by dreams. No, I’m scared of what I’ve spent my career, life really, trying to get other people to believe in: eternal life.”
The wind picked up, blowing a handful of petals high against the window, then lulled again. The petals scattered.
“Death isn’t great foreplay, is it?” he said, smiling coyly. “Shall we get started? The money is in the envelope on the table. Along with a card.”
“A card? A credit card?”
“No, a thank you card. And a chocolate orange.”
“Never had one of those.”
“They are exquisite. One of the finest pleasures known to an ageing bishop is to eat every segment in one sitting. Now, I have something I’d like to show you.”
“Whip it out then and I’ll give it a tug to warm you up.”
“Ah, no, I see, not that. A medical document.” The bishop rose and retrieved from a scarlet box file a letter signed with a doctor’s scrawl, stapled to a graph. “It’s a measure of my sperm count. That figure there.”
“Three?”
“Yes, it’s in millions, but still very low.”
“Well I wouldn’t worry my love. I won’t be counting ‘em.”
“It’s just that, what the figure indicates is that I would be extremely unlikely to impregnate you. The cancer treatment, and, as I mentioned before, I am a virgin and so don’t have anything to offer you in the way of infectious diseases. So I was wondering if we could not use a prophylactic? You see, this will be the only time and I would like it to be the real thing.”
“Double.”
“Sorry?”
“It’ll cost you double. And I can’t promise you won’t catch anything from me. But it won’t be anything deadly.”
“I’m dying quite fast enough as it is. Let me fetch the money.”
“I trust you. It can wait until after.”
She stood in front of the bishop and reached behind to start undoing her zip. Expertly, she wriggled out of her dress. She kneeled in front of him, a full crescent smile rising from her mouth all the way up to her eyes, her face enhanced by a chink of light shining through the window as the May sun finally made its presence felt. This is what I’ve been missing out on all these years, the bishop thought. He sat there, hoping for a stirring in his groin. But instead he felt rather hot and uncomfortable, and a strong urge to urinate. He took her hand, with its scent of lilac hand cream, and held it against his cheek. Tattooed on to her wrist was a single initial: K. He held the hand, palm upturned in his lap.
“Your husband?” he enquired.
“Son. I hated being pregnant. It was like being an overbaked potato. But being a mum …” She fell silent and the carefully painted smile dropped from her face.
“You have a child then?”
“He died too.”
It occurred to the bishop that there is widow, for those who have lost a husband, and orphan, for children who have lost their parents, but no word for someone who has lost a child. A bereft. That’s what they should be called. “He died in his sleep. Wouldn’t drop off and it was just the two of us and I was so tired. When I woke up he was all cold.”
The bishop gently stroked the K on her wrist then entwined his fingers around hers.
“The inquest said he had a heart murmur. Would have died anyway. That’s what they said.”
Still kneeling, she crept forward to lay her head on the flabby stomach jigsawed beneath the rapidly deteriorating liver.
“Is he with Jesus?” she whispered.
The bishop looked up to a faded stitched image of Christ hanging above his mantlepiece. The Redeemer was surrounded by unrealistically pink children, oversized fish and a rather stern-looking apostle. A familiar quote ran along the bottom: “Let the childrun come to me for the kindom of heaven belongs to such as.” A present at a party for all the Sunday school children in the diocese, held in the bishop’s garden decades ago.
“We feel far more guilty than God ever intended us to be,” the bishop said. “I knew a woman, pregnant with her second child. She discovered a small lump on her head, just behind her ear. That lump turned out to be a brain tumour, which required immediate treatment, but the treatment would kill her unborn child. Without it, though, the prognosis was desperate and she risked leaving her young daughter without a mother. She came to me seeking advice.
“I want to be able to tell you that the tumour disappeared of its own accord, that God blessed her by performing a miracle in that small patch of cells by her brain, and the decision did not have to be made. But that is not what happened.”
He stroked the peach-scented head of hair in his lap, absent-mindedly registering the cluster of brown-grey roots descending to artificial blonde tips.
“Hush, my child,” he muttered, as his trousers became sodden with the sudden release of a thousand bridled tears.
Image: A willow pattern cup and saucer standing on a lace cloth. The willow pattern is Blue chinese buildings and trees on a white background. From Etsy
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