SEVENTEEN

Wednesday, December 16, 1925

Before his lunchtime meeting with Father Trollope, Graham walked Paddy round the cemetery on steep Mansfield Road. He had passed the large space many times. It was only ten minutes’ walk from his flat but, until today, he’d never gone inside. Opposite the entrance, across the Mansfield road, he was interested to notice an old iron gate, behind which was the entrance to what looked to be a cave.

The Rock cemetery was very full. Ornate gravestones lined the side visible from Forest Road. Downhill, towards the Recreation Ground, the graves became more various, ranging from the decrepit to the extravagant, elaborate arrangements with statues of angels and carvings of cherubs. Some bore moral homilies extolling patience, destiny and hope. They thought highly of themselves, the early Victorians, if their memorials were to be believed. Above one large tomb, in letters a foot high, was a single word: resignation.

At the bottom of the cemetery, which ended with an unclimbable wall, the graves were overgrown and derelict. In a few places, they appeared to have been disturbed. There’d be no relative living to tend to them. Here, the ground suddenly dropped to reveal a two-hundred-yard wide, twenty-yard deep dip with a network of caves on one side. It could make a good Roman amphitheatre. The caves were not particularly deep and appeared to have no secret passages, for Graham could see through to the other end, where a patch of light broke through. Paddy slipped his lead and chased into the biggest cave, but didn’t stay inside very long. There couldn’t be much to explore.

On his way out, Graham briefly became lost. Instead of taking the path that ran alongside Mansfield Road, he took one that suddenly dropped, taking him into another area that had been carved out of the rock. Here, there were more caves, though these were sealed off, like the one across Mansfield Road. The cave networks were almost certainly connected, he thought, or at least had been at one time. He began to imagine a story about smugglers and secret dens. There might be a novel in all this, a better one than The Episode.

He had no trouble coming up with ideas. Sometimes his head felt like it was exploding with them. Last week, he had decided it was time for someone to revive the poetic drama, and it might as well be him. Vivienne, in her last letter, liked the idea. But he wasn’t sure the form suited a tale about caves.

There were Christmas presents to pay for, but Graham hoped to have enough left over from his allowance to pay for another visit to Jermyn St on his way home next weekend. He planned to spend an evening at home then visit Vivienne on Sunday. She said that he could stay overnight in the family home, which had a small spare bedroom. This was not a prospect Graham relished. He got on well enough with Vivienne’s mother, despite being embarrassed by the baby language the two women spoke when they were together.

Mr Dayrell had deserted the family when Vivienne was a child. Or Mrs Dayrell had left him. Either way, Vivienne hadn’t seen her father, or her younger brother, since she was seven. Graham, while treated with kindness, couldn’t help but feel that he was under constant suspicion of being certain to behave in the same manner as Mr Browning had.

It had taken him months to piece the saga together. Vivienne’s father had had an affair while he was working in Rhodesia, where Vivienne had been born. It had led – Graham still wasn’t sure of the precise sequence of events – to her parents’ return to England and eventual divorce. A son had stayed in Rhodesia. When she was fifteen, Mrs Dayrell had persuaded or instructed Vivienne to write to her father, breaking off all relations with him. After that, Mrs Dayrell’s efforts on behalf of her daughter had intensified. She had not only found Vivienne the job at Blackwells but also persuaded Basil to publish a collection of the teenager’s poems, The Little Wings, introduced by G.K. Chesterton (a family friend whom Graham had yet to meet). The poems were dedicated to Mummydar – Vivienne insisted that the poems had been collected and published without her knowledge. She had shown him the book but refused to give him a copy and instructed him not to buy one, an instruction he’d obeyed.

It had more than once occurred to Graham that the only explanation for Blackwell’s benevolence to his beloved was that he and Marion Dayrell were having an affair. Neither could be said to be physically attractive, though, and this made the idea hard for him to countenance. Basil (BB) was younger than Marion. He had taken over the firm on his father’s death last year and was now known as ‘the gaffer’. Could the publisher be interested in Mrs Dayrell or - just possibly - Vivienne herself?

Graham hadn’t mentioned this theory to Vivienne. A poem of Vivienne’s had appeared in Poetry Review – an honour that had so far eluded Graham - when she was a mere thirteen. Blackwell and Chesterton had each recognised her talent, BB would probably say, but that had nothing to do with lust. Yet what did they see in her work? Graham found it impossible to think of his beloved as a talented rival. He would not have minded her being a great writer. Trouble was, he found little to admire in her poems, and Vivienne had lost interest in writing poetry long before she met him. In his last letter he had asked if she’d read Eliot’s Prufrock, which was, for him, the perfect expression of ennui. She hadn’t, she’d replied, but liked the section he’d quoted.

There was one other decision to be made. Graham could take Paddy with him next weekend, but there were obstacles. Mrs Dayrell wasn’t fond of dogs. Taking Paddy for a walk would be a good excuse to have more time alone with Vivienne. More problematic, however, he wasn’t sure that the brothel on Jermyn Street would allow him to take his pet inside, even if Paddy were in his travelling box. Luckily, Sally was willing to take him until Monday afternoon, when he had to be back for work.

‘The city’s full of caves,’ Father Trollope told him later, on the top deck of a bus travelling to Bulwell. ‘There was a time when the church had to go underground. Priests would hold services in them. Dangerous to attend and potentially fatal for the priest. It’s easy to forget how much you risked by being a Catholic in times gone by.’

Graham remembered a conversation he’d had when Vivienne introduced him to a much older friend. Bede Jarrett was a Dominican. According to Vivienne, he was the first Dominican friar to study at Oxford since the Reformation. He told Trollope what Bede had told him.

‘A scholar I met wrote a book called Medieval Socialism. In it, he argued that, although what we call socialism is a new political theory, the ideas behind it – equal shares for everyone - have been around for centuries. The way he sees it, the Catholic Church is essentially a means of delivering socialism.’

‘Or, one might argue, the other way round,’ Trollope ventured. ‘Are you a socialist?’

For four short weeks the previous year, Graham had belonged to the Communist Party. He’d been hoping for a free trip to Moscow on the back of his party card, but it hadn’t transpired. He chose not to mention any of this.

‘Of sorts. I believe in treating everyone equally, within limits.’

‘Ah yes, limits. The devil is in the detail, isn’t it?’

They began to talk about the devil. Graham could accept the notion of God, whom he saw as an abstract deity, everywhere and nowhere. The devil, not so much so. He was the bogeyman from childhood fairy tales.

‘You can’t have one without the other,’ the priest said.

‘Why not?’ Graham asked. ‘The way I understand it, there’s God, and the absence of God. What some call the devil, I call the absence of God, which allows evil to thrive.’

‘How can you believe in evil, if you don’t accept the existence of the devil?’

‘It’s the opposite of Good. The opposite of socialism. Entirely selfish, amoral behaviour.’

‘I don’t see how that’s the same as evil.’

Graham, with his mind trained by three years at Oxford, found it easy to keep his end up in these encounters. He could not relate to the idea of an Almighty God, except as an abstract concept. To Father Trollope, himself a convert, God seemed to be more personal. Maybe because he was a trained actor. All priests, Graham decided, must be actors of a kind. Especially the ones who lost their faith, which was surely an occupational hazard.

When they were about to part, Graham taking the bus back to his job, the priest off to give the last rites to a parishioner, Graham mentioned that he hoped to be going to church with his special friend on Sunday.

‘Will I meet her, this Vivienne?’

‘I hope so, when I can persuade her to visit me here. She’s very interested in you.’

The priest smiled. Like most men, Graham supposed, he liked to meet a pretty girl.

Thanks for reading Greeneland. The next chapter will probably appear on Sunday.

If you’re enjoying the novel, please tell your friends about it in whatever way suits you best. Word of mouth is by far the best recommendation.