42. Lincolnshire
In which choir practice runs late…
@MarieDeGournay had rung the telephone number of the Lincolnshire Trust four times a day for four days. She had rung at 9am, 11am, 2pm and half past four, on the principle that a Trust which did not answer at one time of day might answer at another, and on the fifth morning she had put the phone down mid-ring, packed a bag and driven to Lincolnshire to find out who was not picking up.
The Trust’s address, according to the register of charities, was a firm of solicitors above a shoe shop in a market town. The shoe shop was there. The solicitors were not. A brass plate remained beside the side door with four screw holes under it where a second plate had been, and the woman in the shoe shop said they had moved to new premises by the cattle market three years ago and she still got their post.
“I keep it in a box,” she said. “Nobody has ever come for it.”
Marie asked whether she might see the box. The woman said she could see the box but not what was in it, because that was the law, and Marie said that was quite right, and looked at the box, and went to the cattle market.
The new premises had a bell, a carpet, and a woman behind a desk who knew the Trust at once. The secretary to the Trust came in on Thursdays. It was Friday. Marie asked whether the secretary could be telephoned, and the woman dialled a number, and the two of them sat and listened to it ring.
“That is the number I have,” said Marie.
“It’s the only one there is.”
“Where does it ring?”
The woman turned the card over and read what was printed on the back. “The Chapter House.”
The Chapter House stood on its own at the far end of a village which had lost the rest of its priory in the 1530s and kept the one room nobody could find a use for. It was octagonal. The village called it the chapel and had done for four hundred years. It sat behind a wall with a gate in it, and the gate had a chain, and on the chain was a padlock a great deal newer than the gate.
Marie walked all the way round the wall. On the far side a field of cattle came up to it, and beyond the cattle a man on a tractor was doing something slow to a hedge. She waited at the fence until he came near enough to be shouted at.
“Key?” he said, over the engine. “Her at the farm.”
Her at the farm was a woman in wellingtons who had the padlock key on a hook by the door and handed it over at once and then took it back.
“That’s the gate,” she said. “The door’s not mine. The door went to the churchwarden when the Trust stopped answering. Somebody has to be able to get in if the roof goes.”
“Where is the churchwarden?”
“Choir.”
The parish church was a mile away, and full of sound. Marie stood at the back through two verses of something in four-part harmony and a long discussion about breathing. Eventually a tall woman with a folder was pointed out to her as the churchwarden. She told Marie that the door key had been with her but was now with her sister, who did the chapel floor twice a year, and had done it last week, and would still have the key in her coat.
“Where is your sister?”
“Pub.”
Marie went to the pub. The sister was not in the pub. The sister had been in the pub and had left ten minutes before to go home by way of the chapel, because she had a feeling she had left her bucket there.
Marie drove back towards the chapel. A small blue car appeared behind her on the lane and stayed there, close, through two bends and a dip, and pulled in when she pulled in, and a woman got out of it holding a coat.
“You’re the one asking about the key,” she said. “Everyone’s rung me. You’ve been round the whole village in an hour and a half.” She took a ring of keys out of the coat pocket and found the right one by feel. “Brenda said you were foreign.”
“French.”
“That’s what I said.” The woman looked at the padlock and gave the chain a shake. “I don’t know why they bothered with a new one. There’s nothing in there.”
The padlock opened and then the chain came off. The gate had dropped on its hinges and had to be lifted up. The path beyond it was flagstones with grass growing between them, and the door at the end of the path was oak, black with age, iron bound, set into a wall of brick that had turned the colour of old tea.
Marie inserted the key and turned it a quarter turn before it stopped.
“It does that,” said the woman, and put her shoulder against the wood, and the door gave with a sound that carried across the field and startled the cattle.
Inside, the room was eight sided and paved, the flags worn into hollows by centuries of feet. It smelt of cold stone and floor polish. The wall with the door in it was brick, and the next two sides of the octagon were glass. Then another side of brick. Opposite the door was a window, plain, clear, leaded in squares, with the light of a flat grey afternoon coming through it onto a prie-dieu that stood on the flags in front of it. The same pattern continued on the right side of the octagon, a brick side then two sides of glass, then back to the door.
Three sides of brick. Five of big glass panes leaded in squares, a little green in the thick places, no colour anywhere.
There was nothing else. No altar. No boards on the walls with names. No cupboard. The telephone was on the floor by the door with its cord going up to a socket in the brick.
Marie walked the eight sides once, slowly, and put her hand flat against each of the three brick walls. She looked at the prie-dieu without touching it. She stood there and looked through the plain window opposite at the back of a hedge.
“Told you,” said the sister, from the door. “Bucket.”
The bucket was behind the prie-dieu. The sister collected it. Marie wrote in her notebook, standing, the order of the walls going round from the door, and the number of panes in the window opposite, which was twenty four, and then closed the notebook and asked whether she might keep the key overnight.
“You can keep it a week if you like,” said the sister. “It’s only a chapel.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/42-lincolnshire