28. The Bishop’s Glass

Two men of the cloth with deep worries.

A very droopy Reverend Barney Pickle was helped back to his room and Father Teatrader assisted him onto his bed. Barney was sagging as if something vital had escaped from his brain and had fluttered off invisibly to the hereafter.

Teatrader looked at him and shook his head.

“Take a few minutes to pull yourself together and then I suggest you do your trouser zip up,” he said quietly, “and put that monstrous thing away before it scares the life out of somebody!”

Then the Father grinned at Emma and walked out of room number fourteen, leaving her to help Barney rise from the almost dead and rejoin her on planet Earth.

“How are you feeling now, Barney?” she asked of the almost comatose vicar as he stirred and one of his eyes tried to open.

“”I came over all weak…” he began, quietly, trying to sit up.

“Something must have upset you?” suggested Emma, “something that Father Teatrader said… Don’t try to remember because it might engulf you in a black cloud again if you do. And, if I were you, I’d do my flies up! Not that I’m a man, of course, with so much to embarrass me if it popped out…”

“You mean..” stammered Barney and he turned almost painfully onto his side so that he could adjust his clothing without Emma seeing.

“No need to be so furtive,” she said with a huge smile, “I couldn’t help noticing, and neither could the Father… And I have been married to a lovely man, you know, and I know what’s what in the trouser department.”

“Oh no,” he moaned quietly, “the forbidden… I’m bound to end up burning for eternity now, there’s no way it can be avoided, oh father, my stern father, forgive me… for I have sinned in the worst possible way…”

“No you darned well haven’t,” Emma told him, “if anything you’ve proved you’re a man or I might have fallen into the trap of not knowing what you were. But now I couldn’t help noticing, so it’s all right. I know.”

“I need to die,” he whispered, “I need to end this wretched life of mine. I know what my story will be in the hereafter, the endless torture with no relief, the stench of dead flesh burning.”

“Barney,” said Emma in a stern matriarchal voice, a tone she’d never thought of using before, “you are talking gobbledegook and if you thought about it you’d know that!”

“I do try…” whimpered Barney, “But so much has been said and done, how can I cast all my father’s words aside? How can I not hear them and not feel the birch or the strap across my back at the least mention of the unmentionable??”

“I think,” she told him, “I think I’ll take myself into my own room until you’ve sorted truth from fiction in your mind.”

“You’ll leave me?”

“Right now,” she told him, and she went to the door that separated their two rooms. “and I think I’ll take all my clothes off and lie on my bed as naked as the day I was born,” she added.

“Don’t… I need….”

”You need a psychiatrist!” she told him, and she did what she said she’d do and left him on his own to try and sort out what in his mind was rubbish, and hopefully discard it.

She even undressed, lay down and tried to dose off.

Meanwhile, the Bishop was in a most unhappy mood, Back at his manse he had to contemplate something that Philip Williams, his old friend and the superintendent of police in Brumpton, had said to him. So he poured himself a very small brandy, making sure that was what it was, very small, and sat in his favourite chair.

Philip Williams had been ridiculously intense.

“Do you think, Jossop, that you might have a problem.” he had asked when he’d send constable Dedbeat on an errand so that he could discuss the matter in private with him.

“A problem, Philip?” he had asked.

“Look, Jossop, I’ll talk to you man to man. If you were anyone else you’d be looking at a few years in Brumpton prison for knocking down two young fellows, even if it was mainly their fault, because you were miles over the limit and behind the wheel of a rather expensive and very heavy motor vehicle that could quite easily squash them flat.”

“I told you what I had to drink!” he had protested, but Philip, the goody-goody copper, was going to have his say.

“But not all of it, my friend, There was nothing wrong with that breathalyser, you know. You’d supped enough to make a w***e blush! And there are whispers going round about the Bishop who couldn’t walk in a straight line even if he wanted to and who got tongue-tied over the word god. People have noticed, Jossop. Young Dedbeat won’t go around telling tales, he wouldn’t dare, but sooner or later someone will. So, Jossop, do you think you might have a problem? With alcohol?”

And that had been the gist of it. And now he was there with his huge television switched off even though he was staring at its blank screen, and he had to ask himself the same question.

“I never get drunk,” he told the television set, “I never feel the worse for the few drops I have, so what does Philip mean by asking me if I have a problem?”

There were sad old men in the outskirts of his village where his manse was who most certainly might be said to have a problem. Like old Thomas or whatever his name was, well known for staggering from pub to pub, and he usually had a bottle with him as well. He couldn’t even string half a dozen words together without forgetting what he was supposed to be saying. That man was an alcoholic and a danger to himself. It was only right and proper that the police stopped individuals like him from getting behind the wheel of a car.

But him? A Bishop in the church? A preacher from the good book? A follower of the great man who two thousand years ago turned water into wine? Isn’t wine a kind of booze, for goodness’ sake?

And now him, a Bishop, threatened with prison?

He supped from his glass. The warmth it gave him, the healthy glow that suffused his whole body and, yes, his mind… was that bad? Did make him a danger when he was out and about in his limousine?

Might one of the two wretched lads who had chose the precise moment when he was driving along that road to behave like the hooligans they no doubt were have been hurt? Might one of them actually die?

He took another sip of his brandy.

No. of course he wouldn’t!

© Peter Rogerson 01.05.24