Acts and Omissions Read Free Page A

promulgating that kind of mischief. I’m afraid my readers are not impressed: a parish priest quite seriously having to make a New Year’s resolution not to tell whoppers in the coming year! We leave him with his cigar and his conscience, and see what’s been happening in Lindchester.
    As dawn breaks, a little red car rumbles its way up the cobbled street and in through the gatehouse of the Close. It is driven cautiously, but well, by Miss Barbara Blatherwick – yes, that is genuinely her name – and she parks it in her designated parking space. She is seventy-eight and, pace the lusty chorus of seamen in South Pacific , she is remarkably like a dame, although in fact she only has an MBE. She reaches over to the passenger’s seat to gather up her handbag, and tuts. There is blood on the headrest. Now she will have to postpone her cup of tea and tackle the stain with upholstery cleaner straight away, or it’ll never come out. What a dratted nuisance.
    Come, come, Miss Blatherwick! Don’t you know this is AB rhesus negative, very rare? The people at the donor clinic get very excited about this blood you are tutting over. Until the would-be donor starts populating the questionnaire with rather too many ‘yes’s, that is. It belongs to Freddie May.
    There, you see? You take fright far too easily. A novelist does not kill off her characters before the reader has had a chance to start caring about them. Freddie did not fall very far when the slate slipped under his foot up on the palace roof, because there was another roof ten feet below. He did knock himself out and split his head open, however. You missed the heart-stopping sight of him climbing from that lower roof on to the wrought-iron fire escape. Looking at the back of the house in daylight, I honestly don’t know how he managed it. But he did: he has nine lives, that boy. Nine? He has forty-five! He is quintessence of cat! He then staggered, clutching his poor head, from the bishop’s garden across the Close to the precentor’s house, and hammered on the door.
    The precentor, Giles Littlechild, was wrenched from cava-sodden sleep by the row. He wrangled a dressing gown on and cantered his long legs wildly down the stairs like a giraffe encouraged by a cattle prod.
    â€˜Argh! What bloody man is that?’ he cried. (This is the Close. People quote under pressure.) ‘What have you done to yourself this time, May? Oh, dear Lord! Come in! Are you all right?’
    And Freddie, being English, replied, ‘I’m fine,’ and threw up in the precentor’s lavender bush.
    He was not fine; that much was obvious. It was also obvious that Giles was in no legal state to drive. Nor was his wife. Nor was anyone else Giles could think of. Getting hold of a taxi would be a nightmare. He ran his hands through his mad scientist hair. There was nobody.
    Except Miss Blatherwick.
    It was 2 a.m. Unthinkable to disturb her! But disturb her he did, knowing that Miss Blatherwick would shake off sempiternal rest and get up out of her grave if one of her boys needed her.
    That’s how Miss Blatherwick came to spend a jolly night at Lindford General Hospital A&E, sitting straight-backed in tweed and frank astonishment among the caterwauling drunks and silly girls who had fallen off their stilettos. It was hours before Freddie was seen to and had his head glued up, and then they kept him in for observation because he’d been concussed.
    I had better explain why Miss Blatherwick demonstrated such heroism last night. For three and a half decades she mothered the generations of boys who passed through Lindchester Cathedral Choristers’ School. She comforted the homesick ones, sat beside the bad ones in the naughty pew in evensong, accompanied them to the secret lavatory that the public did not know about when they were caught short during a service. She dished out plasters and cod liver oil and common sense, found lost socks,