Miss Hargreaves Read Free

a
very
old church, dedicated by the Bishop of Armagh in 1863. Before I was born.’
    From somewhere about him, under the apron, he produced a colossal key. Unlocking the door, he threw it open with a flourish of triumph. Inside the porch he almost feverishly dragged apart some heavy red curtains, alive with dust and sooty fleurs-de-lis. Hurling himself on an inner door, he flung out an arm and, like a conjurer producing a rabbit, invited our inspection and admiration.
    We went inside.
    ‘My God!’ I said.
    ‘Kindly remember where you are, Norman,’ said Henry.
    I will say this about Lusk church: it was bad enough to be reasonably funny, which was something.
    Squint, before we could turn back, seized our arms and dragged us down the nave, rapturously commenting upon the treasures of which he was guardian.
    ‘We are very proud of our beautiful pews, very handsome pieces of wood, I will say.’
    I touched one and shivered. They were made of fumed oak and they had doors with rusty bolts to them. Very tall they were; you felt there ought to be hay in them. I looked up to the galleries. Apart from the usual cleaner’s brooms and pails the only curiosity was a stack of card-tables piled in one corner. I turned to the chancel, hoping to find something–however slight–that I could praise. But it was worse up there. Seaweed-green altar frontal; dead flowers; lichenous-looking brass candlesticks; pitch-pine organ with a pyramid of dumb pipes soaring over a candle-greased console; ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus’, splashed in chrome Gothic lettering over the choir walls; mural cherubim reminding you of cottonwool chicks from Easter eggs; very stained glass; tattered hymn-books, tattered hassocks–it was a horrible church. But there were, mercifully, two redeeming features: those were the dust-sheets spread over lectern and pulpit. Somehow you felt a little safer with those dust-sheets.
    Meanwhile, Squint was rhapsodizing.
    ‘I beg you to observe the beautiful lettering and decoration on the chancel wall. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a Throne.” You like it?’
    He had a habit of hissing like a goose, particularly when he was eager about something.
    ‘Very pretty indeed,’ I said.
    ‘Original,’ said Henry.
    ‘
Unusual
, in a sense.’
    ‘Full of feeling.’
    ‘Filthy,’ I said.
    ‘The font,’ said Henry hurriedly, glaring at me, ‘is superb.’
    ‘The choir screen,’ I added, ‘is definitely in a class by itself.’
    ‘We think,’ said Squint simply, folding his hands and looking modestly at the ground, ‘we think that the whole church is in a class by itself.’
    We proceeded step by step up the nave towards the lectern. It grew darker; we could hear the rain pattering on the roof. My spirits sank. There was something so unutterably depressing about the place. The sexton was standing by the draped lectern, one hand on the corner of the sheet, waiting for us to approach so that he might unveil what I knew could only be a fresh horror.
    ‘Here,’ whispered Henry, ‘this place is awful. Let’s get out quickly.’
    ‘All very well for you to talk like that,’ I muttered, ‘but you started it. We’ve got to go through with it now.’
    Patiently, Squint waited by the lectern. It’s hard to explain the awful sinking feeling that had come over Henry and me. ‘A day we shall never forget,’ I told myself. And as I said it, I thought, ‘Well, you might as well make it really memorable. Get some fun out of this while you’re about it.’
    Some
fun
. Oh, God! If I had only
known
!
    Suddenly the sexton whipped aside the dust-sheet and disclosed the lectern, obviously a favourite of his. We saw an avaricious-looking brass fowl with one eye cocked sideways as though it feared somebody were going to bag the Bible–or perhaps as though it hoped somebody were going to. You couldn’t quite tell; it had an ambiguous expression.
    ‘Now this,’ said Squint, ‘this most distinctive lectern was presented by