‘Even when they’re peaceful?’ I asked.

‘Especially when they’re peaceful,’ said Breslau.

CHAPTER 5

They walked in the Bishop’s official garden. Ceres, Bishop Blashford’s ample black housekeeper, had allowed him to leave his suitcases in the hall and sent him out to join His Grace with the warning that he would be allowed no more than ten minutes before His Grace took tea.

Blashford, the unspeakable Blashford, his open face ringed by soft pale curls, had in his younger days played first-class golf: no doubt clouded the sports-writers’ prediction that he would have gone on to international competition had the Church not selected him first. He was that rare hierarch, an authentic indigenous bishop, born and educated in the country. By choosing a sportsman for this important appointment the Vatican had shown that it understood where the springs of religious fervour truly lay. Now his neatly shod feet pressed the grass. He was wearing what he called his gardening clothes, a fawn suit and panama hat, by which Blanchaille understood him to mean not those clothes in which he worked in his garden but walked there before tea, a trim, elegant figure with a fair complexion which reddened easily in the sun. His black, heavily armoured toe caps glistened, the double knots of his laces showed like chunky black seaweed as his shoes broke free from the bunched wave of his flannels. There was a brief gleam of polished leather with each assured step he planted on the smooth unwrinkled surface of his beautiful lawn. The end of the official garden was bound by a line of apple and peach trees and behind them a thick pyracantha hedge showed its spikes. Heads held high, wagtails sprinted through the splashes of sunlight beneath the fruit trees, their equilibrium secured by the rocking balance of their long tails. They shared Blashford’s dainty-footed confidence.

‘Well, Blanchaille?’

‘I’m leaving.’

‘What?’

‘Parish, priesthood, country. The lot. I’m in a position of a bride whose marriage has not been consummated. My ministry is null and void. In short, I’m off.’

‘I’ve been expecting you to call. The volume of complaints from your parishioners in Merrievale these past weeks has reached an absolute crescendo. Complaints had been laid with the police about political speeches from the pulpit. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to persuade the authorities to allow the Church to deal with this in its own way.’

‘You needn’t have bothered. I also have friends in the police.’

‘We all have friends in the police, Father. The question is will yours do what you ask them?’

He could feel the heat the Bishop gave off as he became angrier. He was vibrating like a cooking stove. He hissed from a corner of his mouth: ‘It’s not like leaving a party, you know. Or getting off a bus. Father Lynch is behind this I’m sure.’

‘Father Lynch has never regarded me as a priest. He sees me as a policeman. I’m beginning to realise he knew what he was talking about. My relationship to the Church is that of a partner in an invalid marriage. The thing is null. I wanted to attack the Regime so I followed the only model I had — Father Lynch. I took holy orders. I would have done better learning to shoot.’

‘Father Lynch is old, ill and not a little cracked. He flips about that decaying church of his like an ancient bat. He says masses in Latin to a band of parishioners as ill and decrepit as himself. He does so without permission. He keeps up the pretence of serving a parish where none exists. The building is scheduled for demolition. We are finding our way back into the world.’

Ah yes, the world. Blashford had been Bishop for as long as anyone could remember. Years ago he had been concerned with safeguarding the Church against the Calvinist aggressor, those who saw it as ‘the Roman danger’. Then came Vatican II, and Blashford discovered ‘the world’.

‘Father Lynch always predicted that the day was coming when the Church hierarchy would be picked for their salesmanship.’

Blashford scowled. ‘The church has been sold because it’s redundant. Not only is the fabric beyond repair and the garden ruined, but only a handful of parishioners remain. There is no more room for all-white parishes, holy Mother Church embraces its South African responsibilities, she embraces her black brethren. Father Lynch, as I recall, refuses the embrace.’

The embrace. How long ago Lynch had foreseen that.

‘Sitting in his garden long years ago, propped up on one arm with Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla on either side of him, he told us that the Church was ours now, we had better prepare ourselves for the embrace. Then he gathered us around him and he showed us the financial pages of the newspapers which were full of the new black appointments being made by foreign banks. Against fierce resistance from their white managers the head offices decreed that black managers be appointed to township banks. “Very soon now,” he said, “we can expect the Church to follow suit. We have always taken our lead from the banks.”’

Bishop Blashford joined his fingers together at the bridge of his nose in a prayerful gesture and spoke with a nasal twang into the tepee of his fingers. ‘Lynch was headstrong, provocative, premature. Race relations in those days were primitive, it was only on sufferance that we allowed any blacks in our churches at all! You certainly didn’t go round making a show of it, not unless you were looking for trouble. But then Lynch was always looking for trouble and you boys he gathered around him were gullible. He was an Irishman who never understood Africa, obsessed by myths and conspiracies. This madness over the Kruger millions, these holidays in fancy dress, these charades. Did you know that he continues to say Mass in Latin? Even though you boys are grown up and gone? Despite all my instructions?’

‘He used to tell us that power was in love with secrecy but showed its public face in policies which arose quite arbitrarily or in reaction to outside forces, but were always presented to people as the result of due and deliberate consideration by wise minds. It’s unlikely that Lynch would have seen the changes of the Vatican as anything more than panic-stricken measures taken in reaction to shrinking congregations. It was a case of swinging the stage around where they could keep an eye on the audience and getting them to sing along whenever possible. What is presented as the will of God is very often a response to a deteriorating market position, he said.’

‘And where did it get you, this adulation of Lynch? You boys who surrounded him with your fancy dress revivals of the old Boer days and your talk of Uncle Paul Kruger? Where it got you was jail, exile, disgrace, death. That’s what you got for listening to him.’

‘But we never listened to him, that was the trouble. Ferreira was supposed to see visions. Van Vuuren was supposed to be a priest. I was scheduled to become a policeman. But maybe it’s not too late. Maybe now he should be taken seriously.’

The Bishop stopped abruptly, he lowered his head, straightened his wrists and shook an imaginary putter, and then with utmost concentration he stroked an imaginary golf ball along the smooth surface of the lawn. This reversion to his old sporting ways suggested a certain tension. This was borne out when the Bishop at length straightened and said: ‘There’s blood on your shoes,’ he looked more closely, ‘and on your clothes,’ he took Blanchaille’s hand, ‘and here, more on your hands, under the fingernails.’

‘I was passing the township outside the city when I was ordered by the police officer in charge to help to remove the bodies of people shot during the riot.’

‘There are no riots in the townships.’

Blanchaille held up his hands with their blood-stained fingernails.

‘And what did he predict for Gabriel Dladla?’ Blashford suddenly demanded.