Whether this was true or not didn’t matter. It was believed. It was an article of faith.

And then there was the deep loathing which the Margaret Brethren instinctively felt for the wayward and disreputable Father Lynch, another of the highly impressive qualities about him that attracted to him his altar servers.

Blanchaille was among the first. Blanchaille’s mother lived three thousand miles away and sent him to the hostel when he was seven. She had been destitute and so the hostel, and the Margaret Brethren across the road, waived their fees and took him in in the name of Catholic charity. Blanchaille’s father, a Mauritian sailor, had deserted his mother when she fell pregnant and never returned and yet she kept his name and passport, drew one for her son later which she renewed religiously, placing her faith in the French connection, clearly determined that her son would one day return to his motherland in triumph, like Napoleon. This foreign document embarrassed Blanchaille and he hid the passport for years. No one else had one. It looked strange and besides he wasn’t going anywhere. No one was going anywhere. The others teased him about it, calling him Frenchie. But after he’d hidden it they forgot about it and began calling him Blanchie instead, a name that stuck. Trevor Van Vuuren appeared to have no parents but he had an elder brother who worked on the whalers and drove a bottle-green MG sports, which was all terrifically exciting. Zandrotti’s father was a crooked businessman, a building contractor handling large commissions in the Government road programme. He made it his business to add rather too much sand to his cement and eventually catastrophe overtook him when bridges began collapsing across the country. A huge hulking man, he’d arrive in his blood-red Hudson Hornet to visit his skinny knock-kneed little son with his spiky hair and his ghostly pallor. Zandrotti Senior made these visits specifically for the purpose of abusing and ridiculing young Roberto. This so impressed the Margaret Brethren that they presented Zandrotti Senior with his very own scapular of the Third Order of St Francis, a devotional association to which they were vaguely attached for reasons never made clear except that Margaret of Cortona had been fond of it. His father, as Roberto later explained, had absolutely no culture and repaid the honour by making his mistress dance naked on a table for a visiting delegation of Portuguese Chianti merchants wearing the scapular as a G-string. This story so delighted Father Lynch that he suggested that since the scapular had bounced up and down on what he called ‘the lady’s important point of entry’, they should return it in the same wrapper to the Margaret Brethren challenging them to touch it to their nostrils and try to identify the fragrance, providing the helpful clue that they inhaled that very perfume which had so excited the saint’s knightly seducer back in the bad old days when she was plain Margaret, just another unmarried mother of Cortona.

This love of the blasphemous jest was one of Father Lynch’s appealing characteristics. Another was the conviction that he was dying and hence everything must be done in a hurry, a conviction repeated often but without any apparent sign of alarm since haste did not preclude style.

Kipsel seldom came to Mass and never to the picnics. Perversely as ever, Lynch praised his loyalty and predicted that Kipsel would go far in life.

Last in the group but first in martyrdom, poor Michael Yates, later Mickey the Poet. If there was any epitaph for him it was that he never knew what was going on. It might have been inscribed above his lost gravestone — ‘He never had the faintest idea.’ He was only to write one short poem, four lines of doggerel, which led Lynch to call him Mickey the Poet, and the name stuck. Lynch went on to discern in him, in that wild prophetic way, ‘some gymnastic ability’.

Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille grieved at the death of Ferreira. I saw him shaking his head and muttering to himself repeatedly: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do? First Mickey the Poet, then Miranda, now Ferreira.’

Naturally he detected in these violent deaths real signs that the end was near, this fuelled his anxiety, deepened his general feeling of doom, of approaching extinction. It is common enough at the best of times in beleaguered minorities in Africa, this feeling of looming apocalypse. Blanchaille’s people, a despised sub-group within a detested minority waited for the long-expected wrath to fall on them and destroy them. They didn’t say so, of course. They didn’t say anything unless drunk or tired or very pushed — and then they would say, ‘Actually, we’re all finished.’ Or ruined, some of them said, or washed-up, or words a lot worse.

This was what in my dream I heard Blanchaille say again and again as he stared into his occupied garden. He knew, as I know, that as the years have passed more and more people have felt this and they knew it to be true and the greater their perception of truth so greater became the efforts to disbelieve it, to push it to the back of their minds, to discredit it until at last, at the time of the Total Onslaught, it became a punishable offence to admit to the possibility. You could be punished, arrested, beaten up, imprisoned for defeatism in the face of the enemy, for after all there was by then a war going on. In my dream I saw Blanchaille place his hands on the window-sill and bow his head, his whole body bent as if something heavy pressed down on his back and he leaned forward rolling his forehead against the window-pane and staring into the garden, the very picture of a man oppressed, weighed down. He thought only of ways of escape. But from what and in which direction remained dark to him.

CHAPTER 2

And when in my dream I saw how Blanchaille stood at his window looking out across the garden towards the small knot of angry folk outside the front gate, I knew them to be his parishioners. They were the stony ground on which his seed had fallen. He had preached, he had warned, but the lambs would not hear, instead they banded together and drove their shepherd out. Tertius Makapan, in a mustard suit and luminous magenta tie, leaning against his dusty Toyota. A colossal man, a brick salesman, responsible for co-ordinating the attack on him; there were, too, his storm-troopers, Duggie and Maureen Kreta, Makapan’s willing creatures, formerly the treasurer and secretary of the Parish Council (before the Council was reconstituted into the Parochial Consensus Committee, the consensus being that Blanchaille must go); and poor Mary Muldoon, mad Mary, who knew no better, or at least he had thought so until she had tricked him out of his key to the church and so allowed the Committee to lock and bar the place against him; and there, hanging back, his black housekeeper, Joyce, who had joined them quite suddenly one night. Simply abandoned the dinner she was cooking for him and left his steak smoking on the stove and went over to his enemies. Maureen and Duggie Kreta carried a large banner: PINK PRIEST MUST GO! They waved the poles and flapped the banner at him when they saw him at the window.

PINK PRIEST MUST GO! Priest? The use of the singular case annoyed him. Not that it was intentional, but merely echoed the Kretas’ way of speaking. Maureen, round and determined with thick, rather greasy dark hair, and Duggie, some years younger, sharp face, thin mouth and full, blond hair. They rode everywhere on an ancient Puch autocycle wearing white peaked crash helmets and dark blue macs. They spoke to him as if he were a not very intelligent puppy. Thus Maureen: ‘Father want to watch out for some of the guys in this parish who don’t give a button on Sunday, look at the plate like it was something the dog brought in. In fact some of ’em only look in it at all like they’re wondering what they can pull out. Father got to watch ’em like a hawk.’ And Duggie, parish treasurer’s briefings about lack of funds: ‘Not two cents to rub together most times. You have to raise some funds. The father before Father was a hot shot at raising funds. Charity walks. Charity runs. That was Rischa. Running priest.’