Prologue

Prologue

Oft have we travelled, dear reader, through realms of Lindchester gold. We have mounted up on wings like eagles and seen the gentle middle English landscape of the C of E spread out beneath us, that patchwork of fields and villages, towns and suburbia. We have noted spire and tower, industrial estate and farm, glided over hospital, cemetery, school, university, and swooped down to peer into houses, flats, tents, and sleeping bags in a shop doorways. We have seen the river Linden and its tributaries threading through everything while cathedral and church clocks have chimed the passing hours away. Latterly we hurtled through Lindfordshire like an out of control double decker, with the narrative eye little more than a horrified dashcam recording the pile-up of history as it occurred. We left our characters in the dark of March 2022 still waiting for Easter.

Oh, Lindchester! Box where sweets compacted lie. I fear to lift the lid, frankly. What if you are like that margarine tub of maggots forgotten by a small boy who has tired of fishing, and which his poor mother finds at the back of the fridge months later, a rustling graveyard of dead bluebottles? For three years you have existed in my mind as Schrodinger’s maggots. Will my looking seal your fate? What if it’s over? What if they’re dead, both Lindchester and the dear old C of E? Who are we, anymore? What do we want to be from now on? Should we even try and save this foundering vessel to which we cling, alternately baling water and scuttling decks, and screaming recriminations as the waves crash over us? The higher up the rigging we climb the wilder the wagging of the masts. Who, who in their right mind will volunteer to captain this Titanic of a flagship? I picture the senior officers in the wardroom playing a desperate game of pass the parcel to the tune of ‘I the Lord of sea and sky’, praying the music won’t stop and leave them holding it. (There she is Lord! Is it her Lord?)

So say all who live to see such times. But that is not for this novel to decide. All I must decide is what to do with this tub of maggots that has been given to me. Do not come to me for solutions and predictions, gentle Anglican reader. I’m just a simple novelist. We deal in questions, not answers.

For this, our sixth venture, I have disabled my dashcam. We will not be chronicling life as it happens. If you want that, follow the news. Instead, I will offer you one summer day in 2025. It will shimmer there, suspended like a raindrop at the tip of an apple leaf. It is tiny in the grand scheme of things, but if you look closely, you may glimpse the whole orchard reflected there upside down, and perhaps your own face frowning in perplexity in that moment before recognition dawns.

On that day there will be tears and laughter. It has been often deferred and long in the planning. It will not be perfect, despite the obsessive efforts of the chief organiser. But when did any Big Day ever go to plan? The left field of life is infinitely vast, full of things we cannot see coming and control. Much has changed since we abandoned our characters in the Lenten dark with barely a glimmer of hope. Baby Ladybird will soon be starting school, and that scamp Freddie Hardman-May is almost 35. (Do the maths, people.) Some of our friends have retired or moved house. Some have received unwelcome diagnoses, others have died. Here and there hopes have been dashed, yes, and hearts broken. New hopes have burgeoned elsewhere, like buddleias in derelict chimneys where hosts of butterflies now flicker.

Best of days, worst of days: it will be both. But I promise you we will soon be flying again. It won’t be on eagles’ wings upborn this time. This is 2025, for heaven’s sake. Think drone instead, whining nosily over the action like the world’s most annoying gnat. You will never fully be able to block out the sound of me at the controls reminding you this is all made up. Buckle in and get ready to zip from this place to that, forward and back in time. We will be upstairs and downstairs, though not, of course, in my lady’s chamber. (Unless she’s decent.)

Oh, day of days, how I’ve longed and grieved for you! Let it be all pastel coloured wedding favours and gorgeousness! Let us see Fr Dominic, newly svelte, in his bespoke three piece pink suit showing off his disco queen moves as he strews rose petals down the aisle in front of the happy couple! Let it not rain! Don’t let everyone hate the best man! Let nobody get stuck in traffic or become so shitfaced that the whole day descends into un-Anglican handbags and storming out. Let the precarious seating plan hold, with its carefully curated tables of exes and feuding relatives and mad vicars. Let everyone get there, if not on time, in time—for the vows, the speeches, the cutting of the cake, the first dance. Or at a pinch, let them get there before it’s all over and the tithe barn is empty, and the last champagne glass has been gathered up.

So much can always go wrong, but please let it be… all right. In the end. I’ll settle for that. Whenever the end is, and always bearing in mind that somewhere over the eschatological rainbow, the end has already taken place. I know that my little raindrop does not really contain the orchard. That’s just a fleeting illusion. It is the orchard that contains every tree and every raindrop that ever clung there.

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