I put down the phone, catch sight of Archdeacon Frobisher’s letter on the table, remember his promise to visit at my earliest convenience. I can’t have him shuddering at this squalor. Suddenly persuaded that physical activity will do me the world of good, I get dressed in old clothes and set to work with hot water, detergent, and rags on the dining room’s nicotine-stained walls. Before long a licorice-colored tide is dribbling down over paintwork that turns out to be cream. Shafts of pale sunlight strike the cleaned patch. I find myself whistling.

Maybe I should have started with the study, that odious layer of cobwebs and those strange stacks of newspapers. But I honestly can’t face it.

At eight o’clock Clive Perry, my new curate, turns up. He’s a shining, reddish-blond young man a few years older than Tom, fond of golf, just as mild and easy this morning as he was on my previous visits here when I was merely a candidate for the job. He’s come to tell me about the Sutton family, whose child—a daughter, I learn, called Meg—I am to christen tomorrow. “Meg’s already nearly two,” Clive says, “and she’s a well-made child. But they want her done at the font, headfirst, the whole works. I warn you, she’s got a mind of her own.”

I smile. “I’ll speak to her parents.”

“Their phone number’s there.” He nods at the piece of paper he’s brought with him. “Now, here’s your visiting list.”

Underneath the list is a sketch map of Upton. I’ve already got the lie of the land, having done my own reconnaissance over the summer, but this map has been marked with the names of the people I am to see. Clive takes me through them in short order, describing succinctly the predicaments—a combination of age and ailments—that keep them housebound. Each visitee, I notice, has a number: Clive has constructed the shortest route between them. My old curate, Rick, though I was extremely fond of him, would make heavy weather of this task.

“I can see why Archdeacon Frobisher spoke so highly of you, Clive.”

He gives me a tense smile. “To be honest, it’s been ghastly. Mr. Blakemore . . . well, let’s say a lot of people have given up on church.” A haunted look passes across his face. “You know he was chaining the door shut? To keep out the evil spirits.”

“We’ll tackle it together.”

He glances up at me, and at the freshly cleaned area of wall, and suddenly smiles. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure we will.”

—