Title: That Note You Hold
Fandom: Grantchester
Rating: Teen & Up
Length: ~1600 words
Content notes: Period-typical homophobia (internalised and otherwise), oblique reference to an adult having sex with a minor (canonical).
Author notes: The poem is Philip Larkin's 'For Sidney Bechet'. The details about its first publication in 1956, in the Royal College of Art magazine ARK, the misspelling of Bechet's given name, are all, as far as I know, true. Bechet's composition 'In The Streets of Antibes' is here. For those who care about such things, Leonard's correspondent is a very minor character who appears as a schoolboy in Chapter 2 of Mary Renault's novel The Charioteer, but this isn't a crossover as such.
Summary: Some years on, Leonard Finch, now in charge of his own parish, receives a letter that both reminds him of the past and suggests a new departure.



Leonard picked up his post from the hall table and on the way down the corridor to his study shuffled it, with characteristic discipline and expertise, into a preliminary order of priority. At his desk, he opened letters of an obviously official nature and modified, where necessary, his initial assessment of their importance. One, from the Ministry of Education, concerned the disposal of the site of a demolished former school, two the unexpectedly contentious subject of the Church Hall Lavatory Fund; another was from a firm of solicitors, regarding a bequest. A suspected invoice turned out to be thanks for payment received (a mixed blessing, for it meant an invoice still to come); Rear-Admiral H A Blatchley of the Monumental Brass Society wrote to confirm his attendance at Open Evening, to speak (with slides) on East Anglian Chalice Brasses; the Misses Wing of Henrietta Close offered their commendation of the bell-ringers (‘a joy to us down here on both Sundays and practice nights’); which was not the sort of communication Leonard usually received about their campanological exercises.

It was a fairly typical freight of correspondence, but it all had to be dealt with, punctuated by a telephone that was these days seldom still. The dregs of his mid-morning tea and the crumbs of an Eccles cake stood at his elbow by the time he reached the two items that his earlier inspection had classified as personal. The first was a belated birthday card from the aunt in Belfast who didn’t regard his ordination as a minister of the Church of England as apostasy (good old Aunt Ivy, he must find the time to write to her properly), the second bore handwriting he thought he might have seen before in some incidental context, and no return address on the envelope. He opened it. Turning over the single sheet to look at the signature, he frowned briefly before placing the bookseller he’d met at Ben Blackwood’s party ten days before, in whose company he’d felt justified in taking an introvert’s refuge, since he had not attended a secular social gathering as a private individual for months on end, and it had turned out a rather more raucous one than he had expected. A clipping fell out onto the desk, a poem on semi-glossy magazine paper. Looking at his two tightly-packed bookshelves, he realised he had not read simply for pleasure in a long time.

Dear Leonard,

I hope you don’t mind my writing to you uninvited: I meant to ask for your address or ‘phone no. that evening at Ben’s but got dragged away before I had the chance, by one of those mysterious boozy undercurrents that are a racing certainty when medical students or housemen are present. Only very rudimentary sleuthing is required to track down a vicar, of course, but I sense I should, nonetheless, attempt to explain myself.

A couple of days ago a starveling finalist from the RCA dropped into the shop with a box of back-numbers for sale, including a complete run of ARK to date. I happen to think it’s one of the better little mags; more various than you’d expect for an art-school publication, & I hope the poor long-haired lout might now be able to afford himself a decent meal or two. There were a few duplicates, which I took for myself, & in one I read the enclosed. It recalled me instantly & very vividly to our conversation: all those marvellous stories of your curacy, in which even your cloth could not have induced me to believe without Ben’s corroboration.

Leonard took up the clipping. The poet’s name was dimly familiar from a time when he’d had the leisure for an occasional reviews page, the poem sharply evocative of both its subject and a host of mental connections, memories in which happiness, exhilaration and enlightenment were mingled too closely with disappointment, pain and fear for him even now to contemplate them with entire equanimity. He listened to music less often than he used: he had a wild impulse to search out a record—scarlet sleeve, bold black type— that he hadn’t played since moving to this parish. But ‘The Streets of Antibes’ blaring from the sitting-room before luncheon would involve him in explanations to his housekeeper, a woman formidable even to a man brought up in the hard school of Sylvia Maguire. He read the poem again. The given name in the title was misspelt, for both of them, Leonard thought evasively, a ‘y’ were ‘i’ should be. He knew that even after a substantial hiatus, he and Sidney might pick things up more or less where they’d left off: that had happened before. He knew also that the extraordinary notoriety that had gathered around that small Cambridgeshire vicarage in those eventful years had engendered as much friction as solidarity between its inmates, much of it never truly resolved. Still, he should make the effort: it was unmistakably a nudge from the cosmos. He read on, trying to suppress an old, discreditable resentment: it had been nearly seven years—was he ever to emerge from that long, broad shadow?

I don’t know much about the association of ideas; my reading on the topic stopped short with some cursory undergraduate perusals of Locke & Hume. & so, now I think about it, I daresay that your mention of your former incumbent’s fancy for jazz (you spoke of him with such affection, & yet I carried away an impression of someone unsuited to training a junior colleague, & rather difficult to work with—was he?) might have something to do with the immediacy with which I thought of you. But—& I write this with trepidation, & some blushes—’

Leonard remembered the man’s oval face and olive skin, even, sweet-natured features lent a certain gravity by steel-framed spectacles, the sort of face that took gracefully the middle-aged waning of what must have been an astonishing youthful beauty. He probably did not blush terribly easily.

‘—but it must be said, or there is no point in writing at all. That explanation did not occur to me until I had resolved to write, found the address, torn out the page from the magazine—not, indeed, until I had taken up my pen to begin. It was, & is, its penultimate stanza that brought you to mind, from which shabby but (I think) respectable lodging I have not been able to evict you since. I confess I did not try very hard.

Leonard’s trembling hand groped for the clipping, though he knew without reading them again which lines were meant: ‘On me your voice falls, as they say love should—’ His voice, his reedy, hesitant voice, somewhat modulated now but never modified, it marked him indelibly as what, after all, he was: scholarship boy, nancy boy. At best it must surely be a cruel joke, at worst a trap: there was plenty of sympathy in some quarters for the erstwhile Archdeacon of Ely, considered a capable administrator unfairly persecuted for merely doing his duty of protecting institutional reputation. And many who thought that also considered Sam Milburn’s offence, if distasteful, at least in accordance with nature. He should burn the letter and the poem—no, keep the poem, send it to Sidney with a few scribbled lines on a postcard long time no saw this and thought auld lang syne, purge it of these uncomfortable associations with a draught of plain, honest friendship, that had never known the complication of sexual attraction. And yet a vaunting, foolish hope leapt in his bounding blood.

Shopkeepers have fewer idle hours than people suppose, & my traditional day of rest is emphatically not yours. But the advantage of serving Mammon is that one may sometimes put up the shutters at will, & to enjoy your company again I should do so eagerly. Name your day & your pastime: my dear old Singer Gazelle is less agile than she once was, but the Weald or the Kent Downs are within our reach if you should like that; or dinner & a play in town, perhaps? Do at least think it over, though I quite understand if you feel, for whatever reason, unable to accept.

Yours ever,

—JEREMY BARNES

Leonard sat back and closed his eyes, striving to deepen and slow his breath. If genuine, and he was beginning to trust it was, this was flattering and exciting beyond the strictly-patrolled bounds of his imagination. He had grown in authority since his appointment here, he knew that, because he had laboured hard to be worthy of it: he was generally liked, even respected. But to be admired lay at the furthest reach of his expectations, to be desired quite outside them. His skin prickled all over.

He opened his eyes, and found they fell unerringly upon ‘where your speech alone is understood/And greeted as the natural noise of good.’ Natural. Good. He still struggled to apply those words to himself, to his yearning for love, which it yet was natural, good, because all love was from God, was God. His lot was patience, to await an advance in human wisdom, tolerance, kindness. But in every other aspect of his life he worked, as well as waited, for a better world, for the Kingdom of Heaven. Why not this one too? They also serve who only go out for a drive on the South Downs. He grinned, and folding his hands, started to formulate a prayer for guidance. But guidance had already come: he couldn’t really expect the still small voice to sound any more clearly than it just had. Leonard checked the telephone number at the bottom of the letter, and reached for the receiver before the bell could shrill with yet another enquiry about baptisms, marriages or funerals. He thought he would still send the poem to Sidney, though: it seemed to have some power to clarify, if not to simplify, complex lives.