Free Angels in the Architecture by Sue Fitzmaurice Page A

do – song sheets to prepare, etcetera. Lovely to meet you.’ Rose extended her hand again and Pete took it.
    ‘Yes, you too.’
    ‘I hope I’ll see you again some time. Goodbye, Jillie. Enjoy your afternoon with your dad.’
    ‘Bye.’
    Rose walked off and then turned back after a few paces.
    ‘Forgive me if I’m being rather bold, Pete. It’s just that I’m about to pin this up to the noticeboard. We run several adult classes – discussion groups really – where we explore questions about what do we know and how do we know it, God and so on. Maybe you’d be interested. There’s one at my cottage on Thursday evenings. There are nine or ten of us, I suppose. We start at seven thirty. Here ...’ Rose handed over a leaflet from the pile of things in her arm. She scribbled on the corner and handed it to Pete. ‘It’s just along from the Cathedral, easy to find. You don’t need to bring anything, although a bottle’s always welcome.’ She grinned. ‘Right, well, must away. Cheerio!’
    Pete’s views on the eccentricities of the Church and priesthood felt both confirmed and dismantled all at once.
    ‘Thank you.’ Pete didn’t know what else to say. That was a bit odd. Cheerful sort though. And she had Tim’s number all right.
     
     
    Tim walked along with his head hanging back almost as far as it could go, holding his father’s hand for balance and staring up at the vaulting far above. They’d walked to the eastern end of the Cathedral, past St Hugh’s shrine, an enormous affair, and back down the northern choir aisle. Pete noticed the vaulting here was irregular and asymmetrical as though two different halves of two quite different cathedrals had been joined together by accident, but cleverly just the same.
    How odd, thought Pete. Bet that disturbs Tim’s linear aesthetic.
    The bright light in the rafters reminded Tim of the reflection he’d seen earlier, and he knew then that he would see it again, and often, because ‘it’ was a special friend who saw the world just as he did.
     
     
    ‘ Thank God!’ Alicia fell into bed next to Pete.
    ‘That was a bit of a mission sorry. He’s in that super-stimulated but super-tired state.’
    ‘Isn’t he always in that state? Honestly, if there’s a balance between giving him plenty of stimulation to get those cogs going, and not giving him too much so he goes completely mental, I don’t know what it is.’
    ‘Yip.’
    Alicia grabbed the top book from a pile by her bed. Tim, bespectacled, had The Times in his hands.
    ‘Isn’t that yesterday’s?’
    ‘Yeah, I didn’t get to it. Tim. You know.’
    ‘I do know.’
    Neither Pete nor Alicia found much benefit in complaining about the trials of parenting an autistic child, but both offered a silent support and a quiet knowing to each other’s quite separate battle with this reality.
    ‘How was the cathedral?’ Alicia had collected her family that afternoon as planned and the evening was then taken over with the usual dinner -bath-story-bed ritual, albeit that this particular evening’s ritual was vastly extended by Tim’s considerable and chaotic energy.
    ‘It was lovely. I really do like it there , so much history and fabulous stories. In fact, I heard a new one from a priest-woman while we were there.’
    ‘A priest-woman? What’s that ya’ dork? There’s no such ...’
    ‘I think she was a deacon – a deaconess, yeah, she was a deaconess.’
    ‘What’s a priest-woman?! Ya’ nong!’
    ‘Well , she was a deaconess, I remember now. Anyway, what I was saying ...’
    ‘Carry on.’
    ‘There was this box Timmy sort of sat on ... leant on. Well, it turned out it was a shrine – just a wee thing, stuck out of the wall. Didn’t look like anything unusual, kind of a seat really, a black stone box. Turns out it’s the body of a child, thrown down a well in the Middle Ages, and it got put there. No one knows who it is, but he’s referred to as Little St Hugh , after the real St Hugh,