A Finer End

Chapter One
     
Imagination is a great gift, a Divine power of the mind, and may be trained and educated to create and to receive only that which is true.
Frederick Bligh Bond, from
The Gate of Remembrance
     
    The shadows crept into Jack Montfort’s small office, filling the corners with a comfortable dimness. He’d come to look forward to his time alone at the day’s end — he told himself he got more done without phones ringing and the occasional client calling in, but perhaps, he thought wryly, it was merely that he had little enough reason to go home.
    Standing at his window, he gazed down at the pedestrians hurrying along either side of Magdalene Street, and wondered idly where they were all scurrying off to so urgently on a Wednesday evening. Across the street the Abbey gates had shut at five, and as he watched, the guard let the last few stragglers out from the grounds. The March day had been bright with a biting wind, and Jack imagined that anyone who’d been enticed by the sun into wandering around the Abbey’s fishpond would be chilled to the bone. Now the remaining buttresses of the great church would be silhouetted against the clear rose of the eastern sky, a fitting reward for those who had braved the cold.
    He’d counted himself lucky to get the two-room office suite with its first-floor view over the Market Square and the Abbey gate. It was a prime spot, and the restrictions involved in renovating a listed building hadn’t daunted him. His years in London had given him experience enough of working round constraints, and he’d managed to update the rooms to his satisfaction without going over his budget. He’d hired a secretary to preside over his new reception area, and begun the slow task of building an architectural practice.
    And if a small voice still occasionally whispered, Why bother? he did his best to ignore it and get on with things the best way he knew how, although he’d learned in the last few years that plans were ephemeral blueprints. Even as a child, he’d had his life mapped out: university with first-class honours, a successful career as an architect... wife... family. What he hadn’t bargained for was life’s refusal to cooperate. Now they were all gone — his mum, his dad... Emily. At forty, he was back in Glastonbury. It was a move he’d have found inconceivable twenty years earlier, but here he was, alone in his parents’ old house in Ashwell Lane, besieged by memories.
    Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he sat at his desk and positioned a blank sheet of paper in the pool of light cast by his Anglepoise lamp. Sitting around feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to do a bit of good, and he had a client expecting a bid tomorrow morning on a residential refurbishment. And besides, if he finished his work quickly, he could look forward to the possibility of dinner with Winnie.
    The thought of the unexpected entry of Winifred Catesby into his life made him smile. Besieged by arranged dates as soon as his mother’s well-meaning friends decided he’d endured a suitable period of mourning, he’d found the effort of making conversation with needy divorcees more depressing than time spent alone. He’d begged off so often that the do-gooders had declared him hopeless and finally left him alone.
    Relieved of unwelcome obligations, he’d found himself driving the five miles to Wells for the solace of the evensong service in the cathedral more and more frequently. The proximity of the cathedral choir was one of the things that had drawn him back to Glastonbury — he’d sung at Wells as a pupil in the cathedral school, and the experience had given him a lifelong passion for church music.
    And then one evening a month ago, as he found his usual place in the ornately carved stall in the cathedral choir, she had slipped in beside him — a pleasantly ordinary-looking woman in her thirties, with light brown hair escaping from beneath a floppy velvet hat, and a slightly upturned nose. He had not noticed her particularly, just nodded in the vague way one did as she took her seat. The service began, and in that moment when the first high reach of the treble voices sent a shiver down his spine, she had met his eyes and smiled.
    Afterwards, they had chatted easily, naturally, and as they walked out of the cathedral together, deep in discussion of the merits of various choirs, he’d impulsively invited her for a drink at the pub down the street. It wasn’t until he’d helped her