Your correspondent has, to her profound regret, been relieved of her duties at this very newspaper, and the manner of her dismissal was not, one might say, dignified. It was a Tuesday, the 7.52 to Leeds, and she had, in a moment of spiritual necessity, partaken of the Holy Sacrament in a manner that a fellow passenger, a Methodist of all people, found ‘ostentatious’. The ensuing correspondence, the disciplinary hearing, the final letter of termination, all of it now sits in a buff envelope on the hall table, and it is this envelope that she must now present to her mother’s new husband, Commander Aubrey Ffrench-Smythe, a man who has, in the six weeks of his marriage, already reorganised the cutlery drawer and expressed a view on the proper way to hang a picture. The prospect, one confesses, is more terrifying than the loss of one’s livelihood.
The Commander’s Morning Routine
The Commander is a man of fixed habits. He rises at six, performs a series of calisthenics in his dressing gown, and then reads the obituaries aloud, ‘to keep the old grey cells ticking’, as he puts it. Milicent finds him in the conservatory, seated in the wicker chair that was once her father’s, polishing a brass compass that has not been used since the Falklands. She places the envelope on the glass table, next to a pot of Earl Grey, and says, ‘Aubrey, I have some news.’ He does not look up. ‘If it is about the lawnmower, I have already written to the manufacturer.’ ‘It is not about the lawnmower.’ ‘Then it can wait until after the cricket.’
The Confession
Milicent, who has never been one for preamble, states the facts plainly: the dismissal, the reason, the name of the Methodist (one Mr. Derek Pottle, a retired tax inspector), and the unfortunate incident with the digestive biscuit. The Commander, who has finally looked up, is not, as she had feared, angry. He is, it transpires, aghast on liturgical grounds. ‘A digestive?’ he says, his voice a low rumble. ‘You consecrated a digestive? The Church of England has a perfectly good wafer, and you used a biscuit with a leavening agent. This is not a matter of employment, my dear girl. This is a matter of heresy.’ He then produces, from the pocket of his cardigan, a well-thumbed copy of the Book of Common Prayer, and begins to quote from the rubric on the consecration of the elements.
The Theological Debate
What follows is not the conversation Milicent had anticipated. Instead of sympathy, she receives a lecture on the Thirty-Nine Articles, the nature of transubstantiation, and the proper texture of the host. The Commander, warming to his theme, compares her dismissal to a court-martial for a sailor who has failed to salute a superior officer. ‘You have broken the chain of command, and the chain of command, in the Navy and in the Church, is what holds the whole bloody thing together.’ Milicent, who has been nursing a small sherry from her hip flask, points out that the chain of command in her own office was held together by a series of passive-aggressive emails and a shared kettle. The Commander is not amused. He demands a formal retraction, to be sent to the editor, the Diocese of Ripon, and the family solicitor.
The Unexpected Resolution
Just as Milicent is preparing to leave, having exhausted her supply of sherry and her patience, the telephone rings. It is the editor of GraveNews, a man who has, in the past, described her as ‘a necessary evil’. He has read her letter of resignation, which she had not written, and has been so impressed by its ‘theological rigour’ that he is offering her a new column, to be titled ‘The Spirit of the Commute’, about the intersection of faith and public transport. The Commander, who has been listening on the extension, roars with laughter. ‘By Jove,’ he says, ‘the Lord does move in mysterious ways.’ Milicent, who has never been one for divine intervention, raises her glass to the strange providence of the British press, and to the digestive biscuit that, in the end, has proved more resilient than any wafer.
