The High Places by Fiona McFarlane Page B

his narrow head, like a fortified town on a hilltop. His clerical shirt was also black, and his single-breasted jacket (all three buttons firmly fastened), and his trousers and shoes, but all in slightly different shades, which gave him a regrettably scruffy look, simultaneously prismatic and funereal. The parish had great hopes for him at first. He’d had excellent theological training, came with good references, and was moreover unmarried, which stirred the ashes of many a virgin breast; and so, in the beginning, when he entered his new congregation, it was as a bridegroom into a rose garden.
    His appearance was promising. The slope of his nose, echoed in the angle of his chin, gave an impression of profound endurance. There was a suggestion of sculpture in the marble-like whiteness of his skin. Yes, he was prim and pallid, in excellent health, with well-made ears, and in his battered blacks he presented a respectable, even slightly romantic figure. Also, he was kindly. He walked with an incongruous maritime swell that might, in another man, have passed for a swagger, and was careful in the maintenance of a small yellow car that he rarely drove faster than seventy kilometres an hour. He spoke in long, dignified sentences, rich in clauses, reminiscent of a veterans’ parade on a memorial holiday, and as he delivered his sermons he had a tendency to rise to the tip of his toes, so that finally he appeared to be levitating behind the pulpit. This was disconcerting, but forgivable. He also caused a minor stir early on when he removed two ancient trees from the churchyard because, he said, they interfered with the grass.
    What worried people most of all was his parrot.
    It was fitting that a man of Reverend Adams’s calling should have acquired few objects on his way through the world, but why should one of them be a parrot? An entirely white parrot too, as if it had once been red and yellow and green and blue but was now in some kind of Chinese mourning, except for the sulphur crest on the back of its head. Every member of the congregation can still recall, with perfect clarity, the appearance of that prodigious bird: the stiff crinoline of its feathers, the Pentecostal lick of yellow flame on its head, the tiny eyes and wormy claws, that grey, awful beak. When it fixed you with its enigmatic eye, it suggested nothing so much as the sorrowful ghost of a parrot, but you were aware, nevertheless, that it was not above a kind of solemn cheekiness. And when the parishioners saw man and bird together, they were reminded of certain ordinary dining rooms on whose walls fantastic wallpaper repeated bamboo and nightingales. It unnerved them to think of Reverend Adams and the parrot, alone together, eating their bachelor meals.
    As Reverend Adams settled into his position, the congregation developed the opinion that he talked too much about death, and with the wrong emphasis. The way he described it, it was as if the arrival in Heaven, the longed-for meeting with God, would be about as melancholy as you might imagine the reunion of a father and son in a railway station, under artificial light. Eternity seemed less glorious, then; it seemed a cheerless thickening of time, rather than a new expanse. And so Reverend Adams was given to understand, by certain older and well-respected members of his congregation, that his flock had begun to pray for him, that he might receive insight into the mysteries of Heaven and the inheritance awaiting him there.
    Reverend Adams withdrew to his rectory, troubled by this rebuke; trouble drawn into the furrows of his brackish brow, which he mopped with a handkerchief he kept stuffed in the pocket of his black trousers. But that night, as he slept, he dreamed of Heaven. It was a sleep so close to sleeplessness that when he woke he was able to recall every detail of his dream of paradise: the river that flowed with dull silver, the endless walls of the City of God, the streets paved with gold, and