The Verger

St Botolph's is open from seven until six and this is not a religious position, it is Fenwick's.

He has been verger for twenty-six years and has had four vicars, and with each new one there has been the same conversation, usually in the second month, usually about heating costs.

The conversation ends the same way every time. Fenwick says: "It's open at seven."

What a verger does

Everything.

Unlocking, locking, heating, the graveyard, the flowers rota which he does not run but which he mediates, the boiler, the bats, the man who comes about the bats, the roof alarm, the box of umbrellas, and the entire physical operation of five services a week and about forty weddings and funerals a year.

None of that is the job.

The job is that between about half seven in the morning and about four in the afternoon there is a warm building in the middle of a town that anyone can walk into and sit in and be left alone in, and Fenwick is the one who makes that true.

The regulars

The nine o'clock man, who has come most weekdays for eleven years, sits in the north aisle for about twenty minutes, and leaves. Fenwick does not know his name. They have exchanged, in eleven years, perhaps four hundred nods.

The women from the market, two of them, who come at about half ten with tea in takeaway cups, which is not allowed, and which Fenwick has never once mentioned.

Students, in exam season, in numbers. It is warm and free and silent and there is no minimum spend. Fenwick puts a second table out in May.

Sleepers. Four or five a week. He wakes nobody unless it is nearly six.

The man who reads the war memorial, who comes about twice a year and who Fenwick believes is working on something, and who he has never spoken to.

The rule

Fenwick has one rule and it is not written anywhere.

If somebody is in the building and clearly not there to look at the building, he goes and does something within about eight metres of them.

He polishes a rail, or does something to a hymn book, or has a long involved struggle with a candle stand.

Then he goes away again.

He does not speak. He does not catch an eye. What he does is establish, without any transaction, that there is a person in the room who knows they are there.

He has been doing this for twenty-six years and he has never explained it to anybody and would find explaining it excruciating.

What it produces

About eleven times a year, somebody speaks to him.

He is at the candle stand and a voice from four metres away says something. Usually it starts in the middle. Once it started with "He was fifty-one," and Fenwick, who did not know who or when or anything at all, said, "Ah," and put the candle down and sat on the end of a pew two rows back.

That was in 2013 and the conversation lasted an hour and ten minutes and he has never seen the man since.

The heating conversation

The current vicar is twenty-nine and extremely good and arrived in September and had the conversation in November.

Heating an eleventh-century building to fourteen degrees from seven in the morning costs, in the current year, about eleven thousand pounds. Congregation is about sixty. The parish share is not being met.

She had the figures and she was right about all of them.

Fenwick said: "It's open at seven."

She said she knew, and that she was not proposing to close it, and that she was proposing to open it at nine.

Fenwick said nothing for a while.

Then he said: "The nine o'clock man comes at nine."

"So he'd be fine."

"He comes at nine because we open at seven," said Fenwick.

She asked him to explain that.

What he said

He said that a building that opens at nine is a building with opening hours, and a building with opening hours is a facility, and people do not go and sit in a facility at the worst hour of their week.

He said that the two hours between seven and nine cost about two thousand two hundred pounds a year and that in twenty-six years he had seen perhaps eleven people in them who were not the cleaner.

He said: "Eleven people. In twenty-six years. That's the number."

She said, "That's a very small number."

"Yes," said Fenwick.

What she did

She sat with it for a fortnight.

Then she found two thousand two hundred pounds by cancelling something else, which Fenwick has never asked about and which he suspects was the flower budget, which would explain a separate and ongoing situation.

Thursday

Fenwick unlocked at seven.

At twenty past there was a woman at the back who he had not seen before, sitting with her coat still on.

He went and did something to a candle stand for about four minutes, at a distance of eight metres, and then went away again.

She was still there at nine.

She was gone by ten, and he does not know who she was, and that is fine, and that is the job.