Past Praying For

by Aline Templeton

  As she ran upstairs, she made a little bargain with – something, she didn’t know what. If people were nice to her again, and no more horrible things happened, she would put Missy away, and never ever ever speak to her again. She felt a little better after that.

  But outside the long staircase window, snow was falling, and the wind was getting up now, blowing round the house with strange sighs and moanings. She shivered. How dark it was! The far side of the landing was in shadow, the doorways black.

  Perhaps she should go to bed, pull the covers over her head and try to sleep the time away like some suffering animal. But it was Christmas Day, and she was still child enough to remember that the Christmas tree was in the drawing room. She scuttled in, closing the door carefully behind her.

  The tinsel on the tree sparkled in the livid light and the cheap baubles gleamed. She switched on the lights, then stepped back to look.

  But the little gaudy bulbs somehow took any magic out of it. The family Christmas tree had always dipped and danced in the flickering, perilous light of candles; this tree was plastic, unreal, nothing to do with Christmas.

  She sighed, and her eyes fell on the presents beneath the tree. There were only two; the pen she had chosen and wrapped so lovingly for her father, which was still there, and just one for her. There had been parcels from her American aunts and uncles, but Mrs Beally had indifferently allowed her to open them as they arrived – indeed, had abstracted some gifts that she ‘wouldn’t be needing’ to give to Karen’s family. There was nothing yet from Gervase. He had said she would prefer something from Austria, though she wasn’t sure.

  She picked up the single parcel, weighing it in her hand. It was not very heavy, and it rattled softly when she shook it.

  The label didn’t say happy Christmas, but it did say ‘with love’ in her father’s writing. She thought Mrs Beally had probably bought it, but he had written the label. He had remembered her. Her heart lifting a little, she opened it.

  It was a nurse’s outfit. Red cape, apron and cap, a mock watch to pin on. A tray, with syringe and tweezers. A grey ligature with tube and rubber bulb, to take blood-pressure. Bandages, thermometer. All neatly packed together.

  Her eyes dilated, but she did not see the details of the small plastic replicas. Like Mrs Beally, she did not notice that it said, ‘Recommended age 4-6’ on the box. She recoiled from the loathsome thing, then in utter revulsion threw it from her, fled to the bathroom and was violently sick.

  To be fair, Mrs Beally had meant no harm. The nurse’s outfit was cheap, with lots of items – a good bargain, in her book – and the girl was a doctor’s daughter. It didn’t occur to her that it might be inappropriate for a child who had last seen her mother surrounded by objects of this kind.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she was weak and trembling, but her movements were decisive. She marched in, picked up the hated gift, placed it neatly in the fireplace, and fetched matches and firelighters from the log box.

  The flames took a moment to catch hold, then flickered up, brighter and stronger. The colourings in the box tinged them with chemical blue and yellow; the plastic shrivelled and smelled, forming melted blobs in strange, contorted shapes. Fascinated, she put on more firelighters, watching them flare up too, consuming what was left.

  She looked at the horrid little tree, and started pulling things off. The tinsel burned merrily and the paint on the baubles sent up sparks of green and gold. She smashed them with the poker, and soon the tree was exposed and ridiculous with its fake lights, rigid branches and unconvincing pine needles. She would have liked to burn the whole horrible thing, but it was too big to fit in the fireplace.

  Her lovely blaze was dying now, and with it her brief pleasure. There had been a strange comfort in the leaping flames, and she would have loved to go on feeding its ravenous appetite, but somehow she did not quite dare. What if her father noticed the bare tree, or asked to see her present? She didn’t think he would, but she cast a lingering glance at the ashes of her fire then drifted aimlessly out of the room.

  Her purged stomach was empty and uncomfortable, so she went to look for food. Breakfast lay, in a pool of cold fat, on the kitchen table, so, though it was not yet ten o’clock, she went to the oven and took out the Christmas lunch which had been left for her. It was burning round the edges already, gluey gravy baked on to the plate, turkey dry and brussels sprouts brown, but she ate it indifferently, and the plum pudding with thick custard.

  When it was finished, she rose to wander restlessly about the house. Upstairs, her own room felt cold and unfriendly; even the familiar Raggedy Ann doll that always slept in her bed seemed to look back at her with a dead, fixed stare.

  On her little desk by the window, there was a book, covered in pale blue suede. ‘My diary’, its cover said in gold, and it had been in her Christmas stocking last year.

  She opened it and looked at the entries, frequent to start with, then more sporadic, then, eloquently, missing. She took out the gold pen from its slot at the side, sat down and turned to the date which was burned in her mind.

  ‘Mommy died on this day,’ she wrote in her unformed hand,’ and I wish I could be dead too.’

  She wrote for some time, with concentration, over several pages. But then there was nothing more to say, and she put back the pen and closed the book.

  It was ten forty-five when she settled down in front of the television. She did not move. She did not smile at the massed talents of British television comedy. Perhaps she did not hear. The telephone rang, once; she listened to it echoing through the empty house but did not try to answer it, and soon it stopped.

  Somehow the hours passed. Once she fetched biscuits and milk, then sat down again to watch the flickering black-and-white shadows that helped keep panic at bay.

  For outside, it was getting dark. All day it had snowed, and now the wind was howling in earnest. The house was stirring and muttering to itself in the gale.

  As the light faded, the shadows in the corners of the big room seemed, eerily, to thicken and encroach, and although she was not cold, she felt a shiver run up her spine. Was there someone – something – over there, behind the big armchair?

  Suddenly, into her head came the vicar’s words to her on that dreadful day when they had put Mommy in a box in the ground. ‘Your mother isn’t really gone,’ he had said, patting her shoulder. ‘Your mother will always be watching over you.’

  For the first time, she thought of her mother, not as an aching absence in her life, but as a dead person, a creature with strange powers she had not possessed in life. What if she came now, dead and with long bony fingers, to carry away the daughter she had loved to be with her for ever in some place of blackness and shadows where everyone else was dead too?

  She shoved her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. It was better to be silent, motionless, in the weird glow of the television screen than to get up to turn on the light. Light might chase away the shadows – but what might remain when the shadows fled? Cramped and rigid, barely daring to breathe, she sat huddled in her chair, glassily unseeing in an interminable torture of terror.

  It seemed a long, long time later that at last she heard a taxi coming up the drive. With frantic energy she leaped from her chair, ran out of the room and downstairs to see, miraculously, her father, not Mrs Beally, climbing out.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ she shrieked, throwing herself at him as he opened the front door, desperate for his protection and assurance that now everything would be all right.

  But Daddy hardly seemed to see her. Looking over her head he detached the clinging arms and put her inexorably aside.

  ‘For God’s sake, not now,’ he groaned, and reaching his study like a wounded animal crawling to its lair, he shut the door on the stricken child.

  ***

  It was from Mrs Beally the next morning that she learned of her brother’s death in an avalanche.

  ‘Your pa went off to Austria first thing. You’ll
need to be good now, because there’ll be a lot to do, people coming for the funeral, I don’t doubt.’

  She did not mention the day before. The child could not.

  The night before Gervase’s funeral, Giles sat at his desk with his papers before him, but gazing over them unseeing to the framed snapshots of his son, his hair tousled from running, and his wife, her mouth in its sweet curve, her blonde curly hair springing back strongly from the smooth brow. The picture of his daughter as a baby he did not even see.

  As he looked bleakly at Melody’s smiling face, his hand dropped from the side of his chair and rested, for an incredulous moment, on her soft curls. He came to himself with a cry, and looked down on a smaller head, then into the pleading upturned face of his daughter.

  It was too much; he could not bear it.

  ‘Get out!’ he said with barely suppressed violence. ‘Get out, and for God’s sake never do that again.’

  And the child fled.

  She was only nine years old, but she had learned already the futility of tears. She had learned that nothing was too bad to happen, and that she could trust no one. She had learned, too early, the frightful truth that we are all of us, in the end, alone.

  She had not learned yet that life went on, and they could patch you up so effectively that no one would realize that inside, somewhere, you had been warped and twisted to destruction.

  She seemed entirely calm by the time she reached her room. She went over to the desk and picked up, once more, the blue suede diary. Sitting in her chair she read, quite slowly, what she had written, and took up the pen again to add another half page. Then she picked up a crayon, and solemnly, meticulously, coloured every remaining page black until she reached the end of the book.

  ***

  Time passed and agony faded, as it does. She worked hard at creating the shell to cover her scars, pretty and smooth and fragile as a robin’s egg. She grew up, she found friends, and she had a step-mother – another doctor – who was kindly, if detached. She married young.

  She left Missy behind, long-forgotten in the mists of a childhood she never chose to recall. But Missy did not go away. Missy waited, silent in the shadowy corners of her mind, for the crack made by some blow of fate through which she could emerge, full-fledged, in a form older, stronger, and more evil still.

  1

  Margaret Moon had always liked dressing up. When she was a plain, square, freckle-faced little girl with long brown plaits, she had loved to put on her mother’s old white nightie and play weddings; long, detailed, luxuriously-imagined ceremonies, with herself the unlikely cynosure of all eyes, the groom an accessory much less interesting than the traditional blue garter.

  And now, when the freckles and the plaits had vanished, but the squareness and a certain child-like gusto remained, here she was, standing on the altar steps, wearing a white gown. Only she was facing the other way.

  She looked down the length of her little church, past the Crusader’s tomb into the thicker shadows of the cross-aisle beyond. Under the Norman arches, the stained glass of the windows was opaque, and only the polished memorial brasses on walls and floor took light from the flickering candles in the jam jars on pews and ledges, a hundred luminous points. The cool, damp breath of old stone was overlaid by their warm, waxy smell. Perhaps that was what was meant by the odour of sanctity, which had always seemed to her a curious phrase.

  Penny Jackson, at the organ which was one of Margaret’s more immediate problems, struggled womanfully into the first asthmatic chords of the tune ‘Forest Green’. Along with everyone else – about fifty of them, Margaret reckoned, with her ex-banker’s automatic eye for figures – she drew an obedient congregational breath for the opening words of the beloved Victorian carol.

  O little town of Bethlehem

  How still we see thee lie...

  Lit from below, her new parishioners’ faces had a strange, disembodied innocence; the mouths round dark ‘O’s of sound, sharp features blurred, wrinkles smudged smooth by shadow. Only the eyes told a story: the young eyes, glowing in the candlelight, wide with wonder and over-excitement; older eyes, veiled or hooded depending on whether caution or age had made the greater mark.

  Here and there, she caught the glimpse of tears, but she did not yet know her flock well enough to guess where these were prompted by grief, where regret, and where the easy, generalized nostalgia for an idealized Christmas as it wasn’t now, probably wasn’t a hundred years ago and most certainly wasn’t almost two thousand years before that, in the draughty squalor of childbirth in a cattleshed somewhere in Bethlehem. If you believed that.

  She did, in fact. It couldn’t be described as a fashionable position, and she wasn’t certain it had the Bishop’s full support, but it was one of the persistent convictions which had driven her to where she stood at this moment, which came as a fresh surprise to her every time she thought of it.

  Sometimes it seemed like one of her dressing-up games, even now, with her feet in their sensible black shoes planted on the flagstone floor of St Mary’s, and the weight of the cassock across her broad shoulders, ready when the hymn stopped to turn and say the words which would introduce the sacrament, here for her own people in her own cure of souls.

  How silently, how silently

  The wondrous gift is given…

  But it hadn’t felt like a gift, more like some sort of monstrous burden laid upon her, so that however unpromising the prospect, she never had the alternative of turning back. There was an illustration in the family copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress which had terrified her as a child, and even now occasionally haunted her dreams, of Christian with his burden of sins growing fleshy tentacles into his back; at times it seemed that her calling was quite as hideously inescapable.

  ‘Do you hear – voices?’ a friend had asked with hushed, fascinated horror, and even as Margaret laughed a dismissal, she found herself half wishing the answer was ‘yes’. Then it would have been simple; a visit to a psychiatrist – the modern white witch – and a diagnosis of stress, a prescription. Religious delusions dissipated, inconvenient vocations removed.

  It was more a sort of relentless discomfort, a niggling itch she couldn’t scratch. At every stage, her approach had been grudging and tentative, every query prefaced, as it were, by ‘Num..’, the word her Latin mistress at school had dinned into her as introducing any question expecting the answer ‘no’. Yet, uncannily, the path had been made smooth and doors that appeared tight shut had opened, sometimes so unexpectedly that she fell on her metaphorical nose.

  She had joined, dutifully, in the prayers that the Synod might be guided to approve women’s ordination, but with a sense of praying after the event. The decision, however little the wise and great and good might realize it, had already been made – probably before the dawn of time, though it didn’t do to get caught up in that sort of speculation, or you could spend your life contemplating the tiny trivial circles which were all your mind could achieve on that subject, like stirring the ocean with a very small twig.

  And praises sing to God the King

  And peace to men on earth.

  What she had certainly never expected was to find herself in a peaceful village in the prosperous Thames Valley, which dozed amid well-kept gardens and quiet leafy lanes, deserted during office hours when, it seemed, almost the entire population abandoned it for somewhere in the City.

  It had been in an inner city charge that she had worked as deacon, then curate; a frenetic, dynamic place throbbing with the urgency of the human need which lay, visible as an open sore, on every side. There were soup kitchens and encounter groups and missions to people as ignorant of the Good News as the savages her missionary great-aunt had so forcefully enlightened seventy years before.

  The babies with Aids, the homeless, the drug addicts and the battered wives she had counselled had been a joyful confirmation that the hand she had felt laid upon her shoulder was indeed summoning her to an important battle.

  So when t
he Bishop told her about Stretton Noble, the charge he had chosen for her, her first, incredulous reaction was that this could only be some sort of episcopal joke. She did not know him well; perhaps he had an odd sense of humour?

  Fortunately, she had restrained herself from bursting into laughter and slapping her thigh. He meant it, all right. As he talked about her duties and the Parish Council and the Mother’s Union, she fought to stifle the unchristian thought that perhaps the lip-service he had paid to the idea of women priests was no more than that. If she was an inconvenient body, where better to bury her than beneath the mouldering turf of a rural English parish?

  Only as she left the Palace, unspoken protests fermenting in her soul, did it cross her mind that whether or not the Bishop had a sense of humour, there was little doubt that the Almighty did.

  O Holy Child of Bethlehem

  Descend to us we pray...

  They had been pleasant enough in their civilized, rather patronizing way, these sleek, well-fed city folk aping what they imagined were country ways with their waxed jackets and Barbour wellies and Range Rovers to tackle, morning and evening, the threatening terrain between the village and the nearest Thames Valley railway station, all of four miles away. They had treated her with such impervious civility that she had no means of knowing what they thought either about women priests, or about Margaret Moon herself, as a person, if this last concept ever came into their heads. She had found herself warming to old Sam Briggs, who was one of the rare indigenous breed; he occupied sheltered housing in the Old Almshouses and with patent sincerity spat on the ground whenever she passed. He was not, she noted, here tonight.

  It was a good congregation, though. There were people here whom she had certainly never seen in the church before, and probably wouldn’t again until Easter, if then.

  The hymn was nearing its end. Behind the gold rims of her spectacles, she closed her short-sighted eyes briefly in inchoate prayer, waiting humbly for the transforming moment of peace and power.