Past Praying For

by Aline Templeton

  Suzanne might have known she would make a mess of it. Perhaps it would have been better if Patrick had done it after all. Then he could have taken the flak; certainly all she had achieved, despite the agonizing beforehand, was to alienate both her closest friends at once.

  She put her head in her hands. Why had everything so suddenly started spinning out of control in her tightly-ordered universe? Only weeks ago, it seemed, she had been coping effortlessly with demands on every side which would have brought many another woman to her knees.

  It was at work that things had started to go wrong, when the Powers That Be were misguided enough to appoint a woman surgeon. It wasn’t that Suzanne was prejudiced of course not, she judged everyone on merit – but this woman breezed in and started making ridiculous demands, oversetting procedures which had worked satisfactorily in the hospital all the time Suzanne had been theatre sister: no one had ever suggested otherwise, and three of the top men always made a point of asking for her if the operation was going to be tricky.

  But the cow had given her a public dressing-down in front of her juniors, humiliating her and undermining her authority. Suzanne was upset, inevitably, and it was hardly surprising that she should make one or two trivial mistakes over the next few days.

  She had no qualms at first when one of the younger male theatre nurses took over working with her bete noire – it was appropriate, really, since men never made such good nurses as women, though she pitied the victims of their operations but now, to her hurt disbelief, her own surgeons were asking for him as well. Somehow, word had spread that Suzanne was difficult, not as much on the ball as she used to be.

  She hadn’t meant to say anything to Patrick about it, but she had been so upset that she couldn’t help blurting it out.

  To her surprise, he had listened sympathetically to her tale of woe. At the end of her disjointed recital, he paused, then said carefully, ‘Do you want me to be absolutely, brutally honest with you, Suzanne?’

  And for a moment, she had almost said yes. Almost – but she had too much to lose. She had built the edifice of Suzanne Bolton laboriously on shaky foundations, with pain and persistence over the years. His honesty was like a huge builder’s ball on a chain, swinging back ready to crash its way through and bring everything tumbling down.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I do want your analysis of what’s wrong with me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d get a real kick out of cutting me down to size.’

  Patrick looked at her and sighed, then shrugged.

  ‘OK, have it your own way,’ he had said, and switched on the television.

  So she had tried to cope on her own with her loss of self-worth. And now it looked as if she had lost herself the support system of friendship on which she was so heavily reliant.

  And worst of all, here, alone, in the silence of her empty house she must confront the question she had crowded out with practical concerns until this moment.

  Which one of her so-called friends could it be who had crept into her kitchen in the hours of darkness and destroyed all her precise preparations? Which of the women who had been granted this familiar access for so long had been harbouring such malice? And, still more alarmingly, if thwarted by a locked door, what might she do next?

  ***

  There was a brief snatch of winter sunshine after lunch, and Laura allowed James to persuade her to come out for a walk. They drove up to the reservoir at the farthest end of the common, strode round it then began the climb to the top of the low hill beyond. They had the place to themselves, apart from a family down below at the water’s edge throwing sticks for a retriever, whose joyous barks were the only sound to break the stillness.

  Shading her eyes to look down at the pleasant scene, Laura drew in great gulps of the cool damp air. She had not realized how badly she needed to get out of the house, which seemed stuffy and over-heated; she had felt unable to get a proper, satisfying deep breath for the last two days.

  She had put up a good show, though. James had been pleased with her and the girls relieved, as she talked and laughed and produced appropriate Christmas fare, for all the world like someone who wasn’t falling apart inside. She had made constant, surreptitious rounds of the house, in fear of what else she might find – or worse still, what one of the others might find that she would be forced to explain.

  But she hadn’t suspected this latest horror. When Suzanne phoned her this morning to ask for her key back she knew, knew at once, that insurance had nothing to do with it. Suzanne was famously bad at the mildest social deception, and she had not been convincing. She had been kind not to confront Laura – too embarrassed, probably – but now Laura was haunted by the knowledge that her sphere of operations was wider than she had supposed. It had taken all her control to conceal from James and the girls the panic and confusion that threatened to engulf her.

  They had set a brisk pace to the top of the hill and saved their breath for climbing, but now James came across to put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Well done,’ he said with a friendly squeeze, and she knew he was not talking only about her effort in reaching the top. ‘It’s good to see that you’re feeling better.’

  Unreasonable rage that he had been so easily deceived rose in her, and she took a step forward out of his grasp.

  ‘I’m not, actually,’ she said, her voice cool and controlled and seeming to herself to come from a long way away. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m feeling pretty dreadful.’

  The comical change in his expression from complacency to wary dismay might at another time have made her laugh.

  ‘Er – aren’t you? Well, that’s, that’s a shame. I’m sorry. You seemed to be much brighter, I thought. Though I know, of course, that it’s because you were making a big effort,’ he added hastily.

  She wanted to scream at him, ‘Can’t you see I’m disintegrating before your eyes? Can’t you see anything?’ But unless she told him her dreadful secret, what good would that do? He would look hunted, talk about stress and working too hard and seeing a doctor, all the while thinking loudly enough for her to hear that she was merely being foolish, hysterical and self-indulgent.

  ‘Look – could we go away for a few days?’ she said instead, the inspiration suddenly presenting itself to her like a gift. ‘The Lake District, perhaps; fresh air and water and mountains…’

  Her beloved Wordsworth, after all, had believed in Nature’s healing powers; perhaps, far from the situation that had reduced her to this, she might find his ‘tranquil restoration.’ She clasped the idea to her like a talisman.

  But James only looked at her with alarm. ‘I’m back in the office tomorrow. You know that, Laura.’

  ‘Take a few days off,’ she urged. ‘I really do need to get away for a bit, put all this behind me – ’

  She knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  ‘That seems a bit extreme, don’t you think? You’ve got another couple of weeks before you go back to school; I’m sure you’ll feel much better after a good rest.’

  ‘How can I rest here?’ she cried wildly, knowing she was doing her argument no good. ‘I can’t even breathe here.’

  She knew the signs of the irritation he seldom actually gave vent to, the tightening of the lips and the smoothing of his hand over his already smooth hair. He was clearly making an effort not to sound impatient.

  ‘Laura, I know you felt your disappointment very keenly. But I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I let you get it totally out of proportion. Everyone gets rejections from time to time, and you just have to put it behind you and get on with life.’

  She looked at him dumbly. How could she tell him the truth, that the pain of her rejection had long been eclipsed by the shadowy fear that was now her constant companion?

  He took her silence for acceptance. ‘You won’t even remember how badly you felt a week from now, I promise you. And really, it would be crazy to go away at the moment. Everywhere will be booked up, and a
nyway, we’re flat broke after Christmas. A whacking great overdraft wouldn’t do anything to relieve our levels of stress.’

  He laughed.

  She said, ‘Oh, if it’s money, of course, that settles it,’ with all the contempt she could muster and set off ahead of him down the hill, knowing she had not been entirely fair.

  There was something else Wordsworth had said; something a lot less comforting.

  Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

  And shares the nature of infinity.

  ***

  Struggling to match her brother Robert’s longer stride, Margaret Moon returned from the Travers’s party that evening in a state of seething indignation.

  She might have known how it would be, of course, because it always was. People were always drawn to Robert, with his expression of cheerful tranquillity and his bow tie, and when they discovered that he was a psychologist, and a forensic psychologist at that, their fascination was often so unbridled as to be positively embarrassing. By the end of the party this evening, people were confiding in him, she was sure, the innermost secrets of their existence.

  She herself had wasted an hour and a half of what was left of her life in a succession of conversations of mind-numbing triviality, and her temper had not been improved by the number of people who came up and said, ‘I’ve just been having such an interesting conversation with your brother,’ before asking her if she was going to manage to get away for a break now that the stresses of Christmas were over.

  She had tried hard to remind herself that she was a priest and that they were her flock. She had tried to banish from her mind the telling image of the rich man, the camel and the needle’s eye. But she needed to talk to somebody.

  Not being High Church, she found the notion of the confessional uncomfortable, and in any case she wasn’t ready to confess her faults. She was still at the stage of being unconvinced that the fault was hers, in any case, which was an unchristian, if human, point of view. What she wanted was to sound off, and Robert’s discretion was unimpeachable.

  With her own front door safely closed behind them, she burst out, ‘Don’t you hate it? Don’t you hate all that silly superficial chat, and those sleek pampered people, and the expensive drinks and the smoked salmon that isn’t even a treat any more?’

  Pausing only to dislodge Pyewacket, Robert sank down in Margaret’s favourite chair.

  ‘No,’ he said, having considered the matter with his usual thoroughness. ‘If I’m to be honest, I rather like expensive drink and smoked salmon. So do you, of course, only you’ve convinced yourself that under these circumstances you shouldn’t.

  ‘But even if it is ethically correct to frown on luxuries which are taken for granted, you should have the intellectual rigour to distinguish between not liking and disapproving. You wouldn’t seriously claim to like mushy peas with vinegar, despite their impeccable working-class antecedents.’

  Gathering up the affronted Pyewacket, Margaret sat down in the harder chair opposite and glared at him.

  ‘You’re nit-picking, Robert. Of course I’m not hypocritical enough to suggest that I don’t appreciate delicious little canapes and champagne. Most people can afford to smoke, if they’re stupid enough to want to, or have a night at the pub, and if I would rather have the occasional nibble of smoked salmon or a decent bottle of wine, I haven’t any hang-ups about doing it. The water at the wedding in Cana wasn’t turned into cheap plonk, after all.

  ‘But you know perfectly well what I’m really talking about – the naked materialism, the smugness…’

  ‘Smugness,’ he repeated, as if tasting the word. ‘Smugness?’

  Pyewacket, to Margaret’s annoyance, jumped off her lap, crossed the room and leaped up, purring, to push his head under Robert’s hand.

  ‘Wouldn’t you say they were smug? Safe in their pretty, cosy little world, no real worries…’

  He scratched the cat expertly in the sensitive area behind his ear, and Pyewacket’s purr rose to ecstatic pitch.

  ‘I’m surprised, I must say, to hear you describe them as smug. You’ve always struck me as an intelligent and sensitive woman, and it’s not like you to permit prejudice to cloud your judgement.’

  She snorted, but he carried on, indeflectably.

  ‘If you want my own impression – ’

  ‘If you’re going to tell me they’re open-hearted models of social concern, I shall probably kick you.’

  ‘Not that, no. But it did seem to me that the place was crackling with nervous tension. There were several people whom, if I had seen professionally, I would have assessed as being close to dysfunctional. There were some very unhealthy cross-currents in the conversations, too. Quite nasty, I thought, and claustrophobic rather than cosy. I am not, as you know, a fanciful man, but when we left I felt as if I were running for cover before the storm actually broke.’

  She glared at him. ‘Do me a favour! Nervous tension? Whatever have they got to be nervous about? Whether it will have to be Cava instead of champagne at their next party, and what people will say if it is? They could try just being grateful they don’t have to wonder where their next meal is coming from.’

  ‘And tell me, vicar, are you grateful to the Bishop for giving you such a nice comfortable berth without any of the problems you’ve had to cope with in the inner city?’

  ‘Well, of course not,’ she said crossly. ‘I do have rather higher aspirations for what I want out of life than mere material comfort –’

  She stopped.

  ‘All right, Robert. All right, don’t say it. Just don’t say, “And they haven’t?” or I shall tip that vase of jasmine over Pyewacket and he’ll scratch you instead of fawning upon you in that contemptible way.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s better. Your behaviour isn’t usually so maladaptive. Perhaps you ought to consider finding out exactly why.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t. You may be a distinguished shrink, but you’re not going to start mucking about with my psyche. You may not believe in prayer and meditation, but then I don’t believe in transactional analysis. I’ll sort myself out in my own way.

  ‘But come on, you can’t stop there. What horrors have you uncovered in my parish which I in my blindness have ignored?’

  He considered. ‘It’s tricky to attempt to give you chapter and verse, especially since a lot of the time I didn’t even know who I was talking to. But there was one young woman – Lizzie, was it? – with a classic victim profile, and a nurse showing definite symptoms of paranoia. She seemed to be using aggression to cope with stress, which isn’t the wisest method.’

  ‘Suzanne Bolton?’

  ‘Possibly. But in general, there was a lot of observable alienation. I found myself in one group where I was the only person who didn’t have my arms folded like a barrier across my chest. And it’s Christmas week; they can’t take refuge in work or shopping or the school run. When things go wrong in a close community, they go very wrong, because the damage is so intimate and there’s no escape.’

  ‘Flight or fight.’

  ‘Exactly. One of the most basic of animal instincts. And when the flight alternative isn’t available, things can get primitive, and to be brutally honest, I think it’s heading that way. You may find yourself with quite a job on your hands, even though it’s a bit more subtle than the sort of work you’ve been indulging yourself with. Quite as challenging, you know, in its way.’

  Margaret sighed.’Well, I like to think you’re being alarmist, but in principle you’re probably right. Do you never think it might be nice to be wrong for a change?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘You don’t look pretty when you’re smirking. But I must say I’m intrigued that you picked up an unpleasant atmosphere. I had put my own unease down to regrettable social prejudices. And yes, I shall regard them with clearer eyes.’

  ‘Good. I think you’ll find there are some very troubled souls, if you can manage to get through to them. And could I suggest that I think
it might be a matter of some urgency?’

  Margaret pulled a sceptical face. ‘What are they going to do – nice middle-class proper people? They’re hardly likely to run amuck, you know – it’s not the sort of Thing One Does. But I’m certainly interested that you mentioned Elizabeth McEvoy. I had noticed that she looked pretty worn down much of the time, and that husband of hers is a horror. Perhaps I could make a start there, get to know her a little better – ’

  ‘There you are, you see? You’re beginning to cheer up, now that you’ve got the scent of a problem. I never knew anyone so shamelessly addicted to stress. Pyewacket and I,’ he stroked the furry circle of cat on his knee, ‘can’t understand it at all.’

  She pulled a childish face at him and went to cook supper. It was true, she did feel buoyed up and encouraged by the suggestion of a challenge. Perhaps God and the Bishop (why did that seem such an unlikely conjunction?) had a task in mind for her after all, perhaps this was a community crying out for what she had to give.

  She went to bed thinking about what Robert had said. He was no fool; if he had smelt trouble, then trouble somewhere there must be. But even so, she was unprepared for the ugly little surprise in the post next morning.

  5

  It was just before seven o’clock in the morning when the cream Series 7 BMW purred to a standstill on the road on the far side of the common. It was still dark; a damp, dreary morning with patches of mist hanging about the black mass of trees which lined the path back to the village.

  The driver switched off the headlamps without putting on the courtesy light inside, and peered out through the side window across the scrubby grass. There was just light enough from the cold glare of the village streetlamps to see anything that was moving, but all was still.

  Piers McEvoy was not a patient man. He swore, thumping the leather cover of the steering wheel, consulted his Rolex, flicked the switch of the radio on, then after an exclamation about the leftist rubbish being spouted by some bint who called herself a political analyst, flicked it off again. He took another impatient look out, and this time was rewarded.