by Bart Casey
“Hello, Margaret,” he said, taking her hand warmly, but checking his instinct to lean over and kiss her. He sat down next to her on the sofa, leaving a gap of about a foot between them. “What’s the news on your dad?”
“Well, it’s not good,” she said. “What’s happened to your eye?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just ran into something the other day. Looks a lot worse than it is.”
Verger Andrew shared the update. “The vicar is still unconscious. The doctor says he’s still strong, but it’s worrying he hasn’t come around yet. His breathing became irregular a few hours ago and they hooked him up to some new intravenous medicine with a mask on him for oxygen. It’s all down to his head injury, they told us. Margaret’s been here all day and I came over about four this afternoon. The staff didn’t want us in the room the last hour or so, thought we might be in the way, although someone comes out to see us every so often.” Margaret interrupted this report with a whimper.
“Oh, Margaret. I’m so sorry,” said Stephen. She leaned over toward him, putting her head on his shoulder with a short sob. He felt any stiffness he was attempting to show her melt away as he hugged her. He felt no resistance from her side.
Just then, the door to the ward opened and a young Indian doctor came out. Verger Andrew introduced Stephen as “a close friend of the family,” which was true enough, but it sounded strange to him.
The doctor began, “Well, I’ve just examined the vicar and given him some pretty strong medicine. I don’t expect any more developments tonight. His breathing seems more regular, and I think all we can do now is give him some time and wait patiently. I’m having him transferred back up to the intensive care unit on the top floor, where they have more staff to keep an eye on him all night. The nurses are just changing shifts and I’ve made sure they have your telephone number at the vicarage, miss, and they’ll call you if there are any developments—otherwise, you should just go home and rest. Then check back with us about ten tomorrow morning. We can give you any news from overnight and then take it from there. Okay?”
“Yes,” said Margaret. “Is there anything I should bring for him from home?”
“No,” replied the doctor. “We have everything here to keep him as comfortable as possible. It’s more important just now for you to look after yourself, and get some rest. I know this is very upsetting, but don’t make it worse by getting ill yourself. You can be sure we are doing everything possible for him right now, and we just have to give it some time.”
“Thank you, doctor,” said Verger Andrew, standing up to stretch out his stiffness from sitting so long. “We understand.”
As the doctor went back through the doors to the ward, Stephen also stood up and helped Margaret up and into her coat.
“I’ll let you take Margaret home, Stephen,” Andrew said. “Both of you and the vicar will be in my prayers tonight.”
“Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much for coming and staying with me,” said Margaret.
Outside, the twilight was darkening under a cloudy sky and the crisp air was a welcome change.
“Did you have a car, Margaret?” asked Stephen.
“No, I just took a taxi from the station. I haven’t even been home yet, but I do have my key. I feel terrible I haven’t been up to see him more often. I mean, I came home for Easter, but I didn’t turn up all summer. I was so busy. And now all this.”
“I saw you on the evening news about Sarajevo this summer, and the vicar’s been telling me about how well you’ve been. So I guess you have been calling him often.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Margaret. “I call him every Saturday early evening and hear what he’s planning for his sermon, and then once or twice during the week. But it’s not the same as visiting, is it? Seems especially lame right now.”
“I’m over there by the fence. Can I give you a ride home?” said Stephen.
“Do you mind if we just walk a bit first? I really need to clear my head.”
“Of course,” he said.
They walked out of the hospital car park and onto the residential streets at a stroll. “He was quite excited about all the things they found in the church—and he’s said very nice things about how helpful you’ve been sorting through it all with him,” Margaret said.
“It’s been exciting for me, too. Suddenly all those quiet years in the library at Magdelan and the Bod have paid off. History coming to life from the tomb, of all things.”
“I wonder if that’s all been a bit too much for him,” she replied. “I mean, it’s been a whole new set of worries added to his plate. He told me he was up all night wondering if it might be very valuable, not that it would mean much to him. But now he’s walking around with all that swirling in his head—no wonder he fell down.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stephen. “I thought it was giving him a bit of a lift.” He wanted to avoid an argument with her at all costs.
“It put him into a commotion. I noticed it in our calls....” Margaret trailed off and just went silent for a while as they walked together in the dark between the streetlights.
“What is it all about, actually?” Margaret asked. “These bloody papers, I mean.”
“It’s about suitcase-size load of Elizabethan manuscripts—and not very ordinary ones at that. Mistress Vavasour was quite the unusual Elizabethan. She kept commonplace books with snippets of things she had read or had been sent, which isn’t so odd, but she also kept letters and personal papers—and that’s not normal at all. Usually you only find deeds, wills, or other legal papers as original manuscripts from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—things that the owners thought might have obvious value over time. Letters were kept only by people like Lord Burghley as ‘state papers’ and important records of who thought what or said what about government affairs. Most common correspondence simply disappeared. But this lady kept a lot of her papers and put them into her tomb. And that’s how they survived over three hundred years: quite remarkable, actually. Very rare.”
“Well, the lady was my mother’s family, as my dad must have told you. We don’t have anything to show for it, although I think my cousins have some furniture and such. But it wouldn’t have been from her specifically, just from the general time period. I was always told she was the black sheep of the family—quite notorious to hear my mother tell it, although she never shared the gory details with me. Apparently, she did everything her own way. In fact, she was thrown out as a maid of honor by the Queen. I always quite liked that about her while I was growing up, especially with her tomb nearby in the church and so on. I liked that she screwed up as a young girl, but then obviously lived on to be a rich old woman. Made me think life might give me second chances, too—although I haven’t seen many of those yet, damn it.”
Stephen didn’t know what to say to that.
By now, they had come all the way down the hill and were starting along the high street of the village. Margaret paused in front of the estate agent’s window and looked over some of the photos and listings on display.
“Well, house prices are up, I see. Do you still have yours?” she asked, separating them from the common ground of the vicar’s illness and adding in distance.
“Yes, and the Americans are still loving it—they even seem to finally have gotten the knack of keeping up the garden.” Stephen inherited his family house after his father died. It was a large detached house and garden—completely too much for him to rattle around in alone, so he listed it with the estate agents as a rental, and an American family had been in it now for almost two years. The father commuted by train into London each day, like scores of others lining the station platform during the morning rush hour.
“I think they see it more as their house than mine, but I believe his foreign posting is ending soon and they’ll be going back to the States. Nothing official, just something the wife mentioned to me when they extended the lease.”
Stephen had always fantasized he would live there with Margaret
and a bevy of adopted children someday, with him reading the newspaper by the fireplace in the lounge. But that hadn’t happened.
“You know,” Margaret said, “we probably should have a bite to eat. I didn’t have anything but a roll on the train and I think the Indian would still be serving. And frankly, I don’t want to go home just yet to toss and turn and stare at the ceiling.”
The Cinnamon Restaurant was just behind the high street. Stephen knew it well. He and Margaret had been there often back in the day. Now he knew it more for its takeaway than its tables. In a few minutes, they were across from each other again somewhat uneasily, although with a bottle of Beaujolais, while one tandoori chicken and a lamb tikka were under construction in the kitchen.
“How has your work been going?” he asked, thinking it would be best to sink into the mundane with her tonight.
“Well, I still have nightmares about the footage on the first rumors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Men and boys massacred and thrown in hastily dug mass graves, with their women looking for them—and then finding them. I just don’t forget that. Then, just back in June, I took on a three-week assignment about trouble in South Africa. There the horror was another massacre by a faction rivaling the African National Congress. It even seemed to have been sanctioned by the white police with over forty dead. If you’re not careful, the job is like being a moth popping up around nasty candles. I mean there’s no point to just spreading the news around. It seems so passive and weak compared with trying to change things somehow. I prefer the investigative side, where you’re gathering evidence to make some sort of calculated point, or to reveal something people aren’t aware is going on—when they damn well should be. That’s quite different. I mean, the job is never boring and the pay is fantastic but you have to make sure there’s some point to it. Plus, I can get very tired of all the travel on a moment’s notice. So, that’s me. How are you doing?”
Stephen had been staring at her as she spoke—my god, she is magnificent, he thought. He had to shake himself awake a bit to answer her.
“The kids and St. George’s are fine. Everybody has had quite a shock as we merged with St. Anne’s and introduced girls into the mix. Now the boys and girls stand around staring at one another in disbelief. I have especially high hopes that the girls’ headmistress, Mrs. Boardman, can take over much of the day-to-day running of the place. We even have a foreign student—from your Bosnia, of all places. His father works at their new embassy, just opened in Kensington. The family moved here in July and I had his parents to dinner right here in the Cinnamon.”
“Really?” said Margaret.
“They’re former professors at the university there. I told them to shop at Waitrose, join the tennis club for the kids, get the boy into the scouts, and so on.”
“Well,” said Margaret, shaking her head in disbelief, “they’re the luckiest Bosnians on the planet—because the whole place is disintegrating day by day, I can tell you.”
“But your father’s papers have been a welcome distraction from the school for me. I’ve enjoyed working on them, and I thought it was a boost for your father as well—not a poison. Anyway, it’s making me remember my original plan to be a writer of books and reviver of lost history. You remember? So, I’m just starting to think about all that again.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Margaret. “Sorry about blowing up at you for exciting my dad. I just needed to hit out at something—but it shouldn’t be you.”
“No worries,” he said as the food arrived.
~
Later that night, after he’d dropped her off at the vicarage, Stephen knew he had been kidding himself a long time. Kidding himself about being all right alone, about getting along, about doing something totally fulfilling in this out-of-the-way village. Most of all, he had been kidding himself about Margaret. He wasn’t over her. He felt so much less without her.
His thoughts wandered back to the when they started. They met while Stephen was ending his summer vacation hiking for two weeks through southern France visiting historical sites. He liked to put his own footsteps where great writers worked or great events occurred and feel the reality of centuries before more deeply. One late afternoon he was enjoying the sun outside at a café after several hours prowling around the old churches and cathedral in Poitiers. Several tables of more casual English tourists were also momentarily scattered around the same café, recovering from a day at the Futuroscope theme park nearby, and waiting for their coach driver so they could board the tour bus and continue on to stage twenty-two of their itinerary, no doubt. His countrymen were not, however, enjoying the attentions of their brusque and sullen French waitress, who seemed to have succeeded in avoiding most of them as the remaining minutes of their leisure time ticked away. When the bus driver suddenly appeared and announced their departure, most had not even received the overpriced refreshments they’d ordered. Stephen watched the farce unfold as they departed the café with a chorus of murmured insults at the expense of the French. At least they still had their money, one portly old gentleman declared.
As the bus pulled away, the French maid in question then efficiently reappeared from inside the café to tidy away the detritus of used serviettes and ashtrays in advance of a more preferred regular clientele, who soon came and filled up the places with their local French banter. Stephen thought her extremely pretty and fetching, in spite of her muttered Gallic comments on the pedigrees of the pale English patrons just removed. Her hair swung, catching the late afternoon sunlight, making her attractively backlit, as if in a film. Somehow she looked familiar. Perhaps he was watching her a bit too closely, because she felt his eyes crawling all over her. Suddenly she glared at him and stormed over, hissing “Etes vous perdu? Pas de l’autobus, monsieur?”
“No,” replied Stephen, responding resolutely in English, at least proving he understood her. “I’m not lost and I’m not missing that coach any more than you are, mademoiselle. I’m here traveling on my own—a simple pilgrim and lover of France.” She was stopped short and briefly speechless—and that’s when he recognized her. He hazarded a possibly inane further comment. “I’m sorry, aren’t you at Oxford?”
At first, she looked stunned, and then, unbelievably, she blushed. A shy grin stretched her lips as she seemed to recognize him. She slipped into the spare chair at his table. Then she lowered her eyes down above her reddened cheeks, like a guilty thing surprised. “Well, so much for my disguise,” she said, now in the same accent as his own. “Yes, and I recognize you from college as well, now that you mention it.”
That first conversation with her on the job had to be brief, but it was long enough for Stephen to realize she was a British girl acting out a real-world impersonation of a nasty French waitress. What incredible cheek to put that over. He had to find out more.
They made a date for when she stopped work at nine that night. Then they strolled around the ancient cobblestone streets of the old city as she explained herself to him. Yes, she was at Oxford in Brasenose College, and in her third year of studying English and modern languages. Her “modern” language was French, and she was finishing up her obligatory year abroad in France, immersing herself in French culture.
“I started as an au pair for a month with a wealthy family,” she began. “They were willing to take a chance on an English Oxford girl while their totally French governess was on her August holiday. It was bloody ironic that my job was essentially teaching two little boys and a girl how to be French. You know, they don’t treat children as we do, letting them fuss and throw tantrums and so on. The French treat kids as little adults they need to teach—not as God’s gift to the world to be coddled. So, with a bit of tough love, by the time the kids are aged three or four, they can go along to dinners in restaurants without any trouble and don’t have to be left at home with nanny in the nursery. Very much better,” she said enthusiastically.
After that, she worked for ten months in Paris for a small independent newspaper,
doing research for the journalists and helping them file the stories they either called in by telephone or sent in by telex. She would then trim and polish them to fit the available space on the page. That had been fast-paced, exciting, and totally absorbing, but she had been careful to leave the last month for some rest and recovery before heading back for her final year at college.
“That’s why for the last three weeks I’ve been filling in as a waitress here five days a week in Poitiers. Most of the regular staff are off on their August holiday, and I was ‘French enough’ for the café owner to welcome me to waitressing the tourists for him—as long as I could deliver the appropriate degree of rudeness both sides of the transactions would be expecting,” she finished, smiling. And, as Stephen had observed, she played that part bloody well.
They met several more evenings that week, getting on like a house on fire. After the fourth date, when they kissed good night at her door, she asked him up, and five minutes later they were all over each other. By the weekend, they were living together in the waitress’s flat that Margaret was subletting. She was impulsive, sure-footed, and fearless in her passion. He had never met anyone like her in his own cautious and well-thought-out world. Then, when her month of waiting tables was over, they rented a car at the Poitiers train station and spent a few days driving around the countryside, sampling village inns and local restaurants, and getting in deeper with the newness of each other.
The first day they only got as far as the small village of Bonnes about twenty kilometers east of Poitiers on the banks of the River Vienne north of Chauvigny. Stephen knew the spot because he’d been hiking around there stalking old battlefields. He parked right on the main street of the village. She knew the town as well and she immediately swept him down to the path along the river. From there, they could see beyond the neat front façades of houses into the private back gardens on the other side of the stream, with their lush plantings and outdoor dining tables clustered up near the back doors of the sandy gray stone buildings. Looking farther out, lush agricultural fields stretched as far as the eye could see.