‘Sorry, Jeremy, but I have to skedaddle, sadly. Family stuff.’
He hasn’t taken his eyes off her.
‘You’re not what I expected.’
A joke – any joke – eludes her.
‘I mean, you know, someone says “woman priest” and you think the whole grey-hair-bobbly-cardigan-house-full-of-cats thing, right?’
He’s got the full cast of stereotypes. Just like how the cocky male crew at Wilhurst used to call the first floor corridor ‘Death Row’, because that’s where the older women ordinands lived.
‘Well, yeah, I guess.’
The vicar’s smile rounds into a cherubic O.
Maybe it’s because she has the energy of a limp balloon, but she can’t tell whether she’s being flirted with or insulted, or both.
Fabian glances down at her left hand.
‘I kind of thought you’d be wearing a skirt.’
‘Oh, Margot’s very twenty-first century,’ chortles Jeremy, slightly flirtatious himself. ‘She’s going to be a huge asset to the team. Fulltime, to boot.’
‘I wouldn’t have taken a non-stipendiary job,’ Margot shoots back.
Fabian tips his head.
‘Sorry to have missed your star turn this morning. I’ll have to catch it on YouTube.’
Margot glances at the vicar, but disloyalty wouldn’t be his style.
‘Jeremy says you’ve come armed with a Ph.D.’ He juts out his lower lip. ‘I hope we won’t be too dull for you.’
The vicar beams, thrilled at this interaction.
‘What was it about, this Ph.D of yours?’
She hesitates.
‘Well, how the Church in the Middle Ages represented women as the counterpoint of body and spirit, a rendering of the eternal conflict between flesh and soul.’
A muscle flickers by Fabian’s right eye.
‘Looks like you’ll have to keep on your toes, mate,’ he says to Jeremy, then glances back at Margot. ‘Can’t wait to hear more.’
He reaches over to clap Jeremy on the shoulder.
‘Sorry but someone’s waiting for me. See you in a couple of weeks.’
He doesn’t look back as they watch him winding through the bar, hand raking through the layers.
‘Great bloke,’ Jeremy says, bumping down onto the banquette next to her. ‘Knows absolutely everyone. Involved in several start-ups, apparently. You know, the kind of guy who’s always ahead of the wave.’
‘Right.’
‘He’s very ambitious for St Mark’s.’
‘That’s an interesting word.’
He tosses back a palmful of nuts and clinks her glass.
‘You two will make a great team.’
Her stomach isn’t so convinced.
By the time she’s walking back home across the Fields, the sky has lightened to a milky blue, like a toddler tamed out of its tantrum.
There’s an empty seat ahead of her, caught in a pool of weak sunshine. She walks over and sits down, glad of the solitude at last.
Jeremy’s explained how the elegant five-storey terraces fronting the park are home to Highbury’s rarefied gene pool of literati, glitterati and legalati. A century and a half ago, their owners would have been stalwarts of St Mark’s, when numbers ran to more than a thousand even on a normal Sunday. Jeremy would be ecstatic now if he managed to pull in a quarter of that at Christmas or Easter. He’s already aired his frustration about the fact that many of these houses will happily support the fundraising appeals, but their generosity never translates into bums on seats. That’s where you come in, Margot. A new face to bring in a new congregation. You and Fabian, a great team.
She shudders. Somehow she will have to make that one work.
She closes her eyes, wrenching her hair out of its ponytail. Her black clothes are sponging up the heat. She can imagine Clarissa upbraiding her for being such a sap, next time they meet up a drink: Lame, M, lame. Imposter syndrome, so not 2016.
Some boys playing a scratch game of cricket nearby; a man is throwing some kind of spongy toy for his dog; people are walking past her on the grass. The honeysuckle bush in the garden behind is rendering the air almost laughably sweet. Just a few more minutes. The agenda for Tuesday’s PCC meeting can wait. No rush to get back to the dingy curate’s flat, with its smell of wet dog, mushroom-coloured stigmata on the wall behind the TV, and rusty cooker with its please-themselves hotplates. Not forgetting the front-door bell playing Zadok the Priest, courtesy of some joker in Church House. After ten days, she’s ready to rip the wires from the wall.
She swallows. She knows exactly how fortunate she is. A flat of her own, after four years of hairy-basined communal living at Wilhurst – Big Brother for the holy. More to the point, she’s lucky to have this job at all. Every other ordinand in her year had posts sewn up by December or January; she was still homeless by mid-April. The central London parishes you’d think would be right-on and liberal might just as well have signed up to Resolutions A and B for all the difference it made. The stained-glass ceiling resolutely in place.
Jeremy was the only one to say yes. The moment they met at the Pets and Owners’ Meet and Greet at Wilhurst, she’d looked around everyone else scoping out their prospective new incumbents and knew she was the one who’d struck gold.
It’s late afternoon when she stands up to go. There’s no evensong tonight, but she has a couple of hours prep, ahead of her first full week as the vicar’s number two. Joint number two. She must try not to forget about Roderick. Just because he’s still away on whatever kind of break seventy-year-old, single, soon-to-be-retired, male priests treat themselves to doesn’t mean he’s not a lynchpin at St Mark’s.
The back route to the flat is longer, but she takes it to avoid bumping into any of the parishioners on Highbury Grove. The thought of some of those prospective encounters makes her roots prickle. If she’d been free to choose, she’d have lived in a different borough, several miles away preferably.
She pops into the twenty-four-hour shop near the roundabout for some chocolate and a couple of magazines, then crosses over two sets of lights and turns the corner into Mildmay Grove. And stops. Paralysed.
Slivers of blue light are dancing off the parked cars. There’s a small crowd standing on the corner, blanketed by an eerie hush. Powerful arc lights are trained on her terrace, even though it’s a bright summer afternoon.
She sleepwalks towards the knot of people.
‘Sorry, can I just go, excuse me, sorry, I live here, can I just squeeze through?’
No one moves or even turns to look at her. Her hands are clammy. She reaches into her pocket, then grabs a couple of shoulders from behind.
‘Can you let me past? I need to get through. Look, I’m a priest.’
One of the men gawps at her, then steps back just enough to let her pass. She pushes forwards as hard as she can and stops dead.
Mildmay Grove looks like a live news feed. There’s a jagged tear where most of her house used to be, a cat’s cradle of blue and white police tape criss-crossing the street. The air is foggy with dust, reeks of something cloying and metallic. Margot feels like her senses are scrambled.
‘Poor sods,’ says a large woman next to her, her arms hugging her chest.
‘Gas,’ announces a man in front. ‘Not bloody terrorists, at least.’
‘Shit,’ the woman answers. ‘What a way to go.’
Margot is worried she’s about to vomit. The Lloyds’ TV blares out from breakfast right through to midnight.
‘Yeah, well, no one in at the time, the coppers just said,’ a man further back shouts over other people’s heads.
‘Are you sure?’ Margot whispers, her breath shaky.
‘Coppers said so, didn’t they? Something to do with a dodgy boiler jobby.’
‘They was lucky.’ An elderly woman to Margot’s right wearing a dirty bobble hat leans in close, licking her lips. ‘Could’ve been very nasty, very nasty.’ She squints, peering at Margot. ‘You was wasti
ng your time, love. No need for last rites, after all.’
Margot can’t drag her eyes away. There’s something obscenely intimate about it: her small sanctuary of sanity and calm now exposed to a couple of hundred onlookers idling on the street. The building looks like a doll’s house vandalised by a wayward child, the front wall almost completely ripped away, ribbons of paper fluttering in the arc lights as though part of some macabre festival of the grotesque.
Something’s glinting on the back wall. It takes her a few seconds to realise what it is. The frame of her leavers’ photo from Wilhurst, now dangling sideways, the hopeful smiles of 120 ordinands buried beneath a filthy layer of dust.
Her legs break into a jive.
‘Mind how you go.’ She turns to her right to see the guy from two doors down, the one who’s always popping around for a pint of milk and, she suspected, the milk of human kindness, now reaching for her arm, his eyes full with concern.
‘Shit, you look like a ghost. You OK?’
She lets him guide her to sit down on the curb.
‘You got anything valuable in there?’
She lifts her eyes towards the pulverised mess and shakes her head. Any other Sunday, she would have been home by now. Someone hands her a bottle of water.
‘This your place, miss?’
She looks up again, registering the black uniform beneath the high-vis jacket, then the pale face of a skinny young policeman, wispy strands of strawberry blond escaping from under his cap.
He licks his finger and flicks at his pad. Maybe this is also one of his first days on the job? His hand is trembling slightly. She takes another swig of water, noticing herself noticing these details, as though some sort of anchor to prevent her vanishing entirely. Behind the policeman, a couple of people now seem to be capturing this exchange on their mobile phones.
‘Was.’
‘So I need to take some detai—’
‘Oh, sorry, I’m sorry, officer.’
She drags her phone out of her bag and stares at the screen.
‘Take it if you need to, miss.’
He taps his phone against his cheek, lower lip slightly out.
‘Dad?’
‘Don’t sound so thrilled.’
She closes her eyes.
‘I can’t talk now, it’s just, I’m not––’
‘Don’t tell me, they’ve already got you hosting a leper convention?’
‘Please, Dad.’
‘Joke, Margot.’
‘Now is not a good time. My fla—’
‘When is, exactly?’
She can’t answer.
‘Just call back when you can finally spare some time.’
The screen fades to black.
‘Not more bad news, I hope?’
It’s the policeman’s professional kindness that finally tips her over.
Chapter 3
Middle of August
The bed and breakfast off Essex Road has two things to recommend it: the mates’ rates agreed by the owner, because her sister’s in the church choir, and the solitude it provides. As Margot staggered out of Mildmay Grove that evening three and a half weeks ago, as someone ushered her into a minicab to be gathered into the vicarage by a shocked Jeremy, more than any of the possessions she’d lost in the rubble that briefly constituted her home, more than the thought of what could have happened if she’d returned half an hour earlier, her overriding terror was for the loss of her freedom, now that the curate’s flat had been obliterated.
She perches on the side of the yellowing duvet and bites on her pen. In terms of comfort, it’s possibly even a step down from its predecessor. But the rollercoaster mattress, the gap between the window and its casement, the slimy wardrobe door, the brown lampshades, the gloom, all continue to provide her with the anonymity she craves.
That sense of good fortune is spiced with an awareness that, over the past few weeks, she has been the recipient of unadulterated kindness in its truest sense. The caravan of gifts from St Mark’s would gladden the heart of the most adamant misanthropist. A drawer full of clothes lent by Sal and Kath, co-leaders of the Kool Gang, to give back whenever. A We Love You, Margot scrapbook from the Kool Gang themselves. A pile of well-thumbed Reader’s Digests from the flower ladies. A giant bottle of primrose bath oil from the two biddies who always nod in unison, three rows back. That bunch of yellow tulips from Tommy the verger, with a card in beautiful copperplate: Chin up, Reverend.
And, of course, four bottles of Chilean red from Jeremy, because what else would a vicar provide?
There’s been no fanfare, no virtue-signalling hoopla, just the no-nonsense generosity of people who want to do their bit. She knows how very lucky she is to be in this particular parish, amongst these particular people.
She pulls the sheet of paper on the bed towards her, circling the numbers in fluorescent marker.
1. Collect Jeremy’s surplice from the cleaners
2. Call the builder about the leak above the sacristy
3. Chase English Heritage about the grant application
She zips the onesie up tighter. Did Kath and Sal somehow foresee the cross-currents in this room?
4. Circulate the statement of accounts before Prissy Pamela starts complaining
5. Email Islington Council about the alcohol licence for weddings
6. Research Paw Patrol for the primary-school assembly
Even as she tries to marshal the priorities, new ones jump up, thrusting their hands into the air. Jeremy loves quoting that line saying that life in ministry is working yourself to death, but slowly. She’s already seen how each week, each day, is so unstructured and unpredictable; sometimes feels like they’re dealing with life, death and everything in between, all in the same afternoon. But that’s the grace, the privilege of the mission.
7. Remind Jeremy to lay mousetraps behind the organ
8. Visit Edwina Walker in Homerton Hospital
She arrows Edwina to the top of the page. Yes, but when? Trying to get on top of all this makes Sisyphus’s to-do list seem like a cheese-rolling competition.
9. Read through the notes on service composition for the next Post Ordination Training session aka POTTY meeting
10. Pin down the choirmaster about the hymn selection for the next quarter
11. Phone that young mother whose husband has run off with his executive assistant
12. Book waxing appointment
She scores through the last one and drags out another blank sheet.
1. Book waxing appointment
2. Find a yoga class
3. Learn German
She stops and sighs.
4. Get a life
Outside the window, profound darkness. It was always going to be a vertical learning curve; any new job would be. ‘Keep calm and muddle on,’ as Jeremy would say. She should have it printed on a mug for him. But, then, after twenty-five years plus, he’s accustomed to the chaos, the infinite straggle of loose ends. Roderick, too, no doubt. She baulks at the thought of the house-for-duty assistant priest. Things aren’t progressing so well on that front. Those liver-spotted hands cradling endless cups of tea, the rheumy eyes watching her every move. She needs to work harder to win him over.
She’s just reaching down to pick up the first sheet again when there’s a loud rap on the door.
She sits back, frozen. Mid evening on a Sunday? Mrs Bartlet, the landlady, has only knocked twice in three weeks, and then just to bring up an electric heater and some post.
The knock comes again, louder this time.
She grabs a cardigan to cover the onesie and heads for the door.
Mrs Bartlet is standing outside in the hall, tea-towel in her hand. So, too, is one of the parishioners, Gwen Taylor. Cradling a lumpy carrier bag, that eager snaggle-toothed smile of hers wide in anticipation.
‘I hope it’s not too late, Reverend?’
One of the navy blue, all-weather, Crocs is already over the threshold.
Mrs Bartlet no
ds at them both and shuffles back to her own quarters and the latest must-see Scandi thriller.
Margot stares at Gwen. Is she here to remind her about the silverware cleaning rota?
‘I just wanted to deliver some baked goodies for you, Reverend, you being homeless and so on,’ she gabbles. ‘David told me I shouldn’t, it would be OTT, but a little coffee and walnut sponge never hurt anyone. I’ve popped some strawberry-jam tarts in as well. All you have to do is keep them shut tight in the Tupperware.’
‘Oh, well, that’s so kind of you, Gwen. But you really shouldn’t have.’
‘Why ever not?’
Margot tenses. It’s such a fine line. She knows she should invite her in, brew up a cup of tea or instant coffee and sit and have a chat. That’s why she’s here.
They both stand by the door.
‘You’ve made it nice and comfy here, then.’
Margot smiles, glancing over her shoulder at the tiny room.
‘Oh, you know, we priests like our cells!’
Gwen frowns. A double beep from the other side of the room breaks the silence. Margot dashes across to her phone.
Get your holy self down to the Spotted Dick on Stoke Newington high street by 8.30. I need a drink.
Clarissa.
‘Just a sec, Gwen.’
She types a reply at top speed.
You’re telepathic as well psychopathic. Mine’s a double G and T.
She turns back to Gwen, still standing by the door, waiting. Margot feels a twinge of guilt.
‘I’m so sorry, Gwen, but I have to head out now.’
‘Oh no. Must you?’Gwen’s eyes hold hers for a second and seem to be watering behind the round frames. Margot swallows.
‘Urgent pastoral business.’
‘But I was hoping we could have a proper chat,’ Gwen says, glancing down at her bags. ‘I wanted to talk to you about all kinds of things I thought we could do at St Mark’s.’
She rummages in her pocket and pulls out a plastic sandwich bag.
‘And I brought some herbal tea bags. I know they’re your favourite.’
The Girls' Book of Priesthood Page 2