She reaches down for her book.
When did her home ever feel like that? Ever?
These journeys – this day of all days – churn up emotions that threaten to unseat her from her moorings.
She glances back out as the farmland outside Basingstoke hurtles past. And why does he always choose pizzerias? That would never have been her mother’s choice. Her tastes – the actress in her – ran far more to bistro louche: monochrome prints of 1950s’ film stars on smoke-gloomed walls, sotto voce Aznavour, waiters mangling their ‘Rs’. Dorset didn’t run to too many of those.
At least they always had the sea.
She won’t be able to stop by the beach in Highcliffe tonight, though a trip down here without breathing in any sea always feels like a small tragedy. Growing up down here, she loved nothing better than walking all the way along the beach to Mudeford one way and Barton-on-Sea the other, hair slapping against her cheeks, brine on her tongue, the indignant screech of terns circling overhead. Autumn and winter, above all, when the space, the emptiness, the liminal beauty of it, was often hers alone, the shades shifting up and down the palette, the cone of quicksilver light tossed about on the waves, the inexorable pull and push. The sense the sea always gave her of things being renewed, when so much in her world seemed broken beyond repair.
Danny is staring at her in that way he has.
She fingers one of the browning carnations in the jar between them.
‘So how’s the new job, Danny?’
He shrugs, snapping his breadstick into equal pieces.
Fitness coach, his third fresh start in as many years.
The silence falls thick again. The unholy trinity – Ricky, Danny and Margot Goodwin – hunched over two macho quattro stagionis and a limp vegetable lasagne. The middle-aged couple on the next table can’t believe their luck at the promise of drama.
‘Doing much fishing, Dad?’ Danny asks, swivelling away from Margot.
‘Not much time right now, son.’
Those days out on the riverbank were amongst the few happy times. Margot had forgotten just how much.
Ricky clears his throat and reaches for his glass of Chianti.
‘So, well, here we are again. Twelve years on.’
Margot looks down, her breath shortening.
‘To Annelie. To your mum.’
Danny turns back to Margot as though he’s waiting for the ‘May God rest her soul’. She’ll never make that mistake again.
‘To Mum.’
The woman alongside catches Margot’s eye and looks away. Ricky replaces his glass and folds his napkin into a small triangle. Maybe he’s also relieved to get it over with?
‘What about your job, then, Margot?’ Danny asks, refilling his glass to the brim, and tilting his head. ‘I was hoping you’d come in uniform.’
‘Thought I’d leave that to you.’
The pull of the script is just too strong.
‘Ha friggin ha. I came here straight from the gym. Two hours training of my own a day, as well as all the client sessions.’ He takes a large swig. ‘Practise what you preach. You’d know all about that. Well, the preachy bit, for sure.’
‘Pack it in, will you, Danny?’ snaps Ricky.
‘Just kidding. She knows that, don’t you Margot, unless bants are now verboten.’
‘I said, leave it.’
‘Come off it, Dad, that’s a bit rich coming from—’
‘Danny,’ pleads Margot. The couple next to them have now stopped talking altogether.
‘What was that thing you always used to say?’ Danny plants his elbows further on the table. ‘Oh yeah, that’s it, the Church is the Tory Party at prayer.’
Margot’s head is thudding, as it does every year. The pebble-dashed past never giving up. It’s crossed her mind her father might even have preferred it if she’d found a job with the Tory Party rather than do what she’s actually done. Just before she left for Wilhurst, he even speculated about what her mother would have said as extra ammunition. She rubs her forehead. Who knows what she would have said? For all those comments she used to make about helmet-haired oddballs when Songs of Praise came on, wouldn’t she have wanted Margot to choose something about which she felt so certain? When she herself had spent most of her own life regretting the dreams she’d lost.
‘Listen, you two. I’ve got an announcement to make.’
Margot looks at her father, curious. Then again, there’s only so many years anyone could suffer being in sales management at SmileTime Party Accessories.
‘You might think it’s a bit of a bolt from the blue.’
‘Shit, Dad, don’t tell me you’ve found God too?’
Margot focuses on the garlicky crumbs next to her knife.
‘The thing is, well, I’ve met someone.’
Her head jerks up.
‘And we’ve decided.’ He stops, clears this throat again. ‘We thought, well, what the hell, we’re going to tie the knot.’
Margot’s mouth goes dry.
‘Her name’s Linda. We met at a sales conference in March.’
Danny rocks back in his chair and blows out his cheeks.
‘Jesus, Dad, you’re a fast worker.’
‘Yeah, well, you know. Anyway. There you go. The News at Ten.’
‘Yeah, shit, well, well done, I guess.’
Danny lifts his glass and clinks it against Ricky’s.
‘Cheers, son.’
Ricky turns towards Margot in expectation.
If she opens her mouth any time within the next few seconds, they’ll all regret it.
The taxi has slowed to a crawl in the mangle of cones and barriers running toward Hinton Admiral. The landscape around her is suffocating, low-rise. The big announcement is running round her head like malware.
Her mother once started to try and explain where it had all gone went wrong, when Margot was about fifteen. But she ran out of words. Margot knew Annelie’s career – or loss of it – was part of it. She took on some small parts when Margot herself was young: she can still remember sitting up on the counter, legs kicking in time as her mother walked up and down the lino reciting her lines. That was one of her last roles: The Merchant of Venice.
The miserable have no medicine but hope.
By the time Margot was seven or eight it was all over: the intense, dangerous, giddying rush of walking out on stage night after night, of slipping into someone else’s skin – gone.
Trying to pinpoint the happy moments of her parents’ marriage now is like delving into a lucky dip and coming up with fistfuls of sawdust. Just a few snapshots remain. Her mother’s hand on his knee as they all drove off somewhere for a weekend, the two of them belting out Wonderwall as she and Danny rolled around in the back seat. The occasional belly laughs in front of Only Fools and Horses. All of them charging through the sprinkler on a melting summer’s day, Margot’s ruched swimsuit turned a dark plum in the spray, Danny aiming a striped beachball at her head.
Eighteen years of marriage and those are pretty much all the good times she can remember as the tumbleweed rolls past.
They hadn’t needed anyone else to rent them asunder. They’d achieved that all by themselves. Her father’s youthful socialism coarsening into middle-aged rancour; her mother’s bitterness at the unravelling of all those dreams.
The miserable have no medicine but hope.
And now he’s invited another player to join the cast of the tragedy?
The taxi driver is humming along to Wave FM, loudly but off-key.
‘Could you try cutting through here on the right somewhere?’
‘You the expert then, love?’
He glances at her in the mirror, then shrugs, pulls across the traffic and turns down a small side road. She braces herself and then, brutally, there it is. It must be eight years, more. New Milton Community Church. Red-brick, squat and bland, caught in a stranglehold of nondescript 1930s housing, that small scrap of grass at the front where the toddlers used to play, the p
refab meeting hall at the side.
She turns to watch it fall away behind as they pick up speed towards the station. All these streets pitted with memories, the shadows edged with barbed wire.
The taxi bounces hard against a couple of dips in the road, the chassis groaning.
She’d only started going there by chance. She and Lorraine were slouching home from school, kicking pebbles into tyres outside the mock-Tudor double-fronts on Marine Drive.
‘Doing anything fun this weekend, Margie?’
‘What, apart from watching Dad and Danny watch non-stop football on the telly, you mean?’
Lorraine popped in another piece of gum.
‘Why don’t you come with me on Sunday afternoon? You know, to our church?’
‘Um.’
‘There’s plenty of cool stuff. Discos, ping-pong and snooker, weekend camps sometimes.’
Margot hesitated. Things were worse than ever at home. So much so that she sometimes worried the other kids would sense it, as though all the verbal violence clung to her like the smell of chip fat. But church?
‘I’ll think about it, OK?’
‘Stevie S and Kieran sometimes come along,’ Lorraine added over her shoulder, eyebrows indicating she knew she had sealed the deal.
Turned out Lorraine’s parents were pillars of New Milton Community Church. Her mum ran the worship band and her dad had a regular preaching slot. That first Sunday when they drove by to collect Margot, Lorraine’s dad had wanted to come in and say hello to her own parents, but Margot had fobbed him off, ashamed at the thought of either party meeting the other.
Everything shifted when she stepped inside that church. It might have been red-brick ordinary on the outside, but its interior was silvery with light. The only other church she knew was the echoey barn they all trooped into for the school carol services, complete with bum-torture pews and grim stained-glass windows. The openness of this place, its bare simplicity, suddenly made her feel weightless and free.
A woman in her mid twenties came over to Margot and Lorraine as soon as they walked in. She was wearing a turquoise hairband, a gappy smile and a badge declaring Welcome to the Glory!
‘Hi there, Lorraine. I see you’ve brought a friend.’
‘This is Margot, Gilly,’ Lorraine said.
‘So happy to have you here in Jesus’s home today with us, Margot. Always great to see a new face. You’re going to have lots of fun!’
Margot had gone there to escape, that was all. A brief spell of calm before returning to the war zone. But after a few weeks of slipping out of her back door after lunch every Sunday to meet Lorraine, this was the place she most wanted to be. It was like standing at the top of the water slide at the aquapark and just letting yourself go. She was made to feel welcome in a way she’d never felt before by this group of happy, friendly people who told her God was like a rainbow and talked about the Good News and the glory days and how Jesus would take care of her own personal happiness: all she had to do was let Him.
Right, wrong. Heaven, hell. Born again, saved. After the eggshells of home, these were simple certainties to live by. She was dizzy with the pleasure of it, snatched by the shoulders and whirled around six feet off the ground.
Gilly asked them all one Sunday afternoon whether welcoming Our Saviour into their life wasn’t the biggest thrill in the world. Margot’s arm was the first to be flung in the air. She’d found her compass for life.
The only thing that bothered her was the secrecy. She knew what her father’s reaction would be to her joining a gang of God-botherers, as he called them. And there were so many sedimentary layers of secrecy within the Goodwin household by then, what was one more?
One Sunday afternoon, she slipped her key into the back door, hiding the new copy of St John’s Gospel she’d just been awarded for regular attendance behind her back. She always came in tentatively, just in case. Sure enough, a crash greeted her as she stepped through the door: the sound of a bottle hitting something hard. She made straight for the stairs without stopping to check. She knew the drill.
‘I told you: I’m never going to another of your moronic work dos again. Got that?’
Up on the landing, Margot couldn’t make out Ricky’s response.
‘SmileTime Party Accessories,’ her mother screamed, voice blurred. ‘All those big ideas of yours, all the big “I am”.’
‘What, and a few walk-on parts in Birmingham Playhouse makes you Helen Mirren?’ Ricky spat, slamming open the kitchen door as Margot ran up to the attic, glad that Danny was out with his friends at least.
By the time she tiptoed downstairs a couple of hours later, the customary phoney peace had descended. The crescendo of verbal violence always followed by a simmering regrouping, while the TV held court at top volume. She reached the bottom step and saw her mother taut-jawed in the kitchen, slamming the iron down on something pale blue. Margot edged forwards. The new skirt she’d planned to wear at the church disco, now with a sooty, long-tailed comet above the hem.
Her mother looked up. She either didn’t notice Margot’s expression or was too far gone in her own misery to care.
In bed, pillow wedged around her head, Margot always asked for help the only way she knew how. But she was convinced this was one prayer that wouldn’t be granted, no matter what Gilly might say.
Chapter 6
Late November
Goldilocks for grown-ups. That’s what breakfast in the Armstrong house feels like. In the half-a-dozen times Margot’s joined them at Nathan’s insistence, it’s always been the same. The five of them around the pine table in tinkling silence, chocolate milk splashes enamelling the boys’ homework, Nathan only glancing up from the Daily Telegraph to offer a coffee refill, Cyd glued to her phone, scraping her spoon across her bowl.
Not everyone can be a morning person. After a few months of red-eye starts, Margot’s not even sure she is. But the body language here spells ‘archipelago’. Quarter to eight on a Wednesday morning. They could be talking about President Elect Trump’s plans for his first day in office. Surely that deserves a mention? Or havoc wreaked by Storm Angus on the south coast last night? Shouldn’t the boys be joshing each other about last night’s north London derby or something? Or Nathan grilling Cyd on her history coursework? One of them could even ask her, the black-clad cuckoo, what she’s up to today. A visit to see her spiritual director in Cambridge, in case anyone’s interested.
Maybe they discussed tactics before she moved in last month. Always stay schtum at mealtimes to stop the holy one launching into grace or, even worse, a sermon. Or is there some sort of breakfast vow of silence they observe, Trappism on toast?
But this feels like business as usual. Or is it just since Elspeth left? The empty chair at the table, even when every seat is filled. Cyd and the boys probably see her as interloper. She wouldn’t blame them if they did. She’s starting to feel like an interloper everywhere. Including her own family. She breathes in.
‘So who’s been to Paris, recently?’
Four faces look up.
She raises the mug in the air and the boys’ heads snap towards Nathan.
‘Oh, that.’ He shrugs. ‘Boys, do I need to give you lunch money?’
Cyd scrapes her chair back hard. Margot waits a beat then gathers her plate and mug and walks to the sink. She catches Cyd’s eye and risks a smile. Sorry about your mum. Sorry about your room. Sorry Mother Theresa’s moved into your home. Cyd slams the fridge door and charges out of the kitchen.
Margot is fixing her collar studs in the hall mirror a few minutes later when she becomes aware of being watched.
‘Not exactly the front cover of Vogue, is it?’ She tries to keep it light. ‘Unfortunately, it sort of comes with the territory.’
She looks back at her reflection, this time through Cyd’s eyes. Scrappy haircut. Eye make-up barely there. Studs in her ears so small she needn’t have bothered.
‘Tragic.’
Margot’s head snaps around again,
but Cyd is already back up on the landing. She runs her finger inside the collar. She’s starting to wonder if she’s been sent here as some kind of punishment.
‘Must you go, Margot, when we’re all so busy getting ready for Advent?’ Roderick growls, trumpeting into his old-man’s hankie. Her loathing of that scrap of grimy cloth and all it’s intended to signify is intensifying by the day, corroding her soul.
‘God knows, we all need tea and sympathy and the chance to unload to an understanding ear sometimes, Roderick,’ Jeremy says. ‘And it’s only every couple of months.’
‘Nothing wrong with spiritual directors, of course, Vicar. I just don’t see why it needs a whole day out. Everything’s so touchy-feely these days.’
Jeremy smiles and walked towards the kettle.
‘Have fun, Margot. Give my best to Hadley.’
‘Probably spend the whole day shopping,’ Roderick snarled, just loud enough for Margot to catch as she heads out of the door.
She looks out at the clothes wholesalers on the Commercial Road as the coach heads towards the M11, remembering that parting shot of Roderick’s. At first, she attributed his endless moods to arthritis or gout or some other aged-priestly ailment. But she knows the hostility towards her is more complex than that. The loneliness hangs over him like a shroud: the crabbiness, his shell. She must keep reminding herself of that. Even so, the constant sniping is starting to get under her skin, even making her sometimes question her ability in the role. They’re supposed to be on the same side, yet she expects someone to shout, ‘Behind you!’ every time he passes her in the vestry. If he had his way, the Reformation would never have happened. That arthritic finger unable to stem the tide.
She somehow needs to lance the boil.
Half an hour later, the coach pulls out onto the motorway. It’s a startlingly blue November day, crisp and even. She offers silent thanks that Hadley became college chaplain at Christ’s rather than staying in Stepney. Doddery’s right: the window-shopping opportunities are so much better in Cambridge.
The Girls' Book of Priesthood Page 5