The Girls' Book of Priesthood

by Louise Rowland

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ Cyd spins round again to face her, her face contorted. ‘What, your bitch of a mother ran off with the neighbour too? Yours also started a new life like you’d never even existed?’

  She elbows Margot so hard as she shoves past that she falls sideways onto the bed. She listens to the footsteps clattering down and the crash of the bathroom door and covers her face with her hands. She was this close to telling her about her own mother.

  She starts walking slowly back down the stairs. Jeremy has to find her somewhere else to live. She didn’t sign up to being a human shield.

  Nathan’s switching off the lights in the hall as she approaches. He looks up, surprised.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  Bruise-coloured bags sag below his eyes.

  ‘Totally. Just heading off to bed with my Horlicks and the Collected Sermons of John Wesley.’

  She gives a little wave and walks on into the kitchen, his confused chuckle dying behind her.

  So much pain and hurt and she is completely failing to help.

  Luck has nothing to do with it. This was meant to happen. That’s why it feels so good to be with you, even if our timing’s crap, but hey xxxx

  She keeps pressing the button so that the ghostly glow illuminates her pillow. He makes her feel like her every nerve cell has become its own LED display.

  Sure you’re not free til Thursday?? I’m not sure I can wait…

  She swallows.

  Thursday. Their real first night. Finally.

  The hours between have balls and chains attached. But, equally, she doesn’t want time to charge on, throwing up balls of dust. It’s already April. Three months until Petertide. She doesn’t feel ready to be priested. And yet she’s never wanted it more.

  She’s not home and dry until she’s kneeling at that altar with the hishop’s hand resting on her head.

  Lord, help me to get to the end of this year and be ready to enter Your service. I want nothing more than to serve my title intact. But I have to deserve it, don’t I? You don’t get there just because you’ve put in the hours, like some kind of reward for good attendance. Help me, please help me make it through.

  Chapter 17

  Mid-April

  This is how burglars must feel. Chest compressed, skin scorched, ears pricked for the slightest sound, the click of a lock, the flicker of an alarm sensor.

  It’s like stepping into someone else’s skin.

  Her first time in his flat.

  It feels profoundly, viscerally wrong.

  Felix hasn’t lied to her. It’s just that she’d assumed – willed herself into thinking, she realises – that he lived down in a basement like she herself does, that there would be a physical separation from the rest of the house. Her psychological cop-out. There isn’t. What there is in this neat two-storey terraced house at the back of Holloway Road is a make-do sofa bed in the living room, a downstairs shower and a rigid set of dos and don’ts to enable this delicate temporary arrangement of hands-off cohabitation to work.

  Pattie is away seeing her new guy for a few days, he said. Does that make it worse, knowing her name?

  She couldn’t face asking for more details. She’s entangled deep enough within this web, its sticky fibres clinging to her soul.

  ‘I tidied up a bit,’ Felix says, wiping a hand on his apron and passing over a glass of wine.

  Tidying, a.k.a. hiding the evidence. But Margot’s professional habit of reading clues whenever she walks into a parishioner’s home is one step ahead of him. The half-empty bottle of perfume on the mantelpiece. The box of apple and cinnamon sugar-free granola beside the wine bottles. The shopping list in cursive female hand on the fridge, cotton wool balls right at the top.

  Traces everywhere.

  The room looks semi-abandoned, contingent, with its half-packed cartons of books and framed posters leaning blind into the wall. The bones of a marriage, the his ’n’ hers division of the spoils.

  She sits rigid on the sofa, watching him destalk the coriander and dice the ginger for his signature dish, humming to himself. He can’t be really so oblivious?

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ he says, looking up.

  She looks away.

  The room is ghostly with flickering shadows. Five, possibly six, glasses of wine on an almost completely empty stomach. Her eyelashes seem to be glued together, her mouth is sandpaper-dry.

  She can still smell the burnt stir-fry left cremated on their plates after Felix spent an hour talking her out of bailing out. It reeks in here from what must have been two packets of cigarettes. That jagged conversation where everything either of them said seemed to miss its target.

  It was half-past four by the time they’d finally collapsed onto the sofa bed, fully clothed and defeated. Margot had fallen into a troubled half-sleep, a tight embryo aware of Felix’s elbow digging into her as she tossed and turned.

  She turns her head cautiously. He’s still asleep. The greyish dawn light heightens his vulnerability. Her eyes well up remembering the crack in his voice as he’d tried to reassure her – and her furious, indignant, response. The enormous sense of jeopardy she’d felt was her baggage, not his. She’s the one with the 24/7 conscience. Why should canon law be on his radar?

  She’s wrecked everything.

  ‘Hey, hey, Gogo, stop. Come on. Don’t.’

  Felix pulls himself up onto his elbow and wipes the tear from her cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He reaches for her hand and she lies back down next to him. Margot feels the rise and fall of his chest next to her, as they listen to the birdsong tuning up outside. She needs to get home before they’re all wake. Yet how can she leave? Cocooned here in his warmth, her mind finally still. In the most precarious of circumstances, she’s somehow safe.

  ‘How about I make us some coffee?’

  ‘No, stay,’ she touches his arm. ‘Stay. Just for a minute.’

  She runs her finger down his forehead, over the childhood bump on his nose, over its tip and down onto his lips. He kisses her finger, smiling, his eyes closed.

  She pushes away the blanket he must have thrown over them during the night, breathes in. Feathery touches at first and then with the urgency of all these endless weeks of tension and fear. He gasps as she slips her hand inside his shirt, her lips locked with his.

  ‘Gogo?’

  She places her finger on her lips.

  In the wrongest of places, at the wrongest of times, this is the choice she has made.

  Neither of them speaks again for a while.

  ‘Reverend Dark Horse,’ he whispers, kissing the small swallow on her shoulder blade. ‘Where d’you get this?’

  ‘Thailand. I was volunteering before Cambridge.’ She pokes his stomach. ‘No need to sound so shocked.’

  He runs his fingers through her hair. ‘One more reason why I’m not ideal vicar’s wife material.’

  The abruptness of it punches the air from her lungs, shocking her out of her state of dizzy denial.

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit hasty?’ She struggles to keep her voice light.

  He checks off his fingertips one by one.

  ‘I can’t do flower arranging. I don’t bake Victoria sponges or make jam. I wouldn’t know one end of a whist game from the other. Jumble sales bring me out in hives. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than run a raffle. And most nights I’m filthy-tempered and foul-mouthed.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘And I haven’t even mentioned my thrash metal phase. Or the alcohol. The drugs. The stint as a stripper.’

  Margot sits up, reaches for her watch and jumps onto the rug.

  ‘It’s six already.’

  She rushes around the room, throwing things into her bag.

  ‘Breakfast first? Coffee at least?’

  ‘Felix, I’m dead if I don’t make it back before the house is up.’

  ‘But you just––’

  The look she gives him as she turns
is enough of an answer.

  When she gets back from work a few days later, there’s something’s different about the house in Aberdeen Avenue. She senses it immediately, upending the hairs on her neck.

  Rasping laughter is coming from the living room. She puts her head round the half-open door and gasps. Ricky is sitting on the sofa, arm slung back against the cushions. Facing him in the armchair is Cyd, feet curled up beneath her, cat that got the cream.

  Margot takes a deep breath and walks inside.

  A solitary chocolate finger sits on the plate between them.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ says her father.

  She drags herself over for the peck on the cheek, her brain rioting at the incongruity. A powerful wave of new aftershave hits her full on. Linda’s calling card, even if she’s not here in person.

  ‘Had a meeting in Archway, Margot. Looked you up on the A to Z and thought I’d surprise you.’

  ‘Mission accomplished, Dad.’

  No one laughs. Cyd is leaning forward, keen not to miss a moment.

  ‘I’m back earlier than normal,’ Margot says.

  ‘Fate, then, or something.’ He laughs. ‘In any case, this young lady has been doing a fantastic job of looking after me.’

  Cyd sweeps her hair out of her eyes and giggles.

  ‘You never told me about any of this,’ her father says, sweeping an arc to indicate Armstrong World. The cosy universe from which he has been so unaccountably excluded.

  ‘Ricky’s been telling me all about when you were young.’ Cyd has her own poker face.

  ‘Your step mum sounds really cool.’

  Margot swivels round, cheeks hot.

  ‘How is Linda?’

  ‘Busy, busy, just like you. She’s got a load of new clients through the local veggie café. And of course she’s up to her eyeballs in all the preparations for the handfasting.’

  ‘What is that, exactly?’ asks Cyd sweetly, beating Margot to it.

  ‘Our wedding ceremony. You girls love all that stuff, don’t you?’

  Ricky chuckles. Cyd giggles. Margot feels like gagging. Linda in some wood sprite-goth confection, those bangles jangling victoriously on her wrist.

  ‘We mustn’t keep you from your schoolwork, Cyd.’

  ‘It’s fine. It’s just history.’

  Cyd inspects a split end. Margot holds her breath. Cyd looks like she’s weighing up her options but finally gives a theatrical sigh and jack-knifes her legs out from under her.

  ‘Great to meet you. Margot never stops talking about you. And bring Linda next time you come.’ She throws a final smirk. ‘I love all that New Age stuff.’

  Ricky laughs and reaches for the last biscuit.

  Margot counts to the end of ‘hallowed be Thy name’ as Cyd climbs the stairs.

  ‘Nice kid.’ He pats the cushion next to him. ‘Come and sit down, love.’

  Everything about this feels wrong.

  ‘So, how’s it going, all your,’ – he pauses – ‘stuff?’

  She stares at him.

  ‘Not bad, thanks,’ she says finally. ‘Just a few weeks left until my ordination, all being well. You don’t want anything to derail you at the last minute, you know, knock you off course.’

  It echoes in her head as she says it.

  ‘Really? I thought it was all a dead cert. The Church doesn’t exactly have people hammering on the door wanting to be vicars.’

  She opens her mouth to answer and finds she can’t.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something, actually, love.’ He coughs. ‘Linda and I would like you to do our wedding. June the twenty-first, the summer solstice.’

  He leans back, grinning like a fourth member of the Magi who’s just deposited a gift of peerless price at her feet.

  ‘Linda’s idea, of course. She really wants you to feel involved.’

  Where are the twins? Nathan? Even Cyd, at this point?

  ‘Is that date good for you?’

  She clears her throat.

  ‘Dad, I’m really sorry. I can’t.’

  ‘We could probably shift the date by a few days.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’

  He leans back into the sofa, brushing some crumbs from his lap.

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a vicar so you could stand at the front and do weddings and all the rest of it, just like the blokes.’

  He reaches over for her collar off the chair and starts spinning it round on his index finger. She fights to restrain herself.

  ‘I’m not allowed to do weddings. Just funerals and the odd baptism. No marriages until,’ – she brakes – ‘if I’m fully ordained.’

  Watch him at close quarters slipping her mother’s ring onto Linda’s finger?

  ‘Surely you can make an exception for your own father?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She looks down at her hands. He’s still spinning the collar at the edge of her vision.

  ‘You always were a line-toe-er, Margot.’

  ‘I’m not doing it deliberately, Dad.’

  ‘Really?’

  He stands up and reaches for his backpack.

  ‘It’s not as if it’s a bog-standard church do. Linda wants something close to Mother Nature, she said, so all your usual churchy rules don’t apply.’

  Margot doesn’t look up.

  ‘I really want you to do this for me, for Linda. Make it a family affair.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘You people are such hypocrites.’

  Cyd walks back into the room grinning.

  ‘Don’t let me down, Margot,’ Ricky says from the door.

  There’s a second of silence before the front door slams.

  Cyd gives a small laugh and runs back upstairs.

  The South Bank dances in the early evening light. Garlands of white bulbs are threaded between the lamp posts, their reflection flirting with the lights from the tourist boats gliding past below.

  ‘This is nice,’ Felix says, hooking his finger under the strap of her new sundress. He tucks a stray hair behind her ear, leaving a trail of heat.

  They look down at the treacle-black water below, pushing and pulling to find its way home. A family is mud-larking on the shore, buckets and spades in hand.

  ‘You’ve got your deep-dive face on,’ he says.

  She keeps her eyes on the eddying swirls, pink-tinged and restless.

  ‘Something at work, Gogo?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I was thinking about my dad.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The whole marriage thing.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, did you talk to your brother about it?’

  The sob comes from nowhere.

  ‘Hey, come here.’

  She swipes at her eyes. Clarissa always used to warn that if you open up too soon about the family cracks and cranks, it’ll be adieu, Mr Perfect. She flinches at thought of Clarissa. How long is it since they last spoke properly?

  ‘I was thinking we could maybe go away somewhere one weekend. Forty-eight hours all to ourselves. Imagine.’

  He nuzzles her neck above the strap of her dress.

  ‘Sound good?’

  It takes a huge effort of will.

  ‘I can’t right now.’ She looks back down at the children crouching of the sand. ‘But sometime soon. I promise.’

  She reaches for his hand, because she hasn’t got the energy to explain yet again.

  Eight o’clock on Maundy Thursday, she gets a call from Jeremy.

  ‘Can you stand in for me at the Chrism Mass, Margot?’ She waits for the burst of phlegmy coughs to stop. ‘Roderick’s not available, apparently.’

  She’s already behind with preparing all the children’s activities for the Easter. She’s got a dozen rolls of crêpe paper to buy for the bonnet-making session and three simnel cakes to bake. But she’s delighted to attend one of the biggest get-togethers in the clerical calendar, attended by hundreds of priests
from all over the capital, the episcopal blessing of the oils proving the perfect occasion for insider gossip.

  Most of the clergy have already finished vesting in the Chapter House at St Paul’s by the time Margot rushes in. It must be a good half a minute before she spots another female face.

  ‘Here we all are once again at this sacred ceremony dating back to the apostolic tradition of Hippolytus on AD 215,’ says the bishop, his voice redolent with tones acquired at one of the country’s oldest public schools followed by one of its most ancient universities.

  She looks up at the mosaics on the concentric circles on the dome far above her head. At the Whispering Gallery, the organ that Mendelssohn played, the chessboard tiles over which the funeral cortèges of Nelson and Churchill moved on their final journeys. Her neck prickles. Assuming her place within this ancient chain of service and praise.

  She slips out her phone and texts under her service sheet.

  Wish you were here!! You would so love this. Xxx

  She catches the eye of her neighbour, who offers the kind of look the principal had down to a tee.

  She’s walking out behind them all an hour later, discussing the address with the vicar of St Mary and All Angels, Bradford, when she stops sharp. Roderick. To the left of a pillar, in animated conversation with Fabian’s nephew. A third, older man talking with them, his biretta nodding in time. Martin Kennedy, presumably. She feels dizzy at the sight of them.

  ‘Someone you know?’ asks the Bradford vicar. They never miss a thing.

  ‘Easy mistake when there are fifteen hundred of us all dressed the same,’ she smiles.

  There are small clusters of clergy all the way down the front steps and she needs to weave her way through them fast.

  A few steps down, she runs into a handful of women clergy chatting together. One nods companionably at Margot.

  ‘All very nineteen-fifties, this, isn’t it?’

  ‘Too right,’ says her neighbour, a tiny woman in her late sixties. ‘I marched down Whitehall twenty-five years ago and yet finding a woman at Chrism Mass remains harder than squeezing that camel through the needle.’