The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Anna said slowly, ‘You are so kind. But – but I don’t think I can accept.’

  ‘Nonsense. Who’s to know? You, me, Peter and Marjorie. Look,’ he said, leaning forward and putting a warm, capable hand on her knee, ‘I know what your financial situation is. Better than anyone. No joke. Don’t blame you for earning a bit. Plucky stuff. Admire you for it. But it’s out of the question. Completely, utterly. Not to be thought of.’

  ‘I want to do it,’ Anna said.

  Colonel Richardson took his hand away.

  ‘’Course you do. Natural for a mother. Quite right. But you’re a rector’s wife before you’re a mother. Church before children. Setting an example, if you like.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Anna said.

  He stared.

  In the phrase of twenty years before, Anna said, ‘I married the man, not the job. I’m not an outboard motor, I’m another boat.’

  ‘Don’t follow you.’

  ‘I am truly grateful to you. You’re a kind, dear man. But you are so used to an unquestioned independence that you forget how many people don’t have it, people who, in human terms, Christian terms even, have just as much right to it as you do. The Church doesn’t understand it either. Lambeth has no idea in the world what it’s like for people like us. I’m Peter’s wife, not an unpaid curate. And I am Flora’s mother, which I rate very highly indeed. I would rather, please, find her school fees myself. It is good for all of us, in this beleaguered little rectory, if I do.’

  She could see she had made Colonel Richardson very sad indeed. It was not his way to speak sharply – that was his wife’s department – but he could not conceal the fact that he thought Anna was both wrong and behaving badly. Her remarks about independence were totally incomprehensible to him. What did she mean? Good God, if you marry a parson, you marry all that goes with it! Like marrying a soldier, as Marjorie had, seventeen moves in twenty-four years of active service and never a bellyache Out of her. She knew the terms even before he’d turned to her, by the water jump at a point-to-point in 1949, and said, ‘I suppose you’d never marry me, would you?’ So Anna should have known, indeed she should. What was the use, Colonel Richardson asked himself, what was the use of being such a splendid rector’s wife all these years, and then chucking the whole lot Out of the window, for a pig-headed whim?

  ‘I suppose,’ he said to Marjorie later, pouring whisky for them both, ‘it’s all this women’s lib nonsense. Whatever that may mean.’

  ‘Too old for that.’ Privately, Marjorie Richardson had decided in favour of the menopause as the culprit, but not for the world would she say such a thing to Harry. Her own menstrual cycle, including its uncomfortable drawing to a close, had been strictly her own affair. Some things – love, sex, God, bodily functions – were simply not for discussion.

  Am I being defiant, Anna thought now, pushing her metal cage of bottles down the aisle towards her allotted shelves, am I simply cocking a snook at Peter? At the Church? Is it because I am consumed with envy when I pass the Woodborough bookshop, and there is Eleanor’s newest novel in a special display, and with resentment because I haven’t heard from Mary for over a year because she is so busy now, commuting to Brussels being a Euro-lawyer? Is it because I am forty-two? Or is it because I am worn out by passivity, by having to accept and bear and endure, and because I am quite clever and resourceful, I have just turned, like the proverbial worm? If I’m a worm, I’m a fairly angry worm, but then I did not like my interview with Colonel Richardson, and I did not like it because he wasn’t angry, he was hurt. I could have coped with his anger, using mine, but not his pain. Colonel Richardson’s pain is only the first pain to make me feel dreadful (why, oh why, do women take to guilt like ducks to water?) and most people won’t be as nice as he was. It’s only the beginning, this arranging of soy sauce, it’s only a start. I wonder, she said to herself with a sudden lurch of her heart, I wonder if I’m embarking on something I shall not be able to stop?

  ‘You there?’

  Anna turned. Heather from flours and dried fruits was standing in the gap between two aisles. She was a small, rat-faced girl with a frizz of dry brown hair and a crucifix round her neck. (‘They said to me in the shop,’ she’d said to Anna, ‘they said did I want the one with a little man on or not. ’Course I did! The plain ones look ever so bare.’)

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘There’s a gentleman looking for you. I thought you were in the warehouse. I’ll send him round.’

  ‘Thank you—’

  A gentleman? Round the corner came a perfectly strange man, a stocky middle-aged man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a shock of greying brown hair. He wore a grey tweed jacket and, oh, damn, Anna thought, a dog collar. Here he comes, sent by the Bishop, at the Richardsons’ instigation, via all those labyrinths of diocesan checking-up they call ministerial review, ho ho, here he comes, the official ticker-off. He smiled at Anna. He had a sweet face.

  ‘Yes?’ Anna said, unhelpfully. She held a raft of glass jars between them.

  ‘Mrs Bouverie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad. I was told I’d find you here.’ He looked at her burden. ‘Vegetable ghee. How extraordinary that such a thing should sell in Woodborough.’ He glanced at her. ‘Mrs Bouverie, I am Daniel Byrne. I am to be the new Archdeacon here.’

  Chapter Five

  Daniel Byrne drove Anna home. He was not, she noticed, a good driver, nor was he at all car-proud. The back seat was strewn with books and newspapers, and the floor was littered with car-park tickets. If Laura had ever owned a car, Anna reflected, this is how it would have looked inside, with the addition of old shoes and chocolate wrappers and squashed hats. Indeed, their own car would probably look like this if left to Anna; but Peter tidied it, because of all the parishioners he gave lifts to. ‘Oo,’ they’d say at the merest smear of mud, ‘you had a pig in here?’

  ‘I saw your husband,’ Daniel Byrne said. ‘I found him at Church End. He said I was to talk to you first. He said you had been harder hit than anyone.’

  Anna said nothing.

  ‘I see,’ said Daniel Byrne.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘But I will,’ he said equably, ‘in time.’

  Anna looked out of the car window. The ploughed field they were passing was speckled with brilliant-green shoots. Damn Peter. Damn him for dissembling; for pretending to Daniel that he wasn’t wounded to the core at being passed over, pretending that it was only Anna who was suffering, as if it were she who could not bear the lack of advancement, of increased prosperity. She glanced sideways at Daniel’s profile. It looked sturdy and peaceful and good-humoured. Had Peter implied, or worse even, said, that Anna had rushed impetuously to take a job in a supermarket because anything was better than the prospect of an unchanged status quo? Had he – no. She must stop. She must not work herself up into a terrible temper on supposition.

  ‘What are you bursting with?’ Daniel Byrne asked.

  Anna was so startled by his perception and directness that she said, ‘I was worrying that you had got the wrong impression, that you—’ She stopped, silenced by loyalty.

  He changed gear at precisely the wrong moment and the car bucked and complained.

  ‘I’m a mass of impressions,’ he said, taking no notice and merely raising his voice a little to be heard above the unhappy engine. ‘I came down from Manchester two days ago, to meet my fellow archdeacons, and the Bishop told me of your husband’s application and of course that made me wish to meet him, and to meet you. I had no idea.’

  ‘Why should you have? It’s hardly your fault.’

  ‘That isn’t the problem.’

  ‘No,’ Anna said.

  ‘Which is why I came to find you. Why I am driving you home. Why I asked your husband if we could all three meet for a little when I got you home.’ He swerved without warning to avoid a peaceable bicycle and was hooted at violently by an approaching car. He threw Anna a sm
ile. ‘If, that is, I do get you home—’

  She did not mean to, but she laughed.

  The sitting-room at Loxford Rectory was a surprise to Daniel Byrne. It had been a surprise to Loxford for ten years, previously accustomed, as rural communities are, to modesty and neatness in the pastoral dwelling-house. It contained the Knole sofa on which St Agatha had reclined in West Kensington (too large for Laura’s tiny flat), several lowering pieces of reproduction Jacobean furniture donated by Kitty (‘Your father loved it but I can’t bear it, it’s so threatening’), hundreds of books on shelves made by Peter out of bricks and planks and the unmistakable overlying detritus of family life. Anna, making room for Daniel on the sofa, moved a pile of sheet music, several seed catalogues, a jersey of Luke’s and Flora’s latest piece of chain stitch in which a huge needle glittered.

  ‘How very nice,’ said Daniel, sitting down. He looked round him. ‘How comfortable. Tidiness makes me nervous.’

  ‘When Peter married me, I was tidy,’ Anna said, recalling her cardigans with a sudden pang; those emblems of an imagined and ordered future. ‘I seem to have slumped, as time’s gone on.’

  ‘Me too,’ Daniel said. He leaned back among the battered brocade and velvet cushions that the sofa had always owned. ‘I was a monk until I was thirty-five. One would think that monastic orderliness would be ingrained in one as deep as heart’s blood, by thirty-five, but it did not seem so, with me. Perhaps,’ he said, turning as Peter came in with a tray of tea, ‘perhaps being a monk is bad training for the handling of possessions. Not having any for fifteen years means I find them quite arbitrary now, impossible to control. It’s as if they have a life of their own.’

  Peter put the tea tray down with difficulty on a table already strewn with books and papers.

  ‘You were—’ he said. His voice was tight with suppressed curiosity.

  ‘A Benedictine,’ Daniel said. ‘I decided, when I was thirty-five, that I was more use out than in. Fifteen years on, I couldn’t be sure of that intellectually, but the instinct still says I’m right. We none of us listen to instinct enough.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Anna said. She poured tea. Passing Peter to take a cup to Daniel, she tried to catch his eye, to give him a little loving glance, but his expression was withdrawn, his eyes and thoughts elsewhere.

  Daniel watched them both. He drank his tea. He noticed how they took chairs at some distance from one another and from him. He debated, within himself, whether to be oblique or direct with Peter, whose face seemed to him both shuttered and vulnerable. He would clearly hate to be patronized; he would smell patronage in any apology, in any request for help made out of desire to soothe sore feelings. Daniel glanced at Anna, upright on her ugly dark chair, her gaze bent on the carpet. They don’t talk, Daniel thought. They can’t. I smell no honesty here. He sighed. He said, ‘May I call you Peter?’

  Peter jumped, ‘Of course—’

  ‘We are brothers in this.’

  Anna wanted to say, I don’t think Peter is brother material. That’s part of the trouble, part of why he is so lonely, but she just looked at the carpet in silence, at the dark place where Luke had once spilled black coffee.

  ‘I have never been in rural ministry,’ Daniel said. ‘I suppose I could learn without you, but I would so much rather learn with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ Peter said again, politely, without warmth.

  ‘One of the useful things you learn, as a monk,’ Daniel said, putting his empty teacup on the floor by his feet, ‘is how to gauge character and mood without speaking. I am under no illusion about how difficult my presence here is for you.’

  ‘Robert Neville will be a great loss to me,’ Peter said rapidly, mentioning the last archdeacon.

  ‘And I might be a gain,’ Daniel said, ‘if you would let me.’

  He glanced at Anna. Her head was now so bent that her dark hair had swung forwards so as to obscure her expression. Daniel felt that she was willing Peter to respond, to show himself bruised and in need of comforting, to expose his wound so that it might be healed.

  ‘Of course,’ Peter said, yet again.

  Daniel levered himself out of the sofa and stood up. He took off his spectacles and polished them thoughtfully with a red snuff-handkerchief. He seemed to be weighing up what he should say next when Peter exclaimed, ‘It’s so hard on Anna. And the children. She works too hard in any case, so much parish work, so much—’ He stood up. ‘You should see her vegetables.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Anna cried, flinging her hair back from her face.

  Peter said, ‘Of course you do.’

  She said, ‘I don’t mind hard work. All I mind, all I really mind is—’ She caught Peter’s eye and stopped.

  Daniel said, ‘May I go and see your church?’

  ‘Certainly. Let me show you.’

  Daniel put his hand on Peter’s arm.

  ‘Thank you, but no. I will go alone, if I may.’ He turned to Anna. ‘Thank you for tea.’

  She looked up at him. Her eyes were miserable. ‘And you, for the lift.’

  Later she said to Peter, ‘I think he’s a lovely man,’ and the moment she had spoken, she knew it was a mistake.

  Sister Ignatia led Flora down a clean, polished corridor. On one side, the corridor was walled, but on the other it was glass, and through it, Flora could see a very orderly garden with a pink blossomed tree in the middle, and a bird bath. The corridor smelled of polish and Sister Ignatia smelled of cloth and soap. She wore a short grey habit and behind her glasses, her eyes were as bright and dark as a robin’s.

  They had left Anna sitting in Sister Ignatia’s study, looking at the school prospectus. Sister Ignatia had said that Flora couldn’t know whether she wanted to come or not until she had had a sniff of the place, seen some of the other girls.

  ‘Convent schools aren’t what they were,’ Sister Ignatia had said to Anna, ‘nothing like so enclosed. I like to think our academic standard’s gone up, and we know what’s what in the world. It wouldn’t be much use a modern nun not knowing where to kick a troublesome man, now, would it?’

  She led Flora by the hand. She said, ‘And why aren’t you getting on where you are?’

  ‘I’m different,’ Flora said. ‘I don’t know why, I just am.’

  Like your mother, Sister Ignatia thought. She opened a cream-painted door and the smell of school lunch rushed out at them.

  ‘Nobody’ll be concentrating,’ Sister Ignatia said. ‘They never do, after twelve strikes, all thinking of their tummies. Now, in we go and you’ll see the third form.’

  She knocked on a second door and opened it to reveal twenty children of about Flora’s age at old-fashioned desks with inkwells sunk into the top right-hand corners of the lids. There was a youngish nun by the blackboard, drawing a map of the River Nile. Everybody stood up.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Sister Ignatia said, ‘good afternoon, Sister Josephine. This is Flora, girls, this is Flora who may be coming to join us.’

  Flora looked down. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at Flora. Sister Josephine did, too, and so did Christ, sadly, from his crucifix above the teacher’s desk.

  ‘I know her,’ someone said.

  The eyes all swung to the speaker.

  ‘Her father’s a vicar,’ the someone said. She was small and plump and her hair was tied in bunches like spaniel’s ears. ‘Her father’s the Rector in our church.’

  Flora raised her head. It was Emma Maxwell, from Snead. Flora waited, her heart like lead in her chest, for the inevitable reaction to her shameful and laughable parentage.

  ‘Well now,’ said Sister Ignatia, ‘isn’t Flora the lucky one?’

  Emma Maxwell thought that actually Flora’s luck lay more in having an older brother. She resolved to tell the others, over lunch, about Luke Bouverie, whose brooding adolescent glamour gave his parents a certain status in the eyes of the parish’s girls.

  Sister Josephine smiled at Flora. ‘She is, indeed,’ said Sister Josephine, with
warmth.

  ‘We’ll leave you now,’ Sister Ignatia said. ‘We’ve the art room to see, and the music school. What about a kind goodbye to Flora?’

  Amid an obedient chorus, Flora followed Sister Ignatia with a bursting heart.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll feel so different here,’ Sister Ignatia said. ‘We’re all different in ourselves, but we’re all the same family. Now, whose family could that be?’

  Back in the study, Flora turned a beseeching face upon Anna. Anna had no need to be besought, for she had done a quick sum on the back of her child benefit book, and had worked out that, if Flora could start at St Saviour’s in the summer term, she would have earned enough to put down at least £100 towards the first term’s fees. While she waited, she had rehearsed what she considered a dignified little speech for Sister Ignatia, explaining that, for this first term, it would not be possible for her to pay the fees in advance, as was customary, but that she would . . .

  ‘If it helps to make up your mind,’ Sister Ignatia said, ‘I’ve four places a year to offer without fees. At my discretion. There are only two such girls in the present third year. I’d be happy to suggest such a place for Flora.’

  Anna said, quite thrown, ‘Oh, but you see, I can pay, and being Protestant—’

  ‘Please,’ Flora screeched, not comprehending Sister Ignatia’s offer but terrified that Anna would somehow bungle her chance, ‘please!’

  ‘It’s at my discretion,’ Sister Ignatia said.

  ‘How kind, how nice of you—’

  ‘Talk it over with Flora’s father. Talk it over. Then telephone me. I shall reserve a place for Flora from the end of April.’

  Flora, heavy with adoration and gratitude, but uncertain of the etiquette involved in hugging nuns, stood and yearned towards Sister Ignatia.

  ‘I will telephone,’ Anna said. ‘I am so grateful.’

  Sister Ignatia put her hand on Flora’s head.

  ‘God bless you.’

  Flora closed her eyes in ecstasy. Clearly quite a different and much more glamorous God than the Loxford one lived at St Saviour’s.