The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  I love Jesus,

  He’s my baby brother

  I love Mary

  She’s my Holy Mother.

  (‘Yuk,’ said Luke with vehemence, ‘and you aren’t even at St Saviour’s yet.’)

  Peter noticed that Luke and Flora both looked extremely happy, and that Anna looked desperately tired. She had said that Isobel had been to see her, and that she, Anna, had been horrible to her. Peter said nothing. He said nothing for almost the whole of the twenty minutes, until he got up and carried his plate and cup to the sink and then said, as he left the room, ‘I see. So I am now the only one in the entire family without a job in the real sense. So you can all do without me.’

  Now, in Quindale vestry, putting on his Lenten stole (regarded as unacceptably High Church by some of his deanery) Peter was full of remorse for his petulance. Yet, at the same time, he could not bear the feeling that, if the career tides were receding from him, then his family’s response of withdrawing too, into their own remedies and inevitable independence, might leave him quite beached like an old wreck on the shore.

  Celia Hooper’s husband, Denis, had fixed up a little mirror for Peter to examine himself in before he emerged into the church. Peering in it now, he thought: How grudging I look, how pinched, how disappointed. He straightened up. I am disappointed, he told himself, and I am quite trapped in it. I can’t think what to do next.

  He went quietly out through the little vestry door – ancient, ogee, poignant – into the chancel. There were seven people waiting for him, the Richardsons, the Hoopers, two parishioners from Snead, and Miss Dunstable from Loxford. As he passed her, Celia Hooper raised her head and gave him a look of steady encouragement.

  Chapter Seven

  At the beginning of Holy Week, Charlotte Bouverie came home. Term at Edinburgh University had ended weeks before, but Charlotte had stayed on in order to try and resuscitate an ailing love affair with a boy in her year. The attempt had failed, largely because Charlotte had discovered that she was so annoyed by Giles’s apathy and introspection that she could hardly remember how wildly attractive she had found him only a month before. She gave him a lecture on his immature shortcomings, during which he lay on his bed with his back to her and emanated suffering, and then she packed her black kitbag with the possessions necessary for Easter at home – Simone de Beauvoir, cigarettes, black socks, Texas Camp Fire tapes and scent – and caught the overnight bus south.

  Like her grandmother, Charlotte was good at bus travel, making friends and ignoring tedium. She changed buses in London, and telephoned Loxford to say what time she would be getting to Woodborough. The telephone wasn’t answered. Charlotte, assuming her mother to be about the parish somewhere with Flora, and Luke to be in his room working with the music turned up so loud that no telephone stood a chance against it, caught her intended bus anyway. She would ring again from Woodborough.

  Now that the Giles question was settled – as much a relief, curiously, as a disappointment – Charlotte was pleased to be going home. She was staunchly fond of her family but, being the eldest, guarded her pioneering independence fiercely, and therefore stayed away from home a good deal in order to train her family to detachment as much as herself. For the same reason, she seldom wrote letters, and for financial reasons, seldom telephoned. But she thought about the Rectory at Loxford a good deal more than its inhabitants supposed, even if being a clergyman’s daughter was not something she actually advertised in her socially and politically dogmatic student circles. Being agnostic, as she was, Charlotte couldn’t exactly empathize with her father’s faith, but she could envisage a time in the future, when she was famous – and she fully intended to be – when admitting to her parentage would be something that could only benefit her image; something indeed rather stylish.

  When the bus reached Woodborough, Charlotte again tried to telephone. Again there was no reply. She crossed the bus station to read the timetables – remembering, she thought, an early-afternoon bus to Loxford – and met her mother, burdened with Pricewell’s bags and looking quite exhausted, coming towards her. Dropping everything, they embraced each other with enthusiasm, and the lady driver waiting to drive the next Loxford service remarked to her friend, the bus station manager, that there was no mistaking those two being mother and daughter.

  ‘But why didn’t you ring?’ Anna said. ‘I’m absolutely enchanted but I’d have hated you to get home and find nobody—’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘Oh darling, we’re such a hive of industry. Luke is working for the tycoon who’s taken the Old Rectory and Flora’s gone to play with Emma Maxwell at Snead in the mornings while I work, so that she will have a thorough friend to start St Saviour’s with.’

  ‘What?’ said Charlotte.

  ‘I wrote. I wrote and told you. About Flora being so miserable and my job and Luke wanting to go to India.’

  Out of the mists of recollection swam a dim memory of such a letter. Indeed, Charlotte could almost visualize it, on her table, among the dye pots and coffee mugs and edifices of books, most of which she never opened.

  ‘Oh Ma. Sorry, but I’ve been absolutely frantic—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Anna said, stooping to pick up the bags again.

  It clearly did. Charlotte said, ‘I really am sorry. I get sort of caught up—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Remind me about your job,’ Charlotte said in a small voice.

  Anna swung an armful of bags. ‘Pricewell’s.’

  Charlotte remembered. ‘’Course.’

  ‘Your turn now,’ Anna said.

  ‘My turn for what?’

  ‘Your turn to say that I am defying Daddy and humiliating us all and failing the parish.’

  ‘Who says that?’

  ‘Everyone. Everyone except the grannies, who are wonderful.’

  Charlotte said, ‘I join the grannies.’

  Anna looked at her. Charlotte’s expression was determined.

  ‘Darling. Do you?’

  ‘Of course. It’s great of you. I just wish—’

  ‘What do you wish?’

  ‘I just wish,’ said Charlotte, ‘that you could do something that exercised your intelligence more.’

  Loxford church was in a ferment. The new Archdeacon was coming to celebrate an Easter eucharist there, before driving back to St Paul’s, Woodborough, for family matins. This had thrown the flower ladies into a competitive frenzy. Loxford must surely outdo St Paul’s in Paschal floral glory, so that the Archdeacon would have his eyes quite dazzled by their achievements and in consequence be almost blind to anyone else’s, all Easter Day. To Loxford’s intense satisfaction it started with two tremendous advantages. Loxford church was stone, and fourteenth century, St Paul’s was brick, and Victorian. In Miss Dunstable and Lady Mayhew, Loxford possessed flower arrangers of an almost poetic ability. St Paul’s, dominated as it was by the diocesan Mothers’ Union, could hope for nothing so elevated.

  The only drawback was that no plans could be put into action until after the three-hour service on Good Friday, when Peter liked the church quite unadorned, with the crucifix above the altar shrouded in black. Even so, on Maundy Thursday evening, special longspouted watering cans appeared in the vestry, along with new rolls of wire netting and blocks of flower arranger’s foam.

  Anna, who had had a grim time persuading anyone to give Easter lilies – ‘Considering what she is doing to the parish,’ Lady Mayhew had remarked to Miss Dunstable, ‘I think she has a nerve to ask’ – found herself suddenly inundated with offers. What might not be given to God in the name of His risen Son most certainly could be given to the Archdeacon in the cause of snubbing St Paul’s. The flower ladies, those obliging people like Elaine Dodswell, found themselves issued with instructions, in Miss Dunstable’s large, old-fashioned hand, run off on the copier in the village post office. Anna said to Elaine Dodswell, in the shop, ‘I’m so sorry. It all seems to have got out of hand,’ and Elaine, who had spent the last weeks
quite stunned with horrified pity that Anna should be reduced to taking a job in a supermarket, said quickly oh, it didn’t matter, you just had to humour people sometimes, didn’t you?

  There was, Anna discovered, to be no place for her in these arrangements. She had done twenty-two Easters at Peter’s side, but she was plainly not going to be allowed to do this one. Whether the parish wished to punish her or cherish her – and she strongly inclined to the former view – hardly mattered; the exclusion was frightfully annoying.

  ‘The small-mindedness of the Christian community when seen at close quarters,’ she said angrily to Peter, ‘beggars belief.’

  Peter thought he would not mention Celia Hooper’s competent plans for the deanery supper. He thought also that he was not, just now, very sympathetic to Anna’s temper. He had even allowed Lady Mayhew to be loudly sorry for him in front of Marjorie Richardson, and although he was later ashamed, he knew he was not ashamed enough.

  Anna went down to the church alone on the evening of Good Friday. Flora had wanted to come – ‘I must practise my prayers!’ – but had been deflected by the lure of being allowed to dress up in Charlotte’s clothes. Luke was, as usual, over at the Old Rectory, and would return at supper-time with the air of small superiority he had adopted for his family after ten days’ association with the way of life of Patrick O’Sullivan. Peter was at Snead, taking evening prayer. The flower ladies, Anna thought with some savagery, would be at home, down on their marks for an early night before the onslaught on the church in the morning. But for now, in the quiet early evening, the church was to be hers and she could explain to it how the unseemly exhibitionism that was about to overtake it was nothing to do with her and that she quite understood its distaste.

  The church, however, was not empty. Standing in front of the altar and looking up at the West window – the original glass regrettably replaced by a Victorian riot of red and blue with a voluminously robed Christ presiding in the centre – was Daniel Byrne. He was dressed as he had been dressed on the day she met him, and he had his hands in his pockets.

  He glanced round at Anna’s step, and said, ‘I suppose it’s unrealistic of me to expect a late-nineteenth-century craftsman to have any understanding of humility.’

  Anna came to stand beside him. She regarded the glassy Christ.

  ‘Wouldn’t you say He looked serene?’

  ‘No,’ said Daniel Byrne, ‘I’d say He looked smug.’

  Anna laughed. ‘I’ve come in here to work off temper.’

  ‘And I’ve come in to make sure I know the lie of the land before Sunday. I’m always thrown by strange churches. Can’t concentrate if I think I’m going to miss steps.’

  ‘Are you settling in?’ Anna said politely.

  ‘Ask me in six months.’

  ‘Mr Byrne—’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Daniel,’ Anna said. She paused. ‘May I tell you something?’

  ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘I have been given a pay-rise.’

  He said gravely, ‘At your supermarket.’

  ‘Yes. And a recommendation to apply for a management course. I shan’t, of course.’

  ‘No?’

  She looked at him. He said, still gazing up at the window, ‘I congratulate you.’

  ‘Heavens!’

  ‘I expect you haven’t told your family.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  He looked at her. ‘Won’t you try?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  He turned to face her. His eyes, enlarged by his spectacles, were the same grey as the tweed of his jacket.

  ‘If you have the courage to do what you are doing, why don’t you have the courage to speak to them?’

  ‘Courage!’ Anna said. ‘Courage! Round here it’s called defiance.’

  ‘Then round here is wrong.’

  She would, she suddenly discovered, have given a good deal to step forward and put her head down on his sturdy shoulder. Had anyone ever done that? Did monks, even ex-monks, get touched?

  ‘I think,’ Daniel said, taking her hand in a firm grasp, ‘I think we will sit down and talk.’

  He led her to one of the front pews, to the carved and throne-like seat where Sir Frances Mayhew led his lady with no small pomp and circumstance on Sundays.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Anna said. ‘You can’t give time to this. You’re an archdeacon, you’ve got rectories and churchwardens and bridges to build to Methodism to think of, you can’t—’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  He sat down beside her on the flat, red-velvet cushions.

  ‘If I hadn’t liked humanity, I’d still be a monk. My brother says I am still a monk, only now in high-street clothing; a voyeur monk, he says. You will meet him on Sunday. He’s coming to church here. He is younger than me and very clever and difficult. I suppose,’ Daniel said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose Jonathan is really my private life. And of course you,’ he turned to Anna, ‘you can’t have one. Can you?’

  She gazed at him.

  ‘Or is it more accurate to say that you could have a private life, but that you don’t happen to?’

  ‘I truly don’t know, I’ve changed so, things haven’t turned out as we hoped. Everyone underestimates the effect of disappointment, of prolonged disappointment. Poor Peter,’ Anna said suddenly, putting her hands over her face.

  ‘The parish needs him for what they need—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you, similarly.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Odd,’ said Daniel reflectively, ‘so odd that humanity declines, on the whole, to think that other people are as human as itself.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know what I can do to help you. If anything. Is it enough to know for the moment that I understand?’

  She nodded. He stood up. ‘I must get back. Jonathan is arriving, and I’m afraid he will alarm Miss Lambe if I’m not there to restrain him.’

  ‘Is your brother a priest?’

  ‘No indeed. He’s an academic, a philosopher. He is taking a sabbatical term and will live with me while he writes a book.’

  ‘Does he—’ Anna began doubtfully, uncertain as to how to ask if Jonathan Byrne shared his brother’s faith.

  ‘Lord, no,’ Daniel said. ‘Thinks the whole thing is a fairy story devised to keep the peasants quiet.’

  ‘A plot?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘I shall like your brother,’ Anna said robustly. ‘I think a lot of it’s a plot, too.’

  ‘We played nuns at Emma’s,’ Flora said. She threaded tubes of macaroni cheese on to her fork. ‘I was Mother Superior.’

  Everyone ignored her.

  ‘I did chanting. I went, “Ho-o-o-oly, ho-o-oly, ho-o-oly is His Na-a-ame.”’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I did it in the bathroom, because it echoes. They’ve got a shower curtain with flowers on. I sent Emma behind it to confess. She had to confess her sins.’

  ‘What sins?’

  ‘She lied,’ Flora said complacently.

  ‘Flora!’

  ‘She did. She told her mother she hadn’t had a biscuit when there was one in her hand.’

  ‘Flora,’ Peter said, ‘any more of this and you will not go to St Saviour’s.’

  Flora, secure in the knowledge of the division between her parents on this subject, merely looked smug. She had made Emma wail, ‘Oh woe, oh woe, oh woe is me,’ behind the shower curtain, and tug at her fat bunches of hair in an agony of remorse. The memory of this was very satisfying.

  ‘I do hope,’ Charlotte said seriously, ‘that St Saviour’s is going to be intellectually up to Flora.’

  Luke said, ‘God, don’t egg her on—’

  ‘Don’t say “God” like that.’

  ‘Charlotte, must you put spanners in the works?’

  ‘In my view, Anna, Charlotte has a perfect right to ask, and I think has a very valid point.’

  ‘But you are actually trying to make quite
a different point.’

  ‘This,’ Peter said repressively, ‘is no moment for such a discussion.’

  Anna leaned forward. The children stopped eating and waited. ‘Look,’ Anna said to Peter, trying to make him meet her eyes. The telephone rang. ‘Damn,’ Anna said.

  Luke got up. ‘I’ll go.’

  Anna hissed at Peter, ‘If you think I’m going to dodge crucial issues because of your notions of what is seemly and what—’

  ‘It’s for you,’ Luke said, holding out the telephone. ‘It’s Celia Hooper.’

  Anna got up. Peter’s heart sank. He pushed his macaroni to the side of his plate and looked without much hope at Charlotte. She was gazing away from him at some spot on the kitchen floor, and her mind had left Flora and her family and had alighted upon Patrick O’Sullivan, whom she had met that afternoon. He represented, Charlotte reflected, absolutely everything she despised, and she had found him hugely attractive. He had been dressed in that terrible affluent middle-class uniform of corduroy trousers and striped shirt and heavy jersey, and he had simply exuded confidence. Charlotte very much hoped she hadn’t flirted with him, but she was anxiously afraid that she had.

  ‘No,’ Anna said loudly into the telephone. ‘No, thank you. Of course I can’t forbid you, Celia, I wouldn’t be so stupid, but I can make it plain that I would so much rather you didn’t. When I want help, I’ll ask for it. What do you mean? What do you mean, I need it? Need what? To be bossed about and organized by people who think they can do my job for me better than I can? Celia, I am sure you mean well – or am I? – but I will organize the deanery supper as I have done, thank you, in the past. And I won’t be patronized. Do you hear me? Thank you for ringing. Not at all. Good night.’

  She put the telephone down and turned to Peter.

  ‘You knew about this.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘You not only knew, you encouraged her.’

  ‘I tried to stop her—’

  ‘Huh!’ Anna shouted. Flora wondered whether to cry and decided not yet.

  Peter stood up. ‘You drove me to this,’ he said furiously, ‘and Celia. You are deliberately pushing the whole parish to take stands against you so that you can be the victim, you can feel you are in no way to blame. If you refuse to do what it is your duty to do, then no-one is to be blamed for generously doing it for you.’