The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Anna stared. Luke and Charlotte watched, breaths held. Flora let out a loud wail and rushed to her father, and over the top of her head, Peter glared accusingly at Anna. She said nothing. Her anger had died out of her like a blown flame. She made some small clumsy gesture with her hands towards Peter, and then she turned and went out of the kitchen door into the garden.

  It was dusk-dark. The black silhouettes of trees stood against a sky still lit by a dramatic glow from the western horizon, and faint mutterings from the branches indicated that it was not quite yet night Anna walked carefully along the slippery path to the garage and unhooked, from a nail inside the door, the elderly mackintosh she used for winter gardening. Like so much they possessed, it had been left behind at the end of a jumble sale, a waif and stray nobody wanted, despite the faded Burberry label at the back of the neck. Anna put it on. It smelled of earth and its pockets rustled with garden tags and toffee papers and torn seed packets. Anna put her hands down into the comforting rubbish and simply let the tears slide.

  It was easier to cry if she walked. She went across the patch of lawn in front of the house, and down the drive beside the churchyard wall. The sight of the bulk of the church was comforting, and for a moment she thought of going in and sitting where she had sat, only hours before, with Daniel, and talking to his imaginary presence. But then she remembered that Peter would have locked the church on his way home from Snead, because he was afraid that the chalice would be stolen from its safe in the vestry, or that vandals would deface the altar, or the huge bible that rested on a lectern carved into an eagle with its wings outspread. So she turned into the lane, and walked slowly past the high garden wall of the Old Rectory, blowing her nose fiercely on a crumpled paper handkerchief from one of the pockets of the Burberry.

  From behind the wall, Patrick O’Sullivan heard her. He had been lured out by the gleaming spring night to see if – as one of his newly acquired gardening books promised him – his Magnolia stellata actually glowed in the dim light. It didn’t; but, while he peered at it, willing it to enchant him all the same, he heard the sound of someone coming crying along the lane; and then he heard them stop, and sigh, and then whoever it was blew their nose, and he could tell that it was a woman. He straightened up. He thought of rural tragedy, of abandoned girls in ballads. Then he thought of Anna Bouverie. He moved quietly away from the magnolia, on to the rim of grass that edged the gravel of the drive, and, as Anna’s figure passed the open gateway, he said, ‘Good evening.’

  She gave a little cry.

  ‘I’m so sorry to startle you,’ Patrick said, ‘but I couldn’t help hearing. And having heard, I couldn’t ignore you.’

  Anna did not turn. She simply said, ‘I think you’d better.’

  ‘Ignore you? Certainly not. Unless of course you want me to.’

  She stopped walking. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but he could tell she had also stopped crying. She said, ‘I wish you hadn’t heard me, of course, but now that you have it would be melodramatic to demand that you pretend you never heard a thing.’

  He stepped on to the gravel.

  ‘Will you come in?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’d like to give you some brandy.’

  The thought of brandy suddenly seemed heaven-sent. Anna said, ‘Oh! Oh, thank you,’ and moved forward. He grasped her arm firmly and led her up the steps into what seemed the exaggerated brilliance of his lighted hall. He looked at her. She was wearing a tramp’s mackintosh and her face was absolutely forlorn. He said gently, ‘This is rather an honour. For me.’

  She gave a little smile. She let him take off the Burberry and lay it on a chair, and then lead her into the room that Susie Smallwood had painted dull red, and then hated, and which Patrick had lined with handsome books and careful pictures. There was a blazing fire. Patrick put Anna into a fat chair. He said, ‘Perhaps you’d rather have whisky?’

  She shut her eyes and put her head back into the cushions. She said, ‘I think brandy. I don’t know. I’m hopeless at drink. Not enough practice.’

  He went across the room to a tray of decanters and bottles on a table made of beautiful, rich, red-brown wood. The cushion under Anna’s head was beautiful and rich too, and so was the carpet in which her feet were now sunk, feet encased in shoes that had no business, she dreamily felt, to consort with such a carpet.

  ‘I don’t quite know,’ Patrick said, coming back with a tumbler and a dark bottle, ‘having had so little practice myself, if there are special rules of conduct for talking to rectors’ wives.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Anna said faintly.

  ‘Please what?’

  ‘Don’t make a category. I live in one all the time. You’re a newcomer. You start new.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. He poured brandy into the tumbler, a lot of brandy.

  She eyed it. ‘I think you should dilute that. And halve it.’

  ‘If I dilute it, you’ll feel drunker quicker.’

  She looked pleased. ‘Will I?’

  He put the tumbler on the shining wood at her elbow, beside a small bronze racehorse on a little podium.

  ‘Everything here is so new—’

  ‘I know. Nothing I can do about it. You can’t hurry ageing, except in people, where you don’t want to.’

  He sat down opposite her and crossed his legs. His shoes were suede. Anna took a swallow of her brandy and said, ‘I wonder if anyone saw me come in.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that why you were crying?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Anna said primly, ‘I don’t know you well enough for this kind of conversation.’

  ‘You won’t get to know me better any other way. Nor I you.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘The very fact,’ Patrick said, ‘that you made that last remark a question not a statement shows that you are enjoying yourself.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Anna said, bending her head to hide her smile.

  He watched her. She was staring down into the brandy glass she held between her hands, in her lap, and she was plainly doing a lot of thinking. He realized, with no small frisson of pleasure, that she was not used to being flirted with, that men did not flirt with priests’ wives, whom they put into a special social category that made them, in the public view, virtually sexless. Patrick looked at Anna’s legs. Nothing wrong with those. He saw her suddenly at twenty, at the age of the pretty daughter he had met that afternoon, full of promise and enthusiasm. He was very touched – touched and excited.

  He said, ‘There’s no need to be so lonely, you know.’

  She put her brandy glass down with a bang.

  ‘I don’t want this kind of thing,’ Anna said, struggling out of her chair.

  He stood up to help her, but she shook him off.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Clumsy—’

  ‘I’m not a toy,’ Anna said. ‘I may be naïve but I am not a plaything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream—’

  ‘People assume,’ Anna said angrily, ‘that priests are quite inexperienced, that they know nothing of the world. It’s so patronizing and ignorant. Who else, if not priests, see humanity at its very worst?’

  Patrick put his hand on her arm. With her free hand, Anna picked it off.

  ‘Won’t you even let me apologize?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I am really sorry,’ Patrick said, ‘to have behaved like a bad cliché, to have been so arrogant.’

  She managed a faint smile.

  ‘But I would like us to make friends.’

  Her smile faded. She said, ‘You’ll see, after a month or two, how difficult that would be.’

  He opened his mouth to say that he would like a challenge, then shut it again prudently. Her expression was not encouraging. She crossed the creamy carpet to the door.

  ‘Won’t you
even finish your brandy?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘When will I see you—’

  ‘In church. On Easter Day.’

  He reached in front of her to prevent her turning the door handle.

  ‘Look. You are a prisoner and you hate it but you refuse to be released!’

  Anna looked at him again. She said, ‘It isn’t as simple as that,’ and then she looked pointedly at the doorhandle.

  When she had gone – she declined to let him see her home – he poured his remaining brandy into hers and took her tumbler back to his armchair. He held it up. There was no trace of lipstick on the glass, no fingerprints, nothing. Her hands must have been very cold. He closed his eyes and thought of them, of warming them. He said to himself sternly, ‘This must not be a game.’ It did not strike him that there was any doubt of his both having and keeping the upper hand.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Luke demanded. He was making himself a mug of hot chocolate.

  ‘Drinking brandy with your boss,’ Anna said.

  Luke whirled round from the cooker. ‘You can’t mean you just went and asked—’

  ‘Of course not. He was skulking about in the garden as I went by, and then he asked me in.’

  ‘Brandy!’ Luke said.

  ‘Yes. All of three swallows.’

  ‘What was he doing in the garden?’ Luke was aggrieved. Patrick was his. It was bad enough having to introduce him to Charlotte who had, of course, gone straight into the blatant routine Luke knew she would, but Mum . . .

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. Where’s Flora? In bed?’

  ‘Watching telly. Dad’s in his study.’

  ‘I’ll go in to him.’

  Peter was at his desk, bent over the foolscap pad in which he wrote his sermons. He said, without looking up, ‘Celia telephoned. To apologize for upsetting you.’

  ‘That was nice of her,’ Anna said, ‘but she doesn’t understand.’

  Peter ruled a neat underlining.

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘I think you do,’ Anna said, ‘if you really think about it. If you’re honest. As honest as you once were.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please—’

  Peter said, ‘We are committed to God. Both of us. With all that that entails.’

  She came and sat in a chair beside the desk so that she could see his face.

  ‘Are you saying, or implying, that only sacrifice counts? That unless we sort – sort of immolate ourselves, there’s no point in it?’

  ‘You are so melodramatic.’

  She put a hand out to him. He ignored her.

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, not turning.

  ‘That’s no answer.’

  ‘There isn’t an answer that would satisfy you. Not in your present frame of mind.’

  ‘Peter,’ Anna said desperately, ‘Peter, what do you want of me?’

  He turned then. He looked at her gravely.

  ‘You know perfectly well.’

  ‘Can we talk about it? Can I tell you how I feel?’

  The telephone rang. Peter picked it up at once, and then handed it to Anna.

  ‘Trish Pardoe. For you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said. She took the receiver. ‘Trish. Yes. No, I haven’t forgotten. I’ll be there. Two o’clock. Yes. Goodbye.’ She put the telephone back on its cradle. ‘The Brownies’ Easter Cake Bake. I had forgotten, actually.’ She stood up. ‘I’d better make something now.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Could we talk? Will you come into the kitchen while I make a cake?’

  Peter said doggedly, ‘There is no more to say. You know what the situation is as well as I do. And Sunday is Easter Day and I have a sermon—’

  ‘But Daniel Byrne is coming!’

  Peter put down his pencil. His shoulders sagged.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course. He will preach, not me. I forgot,’ and then he turned away from her completely, so that he might not be comforted.

  Chapter Eight

  Colonel and Mrs Richardson came to Loxford church on Easter morning, on account of the Archdeacon. Colonel Richardson always made a point of saying that he did not like to worship outside his own parish, which remark roughly translated as meaning that he did not like to be upstaged at Loxford by Sir Francis and Lady Mayhew who had an unwritten tenancy of the best pew (front, left-hand side). Also, if you were churchwarden on your own territory, it was hard, he found, to submit to someone sitting in a pew which wasn’t guarded by his official wand. All these feelings, which he would not have dreamt of revealing to Marjorie, made him gruff at breakfast, sharp with the dogs and moved to say, as he entered Loxford church in all its floral abundance, ‘Good God. Looks like the flower tent at the County Show.’

  Marjorie Richardson, who knew exactly what he was thinking, moved ahead of him up the aisle, graciously greeting people. She made a point of not discriminating socially. She could see Anna’s back, upright in the Rectory pew, beside her untidy children, and she planned, if Anna turned, to give her just a little nod of greeting, a nod that acknowledged her – as was proper – and no more. But, before she reached the pew they had decided upon, the Archdeacon himself, still simply in his cassock, and accompanied by Peter, came out from the vestry and walked briskly across to the Rectory pew and shook hands warmly with them all, smiling down at them as he did so.

  Thrown, Marjorie Richardson halted. The Archdeacon was stooping over Flora, who had been allowed to come to church with her hair apparently screwed up in coloured rags.

  Behind her, Harry hissed, ‘Sit down! We’ll miss him.’

  Startled, Marjorie shot into the pew and dropped her immaculate navy-blue handbag. Somebody sniggered. By the time she had retrieved it, and briefly and uncharacteristically hovered over the choice between a quick mannerly prayer or immediately standing up again, Peter Bouverie was by their pew saying, ‘And this is Colonel and Mrs Richardson of Quindale. Colonel Richardson is churchwarden.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Daniel said, taking Marjorie’s hand in a firm grasp.

  She could not think of a fitting reply. She opened her mouth, but no sound came.

  Daniel looked at her for a second, and then shook Harry’s hand and said, ‘Ah. Diocesan Board of Finance couldn’t do without you, I hear, Colonel Richardson,’ and Harry said, as she knew he would, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing at all. Like to do my bit.’

  Then the Archdeacon smiled, and moved on, and Marjorie fell to her knees, ignoring Harry’s pleased whisper of, ‘Very civil. Wonder how he knew? Like a chap who does his homework.’

  Marjorie was uncertain she liked this chap at all. She was ever more uncertain when, at the end of his thorough and genial circuit, he paused by the Rectory pew for a second time and definitely, quite definitely, said something more to Anna.

  What he said was, ‘I have persuaded my brother to come. Quite an achievement.’ He did not add that Jonathan had come purely to escort Miss Lambe, for whom he had conceived an arcane enthusiasm – an enthusiasm Daniel suspected. ‘You must not make a fool of Miss Lambe,’ Daniel had said to Jonathan. ‘She is easily alarmed.’ Jonathan had looked mildly affronted. Miss Lambe had dressed for Easter Day at church in a grey-flannel spring coat and a matching beret to which she had rakishly pinned a bunch of artificial daisies. Kneeling beside Jonathan, the flam-boyance of the daisies troubled her sense of what was fitting. She was glad that they were on the opposite side of her head to Mr Byrne.

  Jonathan Byrne was not thinking about Miss Lambe or her daisies. He was contemplating, all around him, the seemly manifestations of the rural Church of England; the well-groomed plaster and stone of the church, the flowers, the brushed heads and shoulders ahead of him, the decent sunlight falling through old glass on to the decorous whole. He remembered Daniel’s Manchester parish, the church of red- and blue- and yellow-diapered Victorian brick, the energetic and disparate congregation, the bursts of rowdy evangelism. Of course, the
Church itself had been ever thus, traditional, tolerant and restrained on the one hand, sectarian, noisy and doctrinaire on the other, and Daniel was, by temperament, the kind of man who could understand both. He was, Jonathan thought with the strong affection for his brother that he seldom gave voice to, the kind of man who might, by this very perceptive intelligence, thoroughly disconcert such a congregation as now knelt before him, intoning the confession without, Jonathan observed, much anguish of guilt. ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.’ Sins of omission and commission. What exactly did such sins consist of in a place like this?

  Beside him, Miss Lambe and her daisies trembled a little. The general confession, with its dark hints at the opportunities for sin, always made her flinch.

  After the service, Anna was amazed to find herself greeted with smiles. Bruised by a difficult weekend with Peter and excluded from the decoration of the church, she turned from her pew, chin high, keeping the children close to her, and expected to be confronted with no more than formality from the congregation. But she had not reckoned on Daniel’s influence, his deliberate friendliness to the Rectory pew.

  ‘I must congratulate you on the flowers,’ Marjorie Richardson said.

  ‘Oh, not me, Lady Mayhew—’

  ‘A Happy Easter, my dear.’

  ‘Oh Harry. Thank you.’

  ‘Nice to see the children in church, Mrs B.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘What a lovely morning, Anna, so perfect for Easter.’

  ‘Isn’t it—’

  ‘My dear, you look tired. So does Peter. Of course Easter is such a thing—’

  ‘Rather—’

  ‘I wonder if we could have a quick word about the Evergreen Club’s spring outing?’

  ‘Oh Elaine, of course, could you ring me?’

  ‘Ah. Little Flora. I hear we are going to a lovely new school?’