Jonathan stood up and came round the little white table to help her up, as if she was ill.
‘If I’m very careful, will you talk to me again?’
‘Of course,’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t have to be humoured.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant if I wasn’t so rough and unimaginative.’
She said, ‘I’ll wash your handkerchief.’
‘And read the Maurois?’
‘Why?’
‘For a portrait of a particular kind of rebelliousness. Just for discussion.’
‘I see.’ She smiled at him.
He said, ‘Until the next time then,’ and they went out into the street.
‘You’re late,’ Flora said.
‘Darling, only five minutes—’
‘Five minutes late. That was all very well at Woodborough Junior but here, I can tell you, the mothers are a very different kettle of fish. Where have you been anyway?’
‘Sitting in a coffee shop talking about myself with the Archdeacon’s brother.’
Flora wasn’t interested. ‘I got another merit star. In English.’
Anna took her hand to draw her down the steps on the way to the bus stop. ‘Well done. What for?’
‘A self-portrait in fifty words. Mine began, “I am not strong but I am tall and sensitive”.’
Anna suppressed a smile. ‘I see.’
‘Sister Josephine thinks I might be quite a spiritual child.’
‘Oh?’
‘But I’m not sure I’d have the patience for it.’
‘Flora,’ Anna said, suddenly glowing with delayed benevolence from her conversation with Jonathan Byrne, ‘Flora, do you like St Saviour’s?’
Flora said seriously, ‘I am absolutely blissful.’
‘Oh, good,’ Anna said, squeezing Flora’s hand too hard in her emotion. ‘Oh darling, I’m so pleased.’
‘But it is not blissful,’ said Flora seizing her opportunity, ‘to be the only child at St Saviour’s with a mother who is late.’
A miasma of elaborate tactfulness hung over Loxford on the subject of the deanery supper. It was known throughout the parish – Celia Hooper felt it was her duty in supporting Anna to disseminate this knowledge – that Anna would be very upset if it was even hinted at that she could not manage it this year. It was not, Celia said seriously to people, as if it was a parish affair involving the laity: no, it was strictly Church business, a little party for the deanery priests and their wives, and Anna must not be made to feel that the laity was in any way butting in. Talking about the deanery supper gave Celia Hooper an excellent chance to moot her idea of a little parish support-group for Anna. Most people were very sympathetic, and eager to help; only Lady Mayhew and Marjorie Richardson indicated that they thought Anna needed a spank rather than support. Celia had said to Elaine that they wouldn’t push the matter any further just now, they’d let Anna get her party over.
The pattern of the deanery supper had set itself in amber some years before, not particularly by Anna’s wish, but more by the prevailing wish of her guests, most of whom knew what they expected of a rural dean. They knew, for instance, that he had no extra income from the position, and only a small entertainment allowance. This meant that they wished to be entertained with a delicate balance between modesty and generosity. Cider would be an insult, but anything better than vin de table would be improper. The food Anna had learned to provide – cheeses and salads, cold meats and rolls, followed by slightly childish puddings – was always much appreciated. They all ate with an old-fashioned gusto. It was one of the aspects Anna liked best, this unaffected, unspoiled pleasure at greedy eating in a party atmosphere.
The day of the party, she got up at six and moved the furniture in the sitting-room back against the walls. She then collected all the chairs round the house and arranged them in conversational groups. After that, she made three pints of custard for the trifles, washed four lettuces, counted out seventeen plates (mostly odd), seventeen pudding bowls, and arranged them in the sitting-room between fans of paper napkins. When it was properly light, she went out into the garden and brought in armfuls of the last daffodils, and some branches of new willow. Then she got breakfast. In the middle of breakfast Peter said had she remembered that John Jacobs from Dinsbury was a Vegetarian and she said thank you, she’d remembered everything. Should he pick up the wine? No need, thank you, she had asked Mike Vinson to bring it home with him. And glasses? We don’t need them, there are enough at the village hall.
‘Then,’ said Peter, ‘what is there I can do to help?’
Anna began marshalling jars and cereal boxes on the table prior to putting them away. ‘I don’t honestly know.’
Luke tried to catch his father’s eye for a wink of complicity, but it was not to be done. Peter folded up the newspaper with elaborate precision and carried it out of the kitchen.
‘No need, really, Mum,’ Luke said, ‘to give him a hard time. He was only offering—’
‘He doesn’t want me to do it. He doesn’t think I can do it.’
‘I think he just feels a bit guilty that you have to do it.’
Anna turned from the cupboard where she was stowing things away. ‘Do you?’
Luke nodded. Anna looked at the clock. ‘Oh Lord. Ten to. I haven’t time to sort it out now. Get your stuff, will you? And shout for Flora.’ She ran out of the room and up the stairs. Peter was locked in the lavatory. She called, ‘I’m sorry. Sorry to be disagreeable.’ He said nothing. ‘I’ll see you later,’ Anna called. ‘Will you open some beans for lunch?’ She stopped herself from apologizing for the beans. Flora came out of her bedroom.
‘Come on,’ Flora said, sensing drama. ‘Come on, come on, come on or we’ll miss the bus and it will be utter disaster.’
The guests arrived exactly when they had been asked, at seven-fifteen. Anna felt relief at the sight of them, at their familiarity, reassured by their kind little questions as they came in and by their exclamations of enthusiasm at the sight of the daffodils, of Flora in her green school uniform, of the sherry trifle. They would remain docilely in their couples until, emboldened by a glass or two of wine, they would bravely separate into sexes and get down to the business of the evening which was, of course, diocesan gossip. The priests would compare the impossibleness of their parishes and speak of job opportunities; their wives would talk personalities. Two of them had recently had tea with the Bishop’s wife; the rest were burning to hear about it.
The last to come was Isobel Thompson. She had taken to coming several years before, to help Anna dole out supper, and then to wash up. This year she came with a certain amount of trepidation, but Anna seemed only pleased to see her, not surprised and not touchy. She looked, Isobel thought, strained and tired, but she was smiling, and the house and the supper-table looked lovely. Accepting a glass of white wine, Isobel decided that Anna must have come to some kind of reconciliation with herself, and her role, and that the effort she had clearly made for the party was the first step in a new determination. She said to Daphne Jacobs, ‘Hasn’t Anna done us proud?’
Daphne Jacobs had brought up five children in three rectories and, in between, had taken a quiet pride in her parish work. She had seen Anna in Pricewell’s, and had heard from Mary Marshall at Crowthorne End that she had taken the job out of disappointment when Peter failed to get his promotion. Later in the evening, she intended to discuss it further (covertly) with Mary who was busy, just now, putting something of everything available on to her plate. In the meantime, she said quellingly to Isobel, ‘Lovely daffodils. Ours are all over.’
Sighing, Isobel went across the room to talk to Marion Taylor from Mumford Orchus, whose husband had become a priest when he was fifty-five, to her abiding dismay. He had been an accountant before; they’d had a nice house in Lichfield and she had never wanted life to be any different from the uneventful regularity she had known then. Her secret afternoons with old movies on television were not so much a consolation as a lifeline. She told her daughter
that the pills she took were vitamin supplements and iron, for her anaemia. She made a place for Isobel beside her on the Knole sofa.
‘Anna looks tired.’
‘She’s made such an effort for us,’ Isobel said. ‘How’s your Sunday school?’
‘Folded. Hopeless. They all just used it as somewhere to dump the children for an hour. And I’m no teacher.’
‘You should learn to play the guitar. It’s such a help, a little music, with children.’
Marion Taylor leaned closer. ‘I don’t blame Anna, you know. I admire her. I seem to have lost the will to do much, but it doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize.’
Isobel said stoutly, ‘We have all been praying for her.’
Marion Taylor gave a little snort and her wineglass shook in her hand, spilling some into her beige, pin-spotted lap. She mopped at it fiercely with a paper napkin. ‘Prayer!’ she said. ‘I don’t know I’ve much use for it. But I do know that, if anyone mentions waves of prayer to me again in that awful sanctimonious way they have, I shall be sick.’
The party swelled steadily in volume. An animated discussion of Daniel Byrne in one corner was balanced by a debate on the ineffectiveness of synods in another, while in between the subjects of children and villages and the Bishop’s wife (a dear, but not really in touch, somehow) ebbed and flowed. Peter toured the clumps of people dutifully with bottles of vin de pays and tried to look as he had felt at all previous deanery suppers – like a man with something of a future. They were all extremely nice to him, a little hearty, a shade solicitous, and he began to feel a revived gratitude towards Anna, mixed with a new relief that she might be, somehow, coming through a difficult phase (most natural after such a blow, after all) and that this party was a token of a new leaf turned. He emptied the last of the bottles he had in either hand into the glasses held out to him by Colin Taylor and John Jacobs (vegetarianism, he couldn’t help noticing, seemed to be no dampener of enthusiasm for drink) and went out to the kitchen in search of what he was afraid was probably the last of the wine.
Anna was sitting at the kitchen table with her face in her hands, racked with sobs. He said, ‘Anna.’
She did not look at him. He put the empty bottles down among the piles of dirty plates and bent over her, putting his arm around her shoulders.
‘What is it? Anna, tell me, what is it?’
She hardly could. She said something incoherent, something about its being no good, it all being a sham, and then the tears took over again.
Peter said, ‘Hold on. Wait a minute,’ and went back into the sitting-room. Isobel was in the middle of the synod debate, saying with some firmness that the laity didn’t contribute more because they were never allowed to know better than the Church. Peter went up to her and whispered, ‘Can you come? Anna’s in the kitchen in an awful state and I can’t tell what’s the matter.’
When Isobel reached the kitchen, Anna was stooped over the sink splashing cold water on to her face.
‘My dear, Peter said you were terribly upset—’
Anna turned round, reaching blindly for something to dry her face on. Isobel handed her a tea towel.
‘Thank you. Yes. I’m sorry he found me.’
‘What is it? What is the matter?’
‘I don’t belong, Isobel. I’m out of it, apart.’
‘Oh my dear—’
‘Don’t talk Church to me, Isobel,’ Anna said, interrupting. ‘Don’t talk about Christian love, I beg of you. It isn’t just that I don’t belong, but I don’t want to belong. I feel as if I’ve been in some school crocodile for twenty years and if I don’t break ranks I’ll suffocate.’
Isobel regarded her. Words like tired and over-wrought presented themselves to her. In Isobel’s experience, a change of scene was often the best possible medicine for such cases as these. She wondered where Anna could go? She would ask Peter. She went across to Anna and took the tea towel away gently.
‘I’m going to get you up to bed. Cup of tea and some aspirin. You’re worn out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘Breaking down, not being able to cope—’
‘Once,’ Isobel said, ‘when I suddenly felt I couldn’t cope another moment with my mother, I hit her with The Oxford Companion to Music. It was lying on the floor, propping the door open.’
Anna began to giggle weakly.
‘And then,’ said Isobel, ‘realizing I had given her a lifelong stick to beat me with morally, I thought I hadn’t hit her nearly hard enough. Come on, upstairs with you.’
‘The party—’
‘It’s running itself. I’ll tell them you’ve got a blinding headache. It was a splendid supper.’
‘I bought nearly all of it. I only made the trifles.’
‘So?’
‘Oh, Isobel,’ Anna said, ‘you know. Could I buy things if I wasn’t earning?’
‘Up,’ Isobel said, ‘shoo. I’ll bring you tea in two ticks.’
In the morning, Patrick O’Sullivan went into the Loxford shop to buy tonic water and peppermints, and heard that Mrs Bouverie had been taken very ill in the middle of a big function, and although she wasn’t in hospital, it was touch and go. So he drove into Woodborough and ordered her a basket of lily of the valley, and wrote a card to be dispatched with it.
The flowers arrived and were brought up to Anna by Luke who had decided on a day off school to look after her and/or revise.
‘Heavens,’ Anna said.
‘D’you like them?’
‘I like the flowers—’
‘Yeah,’ Luke said, ‘you can’t blame the flowers. But doesn’t sending them strike you as pretty obscene?’
Chapter Ten
Eleanor Ramsay, alerted by Peter, telephoned Anna and asked her to come and stay in Oxford. Anna demurred, thinking of the administrative complications. Isobel, however, was ahead of her in this, and said that she would have Flora to stay for a week, and that Luke could spend the week with his friend Barnaby whose mother liked Luke because she believed he was a sobering influence.
‘Don’t you want to go?’ Peter said.
She was stirring a cup of tea, round and round, pointlessly, since she never had sugar. ‘Yes, I want to go. But I don’t want to have to go.’
‘Things have got too much for you before, you know,’ he said, unwisely, thinking of her frantic outbursts at St Andrew’s, all those years before.
She glared at him. ‘You too,’ she said, quick as a flash.
He got up and poured more hot water into the teapot.
‘I suppose I might get some translation done in Oxford. I’ve neglected it. I couldn’t somehow face it recently, it seemed both inexorable and insultingly second-rate.’
‘Even compared with loading shelves in a super-market?’
‘Even,’ said Anna in a dead level voice, ‘with that.’
‘Perhaps now’s the moment to give that up—’
‘And perhaps it isn’t. I’m only away a week. You forget I’m a star employee. Nice Mr S. Mulgrove is a man of sympathy and flexibility. I’ll work longer hours the week after.’
‘And collapse again.’
‘I expect so,’ she said. She was beginning to seethe with rage. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ he said maddeningly, ‘it is a great inconvenience to me.’
She closed her eyes. She heard him refill her cup. She did not want her cup refilled. She said, hardly caring, ‘Will you be all right on your own?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. His voice was faintly complacent.
‘The groupies. Of course.’
‘Don’t be cheap, Anna.’
She picked up her teacup and flung the contents at him. They hit his chest, just below his dog collar, across the triangle of grey-polyester clerical shirt-front that showed above the V-neck of his grey clerical jersey. Then she got up and walked out of the kitchen into the garden, closing the back door behind her with tremend
ous care.
Eleanor’s husband, Robert, met her at Oxford station. It was, he said, perfect timing for an arrival, just after the afternoon batch of tutorials, and before a senior common-room meeting. He was a tall, thin, awkward man with the face of a kindly rabbit. He seized Anna’s case and took her arm solicitously.
‘Eleanor and I were saying we don’t think we’ve seen you, actually seen you, for over ten years. Certainly not since Ptolemy was born. These parenthood years are simply extraordinary, aren’t they? One spends all this time and emotional energy developing a great supporting muscle, and then at sixteen they turn round and say they are living their own lives now, thank you, and simply hack it through. I’m afraid Eleanor has spoiled Ptolemy, being the youngest and unquestionably our most able child. That’s why she couldn’t meet you. Your train didn’t tie in with his violin lesson.’
He stowed Anna away in an estate car consolingly strewn with crumbs and discarded lists, and drove her round the city centre, past the Ashmolean Museum, to a large and startling house off Norham Gardens. It was redbrick, its rearing walls irregularly pierced by fantastic windows, and it was crowned at its two front corners with turrets capped in pinnacles of green copper surmounted by Maltese crosses. It was clearly, from the state of the gardens, and the condition of the paintwork, divided into two. Robert Ramsay pulled into the tidier half. His rabbity face glowed with pride.
‘Bought this six years ago. After Eleanor won that great prize for No Joking Matter. Wonderful family house. We love it.’
He took Anna up the steep front steps to a tall door under a fretted canopy. The hall inside was floored with lozenges of black and ochre and russet. Doors were open everywhere and the glimpses of the rooms beyond them gave an impression of vigorous life – tables piled with books, musical instruments propped against armchairs full of papers and cats, wine bottles and bowls of fruit, shawls and jackets thrown about, strong colours, cascading curtains. Robert led Anna up a great wide red wooden staircase, past long windows with occasional idiosyncratic patches of chequered glass in blue and yellow, to an immense landing where huge brass and china pots stood about filled with enormous thirsty plants, and books and laundry lay in amicable disorder together on the polished wooden floor.
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