The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Daniel and Jonathan Byrne sat in Daniel’s study. They had not put any lamps on because the light was fading so beautifully outside the window that it seemed a pity to outshine it. Miss Lambe had given them coleslaw for supper, and Daniel was revolving in his mind how to tell her tactfully that he found coleslaw disgusting. He thought he might say that it gave him indigestion (it didn’t; nothing did) because that would let them both out so easily. Caring for the tenderness of Miss Lambe’s feelings – as small and vulnerable as seedlings – was becoming an exhausting and full-time job.

  Jonathan was not thinking about coleslaw. He was less chivalrous towards Miss Lambe – perversely, she adored his mild carelessness towards her – and simply hadn’t eaten his, pushing the pale, glistening heap to the side of his plate, and leaving it there. He was thinking about Anna, and about Luke, whom he was getting to know and getting to like. Luke’s conscience was deeply troubled at leaving home, at abandoning his mother, but, as he could see no way to improve anything, and was being driven demented by the atmosphere, getting out had seemed the only course. He had said this quite directly to Jonathan, on their second meeting, and Jonathan had said there was only point and merit to sacrifice as long as it achieved something. The next natural step would have been to talk about Anna, but both avoided it. Jonathan had talked to no-one about Anna; he simply thought about her.

  He said to Daniel now, ‘I want to tell you something.’

  Daniel’s mind, which had abandoned coleslaw for tomorrow’s meeting with the Bishop, came swiftly back. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m in love with Anna Bouverie.’

  There was a fractional pause and then Daniel said, ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Little things. Remarks. The look of you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Does a sermon follow? Will you try and stop me?’

  ‘Have I ever,’ Daniel said, ‘tried to stop you doing anything?’

  ‘But what about Peter Bouverie? He’s a priest of yours—’

  ‘Are you asking me to make up your mind?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Jonathan said, ‘I’ve done that. I want to marry her.’

  ‘She is married.’

  ‘Daniel—’

  ‘I can’t encourage you. I may understand why you feel as you do, but I can’t encourage you to act on it. Marriage is difficult enough, these days; for one thing it tends to go on for so long, but it mustn’t be attacked, undermined, by people who have the power to withhold themselves, even if they haven’t the inclination.’

  ‘And Anna?’

  Jonathan couldn’t see Daniel’s face in the dark, but he could hear that his voice had softened.

  ‘Ah. Anna.’

  ‘Throw Anna to the wolves in the name of orthodoxy? Is that what you think?’

  ‘I think individuality of choice and personal convenience are inadequate as moral principles.’

  ‘Choice and convenience! Is that what you think has brought about Anna’s situation?’

  Daniel swung round in his chair. ‘Don’t cheapen what I say. For wisdom and balance, humanity must give its unequivocal support to the defence of human life and to Christian institutions such as marriage.’

  Jonathan got up. He crossed the room to stand over Daniel.

  ‘There speaks the natural celibate. Sacrifice of the spirit, however futile and destructive to the individual, is to be encouraged as long as appearances are maintained for the comfort of your Christian society.’

  ‘Not comfort. For morality.’

  ‘Morality! And is it moral for Peter Bouverie to starve his wife and parish of everything but pure form?’

  ‘He’s a sick man,’ Daniel said.

  Jonathan shouted, ‘Well, do something about him! And leave his wife to me!’

  Daniel bent his head. ‘Has she said she would like this?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Then your love isn’t returned?’

  ‘Oh yes. But she’s encumbered. She can’t rush forward freely as I can. There’s her husband and children. And there’s your damned Church. Where’s its tolerance and intellectual subtlety? Where, for God’s sake, is its vision?’

  Daniel rose too. He said sadly, ‘You know what I think. You know I think the modern Church lacks holiness because we’ve played about with the truth. I hate its narrowness of spirit.’

  ‘Yes. So you say. But may Anna not be allowed to hate it too and to try to escape from it?’

  Daniel turned and put his hands on his brother’s shoulders. ‘Give me a day or two. Let me talk to the Bishop.’

  ‘What good will that do? What bishop can ever decide anything? And what has the Bishop got to do with it, anyway?’

  ‘I must,’ Daniel said, ‘for Christian and Church reasons. For you and Anna. And for poor Peter Bouverie.’

  It was the first time for weeks that Anna had been at home at lunchtime. She made Peter a salad and called him to the kitchen. He said that he was terribly busy and would like to have it on a tray in his study. Anna carried it in, in silence.

  ‘You are very kind,’ said Peter, as if speaking to someone he hardly knew.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Have you had a good morning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘I spent the morning being congratulated by the village. Celia Hooper even stopped her car to say with a merry laugh that I’d now put them all out of a job. She sounded quite resentful.’

  Peter turned his head away. Would she never stop? Would she never admit defeat, but make a grievance, a point of discord, out of everything? He had never thought, until recently, that Anna was a greedy woman. He didn’t look at her; he didn’t want to. He looked instead at his salad, at the slices of cold chicken, at the lettuce leaves sprinkled with herbs. He said, ‘Thank you for this.’

  Anna paused by the door. ‘I’m going into Woodborough. To collect Flora.’

  ‘I thought she came on the bus.’

  ‘She does. I want to go with her. I need the occupation. I suppose I mayn’t have the car?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘And I suppose we couldn’t have a walk together. Instead?’

  He sighed. He said, ‘I have parishioners coming.’ Patrick O’Sullivan’s housekeeper had asked to come, he couldn’t imagine why.

  ‘Please,’ Anna said.

  Peter didn’t reply. After a second or two, she went out and closed the door gently behind her.

  In the kitchen, her own salad lay on the table. She felt tremendously unhungry and put it in the fridge, thinking: Never mind, Luke can make it into a sandwich later. But Luke wouldn’t be here later. No-one would be, except herself and Peter and poor Flora who didn’t like the feeling in the house. Who could blame her? Who could like the feeling? Standing by the refrigerator and gazing out of the window at those orderly, green rows of vegetables she had planted, Anna felt that, almost without realizing it, she had turned some kind of corner. There was nothing to be gained any more from steeling herself and ploughing on – and there was plenty to lose. I’ve given him every chance, she told herself, every chance to come close to me, and every olive branch I offer he breaks across his knee.

  She glanced at the clock. It said five past one. Over three hours until Flora returned, three hours in which she had more than half intended that she would go and see Jonathan. But on reflection, she decided she would not do that. She would instead walk down her garden past her beans and peas, past her washing blowing on the line and through the neglected gate at the bottom. Then she would make her way to the hills beyond the river, just going straight across country like a wild animal, and climb the slopes to that mysterious copse. When she got there, she knew she would have decided, she knew she would be sure what she would do.

  She opened the back door, her spirits suddenly lifting, and closed it firmly behind her. The few clouds were high in a clear sky and the
air smelled clean, full of the scents of grass and earth. Then she paused, checked by an impulse to go back into the house to say goodbye to Peter. Why? He thought she was going to Woodborough; he expected her to be out. She shook her head at the thought of him. Does one ever know, she asked herself, the difference between love and habit? Above her, a blackbird sang, and then another answered it from yards away, quite sharply, as if in reprimand. Thrusting her hands into her pockets, Anna stepped out along her garden path towards the distant hills.

  When Ella got up to go, Peter rose and showed her courteously out of the house. He seemed perfectly calm. He had been perfectly calm all the way through their interview, so that it was impossible for Ella to tell whether he knew the whole story already. At least his apparent tranquillity had made it much easier for Ella, who had been able to relate what she knew unemotionally, as if she were reciting facts to a police sergeant. Peter had nodded once or twice, and glanced at her occasionally, but mostly he had looked past her, at a picture hanging just behind her which she saw, when she got up, was a seascape, a watercolour of waves and foam and sky and, in the foreground, a little wooden dinghy beached on shingle.

  On the Rectory doorstep, she said, ‘Goodbye. And thank you for seeing me.’

  Peter said, ‘Goodbye.’ Ella waited for him to thank her for coming, but he didn’t, so she turned, a little clumsily, and went down the drive beside the churchyard wall. She felt tremendously depressed and not at all relieved. It was certainly the right thing to have done, and it was equally certainly a most unpleasant thing to have done. Her sister Rachel would have said she should have done it weeks ago, nipped the whole nasty business in the bud.

  She reached the lane and squared her shoulders. Across the village green, Elaine Dodswell was planting petunias in two urns that guarded her little bridge in summer, in addition to the frogs. A pang of envy seized Ella. What wouldn’t she give, at that moment, for a cottage of her own, with her own untroublesome petunias, instead of this ill-defined life, half prefect, half parasite, on the coat tails of Patrick O’Sullivan’s wishes and whims? She quickened her steps and Elaine, seeing her, brandished a trowel at her and called out the offer of a cup of tea. Thankful for the distraction, Ella nodded, and hurried towards her.

  After Ella had gone, Peter went into the sitting-room and sat carefully on the sofa. He sat there for a long time, slipping his thoughts through his mind like the beads on a rosary. One thing was very plain and that was that he wasn’t at all surprised; indeed, he felt almost relieved to know the key to Anna’s extraordinary behaviour recently. What was more, knowing the key, being in power by possessing his new knowledge, made him feel, for the first time in months, curiously elated. He looked around the room, reduced once more to its habitual untidiness, and found he even wanted to smile. It was such a relief, such a violent, savage, unspeakable relief to know that he hadn’t imagined things after all, that his revulsion for Anna had been instinctive – rightly instinctive – and that he wasn’t, oh, joy of joys, going off his head. His unconscious mind had known what his conscious mind had refused to know. In a curious way, he felt himself to be free, as if shackles had fallen from him. He found that he was trembling.

  He got up and began to pace the room, rhythmically banging one closed fist into the other open hand. His father used to do that, and it always, Peter remembered, made Kitty nervous because she never knew how to react to her husband’s perturbations of spirit, being incapable of either dealing with them or leaving them alone. Peter thought of Kitty with great affection. There was a loyal woman! A selfless, devoted, faithful woman! He forgot that most of his life she had almost driven him mad with her indecisiveness, her fluttering mind, and that it was Anna who had kept up communication with her. Now, pacing his sitting-room, Peter thought of his mother as someone almost noble. Even so, he did not contemplate telephoning her. He simply pictured her in his mind as a symbol of good womanhood and as a contrast to Anna with her perversity, her rebelliousness, her seething dissatisfaction.

  He paused by the window and looked at the church, across the drive and the churchyard Wall. He felt no urge at all to go and sit in it, no flicker of desire to pray. He felt he could never forgive Anna for having perceived in him this growing hollowness, and the fear that accompanied it. Oh, her behaviour had been so calculated, almost cynical, a carefully orchestrated campaign against him, culminating in this offensive revelation of a liaison with Patrick O’Sullivan! Well, at least this was a culmination. It had made up his mind for him. Either Anna repented and made amends for what she had done, or he would divorce her. Simple.

  He left the sitting-room and went upstairs to wash. He combed his hair, looked at himself without affection in the bathroom mirror, and exchanged his cardigan for a jacket. Distasteful though it was, his first obligation, as a clergyman, was to confide the details of his troubles to his superior, the Archdeacon of Woodborough. He thought he would simply call, on the off-chance, so that by the time he faced Anna with her choice of futures the facts would already lie safely in official hands and she could not distort them. If Daniel Byrne wasn’t in, Peter thought, he would just wait.

  He left Anna a note on the kitchen table. It said, ‘Back later, P,’ and he wrote the time, ‘3.10,’ underneath, and the date. Then he locked the back door and put the key under the brick which was, he had been telling Anna for ten years, the most blindingly obvious place to put it, and went out to the garage.

  He drove slowly through Loxford, raising his hand in response to the few people who waved to him. He was conscious of his hand going up and down steadily, regally. How calm I am, he thought, how released, how free. Lady Mayhew was crossing the green with her dogs and she began to gesture towards him, as if she wanted to speak to him, but he felt that he had no obligation to anyone that afternoon because he was, serenely and composedly, bound upon something that was almost a mission. As he turned away from the green towards the main Woodborough road, he could see, in his driving mirror, Lady Mayhew’s obvious exasperation. He almost smiled because it mattered to him so little.

  He drove on between the still green wheatfields. He observed that the barn on the right which had been so damaged in the winter gales was having a new roof put on, and beyond it, a field of linseed was in full, blue flower. He saw scraps of litter in the verge and wild, purplish cranesbill in the hedge, and ahead of him, swerving blackly across the tarmac, the tyre marks of a skidding car. He felt acutely observant, as if the world had come into a sharp, clear new focus now that he possessed the key to what had been the matter. It wasn’t just relief either; it was something more akin to triumph.

  The lane turned sharply just before the main road. Peter braked, as he always did, changed gear, and drove smoothly round. The main road was quiet ahead of him. He pushed his foot forward to step on the brake, and as he did so a bright, detailed, unwanted, unbearable picture came into his mind of Anna, naked, in the arms of Patrick O’Sullivan. Peter gave a little cry, which turned into a much greater cry, and the car sprang forward of its own accord and as if in response to his sudden agony. Blinded by tears, Peter simply let it go.

  At the inquest, the bus driver said he had had no chance. He’d been coming along, all slowed down and ready to turn down the Loxford lane, when the Reverend’s car had shot out, without any warning, and headed for him, straight for him. It was all over in seconds. He’d braked, of cour$e, braked as hard as he could, but there was no avoiding it. He said that, if it was all right, he’d like to express his real sympathy for the Reverend’s family and tell them he’d be haunted by those ten seconds for the rest of his life. Then he broke down and had to be comforted by a constable.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Loxford church was packed for Peter’s funeral. Anna had said she would like it to be full of flowers, and it was, most touchingly, with all the fragile, impractical flowers that she loved, like delphiniums, already shedding petals, and cow parsley, distributing its peppery dust. The Bishop came, with his wife, and he and Dan
iel officiated together, and Peter lay before them in his coffin, below the chancel steps.

  Anna sat in her usual pew, with the children and the grandmothers beside her. Charlotte had come down from Edinburgh on an overnight bus and, despite having hardly slept, was composed and controlled. At one point, she even briefly took Anna’s hand. On the other side, Luke and Flora wept and wept, Flora out of fear and Luke out of anguish.

  ‘I didn’t love him,’ Luke had hissed to Charlotte in the few moments they had had alone together. ‘Don’t you see? I’m a bastard. I feel so guilty.’

  ‘You did love him,’ Charlotte said, who had had all night in a bus to think about this. ‘You did. You just didn’t like him much recently. He didn’t like himself.’

  They neither of them said anything of this to Anna. She was most affectionate to them, but nothing she said invited a confidential conversation.

  ‘She’s working it out herself,’ Charlotte said. She felt extremely old suddenly, tired and experienced. ‘None of it’s straightforward for her.’

  ‘It’s shock,’ everyone else was saying. How could it be otherwise? What would you feel, they said to each other, if you came back from a country walk and found a policeman in your garden with such news as that? Of course, Peter and Anna hadn’t seen eye to eye just recently, but what marriage is ever all plain sailing? You had to admire her dignity. Really, her dignity was perfect. So brave; too brave, of course, there’d be a reaction soon, a breakdown. Most of the congregation, craning round each other to look at the occupants of the Rectory pew, speculated with an uneasy excitement about Anna’s precarious future.

  So, without excitement, did Laura. She stood beside Charlotte in a hat waving with funereal plumes, and felt anxiety almost obliterate her grief. She thought intermittently of Peter, of young, student Peter painstakingly scrubbing a corner of her kitchen table to make it fit to eat off, but she thought predominantly of Anna. Her heart sank when she thought of Anna, because it seemed to her that Anna was about to embark, and not out of choice, upon exactly the shapeless, unstructured, struggling life that she had had herself, and that she knew to be such a weary battle for the spirit. She had believed Anna wasted in her marriage to Peter; now that he was dead, the uncertainty of the future seemed more destructive than the waste of the past. Laura heaved a gargantuan sigh and a shred of feather detached itself frdm her hat and floated down on to Kitty’s prayer book.