The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Of course,’ Anna said. It would clearly help Charlotte.

  They sat there for a long time in the growing dark. The telephone rang several times and solicitous people asked if they were all right and did they need anything. To all of them, Anna said they were fine, thank you, and that all they needed was time. Then they took the telephone off the hook, and went upstairs together.

  Charlotte went into Flora’s room, where she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Luke paused before going into his room, just long enough to say, ‘Will you be lonely?’

  Anna said carefully, ‘I don’t think so.’

  Now, lying awake, she wondered about it. What exactly did lonely mean? What had she meant by it, in the past, when she had declared herself to be so lonely within inches of Peter’s living, breathing self? She switched the light on again, and picked up the dictionary from the floor. ‘Alone,’ it said, ‘solitary, standing by oneself.’ Yes, Anna thought, yes, I am all those things. ‘Abandoned,’ the dictionary went on, ‘uncomfortably conscious of being alone.’ She closed the book emphatically. She was neither of those last two things. She reached out and switched off the light. Those two things had been the loneliness of the past.

  Miss Lambe was polishing the brass in Woodborough Vicarage. It was a huge task, involving over thirty pairs of door knobs, not to mention the front-door knocker and the letter box and the Archdeacon’s study fender. Miss Lambe had chosen it deliberately, because it took her mind off things. The thing she wanted her mind particularly taken off was Jonathan’s leaving the Vicarage. At the end of the week, he’d said to her in the kitchen that morning, at the end of the week he’d be going back to his university and then to Greece. Miss Lambe had little enough idea of the whereabouts of his university, and none at all about Greece, but they both sounded a long way off. He said he’d be back, of course, but Miss Lambe knew that that would not be the same as knowing, on a daily basis, that she’d find his blue shirts in the linen basket to be washed, along with the Archdeacon’s grey ones.

  She knew that he and the Archdeacon had had a long talk the night of Mr Bouverie’s funeral. She hadn’t been able to sleep, and had pattered downstairs, anxious not to be seen in the intimacy of her all-enveloping pink woolly dressing gown, and had noticed a line of light under the Archdeacon’s study door, and heard their voices, just as the clock struck midnight. It did not occur to her to listen, but, as she scurried by, she could feel through the closed door that the atmosphere of the conversation was grave. It was, in consequence, no surprise to her to hear that Jonathan was going, but it made her feel most peculiar all the same, shaken and unsteady, and prone to snuffle. Polishing was a good antidote to snuffling.

  She was painstakingly rubbing polish into the front-door knocker with a toothbrush when Anna appeared. Miss Lambe did not like Anna, who seemed to her not a good churchwoman, not properly modest and unassuming. Anna smiled at Miss Lambe. Miss Lambe clutched her toothbrush.

  ‘I wonder if Mr Byrne is in,’ Anna said.

  Miss Lambe gave a tiny toss of her head.

  ‘Mr Byrne is working.’

  ‘Do you think I might interrupt him very briefly?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Lambe.

  ‘I think,’ Anna said, putting her hand On the door, ‘I think I just will, all the same.’ She gave the door a little push.

  ‘Stop!’ said Miss Lambe.

  ‘No,’ said Anna. She pushed the door again and it swung open. The tiles of the hall were still damp from Miss Lambe’s morning mopping. She stepped forward. Miss Lambe sped after her.

  ‘He’s private!’ Miss Lambe cried, prodding Anna with her polishing toothbrush.

  ‘Oh Miss Lambe,’ Anna said turning. She was laughing.

  Miss Lambe was full of sudden hatred. ‘Stop that!’ shrieked Miss Lambe.

  A door opened on the landing and Jonathan appeared. They looked up at him.

  ‘She wouldn’t stop!’ Miss Lambe cried to him. ‘She wouldn’t, she wouldn’t!’

  He began to descend the stairs. Anna could see he was fighting laughter. She said, ‘Miss Lambe was very properly defending your working privacy. But I’ll only be a moment.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Jonathan said. He put his hand under Anna’s elbow. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Miss Lambe, leading Anna away. Miss Lambe watched them go up the stairs together, his hand still under her elbow. She would not, she decided, make them any coffee.

  ‘Now,’ Jonathan said, holding Anna hard against him. ‘Now, my darling. At last, at last. Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I love you.’ He led her to the divan and sat down on it, drawing her down close to him. ‘Daniel has dismissed me. Very kindly and nicely and inevitably. To do me justice, I think I should probably have dismissed myself, to make things easier for you. For us.’

  Anna leaned against him.

  ‘I came to dismiss you too.’

  ‘Did you?’ His voice was indulgent. ‘How comfortable, that we should all be in unison. I shall go back next week and set things in motion.’

  ‘Things—’

  ‘For you to join me. For you, after a decent interval, to become a don’s wife and thus exchange one set of stereotypes for another.’ He was laughing again.

  ‘Not that,’ Anna said softly.

  ‘Not quite that, of course, but I fear not so different—’

  ‘Jonathan,’ Anna said, ‘I love you and you saved my sanity and I want to be in bed with you. But I’m not marrying you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so clumsy. Peter’s only been dead a fortnight.’

  Anna picked up his hand and separated the fingers. ‘You aren’t clumsy at all. And it isn’t Peter. It’s two other things. One is that I don’t want another relationship just now, I don’t want the involvement again yet. The other is that I have things to do.’

  ‘What things? I’d never stop you—’

  ‘Things,’ Anna said, ‘that I haven’t done for too long, for twenty years. Things I can do for their own sake, not in relation to other people. I have to learn, you see, to live with myself, I have to learn what I can do. It’s so trite to talk about being oneself, but it’s what I feel, what I truly feel.’

  ‘Why should marriage stop that? I’m the least possessive of men.’

  Anna turned to look at him. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, I’m desperate for a rest from marriage.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know marriage to you would be unrecognizably different from marriage to Peter, but I still don’t want it just now.’

  ‘Darling Anna,’ Jonathan said, putting his arms around her and pulling her down to lie beside him. ‘You are very difficult to follow. Could you please tell me exactly what it is that you do want?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said. She looked straight at him. ‘I want a lover.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Bishop’s study was a modest room. It was painted pale green and it looked out on to a long lawn lined with herbaceous borders that ended with a fine view of the Cathedral’s Chapter House. It contained comfortable, ugly furniture, a great many dark, grave books and several photographs of the Bishop’s grandchildren, all of whom appeared to have spent many, many years without any front teeth. There was a vase of yellow roses on his desk, and a very old mongrel asleep on the hearthrug.

  When Anna arrived, the Bishop said he was so sorry, his wife was out, so they would have to make coffee for themselves. Anna said she would be delighted, and they spent a long time in the kitchen while the Bishop opened cupboards full of saucepans, and bags of flour, looking for cups. Once he said, ‘Ah, biscuits,’ in a pleased voice, and put a tin on the table. Then, in the midst of these explorations, his secretary came in, and looked crossly at Anna, and shooed them both into his study. Ten minutes later, she appeared with coffee on a tray laid with a tray cloth, and biscuits arranged in a fan on a flowered plate. The Bishop, who was deep in thought over what Anna had just said to him, failed to ac
knowledge her arrival, or her indignant departure.

  Anna took a cup of coffee and the sugar bowl over to the Bishop. He said, spooning sugar, ‘So what you are suggesting is a series of local support-groups for clergy wives?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Anna said. ‘That could turn into precisely the sort of bossy, ill-defined, do-gooding group that makes parish life so difficult. I think it ought to be a diocesan project. Like the ministerial review, or whatever you call your care-of-priests scheme. What’s wrong is that the top administrative end of the Church doesn’t know what it’s like to live out in a rural parish. And I have to say that it often feels as if they don’t much care, either.’

  ‘You’d be quite wrong about that,’ the Bishop said with some energy.

  Anna said nothing. The Bishop stirred his coffee. He cleared his throat. ‘Would you wish to be part of this scheme? In this diocese?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Anna said, ‘of course. After all, I know the other side. Trying to live with someone with a strong sense of service is taxing enough, so what must it be like being married to a vocation?’

  The Bishop looked at her. ‘What about a wife’s sense of service?’

  Anna looked back. ‘A sense of service to God is one thing. It’s independent, you chose it, you choose how you fulfil it. A sense of service to a husband who has chosen God is quite another. Handmaidens of the Lord have a much better time of it than handmaidens of husbands.’

  The Bishop began to feel relieved that his wife was out. He had felt a little uneasy at seeing Anna and had wished for his wife’s presence, but, now that he knew her errand, it seemed to him that his wife might not altogether have taken his part. He could not fault his wife’s loyalty, but he had felt, in the last few weeks, a certain steel in her that he had not observed before.

  ‘A clergy marriage,’ Anna said, ‘isn’t immune to anything a lay marriage is vulnerable to.’

  The Bishop leaned forward. ‘I shall talk to my council.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Can you think of any specific examples—’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said. She got up. She was suddenly weary.

  ‘I doubt we could pay for your help. I imagine such advice as you might give would have to be voluntary.’

  ‘I never imagined otherwise.’

  ‘My dear Mrs Bouverie,’ the Bishop said abruptly, getting up too, ‘how are you managing? What is your future?’

  ‘We have to leave the Rectory, of course. But I have plans—’

  He peered at her. ‘Do you? Are you getting help? From the Archdeacon?’

  ‘I am inundated with help,’ Anna said, ‘which I don’t at all seem to want to accept.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She regarded him. ‘Would you? In my position? Or, for that matter, at any time in your life? Would you like to be beholden?’

  The Bishop smiled. He put out his hand and grasped hers. ‘I should absolutely loathe it,’ he said.

  Everybody had made offers. Laura and Kitty had offered to sell their flats; Sir Francis Mayhew had suggested the old coachman’s rooms over his stables; Eleanor had telephoned from Oxford saying that she had finally decided to leave Robert and – this was added rather perfunctorily – she was so very sorry to hear about Peter, so why didn’t they join forces and set up house together in Oxford? No sooner had she declined all these, than Daniel came out to Loxford to suggest, rather diffidently, that they might all move into the Vicarage, which needed people as he did, and to be quite honest, Miss Lambe . . .

  ‘No,’ Anna said gently. ‘No. But thank you very much.’

  ‘Because of Jonathan?’

  ‘Because of independence.’

  ‘But I would regard you as being wholly independent—’

  ‘Daniel,’ Anna said, putting her hands on his shoulders, ‘I think I believe in God now more than I ever have, but at the moment, I simply can’t stand the Church.’

  Soon after Daniel had gone, the telephone had rung. Luke had answered it and came to find Anna, who was pulling early carrots, saying that it was the Diocesan Secretary. Anna looked amazed.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘I dunno. Said his name was Warbash. Brilliant.’

  ‘Mr Warbash?’ Anna said into the telephone.

  ‘Commander Warbash, actually. Mrs Bouverie, could you run into Church House this week for a moment?’

  ‘Is it about my idea?’

  ‘No,’ said Commander Warbash, who regarded clergy wives as a pretty low priority in his scheme of things. ‘No. It’s about something much more to your advantage. Something practical.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me on the telephone?’

  ‘No,’ said Commander Warbash.

  Three days later, across his well-marshalled desk, he offered Anna a house. It was a cottage on glebe land the far side of the diocese. It had three bedrooms and an orchard and it was on a bus route. Anna might have it rent-free for five years.

  Anna explained that Flora was at school in Woodborough and that Luke was probably going to do a foundation art course at the polytechnic. Commander Warbash said that both those facts might be regarded as details.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Anna said.

  Commander Warbash said that the suggestion of a house had been made by a well-wisher of Anna’s on the Diocesan Board of Finance, and that he, Commander Warbash, had assumed that, in her position, she would leap at the offer.

  ‘I think,’ Anna said boldly, ‘that the test of true kindness is whether it benefits the recipient more than the donor.’

  ‘So you decline Glebe Cottage?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’m very grateful for the offer, but I can’t disrupt all our lives by moving twenty-five miles away. Also—’

  ‘Yes?’ said Commander Warbash.

  ‘Let’s just say that the Church doesn’t owe me anything any more. I’m—’ She paused. She wanted to say ‘free’ but thought it would sound aggressive, so she said instead, ‘separate now.’

  ‘So how will you live?’

  ‘I don’t quite know yet.’

  ‘You have your children to consider.’

  She wanted nothing so much as to lean across the desk and slap him. She looked at his healthy, cleanly shaven, decent, insensitive, English face and imagined how it would feel under her hand. To restrain herself, she put her hands in her pockets.

  ‘I imagine,’ Commander Warbash said, ‘that we have nothing more to say to one another.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He rose and held out a hand. ‘Then I will bid you good morning.’

  Anna smiled. ‘Good morning. And thank you for your time. I do hope,’ she said with great warmth, ‘that you will find a nice, amenable, grateful tenant for Glebe Cottage.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said. But when she had gone, and he reflected upon Glebe Cottage’s dismal downstairs bathroom and four windows only a few feet from a main road, he rather doubted it. He began to hum. Confrontations always stimulated him a little, particularly with pretty women.

  Anna said, ‘I’ll have to go and thank Colonel Richardson. It was his idea, clearly, and at least he really meant to be kind.’

  Flora was drawing at the kitchen table. She wanted to live in a house like her new friend Verity’s, with a conservatory and a double garage. She hadn’t chosen to grasp the fact that there was even less money than before, only the fact that she was no longer committed to living in a Rectory. She said, ‘It would be kind to me to live in a real house.’

  ‘It would be quite kind to me, too,’ Anna said.

  Flora drew a blobby tree and began to add apples. ‘If you died now, I’d be an orphan.’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘No!’ Flora said in terror.

  ‘Then why say such things?’

  Flora drew a rabbit under the tree. ‘To scare you. To make you stay alive.’

  Anna bent and kissed her. ‘I’m going to see Colonel Richardson. Luke’s upstairs if you want him.’

  ‘Yes,’
Flora said. She drew a second, smaller rabbit. ‘Drive carefully.’

  It was curious and exciting to drive so much, to feel that the car was hers to drive. She reversed slowly and drove down to the lane. She passed the Old Rectory without looking at it; the thought of Patrick O’Sullivan filled her with a dull rage mixed with shame. She drove across the green, waving to Mrs Eddoes who was tying up her sweet peas with raffia, and to Sheila Vinson who was washing her front-door paintwork, and turned down the lane to Quindale. She decided, as she drove, that she would not attempt to rehearse her explanation for turning down Glebe Cottage. She would simply, when confronted with Harry Richardson, tell the spontaneous truth.

  But Harry Richardson was not at home. It was Marjorie, in a blue-and-white-patterned summer dress of immaculate cut, who opened the impressive front door of Quindale House. Anna was rather thrown.

  ‘Marjorie. I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I wondered if I might have a word with Harry, he’s been so kind—’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s out,’ Marjorie Richardson said. ‘Regimental reunion in London.’ The hand that was not holding the front door crept to her double row of pearls. ‘Come in,’ she said unexpectedly.

  Anna came. She followed Marjorie across the beautiful old rugs on the hall floor to a pretty back sitting-room with a door open to the garden. Out on the lawn beyond, the Richardson Labradors lay stoutly in the sun.

  ‘Coffee?’ Marjorie said. ‘Or gin?’

  Anna said, startled, ‘I suppose it’d better be coffee—’

  ‘Why? Wouldn’t you rather have gin?’

  ‘I’ve almost never drunk it—’

  ‘I’ve drunk it all my life,’ Marjorie said. ‘All my generation have. We’re nothing like so fond of wine, but we all grew up on gin. I’ll make you a weak one.’

  Anna sat down, slightly dazed, on a fat, chintz-covered chair. Marjorie went over to a lacquered tray full of bottles and began some competent mixing. She came back to Anna with a small stemmed glass full of ice and lemon.