The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  In the churchyard afterwards, Celia Hooper came up to Anna. She said, ‘Oh, I’m ever so pleased to see you,’ and then to Anna’s amazement, she kissed her. ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘Are you settled?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said, recovering. ‘Yes, I am. We all are. It’s a funny little house but we like it.’

  ‘Oh Anna,’ Celia said. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. ‘We miss you—’

  ‘I expect it’s just the change—’

  ‘No. No, it’s more than that. You ask Elaine.’

  Anna looked across the churchyard. Dorothy Farmer was saying something to Daniel. Even from this distance, her demeanour looked arch.

  ‘She seems terribly efficient—’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s efficient all right. I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I feel, we all feel, that there isn’t the same humanity, somehow. We’ve lost the colour.’

  ‘It’s very early days,’ Anna said, battling for the right platitudes.

  Two precise tears spilled from Celia’s eyes. ‘We miss Peter—’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say this, to you of all people, but you felt you could get close to Peter, that he needed you in some way—’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘Am I offending you? I’d do anything rather than offend you.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Anna said, ‘that you and I have got quite beyond this kind of conversation? You did offend me, in the past, quite tremendously, but then, in a sense, I offended you by not being what you thought I should be. It’s all over now, all of that.’ She glanced round the churchyard. ‘This isn’t my parish any more, this isn’t my patch. I’m not part of the Church now, not the way I was.’

  Celia looked at her. ‘You seem so controlled—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Don’t you feel sad, being back here? Don’t you hate seeing her being what you were? And what about Peter—’

  ‘What about him?’

  Celia looked suddenly nervous. She said, ‘I didn’t mean to suggest—’

  ‘Shall we leave it?’ Anna said. ‘Shall we just leave it there?’

  ‘Except—’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘I’d love to do something to help. Really I would. Make curtains for you or something.’

  Anna stared at her. Would she never understand? Then she touched her arm briefly. ‘Thank you so much, but I’m making my own. Not very well, but I don’t seem to mind that.’

  And then Laura came up, and said that the Bishop had told her that her fleeting appearances on television were about the only reason he ever turned the thing on these days. She glanced roguishly at Celia. ‘Rather a feather in one’s pagan cap. Don’t you think?’

  Patrick O’Sullivan had seen Anna arrive in Loxford. He had told himself that he wasn’t looking out for her, but that he would have been reading the paper in that particular chair by that particular window just then, in any case. It was chance that he should happen to look up and see her helping Laura out of the car, followed by a brief pantomime with the wind and Laura’s hat. He had craned forward. Anna looked very well, he thought. She wore clothes he didn’t recognize. She was a schoolmistress now, he told himself. He tried to smile.

  He did not go across to the church. He wasn’t particularly interested in this new Rector and even less so in his purposeful, bolster-shaped wife. Ella, who came to see him sometimes on her half-days off from Snead Hall, said that there was a lot of muttering in the parishes about Dorothy Farmer. As a leaving present, Patrick had given Ella the deposit on a bungalow at Church End, which she would use in the holidays, and when she retired. She seemed to like Snead Hall. She said it was a relief to work with other people.

  In her place, Patrick had hired a Spanish couple. They had lasted three weeks, and then the wife had said that the country gave her allergies, and they had gone back to London. The agency Patrick used had replaced them with a quiet Scottish pair. Patrick had the feeling that the husband – courteous, unobjectionable, industrious – had once been in prison. It was something to do with his self-effacement and his wife’s watchful protectiveness. The wife cooked better than Ella, but she had no sense of humour. Patrick missed Ella.

  He looked out of the window again. Below him, in the shrubberies around the front drive, his silent Scots manservant was pulling out bindweed. Everyone was coming out of church, and the privileged few were straying off in the direction of the Rectory. Another tea party. Was the Church of England wholly sustained on tea and coffee and custard creams? He saw Anna from a distance. There was quite a crowd round her, an eager-looking crowd; he could even see Miss Dunstable in it, and Lady Mayhew, of all unlikely people. The crowd moved slowly out of the churchyard and across the green to where the cars were parked. Anna stopped by hers, unlocking the passenger door for Laura. Then she turned and said something, laughing, to Sheila Vinson, who was standing quite close to her, and for a moment Patrick could see her face very clearly, and she looked suddenly very young, and very like Luke. Patrick gripped his newspaper. It wasn’t just Ella he missed. He missed Luke. And Anna.

  67 Nelson Street was much improved. Charlotte had brought Adam, the engineer, to stay for a fortnight – this had caused great complication in sleeping arrangements, with Anna and Flora ending up quarrelsomely sharing Anna’s bed – and he had steadily, good-humouredly, obliterated most of the fearful wallpapers under coats of bargain emulsion, bought from a stall in the market. Then he had taken Charlotte off to Italy, with backpacks, and Luke and his friend Barnaby had, to Anna’s amazement, offered to clear the garden. They did it with enormous gusto and lack of finesse, lighting vast belching bonfires that brought Anna’s new neighbours round at once in high states of indignation and leaving the garden looking like a lunar landscape. ‘There,’ Luke said with evident pride. ‘Now that’ll give you a really clear start.’

  Luke, she observed, was very happy. He had acquired a girlfriend – a small, dull, sweet thing with huge brown eyes and a perfect rosebud mouth she hardly ever opened and a holiday job collecting trolleys for Pricewell’s. (It took some self-control for Anna not to tease him about Pricewell’s.) Above his bed in his blackened eyrie, Luke had pinned reproductions of paintings he admired, a poster Barnaby had given him advertising a new political group at Leningrad University (in Russian which he did not speak or read), and a photograph of Peter. It was an official photograph taken for the Woodborough paper when Peter became Rector of Loxford. He was in his cassock, and a surplice, and he stood gravely in front of the south porch of Loxford church. It was not the one Anna had on her dressing table. That one had been taken when Luke was born, and Peter was standing by a gate to a field holding the baby, and looking at the camera, and laughing. Flora didn’t like that photograph. She didn’t like the fact that the baby Peter was holding was Luke and not her.

  People began to come, quite soon, to Nelson Street. Daniel came, and Isobel Thompson, and a fellow teacher from St Saviour’s. Flora brought friends home; so did Luke. Marjorie Richardson brought her magnificently outspoken daughter, Julia, who stayed to supper and then put herself to bed on the sofa. And then, quite unheralded, Patrick came. Anna opened the front door, expecting Isobel, and there he was, standing on the pavement, looking up at her. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him.

  She said, quite truthfully, ‘You are the last person I expected.’

  He followed her into her sitting-room. He said, ‘This room could belong to nobody but you.’ He looked odd in it, so ordered and expensive amid Anna’s possessions which seemed to crowd round him in this little room with almost an air of eagerness. He held out a paper-wrapped bottle. ‘Something for you. To christen the house.’

  She knew it would be champagne even before she opened it. She said, ‘How very kind,’ and put the bottle down carefully on a little table by the fireplace. Then she waited.

  Patrick sat down on the Knole sofa, which now dominated Nelson Street like a dead mammoth.

&nb
sp; ‘Are you happy here? Not cramped?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’re cramped. But it doesn’t matter, it isn’t important.’

  ‘I’ve wanted to come, for weeks,’ Patrick said, ‘but I’ve managed to restrain myself. I wish you’d sit down.’

  She sat, on a low chair across the room from him.

  ‘Ella accused me of playing games with you. She nearly admitted that you had said so to her. And then she accused me of losing interest in you the moment Peter died, the moment you were free. I simply can’t rest until I’ve told you that neither is true.’

  ‘I’ve got some deeply ordinary wine,’ Anna said. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘I’d rather you listened to me.’

  ‘I was only trying to lubricate the occasion—’

  Patrick shouted, ‘Don’t mock me!’

  ‘I don’t have to listen to you,’ Anna said. ‘I certainly don’t have to if you shout.’

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, staring at her. ‘I suppose this is some kind of revenge.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘Once I had the upper hand. Now you do. And you’re enjoying it.’

  ‘Patrick,’ Anna said, ‘you don’t have a clue, do you?’

  ‘I have more than—’

  ‘No,’ she said, interrupting, leaning forward herself, ‘no. You don’t. You talk of revenge. Revenge has never crossed my mind. All that I’m interested in just now is independence.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s just this modern woman thing.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with gender. It’s to do with humanity. Do you know what independence means?’ Anna said. ‘It means not being subordinate. It means thinking and acting for yourself. It means not depending on anyone else for your sense of value. Wouldn’t that describe you?’

  ‘I’d like to think so—’

  ‘Well, I’d like to think it described me, too, now.’

  ‘But have you enough money?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, suddenly furious. ‘Yes. Heaps. Billions. More than I know how to spend.’

  He sighed. ‘If I can’t help you, and clearly I can’t, is there any way we could have some kind of relationship?’ He looked at her. ‘Would you come to bed with me?’

  She said, ‘I do have to admire your continuing nerve—’

  ‘But you responded when I kissed you.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So you liked it.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So you would like some more.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘There’s another man,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Anna,’ Patrick said, holding his hands out to her, ‘why not me?’

  She stood up. She was weary of him. ‘Because you’re a bully,’ she said, ‘and I’m tired of bullies.’

  The Farmers were eating an early supper in Loxford Rectory. It was the evening of a Parochial Church Council meeting at Quindale. Celia had just resigned as secretary. Philip Farmer proposed to suggest that Dorothy should take her place. Dorothy had always been excellent at that sort of thing.

  They ate their supper in the kitchen. It was newly painted in lemon-yellow and looked out on to the beginning of the patio with which the Farmers intended to replace Anna’s vegetable garden. They would certainly go on growing vegetables, but at the far end of the garden where there was that terrible wilderness. It would be a good spot for Dorothy’s rotary clothes-dryer too, out of sight of prying eyes.

  Between them, on the table, by the salt and pepper mills, lay a letter from the Archdeacon. It was about a new diocesan project to help the wives of clergymen who got into difficulties. The help would cover a whole spectrum of domestic problems – lack of money, loneliness, marital misery. The Archdeacon asked all the priests in his area to think of anyone they knew who might be in trouble of this kind. The names of such people, and the source from which they came, would be treated, of course, with the utmost confidentiality.

  Philip said cheerfully, reaching for the water jug, ‘Well, we needn’t put you forward, dear.’

  Dorothy reread the letter. She said, ‘You know, I think it’s shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I think they all got their fingers burned over Anna Bouverie and now they’re trying to stop anything like that happening again. Though I must say, I’m amazed he’s got the nerve to send out a letter about it himself.’

  ‘The Archdeacon? Why?’

  Dorothy folded and rolled her seersucker napkin and pushed it through her napkin ring.

  ‘You know how I am about gossip—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philip, who did. He went on eating, as if he didn’t care.

  ‘Of course, one must be terribly careful in villages.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I think I wouldn’t have given this tale any credence if it hadn’t tied up with so much evidence.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Dorothy folded her hand on the table. ‘The rumour is,’ she said, ‘and mind you, I can hardly believe it – but the rumour is that Anna Bouverie formed a liaison with the Archdeacon of Woodborough.’

  ‘Polyester!’ Miss Dunstable shouted.

  Anna held the telephone a little away from her ear.

  ‘Modern!’ Miss Dunstable bellowed. ‘That’s what she said to me! “This is the modern Church,” she said to me! “We need easycare altar linen.” Easycare!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Anna said, ‘I’m so sorry—’

  ‘It’s blasphemy!’

  ‘Perhaps she really wants to save trouble—’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Miss Dunstable said. ‘What’s trouble beside standards, I’d like to know? She’s a frightful woman.’

  ‘Are you sure,’ Anna said, leaning against the wall of her tiny hall and smiling, ‘that she isn’t just different?’

  ‘Vulgar,’ Miss Dunstable said. ‘Wants dried flowers in the Lady Chapel. It’ll be plastic poinsettias at Christmas next.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Really I am. But I don’t think I can do anything.’

  ‘No. No, no. Of course you can’t. I just had to let off steam. You know.’

  ‘Of course I do—’

  ‘I’ve saved you some of my Californian poppy seed,’ Miss Dunstable said, in a different tone.

  ‘How nice of you—’

  ‘I’ll give you some pinks when I divide them.’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  There was a little pause and then Miss Dunstable snorted, ‘Easycare, indeed,’ and banged down the telephone.

  Luke was in the kitchen, cooking pasta. This week, he thought he would probably be a sculptor. Last week he had toyed with photography. He called out, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Miss Dunstable.’

  ‘What did she want, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I think,’ Anna said, ‘that that was yet another apology.’

  Luke twirled long, pale lengths of tagliatelle out of the saucepan on a wooden spoon. ‘Weird,’ he said.

  Seventy miles away, in his unremarkable university rooms, Jonathan was writing to Anna. He wrote to her a great deal, long, discursive, loving letters which were, he found, small but vital compensation for not seeing her as much as he would have liked to. His need to see her troubled him considerably, because it was a need that was new to him, and because it interfered with the self-sufficiency he had grown accustomed to, and dependent upon. He was also troubled by thinking that not only did Anna not seem to need him as reciprocally as he needed her but also that part of her remained elusive. Another part of her, which he also found difficult to come to terms with, seemed to be particularly attached to Daniel. It didn’t, in Jonathan’s mind, make all of a piece, it didn’t seem to be consistent. When he looked back on his relationship with Anna, he saw an image of her, standing in a cage surrounded by people who were either longing to rescue her or determined that she should not escape. And then suddenly, it seemed to him, the cage was empty and Anna had eluded all those people and had run ahe
ad of them, away from them. It was almost, now, as if she were in hiding, and they were all looking for her, guided only by bursts of slightly mocking laughter from her hiding-place. The tables were turned – but how had she done it?

  For the first time in his life, Jonathan thought a good deal about the future. He thought about it because it had begun to matter. He found he wanted to plan. He had to stop himself from saying to Anna, In two years’ time, will you – or even, Next Christmas, can I – because he wasn’t inclined to tempt providence. Her life looked predictable enough, but its essence was so changed from her former life that it hardly seemed to belong to the same person. She had said to him once, seeing his anxiety, ‘I will need someone else one day. I think I will. When I’ve got used to myself.’ He had to be content with that.

  Yet her growing degree of self-government disturbed him. You could see it reflected in her children, in her appearance, in her actions, which seemed to him sometimes arbitrary, because they weren’t predictable. She excited him terribly, her personality quite as much as her body. He felt he was on some marvellous quest, at the best of times, and utterly lost in a hostile maze, at the worst. He was more deeply interested than he had ever been in his life before, more committed, more afraid.

  He wrote, ‘I am afraid.’ He looked at it. He didn’t like the look of it, so he crossed it out blackly and wrote, ‘Damn, damn. Mustn’t whine. Won’t whine,’ instead. He put his pen down. What was there, after all, to be afraid of? What was there to fear in placing his hopes and fears in Anna’s hands? Of all the people Jonathan had ever known, besides his brother Daniel, Anna had a faithful heart, that commodity he had never thought to value before and which he now knew to be more precious than pearls. Smiling to himself, Jonathan seized his pen again and began to write rapidly.