The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Chapter Nineteen

  Anna sat on Peter’s grave. When it had been covered over, the turfs had been put back, like a roughly torn green rug, and they were at last slowly beginning to knit together once more. The mound of earth had subsided as well. It was starting to look, Anna thought, much more harmonious with the surrounding churchyard.

  It was November, a soft, dove-grey day with no wind. Beside Anna lay a spade and an empty black plastic flowerpot which had contained the old shrub rose she had just planted at Peter’s feet. At his head, there was nothing. There should have been a headstone, a simple upright slab of local stone from the quarry beyond New End, but Anna had only just won the battle over the lettering; her last battle, she sometimes thought, of the whole long business.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Anna said. She looked round. The churchyard was empty, and so was the lane beyond it. If anyone was watching from behind the shining Rectory windows, Anna thought, well, let them.

  ‘Peter,’ Anna said, ‘I have to talk to you.’ It was easy to talk to him, sitting on his grave in the mild, still afternoon, with her arms wrapped round her knees. ‘We needn’t pretend now, need we? We needn’t avoid the fact any longer that we had come to the end of our happy times together. Do you get the feeling that we were, in some way, rescued? I wish you hadn’t been the one to pay the price, I violently wish that, but I can’t help wondering what would have become of us, with my growing appetite for life, and your increasing distaste for it.’

  A little, diffident gust of wind blew a few yellow leaves across the grass towards her. She picked them up. They came, she noticed, from the Silver birch by the Rectory garage that she had so despised as suburban when she first came to Loxford, and had then grown to love for its grace and colouring.

  ‘It’s lovely now,’ Anna said, laying the leaves down Peter’s mound like a row of buttons. ‘I can love you in peace, I can remember things without bitterness. I think you can understand that now, can’t you? If you can’t, if you still feel I ought to be doubled up in self-abasement, then you haven’t been in paradise long enough. But I don’t think you do. I don’t feel you haunt me.’

  She looked at the space at the head of the grave.

  ‘I want to talk to you about this headstone. You know what the parish wanted? They wanted “Peter Bouverie” and then your dates, and then “Rector of this parish from thing to thing”, and then “Beloved husband, father and friend”. Well, I struck. I mean, you don’t want that kind of meaningless, sentimental claptrap, do you? I struck and I’ve won. I’ll tell you what you’re getting and it’s from me to you, Peter, from me to you.’

  She turned and put her hands on the grave, as if on his chest.

  ‘In very simple letters, we will put your name and your dates. And then underneath, this will be carved. Listen: “Pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven.” And the emphasis, Peter, is on the “merrily”.’

  ‘Oy!’ someone shouted.

  Anna looked up. Mr Biddle, unchanged in every degree, was leaning on the churchyard wall. He took off his hat and shook it at Anna.

  ‘Waste of time!’ he bawled. ‘Waste of time, Mrs B! ’E can’t ’ear you!’

  He cackled with mirth. Anna got up off the grave and stood looking down at it, calmly, dusting her hands together. Then she waved at Mr Biddle, smiling.

  ‘Oh yes, he can!’

  She glanced down at Peter. She said again, so softly that only he could hear, ‘Oh yes, he can.’

  THE END