by Lis Howell
Phyllis looked through it: apart from the women who did flower arranging too, there were the three men to add. Clever but sad Robert Clark who was Mary’s widower; grumpy and crude old Tom Strickland, the veteran churchwarden; and super smooth Alan Robie who lived with his ‘friend’ in Church Cottage.
Oh, and of course there was also Daisy Arthur. Phyllis sighed. Daisy was still just a girl, who’d come back to the village after university. Phyllis put the list in her pocket thoughtfully. Apart from Daisy and Suzy Spencer, it was mainly old faithfuls, which was a shame. Phyllis had felt particularly hurt at being snubbed by the new churchwarden and his wife, Kevin and Janice Jones. They were young marrieds who lived in Tarn Acres, the new houses behind the church. They maintained that they couldn’t come to the group because their children were so tiny, but Phyllis suspected that they secretly sneered at traditional scripture study. Janice was a straightforward local girl, but Kevin Jones was a Yorkshireman with a round shaved head who wore black T-shirts with slogans on. He was very chummy with the new vicar, whom he called Nick the Vic. Best not to think about that, Phyllis told herself. There was a nagging suspicion at the back of her mind that both Nick Melling and Kevin Jones would be quite happy to get rid of the traditions she was trying so hard to maintain.
But some people appreciated her efforts, and, surprisingly, spiky-haired Suzy Spencer was one of them, despite Mary’s misgivings. Suzy was a neighbour of Kevin and Janice Jones in the ‘executive homes’ in Tarn Acres. She had turned out to be kind and helpful, but . . . Phyllis sighed. It wasn’t just her casual appearance, or the time she’d used a four-letter-word in church. Perpetually on the go, Suzy had a favourite saying, ‘If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing badly,’ which she would repeat with a laugh whenever her flower arrangements collapsed, which was often. Most people at All Saints took it all more seriously.
The rustling in the main church was growing.
‘Who’s there?’ Phyllis shouted. Her voice trilled from the flower vestry as crackly as the dried thistles they had sprayed gold one Christmas. The rustling stopped.
‘Who’s there?’ she said again, trying to sound authoritative. The words echoed like a church mouse’s squeak.
I will have to go into the dark and see, she thought. Propelled by a sense of both duty and foreboding, still clutching her scissors and the last few lilies, she opened the flower vestry door and moved in between the pews to the church nave.
It was the last voluntary move she made.
* * *
Robert Clark suddenly noticed that the sun was setting behind him and he stopped digging. He wasn’t quite sure why he was turning the earth over anyway. But the garden had always been his wife’s territory and, like so many other things, he felt he had to keep it going as Mary had left it. Carefully, he knocked the clumps of soil from his spade, took it to the shed, wiped it, shut and locked the door, and walked round to the front of his house so he could leave his heavy shoes in the vestibule. He sighed. The front-garden fence was in need of attention.
‘Evening, Robert.’
He turned to see Alan Robie from Church Cottage out for his evening walk. ‘Just my daily constitutional,’ Alan boomed. Alan played the role of middle-class countryman to perfection, with his pipe and tweed jacket. Robert found it rather touching. Everyone knew Alan was gay.
‘Evening, Alan. I expect you’ll be at church tomorrow?’
‘Oh yes. Never miss Easter Sunday, you know. Just hope Nick Melling isn’t going to astound us all with his guitar playing again. Not my cup of tea.’
‘But Stevie likes it, doesn’t he?’
At the mention of his partner, Alan assumed a paternal look. ‘Younger people, you know. I suppose they have to be catered for. By the way, Robert, are you joining the Bible study group again?’
‘Oh yes, I think so!’
‘Jolly good!’
Robert watched Alan walk purposefully down the lane from The Briars. He smiled, but Alan’s remark rankled slightly. I don’t think of myself as old, he thought. But perhaps that’s how other people see me. And of course Mary was older than me, which might explain it.
Inside, he took off his boots and straightened out the hems of his brown corduroy trousers, hung his gardening hat on the convenient peg, and ran his fingers through his hair, where he’d perspired under the tweed cap. He still had a lot of hair, not all of it grey. Mary sometimes used to kiss him on the top of his head. He put the kettle on. It was fourteen months and two weeks since she had died, and he missed her more now than ever. Hadn’t C.S. Lewis written something about how, when shock and grief end, the power of memory kicks in?
It was Easter Saturday. Tomorrow would be the biggest day in the Church’s calendar and he would be there, singing in the choir as he had done for ten years, smiling and pretending he was coping. Christ is risen, he thought. But Mary is dead. It was now, when all the activity was over, that he really hurt. He’d been distraught when her cancer had been diagnosed, but then they had fought it so hard it had energized them both. Mary wasn’t the sort of person to give in. But astonishingly, she had lost. Her death had been a sort of outrage, a massive event, which had its own grim momentum. Now, there was nothing.
He sat alone at his scrubbed wooden kitchen table, with Mary’s china collection in the dresser and the copper-bottomed pans he never used hanging on the wall. He was drinking his tea, aware it was getting dark. What could he do to fill in the next hour? At seven thirty he would go to the Plough for a pint. He remembered how, when they’d married, Mary had said, ‘You must do your writing while I make dinner.’
That had been the plan, but he’d given up his attempts to be a novelist. Being a teacher suited him better. Mary had occasionally hinted at her disappointment, but they had rubbed along happily, just the two of them. In those days, women over thirty didn’t usually start families and Mary had been thirty-four when they married. When she suggested that it was too late for children, he had agreed. And generally, their marriage had been good. It had its ups — and one very big down — but in the end they had each other and that had been enough.
What am I to do with myself? he thought. There was nothing for it but to go on, living the life Mary had chosen for them. She had loved Tarnfield, and she’d encouraged Robert to apply for his job at Norbridge College. She’d seized the chance to move back to the village where she had been brought up. As a girl, Mary had been ‘someone’ in Tarnfield — the local doctor’s daughter. When her childhood home, The Briars, had come up for sale she’d rushed to make an offer and all their available resources had been spent on the deposit and mortgage. It was a lovely detached Edwardian house, double-fronted with two bay windows, and a fanlight over the door. It was at the end of a little unmetalled cul-de-sac. Even with Mary’s salary from the part-time job which she’d taken in the office at Bell’s Wood Yard, there was no money left for anything else. The house had been their world. Keeping it going was a huge drain on Robert’s resources. But he couldn’t imagine any other way of life.
Tomorrow he had been invited to Easter Sunday lunch with Monica and Frank Bell, nice people of this parish, though Frank never darkened the church’s door except to do odd jobs. With a little glow of pleasure at having something to do, Robert remembered he needed to iron a shirt.
He went upstairs, pausing in the loo and afterwards looking at himself in the mirror. Short brown hair, grey at the sides. A nice average face. Sad eyes. I’m becoming an old fogey, he thought, with my outdated interest in the church, and my clean living and my silent misery, guaranteed never to embarrass anyone. The thought of sex worried him a little, but he was never the sort to resort to glossy mags, or the internet, or lap-dancing clubs in Manchester. He was aware of all that of course and he was sad that his sex life was over. But he also knew from experience that in times of trouble that was the first urge to go. When it pounced back sometimes, he sublimated it in grief for Mary, his only lover for twenty-five years. He imagined that people thought a midd
le-aged churchgoing couple had none of that. But they were wrong, and once again he longed for the smell and touch of her.
He always did the ironing in the little spare bedroom at the front of the house. There was still enough light from the setting sun to mean he could stand there in the darkness for a moment, looking out up the lane to the main road which wound like a grey tarmac ribbon down the hill. As he watched, he saw a car coming towards the village.
To his surprise, instead of passing the end of the lane, it trundled round the corner and came straight towards The Briars. Robert knew exactly what was going to happen, and there was nothing he could do but watch. The car slowed down as the lane flattened out, but then it continued on towards his low front-garden fence. There was the crack of contact, a silence, then the sound of falling timber. As he turned to run down the stairs, Robert recognized the driver. He groaned. It was Suzy Spencer, the woman his efficient wife had labelled the local flake.
2
Easter Eve, earlier
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.
From the Confession at Holy Communion
A few hours earlier, Easter Saturday had become the day from hell for Suzy and the rest of the Spencers, or at least those of the family who still lived in Tarnfield. Nigel Spencer had escaped three months earlier to live with his PA in a smart new apartment in Newcastle. He had left his wife and their two children in the picturesque village he had chosen when he uprooted them from London and moved the family ‘up North’ for his job in advertising.
‘I don’t want to go to Daddy’s,’ squealed six-year-old Molly. ‘It’s my best friend’s party today.’
‘Well, we can’t all go to everything, sweetie.’ Suzy smiled through clenched teeth. ‘Daddy’s meeting you and Jake off the six o’clock train. He’s taking you roller-blading tomorrow, and he’s booked Pizza City.’
‘I don’t like pizza anymore.’
‘Molly, that’s ridiculous. I’m not listening to this. Where are your roller-blades?’ Suzy Spencer yelled up the stairs: ‘Jake? Have you packed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What about your clean jeans?’
‘They’re still wet. I’m going to wear these ones.’
‘With the bum down to your knees? No you’re not. Are you taking your sax?’
‘Yeah, I want to practise.’
Well, that was a turn-up for the books. Jake’s enthusiasm for music was a surprise, since neither Suzy nor Nigel could play a note. It was great that he was taking the sax over to Newcastle. The kids didn’t realize how lucky they were to be getting out of the village for Easter, Suzy thought, despite all the upheaval.
She suspected Nigel had been disappointed with Tarnfield from the start. He’d chosen it because it was pretty; the houses in Tarn Acres were smart but relatively cheap; and now that Suzy was forced to be a part-time freelance TV producer, she could drive the children to school in Norbridge. But Nigel’s knowledge of country life had come from reading a leisurewear catalogue and he couldn’t cope with a place where you needed to be third generation in order to understand the bus timetable. Country life could be very stressful, the Spencers had discovered. The Lo-cost supermarket shut at eight, and the cinema and video shop were miles away. Without a car you’d be lost. There was a toughness about Tarnfield too. It hadn’t always been a cosy place to live and it had a ferocious history. The sheltering dark sandstone walls of the church, rebuilt in Victorian times on a site a thousand years old, cuddled the Plough Inn protectively from marauding Scots. The High Street formed a backbone against which everything else clustered.
One winter had been enough. It had been no surprise in the spring when the telltale signs of another of Nigel’s ‘flings’ appeared — late working, weekend conferences, new bright-coloured underpants. They’d been living in the village for eighteen months when he said he couldn’t stand it anymore and decamped. Just after Christmas, in a weekend of tears and hysteria — some of it genuine — Suzy closed the door behind him with relief.
And now here she was, stuck in a close-knit northern village where she had no friends, working for three days a week as an assistant producer at Tynedale TV, getting the odd bit of work for Granada in Manchester, looking after Jake and Molly, but with no social life of her own. And for the first time since she’d left university years before, she had no idea where life was taking her.
‘I want to go to Sunday School tomorrow,’ wailed Molly, surprisingly.
‘That’s funny. Half the time you don’t want to go when you can!’
‘But we’re making an Easter garden tomorrow with Daisy.’
Daisy Arthur was one of their neighbours in Tarn Acres who also ran the Sunday School at All Saints. She was a pretty but earnest girl who had come home to Tarnfield after uni, with sleek light brown hair and a taste for bright colours. Molly was at the age when she thought all teachers were wonderful, and Mummy had become boringly familiar.
‘Well, tough. You’re going to your father’s.’ Sometimes Suzy cracked with the effort of persuading the children to love their defecting dad. ‘Jake . . . hurry up!’
Jake had been experimenting with fierce sulking because he wanted to spend Easter Monday on a car trip down the M6 to a paint-balling centre near Preston with some of the older village lads.
‘No. Out of the question,’ Suzy had said. ‘That’s just the sort of long journey that could end in a nasty accident on the motorway.’
‘Dad wouldn’t say that. You only say that because you’re a crap driver yourself.’
He had stormed off to his room where the sound of loud incoherent music started to bounce off the walls. It was cosmetic anger: Jake was an easy-going boy and usually he and his mother got on well. But Suzy was irritated because she knew he was right. She was a bad driver. And she felt bad about banning his expedition. Was she projecting her own failings on to him and his mates? Would Nigel have said, ‘Yeah great, go for it’?
Then, infuriatingly, the washing machine flooded the kitchen. And just when Suzy was trying to mop up, one of her neighbours knocked on the door, ostensibly to ask her to join the ‘Ban the Wheelie Bins’ campaign. Barbara Piefield had been born in one of the Tarnfield labourers’ cottages and she and her husband had upgraded to Tarn Acres as soon as it was built. Keeping the neighbourhood ‘up’ was Babs’s life’s work. She viewed Suzy with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, but she liked to gossip. Though she wasn’t a churchgoer herself, she loved all the speculation and controversy surrounding Nick Melling, the new vicar, and his intentions. No one was really sure which way All Saints would go now — high church or happy clappy — but most people in the village had an opinion about it, even if they never went near the place.
Babs sat and chatted and wouldn’t go home, so it was three o’clock before Suzy phoned the washing machine engineer on the 24/7 hotline.
‘Ooh, Tarnfield. The earliest we can possibly get there is Monday week sometime between eight o’clock and one o’clock.’
‘So I have to take the day off work?’
‘It’s not our problem,’ hovered unsaid.
‘God, this place!’ Suzy swore to herself, not for the first time.
And yet . . . if she was fair, it hadn’t been too awful. After some enquiries — and a few raised eyebrows from the earth mother brigade — she had arranged for Sharon Strickland to come and look after Molly for a few hours after school when she was working. And two of the ‘school gate mums’ from Norbridge had invited her for coffee. But going to see them meant a twenty-minute drive. Tarnfield was tiny by comparison to the nearest town, and in the village almost everyone was connected to everyone else through birth or marriage. Getting to know people was like trying to catch up with a soap opera — except that this drama had been running for at least fifty years, to the same participating audience. It wasn’t the life Suzy had expected for herself and her children — and it was alien and frustrating at times — but even so, when the larks sang like celestial sm
udges in the screensaver blue sky, or the smell of woodfires curled round the village on autumn evenings, she felt it wasn’t all bad.
One lonely Thursday shortly after moving to the village, she had visited All Saints. She had been brought up as an Anglican so it was one of the few things in Tarnfield that felt familiar. She went in and sat down in a pew. There was a quiet beauty to the church and a sense of its being lovingly cared for. After the chaos of an aggressive marriage and frantic family life, the peace brought tears to her eyes. Then she had heard voices, and suddenly Mary Clark had waylaid her, assuring her of a warm welcome at services. Mary had been insistent, in a bossy, efficient, no-excuses kind of way, and Suzy had felt obliged to go back the next Sunday.
It wasn’t such a bad idea. Going to church meant she could escape from Nigel’s weekend blues for a few hours. Suzy sensed that Mary Clark didn’t approve of her, but Mary dutifully chivvied her into getting the children involved. Molly went to Sunday School and even Jake had been persuaded to take part in some sort of male bonding, clearing the churchyard undergrowth with lads wielding serious metal implements. But that had been nearly two years ago. The super-competent Mary Clark was dead now. This was Suzy’s second Easter in Tarnfield and, despite the church, she felt like an outsider.
By five o’clock on this Easter Saturday, she was still mopping up the water on the kitchen floor with old towels. She needed to hurry. She wanted to call in at All Saints on her way to the station to check that Phyllis Drysdale was managing with the Easter lily display, despite her arthritis. The train to Newcastle passed through Tarnfield Junction at six fifteen. If the kids weren’t on it Nigel would go mad. He had been working all day — on yet another crucial deal, of course. But he had insisted the children come to him for Saturday night when his girlfriend would meet them off the train. They would stay for Easter Sunday and come home that evening, leaving him and his partner to Easter Monday in peace. It was all organized to suit him, and to avoid Suzy meeting his current ‘squeeze’. Sod him! Suzy thought.