You Owe Me Five Farthings

by Jane Anstey

  As he had told her nothing of his profound spiritual experiences of the past weeks, his behaviour made no sense to her, and she dared not risk upsetting their family equilibrium by questioning him further about it. Robert was happy, and that was something––indeed, given the upsets of the last few months, it was a great deal. But she realised that she herself had lost interest in their marriage just as he had begun to behave towards her in the sympathetic and considerate manner she had once longed for. She was still so heart-sore at her final parting from Simon that she had no thought or feeling left for anything else. The relationship that really mattered to her was dead, and by her own hand, and Simon had accepted its demise and was prepared to move on. The thought was like dust and ashes in her mouth.

  She found herself plodding on from day to day that week with routine tasks, relieved to see Robert so well recovered from last year’s ordeal, but herself emotionally numb and unfocused. All Clive’s efforts to bring back some warmth into their relationship ran aground on the rocks of her withdrawal. She could not see how she could ever feel anything but a very tepid affection for Clive again, however pleasant he was to her, and could only hope he would continue to be patient and content to live with her as a friend for Robert’s sake. Perhaps when Robert was older and things had settled down, she might be able to…She caught herself up guiltily. That was no solution to the problem. Simon was leaving Hampshire and she knew that emotionally, too, he would move on. Indeed, she knew it was right that he should do so. She hoped, she told herself stoutly, that he would find someone else to love. She didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life alone. The years would pass, and whatever she and Clive could put together to tide them over would have to suffice a lifetime.

  It was a bleak prospect, but the best she could hope for.

  Eighteen

  Clive was aware of Rose’s emotional withdrawal––he could hardly avoid it. But her cool attitude towards him was not the only reason, he felt, that his efforts to remake their marriage had come to nothing. Whatever Jan might say about it being possible to maintain a long-term marriage without passion, he did not believe it would work for him, or perhaps for Rose, and in any case, he lacked the patience to take more time over the attempt. A week was enough.

  In point of fact, he appreciated Rose as a person far more than he had ever done in the past. He recognised that she had emotional depths and passions he had never bothered to plumb and had not even been aware of. But it was too late to do so. Not only had she withdrawn from him, had given no sign that she might allow another thaw in their physical relationship, but he himself felt a complete revulsion of feeling. In repenting so completely of his sexual sins of the past, and in falling in love with Jan, as he was convinced he had done, he had become a different person, had left behind in some distant cubicle all interest in the opposite sex. His change of attitude ran so deep that he wanted to turn his back completely on his previous existence. But he was aware that in falling in love with a man so far beyond his reach both morally and personally, he had effectively shut the door on the opportunity to explore an alternative sexual orientation. The love that had begun to make him aware of its possibilities had also precluded its expression.

  While this sea-change was happening, his sense of vocation had grown, and he came to believe that he must follow it, whatever Jan thought or said, whatever Rose wanted or deserved of him. Surely Jan would see how powerful that vocation must be, if he was prepared to give up everything in order to follow it? Surely the Church could not be deaf to his pleas to join a religious community? Vocations were not so numerous that they could afford to turn their back on his. If Rose would just agree to a separation, he thought, and if he bent over backwards to ensure that she had everything she needed (within reason), would Jan recognise that events had moved on, that there was no way back, and that he, Clive, must be allowed to follow his vocation as he wished?

  It was in any case clear to him that, whatever he decided to do next, whether the Church would have him or not, his marriage was moribund. And the innate decisiveness that had given him success as a business manager convinced him that there was no point wasting emotional energy on a relationship with no future.

  “Rose, we need to talk,” he said. Supper was over and Robert had been despatched to his bunk bed at the other end of the cottage. It was the last evening of their holiday, and he didn’t want to go back to Hampshire with matters unresolved.

  She looked at him quizzically. “What about?” she asked without much interest.

  “About us.”

  “Oh. Us. Well, I suppose so. If you want.” She sat opposite him at the fireside. “What is it you want to talk about?”

  Given this permission, grudging though it was, Clive could not immediately decide on the best way to start the conversation. He didn’t want to beat about the bush. At any moment, she might lose interest completely and withdraw into herself, and the opportunity would be lost. “I suppose...I want to talk about the past––and the future,” he said rather lamely. “I mean––where did we go wrong?”

  “Go wrong?” Rose was bemused. “What do you mean?”

  “We thought we loved each other when we started out, didn’t we?” he said, warming to the task as the memories flowed. “That lovely summer day when you wore the long white dress your mother made you, and I wore my morning suit and carnation. Did we really, do you think? Love each other, I mean? Or was it our imagination?”

  She looked at him. “I was very young,” she said.

  “You were, weren’t you?” he agreed rather sadly. “Too young, probably. Seventeen when I met you. Eighteen when we married. You were very sweet, though, Rose. Sweet and pretty and very innocent.” He was conscious suddenly of a real affection for the person she had been.

  “Naïve,” she corrected him.

  “Yes, maybe. You thought I was wonderful, didn’t you? And I thought I could mould you any way I wanted. You’d be the perfect wife when I’d finished with you.”

  “We were both wrong,” she told him, meeting his eyes for a moment, before looking away again. He was right, though––she had thought him wonderful when they first met. Clever, smart, and successful. She had had her head turned by his attention, and found out too late that she couldn’t live up to his expectations.

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t the right way to start,” he said. “And now I don’t know how we should finish.”

  She looked up. “Finish?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I’m trying to be honest with you, Rose. I haven’t done that in the past, but I want this to be straightforward. Cards on the table.”

  “What cards?” she asked, still bewildered.

  “I want to leave you, Rose. I need to. I need our marriage to come to an end. Now. But I don’t know how to do this without hurting you. You of all people haven’t deserved that.”

  “But why do you need to leave?” she asked, putting on one side for the moment her own amazement––or could it be relief?––at his straightforward declaration of intent. “Is it still Olivia? Or is there someone else?” But who could it be? Someone new? He’d said the new PA wasn’t his type, and she couldn’t believe he was in love with poor little Maddie next door.

  “No!” He swept her question aside with the contempt it deserved. “I’ve finished with chasing women. And I told you Olivia never meant anything to me.” He smiled ruefully. “I expect she’s taken up with someone else by now––probably her new boss, whoever that is.”

  He hesitated momentarily, and she wondered what it was that he wasn’t telling her. “Then why do you need to leave me?”

  “I want to become a monk,” he said, coming clean at last.

  Rose’s eyes widened. “A monk!” What an ambition to dream up out of nowhere. She really could not think of anyone more unlikely to take to the monastic life. Clive must have taken leave of his senses.

  “Yes. I know it sounds strange, but I’ve been visiting Whitehill Abbey recently––retreats, day visits, t
hings like that.”

  “All those weekends,” she exclaimed, light dawning. “That’s where you were going.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been talking to the monks, and to the abbot––Father Petrowski. I could find peace there and serve God. I know I could. I want to join the community and make my home with them.”

  And I thought he might have been on more of his ‘business trips’, thought Rose. How wrong could you be about someone? Her own husband, too. Had she ever really known him at all?

  “They’re Catholics,” she pointed out. A stupid thing to say, and so obvious that it was unnecessary. But it was the first thing that came into her head.

  “Theirs is the original faith,” he said simply. “The true faith. Anglicanism is a heretical shoot. A sucker, if you like.”

  Rose would have liked Jeremy to be in the room to challenge this unfamiliar view of the Protestantism in which both she and Clive had been brought up. She herself had neither the theological knowledge nor the power of argument to meet it, even if she had wanted to. Goodness, she thought suddenly, irrelevantly. What will Remy say about this?

  “Will you let me go, Rose?”

  “How can I stop you?” she asked. “You can pack your suitcases and leave if you want. I can’t do anything about it.”

  “I want your blessing,” he explained. “My vocation gives me the moral right to leave you, to become a brother, as long as I fulfil my obligations to you. At least I think it does,” he added, trying to be honest. “But I don’t want to leave any bitterness behind.”

  Bitterness?! How much bitterness he had created in the past, with his affairs and his contempt and neglect of her! Whether or not she had loved him once she didn’t know, and it no longer mattered. She certainly didn’t love him now. But she still felt bitter enough about the past to resist the suggestion that she let him go freely, without rancour. He had always taken what he wanted, with scant regard for her feelings. Why should now be any different? He had said he didn’t want to hurt her, but how could he think that was possible, in the circumstances?

  “How will we manage, Robert and I?” she asked at last.

  Clive recognised with some relief that her main difficulties with his leaving seemed to be practical. “I’ve decided to leave the company,” he told her. “Any income I have once I’ve taken my vows will be at the disposal of the monastic community I belong to. I don’t know how I will support myself until I am allowed to take up my novitiate, but I don’t care if I have nothing. I will make over the house to you, of course. I’ve paid off the rest of the mortgage. I’ve opened you a savings account with enough money in it for Robert’s education––even if he stays at the village school until he’s eleven, he should go on to Northchurch College, if you don’t want him to board. And you can sell anything of mine that you don’t want to use yourself. My golf clubs are worth a fair bit,” he added. “And some of my suits.”

  “Will you divorce me?” she asked abruptly.

  He squirmed slightly. “As a Catholic, I won’t be able to divorce you. I would agree to a legal separation.”

  “I can divorce you, though.”

  “Not by consent.”

  She looked at him coldly. “For adultery. And now desertion.”

  He flushed and looked away. She could not remember him ever showing shame or discomfiture. Truly this was a new Clive. She was suddenly ashamed of pursuing her advantage in the argument. He was, after all, trying to be fair to her.

  “Why do you want a divorce, Rose?” he asked after a moment.

  There was silence. Then he said, with some satisfaction: “Ah––I think I know the answer to that. Simon.”

  It was her turn to look away. “I don’t think Simon would want me now,” she said at last. “What we had is over, what there was of it, and he’s leaving Hampshire, anyway. He told me so a couple of weeks ago. I only stayed with you because of Robert, to give him stability, not because there was anything left of my relationship with you. But I tried to make a fresh start, Clive. You know I did.”

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice was sad rather than angry. “I tried, too. It could have been good, if things had been different. Simon managed to bring out something in you that I never had.”

  Rousing the sleeping dragon. “Nothing ever really happened between me and Simon, Clive,” she said, trying to correct his obvious misapprehension.

  Clive raised his eyebrows in surprise, and perhaps disbelief.

  “It nearly did,” she added honestly. “It might have done, perhaps, the night of Brian Warrendon’s death, when I was at Simon’s house for the tower meeting. No one else came to the meeting, you see, and we were alone. But then you rang to say Robert had disappeared, and when we found him he was traumatised, and my relationship with Simon just folded up after that. I had to stay with you, for Robert’s sake. How could I leave? How could I ask a little boy to change his whole life and make a home with me somewhere else, after all that had happened to him? But I wanted to. Oh, Clive, I wanted to.”

  “You could only think of Simon,” observed Clive, and she heard a slight edge to his voice. “Even in bed. Don’t you think I realised that, in the end?”

  “I honestly didn’t think you would care, Clive. What are you saying? That I’ve driven you out?”

  “No,” he said instantly. “This vocation––this call to be a monk––is impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t felt it. It’s so powerful, I can’t do anything but follow it. It’s not just what I want to do. It’s something I must do, whatever anyone says. If you want to be free of me, too, then all the better. I don’t know what your divorcing me will mean for my acceptance as a monk. But if the petition has come from your side, perhaps they will just ignore it, though I may not be able to consent. Legally you are justified, of course. I recognise that. It’s only spiritually that the Church will say the bonds are permanent and indissoluble.”

  Rose shook her head. It bordered on the surreal to hear Clive calmly discussing practical Catholicism in the kind of voice he would normally use to explain some business decision: calm, rational and detached. “I don’t know what I want to do at the moment,” she said helplessly.

  He put out a hand and touched hers, gently, almost tenderly––though the tenderness was devoid of any sexual frisson. He and Rose were two individuals inhabiting the same living space, owing each other consideration and care but nothing deeper––and that wasn’t enough for either of them. The marriage was over, but after twenty-three years, Rose couldn’t visualise what the future would look like without it.

  Nineteen

  Rose found herself trying to explain all this to Jeremy the following week when, having met her in the local shop one morning, he took her off to the rectory for coffee to find out how she was.

  Remy and Liz’s ongoing concern and kindness overwhelmed her, and she said so.

  “But of course we’re concerned,” said Jeremy, wishing that Liz had been available to join their conversation that morning, instead of filling in for a sick colleague at work. As a mere male, he felt rather inadequate in the circumstances, in spite of his clergy credentials and experience. Women needed women at times like these. “You must be devastated.”

  “I feel,” Rose exclaimed, her anger spilling over, “as though Clive’s viewing everything––even everything he’s done to me while I’ve been married to him––as part of God’s strategy to bring him to where he is now. And now following this vocation––what he sees as God’s ‘call’––seems to mean leaving me with no marriage at all!” She sounded as close to indignant as Jeremy had ever heard her.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, rather diffidently: “I suppose, you know, that is really how it might seem––at least from Clive’s point of view.”

  She stared at him.

  “Well,” he went on, the diffidence shading over into apology, “God doesn’t make people do evil or immoral things, of course. That’s their own choice. But on the other hand, if you––I mean a
nyone, not just you personally––have ever really genuinely offered yourself as ‘a living sacrifice,’ in the words of the After Communion prayer, then God might actually take you at your word. He does that, you know,” he added, gently.

  “Oh,” said Rose, as though stunned. “I see what you mean.” She looked down at her hands blankly.

  Silence fell. They were both remembering the time she had run away from that very prayer, at the early morning communion service to mark the saint’s day of St John of the Cross. Jeremy felt a moment’s intense irritation with God. Why can You never forget anything we ever said to You? Why does it all come back to haunt us later, as though You had to hold us to our promises, no matter what?

  He shook the feeling off, as inappropriate both to his faith and to the moment and tried to think what else he could say to Rose.

  “God asks too much,” she told him, before he could find anything new to bring to the discussion. He couldn’t immediately think how to counter this uncomfortable echo of his own thoughts, and she went on, hopelessly. “First I had to give up Simon, and now I have to lose my marriage anyway.”