The Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  He seated himself on her sofa, she gave him a coffee and sat in the armchair, and looked at him, his almost-bald head covered by a few thin strands combed carefully from above his left ear over the pink shining expanse of his scalp to meet the balancing growth of hair at his right ear. The elbows and cuffs of his battered tweed jacket had been reinforced with leather, probably by Sheila. His hand-knitted dark blue waistcoat concealed the fact that his clerical shirt was really only a stock, easily removed when it was time to do his half hour of gardening while Sheila washed up the dishes after their lunch.

  “Well?” said Esme.

  “It’s about your appointment, my dear.”

  It transpired that a minister from a circuit in a wealthy suburb of London had rather precipitately abandoned his congregation in the company of his senior steward, who was the wife of his organist. The organist, heartbroken and embittered, had refused to have anything further to do with the Methodist church and offered his services to the Baptists (they had gratefully accepted, having been managing for years with a second-rate pianist who could neither sight-read nor play the pedals). The church community had been left shocked and distressed, without a minister, a senior steward, or an organist.

  In the immediate emergency, the chairman himself had plugged such gaps as he could, and the other staff of the circuit had arranged medium-term pastoral and preaching cover. But the chairman had promised to do what he could to secure a new minister without waiting for the usual slow wheels of stationing to begin to grind. Knowing that when Esme left she would not be replaced, it had occurred to him that though she should give her congregations ample time to make their parting, and the circuit ample time to adjust, nonetheless her move might be brought forward and considered before the usual time in May, if she were interested in investigating the possibility.

  “It’s a plum job,” her superintendent stated frankly. “If you want to do well, this would set you on your way. They wouldn’t tolerate just anybody in that part of Surrey. It’s a compliment to your preaching and admin gifts. There’s a rough patch in that circuit, but the section they’re offering you is very smart indeed. Good parsonage—I’ve been in it. Compliment to your pastoral gifts too—it will take something to pull the congregation through this in one piece. Chairman thinks highly of you, my dear; he knows you won’t let him down. What do you think? Take a look?”

  Something in Esme’s stomach gave a lurch as the reality of her move came alarmingly nearer. She hesitated. Then, reasoning that as she had committed herself to going, this could save protracted uncertainty, and prove a shrewd step on her inevitably nomadic chosen path, she agreed to pursue the matter. Her superintendent congratulated her; evidently he approved. It made little difference in this circuit except for accelerating the time-table of restructuring. It would help the chairman out of a hole, which would be regarded favorably. And he felt it would be a sound and positive step for Esme, which made him feel a lot better about her having been edged out of the team. Without real thought or discussion, she felt herself crossing another threshold.

  When he left, promising to contact the chairman for her, who would initiate the necessary liaison, Esme closed the door behind him and leaned her back on it, feeling shaky and terribly weary.

  This had been a sound decision for a minister. If she discussed it with her mother, or any of her family, they would be enthusiastic, Esme felt sure. Her colleagues would be impressed and think she had done well. The circuit stewards would feel relieved. Her own church stewards and members would feel as positive about this as about any move. It was only …

  With a sigh, feeling slow and tired and inexplicably miserable, Esme made her way like a sleepwalker to the kitchen. She made herself another coffee and, being temporarily out of flapjacks, took half a packet of biscuits into her study with her. She sat down at her desk and opened the document folder on the computer to check her notes for the last school assembly she had done.

  Until she had talked this through with Jabez, she wouldn’t really know what she thought about it herself. What were the implications of that anyway, she asked herself? And why anyway did the deepest part of her say, Not yet! Not yet! whenever she thought about telling Jabez and Ember? Would it cause them so much of a problem? They had certainly been good friends, but she told herself it would be vanity to presume she figured that much in their lives, whatever had passed between them this morning.

  She opened the file named Priory Street Infant School. She put Ember and Jabez and everything about the move out of her mind. Nothing had been decided. It would take ages anyway. Next week saw the beginning of Advent. She was unlikely to hear anything before the New Year.

  Esme worked determinedly through what remained of the morning. She cycled out to see a blind and frail housebound church member on the outskirts of Brockhyrst Priory in the afternoon. On the way home she called in to the DVD library to choose a film, then stopped at the supermarket and did her shopping, wobbling rather precariously home with her bicycle basket full and three carrier bags dangling from the handlebars unevenly weighting the bike.

  She spent three hours as afternoon crossed over into evening ransacking poetry anthologies and the Internet to put together a presentation for the Ladies Fellowship on The Spirituality of Winter. While her supper heated in the microwave, she printed out the poems she had downloaded. Then she took her meal on a tray with a cup of coffee into the sitting room to watch her film. She ate her supper from the plastic container it had come in, telling herself that this was simplicity interpreted by the twenty-first century. In another mood she might have found the film funny and touching: Tonight it seemed irritating and trite. She paused it four times to answer the telephone, without really minding the interruption.

  At eleven o’clock that night, the film finished, and she took the tray through the dark passage into the kitchen, where she caught sight of her bicycle handlebars resting against the windowsill. She had forgotten to put it away in the shed.

  She deposited her fork and mug in the sink. She looked at the encrusted remains of overmicrowaved lasagna on the walls of the empty plastic container, and guiltily threw it in the bin, trying not to think about Jabez’s disapproval of excess packaging. Then she opened the kitchen door and went out into the back garden to put her bike away. The streets were quiet at this time of night, apart from the sound of a vehicle with a diesel engine climbing the hill toward the parsonage and then ceasing somewhere nearby. She took hold of the cold bike, and, as she wheeled it to the shed, stopped to look up at the night sky. Here in Southarbour the darkness was never profound enough for many stars to be seen. But tonight a sickle moon shone clear and bright in a sky mostly clear of cloud now, and the tingle of frost nipped the end of her nose.

  In the shed she startled herself by treading on an empty plastic flowerpot, which broke with a loud crack. It was difficult to stow the bike in the dark, especially as the shed was not large and already accommodated the lawnmower. Extricating herself, she shot home the bolt to fasten the door and snapped the padlock shut. As she did so, she half thought she heard someone speak her name; with a sudden fright as she turned, she realized she was not alone in the garden.

  Her clutch of terror turned to simple astonishment as she recognized the figure standing on the frosty grass between the gate at the bottom of the garden and the shed where she stood herself.

  “Jabez?”

  Esme’s breath as she spoke lingered in a cloud on the frigid air. She stared at him in amazement—for Jabez indeed it was.

  She had not been mistaken in thinking she heard his voice quietly speak her name, half wanting her to hear, half afraid to reveal his presence.

  The moonlight discerned him, but though he carried something, held something in his hand, she did not take in what he had there. Now seen, he stood there quite still, and across that distance of yards, and even in the dimness of night, there formed between Esme’s eyes and his an electric corridor, such that she felt she might say for certain—and
maybe for the first time ever—that looking into the eyes of Jabez Ferrall, her eyes had beheld an immortal soul.

  He did not move. Just looked at her, with eyes as full of life, as vital, as a fox or deer or any wild thing that, first surprised, will hold your gaze in message and appraisal; total encounter, a momentary precursor to inevitable flight.

  It occurred to Esme that he had expected to find her out in the garden as little as she had expected to find him. Her immediate surmise, that something was wrong, gave way to a sense that having not expected to be discovered, he was urgently contemplating retreat.

  So it came about that Esme abandoned her first intention of speech—“Are you all right?”—the question framed in practical, conventional format in the bright, sociable mind that filled all the front stage of her habitual thinking. Instead, from somewhere else, perhaps from the twilight mind of her solar plexus reaching out to worlds beyond, came unbidden the words she actually said. “Don’t run away. Please. Don’t run away.”

  And she said it to the wildness and shyness in him, to his privacy and to the depths of half-healed pain in him that, for some reason she couldn’t understand, suddenly stood before her. His face changed then. The uncertainty of the wild thing poised on the brink of involuntary flight crystallized into something more frightened, as will came in to control instinct and he knew he would stay. He came across the garden to her.

  She understood when he spoke. The fear that had stolen across him like a shadow more somber than the darkness bewildered her until she heard him say, “I’ve brought you some flowers.”

  Flowers. In November. In the middle of the night.

  And then she felt as scared as he did, because obviously he was offering her his heart. And where did that leave them?

  Esme thought fast. She could see no way not to hurt him. To accept the implicit gift of his love would be a gross unfairness in view of her intention of moving away. To refuse it would wound and humiliate him. He saw her hesitation, and something changed. He did his own quick thinking.

  “I been uneasy all day—about what was said this morning.” His eyes met hers, and she saw the flicker of prevarication in them. “I hadn’t thought to find you out and about at this hour. I thought you’d be in bed. It had been my intention to leave these here for you. For the morning. To apologize. Ember and me, we may overstep the mark sometimes. We’re simple country folk. You mustn’t expect we’ll always get it right.”

  Esme had to admire the skill with which he turned his self-offering into the building of an unbridgeable chasm between them. It hurt, though.

  “Ember and you?” she said, picking up the very deliberate discontinuity he had placed between them and her. “Simple country folk. Are you?” Her eyes met his gaze, level and direct.

  “Yes,” he replied quietly.

  Oh, God, her soul sent its silent distress flare, now don’t let us turn this into a fight. Troubled, anxious not to damage the friendship between them that had become such a source of strength to her, instinctively, without conscious formulation, the core of her spirit reached out for help and strength.

  He looked down at the flowers in his hand, and held them out to her. In the garden at the front of his cottage, one yellow rose that climbed against the house bloomed gamely on into December. Mingled with ivy from the hedge, rosemary, and a feathery spray of blue juniper (filched from the garden of the Old Police House; she recognized it), the last of these roses were what he had brought her.

  “Jabez, come inside,” she said, as she put out her hand to take his flowers.

  He rewarded her with a tense, shy smile.

  “I think I’d best not stay.”

  She felt the splinting of his pride in the stillness of the way he spoke.

  “Jabez—” but he shook his head.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he said, gently. “Leave it now.”

  He left the roses in her hand, and in an understated gesture of finality, he turned and made his way across the moonlit garden, out through the gate, as quietly as he had come.

  I’ll see you soon. She examined this small token of hope. It was something, but she felt bereft.

  It felt impossible, too difficult. Jabez’s life had been built on a different foundation entirely from hers. His sense of self and his sense of belonging grew out of rootedness in the earth and the family, out of how he had loved, and out of the making of his hands. What Esme aspired to had been based on professional achievement and on membership of a body of people scattered across the world—some whom she had never met, some all too familiar. But they were bonded together by the traditions and doctrines they believed in—or in some cases accepted without analysis, for the comfort of a sense of belonging. She felt a sudden sharp misgiving about the wisdom of tying home and income to so structured an ideology. What happens when a person changes? she asked herself in sudden panic. To walk with God is an unfolding rhythm of life, a wild music of many moods and tempos, embracing the shadows of doubt and disillusionment and the black dark of despair as well as the sweet blue heavens of joy and affirmation, the glorious sunset colors of the soul moved by beauty, amazed by peace. To serve the church as an ordained minister is an altogether narrower, more prosaic thing.

  As she stood there alone, holding her flowers and still looking along the empty garden at the gate Jabez had closed behind him, Esme became aware of herself shivering. She went indoors, finding a vase for her flowers, locking up for the night, making a hot-water bottle for her bed, the core of her congealed into a hard lump of wretchedness.

  “I’m sorry, Jabez,” she whispered in the darkness as she curled round her hot-water bottle in her cold bed. “I’ll come out and see you in the morning.”

  And after awhile, she slept, but she woke early.

  Is it too soon to go and see them again? Am I sending the wrong signals and making things worse by going to see them so often? As Esme bathed and dressed and cleaned her teeth, she felt completely at sea, alone in the complications of a situation that was pulling her relentlessly in conflicting directions. Then, seeing that the day promised fair again, and recalling that the next few days were filled with commitments already, bringing it to Sunday night before another opportunity presented itself, Esme decided to cycle out to Wiles Green again whether it was wise or not. The separation Jabez had made between them the night before had been sensible and redeemed an awkward situation, but the ache it left felt unbearable. She couldn’t contemplate waiting a week to put it right.

  She went, a little later than the morning before.

  As she pushed her bike around into his yard, she could hear their voices in the kitchen. Through the window at the back of the house she saw Jabez standing, washing up at the sink. He glanced up and caught her eye as she passed. She heard him speak quietly and then the conversation ceased.

  “Morning!” she called cheerfully as she propped her bike against the wall and came in through the door, which, despite the cold, stood open for the sunshine. Esme stepped over Jabez’s boots, abandoned in the doorway.

  Above the kitchen table, in the corner that held the warmth of the stove, the drying rack had been let down on its pulley system, and Ember was folding dry washing from it onto the kitchen table. “Talk of the Devil,” she said amiably as Esme came in. She drew breath for further speech, but Jabez suddenly stopped what he was doing, gripped the edge of the sink, and, imploring, almost wailed, “Please! Ember—please!”

  What on earth was she about to say? Esme wondered, but for once Ember forbore, continuing serenely with her task. Jabez left the sink, wiping his hands on the drying-up cloth, and said more calmly, with only a trace of desperation, and without looking at her, “I’ll make a cup of tea, shall I?”

  “That would be very nice,” said Ember, with an elaborate civility designed to betray other matters below the surface.

  “What?” asked Esme. “What is it?” She wondered if Jabez had told Ember of their meeting the night before.

  “Have you fetched the mi
lk in, Ember?” asked Jabez, ignoring Esme’s question.

  “Still on the front step, I imagine,” Ember replied, turning her gaze on him in bland innocence. “You better go and fetch it.”

  “Ember, please,” he entreated again, and hesitated a moment before going through the house to open the front door.

  Ember moved like lightning, quicker than any woman of eighty-six should be able to move, to push the kitchen door closed with her foot.

  Lower than Esme had imagined it was possible for a person to speak and still make herself audible, Ember said as she passed Esme in returning to the table, “He been telling me how much he loves you. I never would have guessed he had that much passion about him. You better watch out.”

  And she was back folding clothes in silence when Jabez pushed through the door with a pint of milk in his hand, looking from one to the other of them in helpless suspicion.

  These words dispelled all Esme’s anxiety; she had not turned him away irretrievably then. She felt a wave of joy that it was as she had hoped, and not admitted that she hoped. An irrepressible desire to giggle began to bubble up inside her.

  “You seem a bit low on firewood,” she said, her words slightly unsteady as she tried to still the quaver of laughter that wanted to escape. “Shall I get some more in from outside?”

  “That’d be kind,” said Jabez doggedly, setting the milk down on the table. Where he stood obscured the way past the stove, and Esme had to come by him for the wood basket.

  “Excuse me, then,” she said sweetly, gently putting her hands on his waist as she brushed by. It was the first time she had ever touched him, except the moment long ago that her fingers had touched his on the bicycle handlebars and the brief inevitable meeting of their hands as he gave her the flowers last night. He turned and looked at her, searching, as she came back past him with the basket. She said nothing, but Ember’s words had started something effervescing in her soul like sparkles of sunlight, and she couldn’t help the grin that tugged at the corners of her mouth.