Knowing Anna

by Sarah Meyrick

  ‘So why send Anna to Spain?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She was away weeks. Was that really necessary?’

  ‘I didn’t send her anywhere!’ retorted Stephen, before he could stop himself. ‘I think that was what she felt she needed,’ he added more gently.

  ‘She said it was your idea.’

  ‘Really? Well, we certainly talked a lot about pilgrimage. That I remember. She was fascinated . . . kept asking me questions, wanted to know more. But we also talked about retreats. I remember lending her a directory of retreat houses in the UK. There are a lot, you know, many in the most stunning locations. I think she wanted to get right away from Farmleigh for a bit. She thought a change of scene might help.’

  ‘It did,’ said William. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ said Theo. ‘I don’t really want to think about it.’

  Ruth was waiting for the walkers at the viewpoint. She’d set out picnic rugs on a wide grassy strip. Stephen watched William’s face light up when he saw her, sitting on a bench, and Ruth smile in return. Theirs was a good relationship, he thought. They were as solid as could be. Anna had inarguably had a good start in life. Who could put a price on growing up in a happy family?

  Of course, it wasn’t a given that the children of happy marriages would be equally lucky in love – but there was something about passing on the torch of mutual respect, of good communication, of not allowing small problems to escalate, that gave the next generation a head start. He wondered about Theo’s parents. His father, he was pretty certain, was dead, but he thought he remembered the mother – thin, worn out, weeping quietly into her hanky – from Anna’s funeral. Was she much involved in the life of her son and grandchildren, he wondered? Was she a support to Theo or just one more worry on his list?

  Checking his watch, he realized that it was nearly time for the silence again. He thought it was proving effective, but it was hard to tell. There was so little quiet in today’s world that it was doubtless a novel experience for many in the group. On balance, he thought the children and young people were managing slightly better than he had anticipated, but he was less sure about the adults. Certainly in a world of portable media, quiet was a worryingly unfamiliar experience. Was it a misjudgement? He had to remind himself that while in his case silence was an old friend, for others it was a new acquaintance, and one they were not altogether sure they wanted to get to know.

  On balance, though, after only two days he thought he could detect an element of thoughtfulness, a different rhythm in the group, when they walked without talking. After the initial oddness – the mimed After you’s and self-conscious Thank you’s as the pilgrims passed each other on the path – it seemed to settle, somehow. The quality of conversation that followed felt richer for the time apart.

  ‘Friends!’ he called. ‘Just before we set off again, can I nudge you into silence? I thought we’d try an hour. Today’s theme is all about “wilderness”. What does that word conjure up, I wonder? The dictionary definition is something about those parts of the natural environment that have escaped human intervention. That handful of truly wild places that are still untouched by roads or other infrastructure. I was telling Theo and William about a wild place in Ireland I’ve visited a number of times. It’s pretty remote but I love it. You may be able to summon up your own images. For some of us, wilderness sounds very attractive, romantic even. But for others, wilderness is a place of isolation, of abandonment, of fear. It’s somewhere we feel, quite literally, bewildered.

  ‘One of the things about pilgrimage is that it gives us the opportunity to explore our inner landscape, to reflect on our own lives a little. That may be frightening or painful. Perhaps you’re living in a spiritual wilderness at the moment. Grief can leave us feeling as if we are groping around in the darkness.’

  He hesitated. ‘There are no easy answers, I’m afraid. I wish there were. Sometimes it’s a matter of just pressing on, looking for the light of Christ in the distance, even if for now it’s just out of sight. We just have to wait for the way ahead to become easier. There’s a prayer, written by a Jewish prisoner in the Second World War, that says:

  ‘I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining.

  I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.

  I believe in God, even when there is silence.

  ‘Can I invite everyone to take that prayer into the silence this afternoon? Try and remember that God walks with you, even in the wilderness. Perhaps especially in the wilderness.’

  He hoped that he hadn’t pushed them too hard. He’d deliberately stopped short of describing the transformative moments Jesus had experienced in the wilderness. Or talking about wilderness as liminal space, where identity shifts and new possibilities emerge. He wanted to avoid any suggestion that suffering was good for the soul. Pain was pain, even if at some point in the future people looked back at a dark time and felt that they had learned something important along the way.

  He thought of Anna, a decade ago, brutally felled by loss, like a tree cut down at its roots. Poor Anna. And Theo, of course. But it was Anna who had made the deepest impression on him. The flood of tears that coursed down her dazed face. Her utterly heartbreaking rendition of ‘The Swan’ from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals at the funeral, as she poured heart and soul into every single note. And then the inexorable slide into that alarming black depression. She had spiralled lower and lower, barely able to function, until the combined offices of an understanding GP and the right medication lifted her onto a plateau just high enough that she found the resource to seek out bereavement counselling from the surgery and pastoral care from the vicarage.

  Experience – and faith – taught him that it was possible to walk through the wilderness and emerge transformed. Anna had done so. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me, as the psalmist put it so beautifully. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. How he loved the poetry of the King James Bible! So much more evocative than those worthy but pedestrian modern translations. Useful they might be on occasion, but they left his soul untouched.

  He wrestled his way through a stretch of the path overgrown by brambles and nettles, and then paused as he crossed the noisy dual carriageway. From his vantage point on the bridge, he watched the traffic hurtling onwards, to London one way and the south coast the other, the drivers heedless of the ant-like specks of the walkers overhead. Was that an image for his own barren spiritual landscape, he wondered? Plenty of activity, but very little thought to what was going on around him? Was he stuck on a relentless treadmill? A one-way journey that allowed for no diversions, no turning off the course he’d started?

  Maybe. He certainly believed that he knew where he was going, until he’d met David. The carefully constructed carapace of his character had served him well for the best part of thirty years. He inhabited the suave personality – the opera-loving Anglo-Catholic priest, devoted to his parishioners, serving his Lord in London, Bristol and, for the last twelve years, Farmleigh – with such determination that he’d almost forgotten that life had ever been different.

  David had changed all that. Falling in love – at the utterly absurd age of fifty-five – threatened to bring his flimsy house of cards crashing down in one fell swoop. And what would that collapse leave in its wake? He pictured a handful of playing cards scattered on green baize. What was face up on the table? The measly two of clubs? The ace of spades? Was David the joker in the pack?

  David! He’d be seeing him in just a couple of hours. Given the knots the dear old C of E had tied itself into, Stephen had reconciled himself to a lifetime on his own. However unsatisfactory the Church’s stance – that while it was acceptable for the laity to enter into a monogamous same-sex partnership, celibacy was required of the clergy – and however widely
the rules were flouted by others, Stephen had always felt that this was a matter of discipline under God and a duty of obedience he owed to his bishop.

  There was another, more pragmatic reason: though renouncing the possibility of intimacy was a deprivation, Stephen was convinced that for him, at least, celibacy presented the lesser of two evils. He knew himself too well: once the genie was out of the bottle, as it were, he knew that he would find it almost impossible not to behave very badly indeed.

  He had form, after all. He’d got himself unforgivably entangled in an impossible relationship while still at school, and somehow found himself engaged to be married at the tender age of nineteen. Linda was pretty, kind and a sympathetic listener, but with the benefit of hindsight he could see that her mother, Elaine, had been the driving force behind the wedding plans. It was as if she saw Stevie (he wasn’t yet Stephen) with his good grades and plans for university as her daughter’s ticket out of the depressed north-east. Linda’s burly father, Brian, was unemployed after decades down the pits, while her mother scraped a living as an office cleaner.

  Stephen knew the pitch first-hand: his own father had sunk into sullen alcoholism after he was laid off by the shipyard that had employed him for twenty-three years as a welder. But beyond their shared fury at losing their livelihoods while the economy that had sustained their families for generations disappeared down the pan, the two households had nothing in common. When Stephen’s evident reluctance to set a date for the wedding reached an impasse, Elaine sent Brian round to find out what exactly he thought he was playing at. The results had not been pretty.

  Hearing the row, his father roused himself from stupor just long enough to throw Stephen out of the house in disgust. As a result, he found himself moving to Manchester in pursuit of university and a new life several weeks ahead of schedule. His one regret – the loss of Linda’s undemanding friendship – soon melted away when his older brother turned up on the doorstep in early October with the startling news that he was to be a father and he’d better come home and face the music.

  At which point Stephen finally dug in his heels: he knew, absolutely knew, that Linda’s pregnancy (if indeed it existed) was nothing to do with him for the simple reason that they had never slept together, though not for want of trying on her part. Nobody would believe him; he recognized at once that the cost of not returning to Tyneside and marrying Linda would be the permanent loss of his family and his home, along with the last few shreds of his reputation. But equally he knew that this was his Rubicon moment, and that if he didn’t draw a line in the sand now, he never would.

  Perhaps it was no great surprise, then, that his early twenties – when he finally acknowledged his sexuality, but thankfully well before he was ordained – were spent in a mindless quest for anonymous sexual encounters that he soon knew to be thrillingly addictive and destructive to his soul in equal measure. By the time he started theological college he’d begun the wholesale reconstruction of his persona, which included a well-polished patina of amused detachment on the subject of love and sex, and a lightly ironic, throwaway remark about saving himself for the Lord’s work. Alongside his studies, he devoted significant attention to observing the traits and tics of his fellow ordinands (especially those who hailed from public school and Oxbridge) and adopting those mannerisms that appealed to him. He was a swift learner, and soon sloughed off the skin of his old life along with his Geordie accent. (His life-long passion for the Magpies he refused to abandon, on the grounds that every parish priest worth his salt needed a football team to follow.) By the time he started his curacy, the transformation was complete.

  But the way he felt about David was so totally different from anything he had experienced before that he was in turmoil. Cupid’s arrow had well and truly pierced his heart, and all the old clichés turned out to be true. It was like seeing the world in colour for the first time after decades of black and white. Birdsong seemed louder and sweeter. Heavens – he even caught himself humming snatches of Frank Sinatra!

  What, if anything, to do with that love was the question. David was deliciously unbothered by the age gap – he was a mere thirty-two – but was it fair on him, to form a permanent relationship? Could Stephen really cast aside so lightly the principles he’d clung to for the past thirty years? And if he did, how would he explain David’s presence in his life to his parishioners, let alone to his bishop? On the other hand, having tasted such wholly unexpected joy, could he really let that slip away from him? Wouldn’t he be consigning himself to the very worst sort of wilderness imaginable? And quite unnecessarily?

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Bethany in the distance, gesticulating in his direction. Glancing at his watch, he was startled to find that an hour had slipped by without his noticing. He smiled and waved back, about to tell the pilgrims that they could begin conversation again, when William appeared at his side.

  ‘Think we’ve gone wrong somewhere, Father,’ he said.

  Stephen looked around. Where were they? A railway station? That wasn’t on the route, surely? Disconcerted, he reached into his backpack for the file of maps. Bugger, bugger, bugger. They had strayed badly off course. So absorbed had he been in his own inner landscape that he’d taken his eye off the all-important terrain around him. And he’d led the party well and truly up the garden path as a result. How humiliating! He could already hear the grumbles, the questions, the inevitable complaints.

  ‘Friends!’ he called, putting as brave a face on it as he could muster. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to confess I’ve made a major cock-up. I’m not quite sure how it happened but we’ve taken a wrong turning. I was miles away. And now we’re all miles away. All we like sheep have gone astray, you might even say . . .’ He laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Sorry, troops. We need to retrace our steps, get back to the main path.’ Just then, as if to rub in his foolishness, it started spitting with rain. There were groans as people fished in their bags for cagoules. Oh Lord, he was going to have a mutiny on his hands if he wasn’t careful. He pulled on his own waterproof, and made to zip it up, only to find that in his haste the fabric jammed in its teeth. He tugged at it furiously before abandoning the attempt with a curse. ‘This way!’ he called angrily.

  In the end it rained, albeit lightly, for the rest of the afternoon. The day that had started so promisingly deteriorated rapidly, along with Stephen’s spirits. The promised couple of hours of sunny leisure melted away like a mirage.

  ‘I just hope there’s going to be lots of hot water when we get to this convent, because we’re going to need it,’ said Mary Anne grimly. ‘Do you know it well, Father Stephen?’

  ‘I have every confidence in the good sisters,’ he said, hoping against hope that the guest wing was as comfortable as the convent website suggested. ‘I haven’t been there personally, but it comes highly recommended.’

  He racked his brains. Who had recommended it? Someone in his clergy chapter, he was pretty sure. But if it had been Colin, for example – and he was apt to disappear off on retreat at the drop of a hat so was the most likely suspect – they could be in for an unpleasant surprise because Colin was oblivious to his surroundings. He was the sort of priest who, offered instant coffee in a chipped mug, said ‘Lovely!’ and actually meant it.

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Catherine. ‘How much longer now, do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, the kids are beginning to wilt,’ Tamsin lobbed in.

  ‘There’s a steep bit down at least a hundred steps, and then it can’t be more than a mile after that,’ he said. ‘Ruth should be waiting, along with my good friend David who’s bringing his school minibus so that we can shuttle down to the convent.’ Good Lord, was he blushing? ‘So the end is in sight! Meanwhile, do take care on those steps, one and all – they could be slippery in the wet.’ He bustled up and down the line of walkers, spreading the word about the forthcoming descent and its hazards. The very last thing the pilgrimage needed was an accident.

 
And then, and then . . . just as he was allowing himself to im­­agine that they were on the home strait, Stephen saw a familiar frame at the viewing platform halfway down the steps. A tall, stooping figure of a man, coatless and dressed in an incongruous bubble-gum pink Hello Kitty T-shirt over the sort of long-sleeved, finely striped shirt more commonly worn by office workers. Below, he sported a baggy pair of grey tracksuit trousers that – judging by the expanse of grubby underwear on display – had long since parted company with their elastic. His feet were shod in bright yellow rubber boots more suited to a yachting weekend than a walk in the countryside. He was carrying two tatty supermarket carrier bags, each bulging with heaven-knew-what. And to cap it all – quite literally – he sported what must once have been a plain white safari hat, but today was liberally decorated with pink, purple and yellow flowers. Snapdragons, thought Stephen. There was a rather lovely display of them in a glazed green container in the front garden of the vicarage. Or at least there had been when Stephen had left home on Saturday. Oh fuck.

  ‘Adam!’ he said. ‘Goodness. What a surprise!’

  At the sound of his name, the man flinched, and bobbed his head up and down in a characteristic nod. ‘Hello, Father,’ he mumbled, grinning vaguely and looking into the middle distance.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ asked Stephen. Adam’s head dipped again, and he half turned away, so that Stephen missed his muttered reply. ‘Dorking or Oxted?’ Even as he posed the question, Stephen realized it was almost certainly meaningless. He tried again. ‘Up or down the steps?’

  ‘Following you, Father,’ nodded Adam.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Everyone,’ he mumbled. ‘For the music lady.’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam, more distinctly. The snapdragons wobbled alarmingly as he nodded. ‘Walking for Anna. The music lady.’

  ‘Ah. I see,’ said Stephen, thinking quite the opposite.