Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Mummy’s having a piggyback,’ Kat yelped, clapping her hands. ‘I want one. I want one.’

  ‘But you are the leader,’ Vincent declared solemnly. ‘We are all going to follow you.’

  Kat paused, as the gravity of the appointment sank in. She then set off at a gallop, steering a stomping course through the gullies and pools of water, stretching down the lane ahead of them like a chain of stepping stones. The vicarage was just visible in the distance beyond the bend, the cloudy light glinting off its tall windows.

  Vincent carried Connie and the shopping all the way, making a show of copying some of Kat’s dancing steps if ever she glanced round. Eleanor went last, watching her mother’s long blue heels bounce against her father’s black robe. Kat had got a head-start and her father walked so fast it was hard to keep up. He was like a tree, Eleanor decided, a huge old tree with a gnarled face and thick branches for arms and legs. Her mother looked like a doll in comparison, clinging onto his back like her life depended on it. It occurred to Eleanor in the same instant that, just as there had been a time before Kat, there had been one before her too, when it had just been her mother and father. The thought made her feel funny, as if it was one she wasn’t supposed to have.

  Her father took charge that night, as he usually did since the move, putting them in the bath and making scrambled eggs, which he said had to be eaten before the cake could be cut. There were no candles, so he used upturned matches, which he insisted – when Eleanor asked – that only he could light and which fizzed like sparklers and left black specks in the icing from Kat’s efforts to blow them out. Kat said a breathy inaudible wish with her eyes closed and then Vincent helped her cut four hefty slices, making the jam and cream spill out of its creases. Like blood and guts, Eleanor pointed out before she could stop herself, earning a telling-off.

  ‘It’s only words, Vincent,’ murmured her mother, taking a slice, but then moving the cake round her plate instead of putting it in her mouth.

  ‘Do you think your sister enjoyed her day?’ Vincent asked Eleanor later, coming upstairs to settle them after Connie, stretched out on the sitting room sofa, had summoned them to her side for goodnight kisses. Kat was already asleep, her hair a yellow fan across the pillow. Eleanor wriggled deeper under her covers, feeling with her feet for Mottie, her old bear, who lived at the bottom of the bed.

  Vincent turned off her bedside light and sat on the mattress, the weight of him rolling her towards his knees.

  Eleanor thought of the beautiful bike, which Kat had seemed to love but then refused to ride. And then of being left alone for the afternoon. And then of the abortive attempt to go swimming. But Kat had been happy enough, most of the time, as she always was. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘That’s good. And what about her big sister, did she enjoy it too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor lied, because the day had ended so well and because of the recently acquired, hardening instinct that confessing to unhappiness was somehow disloyal. To him. To all of them.

  ‘Did Mummy leave you on your own today?’

  ‘No.’ The word flew out of her mouth, but it sounded wrong. ‘Just for a little bit.’

  ‘For a little bit. Okay.’

  ‘She had to or the cake wouldn’t have been a surprise. I looked after Kat fine.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’ He had placed his hand on her chest but was looking round the room like he had forgotten he had left it there. Eleanor could feel her heart thumping under his palm. ‘You can have your own room soon,’ he went on in a dreamy voice, ‘just as soon as I get around to redecorating this old place – you’ll like that, won’t you?’

  ‘Maybe, but Kat won’t.’ Eleanor spoke in a rush. ‘Kat likes being with me.’

  He shook his head, lifting the hand at last. ‘Yes, but we all have to grow up sometime. Even your little sister.’ He traced a finger down her cheek, looking sad. ‘You are ready for a room of your own. More than ready. All that reading you do.’ He kissed her forehead and then made the sign of a cross where his lips had been. ‘But none of that bookworming tonight, okay? It’s too late and you’ll ruin your eyes with that torch of yours. Don’t forget to say your prayers.’

  ‘I don’t know what to pray for.’

  ‘Pray for everybody, including yourself.’ He stood up.

  ‘I prayed not to leave London,’ Eleanor confessed in a tight voice. ‘And it didn’t work.’

  ‘God has his reasons.’

  ‘Did you pray not to leave London too then?’

  He pulled on the wispy ends of his beard, like he always did when he was thinking. ‘I leave big decisions to God. I trust him. He knows best.’

  Eleanor thought of her new school in Broughton, wondering why God thought it best that she should hate it and have no friends. She had done one term, enduring the ignominy of being the only new pupil to arrive halfway into the year. A classmate called Clarissa Mayfield had hung around her, but she was the universally disliked, spoilt, crybaby daughter of the Head, and so it didn’t count. The person who counted was a girl called Isabel Kirby, a girl whom Eleanor had quickly learned to do her best to avoid.

  ‘I hate school.’ She knew it was a terrible thing to say. The landing light blazed like a sun behind her father’s head, a halo, casting him in shadow. In his sermons he sometimes said that God was light, shining in the darkness of the world.

  ‘But it’s the holidays.’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

  ‘I never want to go back.’

  ‘You’re too bright, Ellie, that’s your trouble. It makes the other kids feel left behind. You ask too many questions. Know too many answers. But the teachers like you, which is what matters. Life isn’t a bed of roses, my child, it can be a struggle. It’s supposed to be a struggle. For all of us.’ He spoke emphatically, clasping his hands so tightly that for a moment Eleanor thought he might be about to drop to his knees to pray. She had walked in on him doing so the previous weekend, hunched on his study floor between all the messy piles of paper, head bent like someone expecting execution.

  ‘But why? Why is it a struggle?’

  ‘Because if it was easy it wouldn’t mean anything.’ His voice was harsh, but then he ruffled her hair. ‘Now. Goodnight, Chatterbox. God bless.’

  Eleanor rolled onto her side, cradling Mottie gently between the arches of her feet. The bear was eleven like her and had bald patches; but they were soft and good for rubbing. She moved each foot in turn, getting the soothing rhythm that helped her feel sleepy. The things her father had said drifted in and out of her mind. She didn’t understand them, but if she was clever, like he said, then she would one day, surely. And for the moment this seemed a great comfort – that answers existed, even if they were beyond her grasp.

  As she closed her eyes, she saw again their evening procession down the muddy lane: Kat up ahead, thinking she was in charge, skipping and splatting, Connie pinned like a yellow butterfly to their father’s back. She and Kat were the children, but it was their mother who had needed carrying; Eleanor tried to hold onto this thought, sensing that it might take her to the brink of understanding something, something momentous. But the image slithered free and blankness came instead, pulling her into the world she liked best, the one where nothing had to be understood because you didn’t even know you were alive.

  7

  Vincent held the phone a little way from his ear as Mrs Owens talked. She didn’t want to interfere, it wasn’t in her nature. She had been in agonies about it all week. Agonies.

  The telephone flex had lost its neat regular curls and become a stiff tangle, destroyed by hours of fiddling. Vincent let his gaze drift out of the kitchen window, where the sun was still gathering power, a low-wattage light bulb labouring in a dark room. The window faced south, framing the edge of the wood that skirted the drive and offering a shadowy view towards the broken horizon beyond the vicarage’s wide sprawling garden. It was the point where the South Downs fizzled out, tailing off into a few last low ridges; giant, dista
nt waves breaking on a flat shore.

  Vincent allowed the cleaner’s voice to come back into focus. She didn’t think it was right that his girls had been left on their own while Mrs Keating was seen in town. She didn’t blame the vicar, he had been laying poor Tony Mossop to rest, God bless his soul, but the thought of those little girls…

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Owens. I value your concern. Really, I do. It was just one of those complicated days – the girls were left briefly, it is true – Connie was organising a surprise for Katherine’s birthday. Nothing that is likely to arise again. I had no idea you had telephoned. I hope Eleanor was helpful. She’s very grown-up for her age. Pardon? No, I don’t think your gloves have turned up. But I’ll double-check with Connie, of course. Hopefully, we won’t be needing gloves much from now on, not with the weather getting so much warmer… Oh, they were rubber? Extra-large pink? I’ve got it now. Yes, have a nice holiday. And thank you again, for your concern.’

  Vincent glanced back out of the window. The tops of the silver birches were on fire suddenly, just for a few seconds; a miraculous combination of light and angles. He could feel his soul swelling. It always helped to see the sun.

  Vincent knew people talked. They had in South London and they would in Sussex. That Broughton was not only a much more scattered but infinitely less hectic community than his Wandsworth parish made no difference. It was still a goldfish bowl. Parishioners watched and judged, with expectations that were not only high but also unashamedly proprietorial. How a priest comported himself was their business. Connie was a Belisha beacon, even when she kept her head down; even when she didn’t do stupid things that she had promised never to do again.

  In the early days, scrutiny had been an aspect of his calling that Vincent welcomed. After all the years of false starts, the twists and turns of dead-end jobs, the failed relationships, it had been a joy to emerge from the purging of the seminary at the grand age of forty-one and embark on a life that was contrastingly singular and transparent – both to God and to those whose spiritual health he had vowed to serve.

  Then, God bowled him a googly. He sent Connie. Of course, God sent Connie, because, Vincent reasoned, even as he edged into the maelstrom of the feelings that she stirred in him, being human could still be a highly complicated business and God had every right to remind him of the fact.

  As with so many momentous things, it had happened quietly, unexpectedly, on a Wednesday afternoon. It was the first Wednesday of the month, which in those days had come to mean a visit to the flagship property of the Home for Hope project, a scheme Vincent was pioneering to wrest some of the large dilapidated houses in his parish back from squatters and convert them into volunteer-run refuges for the homeless. It was an ambitious project, launched on good faith rather than good economics. Local government had promised support and then withdrawn it. Five months in and the energies of the volunteer team, not to mention the wherewithal to keep even this first home open, were flailing badly.

  Mulling over the problem, Vincent had taken his time covering the half-mile between the paint-peeling front door of his own run-down accommodation and the newly restored gleaming black entrance gates of the refuge. He walked with his head down and his arms clasped behind his back, preoccupied for the first time in a while by chipped paving stones and the ugly smears of spat chewing gum rather than the glories of the world. He had envisaged opening several more homes across South London, each a pearl of succour and hope for those most in need; a working testimony to the force of God’s love on earth. He had seen it so clearly that just to contemplate the possibility of failure made his skin crawl with shame.

  Since his last visit, a thick, splintering crack had appeared across one of the panels of coloured glass set over the refuge’s main entrance. The result of a thrown bottle or stone, Vincent guessed sadly. Almost worse were the empty crisp packets and beer cans blowing around the splitting folds of two bulging black plastic rubbish sacks which had been propped carelessly against the overflowing dustbins. The rubbish men must have driven past without stopping. Again. Such details mattered. It would have to go on the agenda that afternoon. Again.

  He braced his shoulders, punched in the new-fangled security code that had sucked up too much of the Hope Project funds and pushed open the door. And there was Connie, swabbing the tatty lino of the front hall. She was barefoot, wearing a red T-shirt and faded blue flared jeans with straggling hems. Her feet looked muscled, as if they were used to being shoeless. Her long, astonishing curly, white-blonde hair was swept back into a plain ponytail with a brown elastic band, the sort one might put on a parcel. Strains of some music were coming out of a room down the corridor and she was very subtly moving the mop and her body in time to it. ‘I’m so tired of being alone, I’m so tired…’ Vincent would only register the tune later. At the time, he wasn’t able to take in much beyond the fact that he had forgotten what a woman could look like; the sheer power of female physical beauty. It was like being blown off his feet.

  ‘Hello there.’ He offered his hand, glad of the priestly mask of his clothes, careful to behave exactly as he would towards any of the residents or volunteer employees. ‘You must be new. I’m Father Keating, in charge of this place and the whole Home for Hope project.’

  ‘Oh, reverend… but I am Connie.’ There was a soft trace of upper-class refinement in her accent. Home Counties, public school, ponies, twin sets and pearls – unappealing, clichéd associations skidded across Vincent’s brain. But it was her use of the word ‘but’, sounding so like an apology for existence, that snagged on his already shredding heart. How did such a creature get to be so uncertain? She had fresh skin and the most piercing translucent blue eyes he had ever seen. They sought his and then dropped quickly, back to the sopping strands of the mop-head and the task at hand. After the squalor of the bins, Vincent could have loved her for that alone. He wondered how old she was. Thirty? For a few moments he felt like some creature in a fairy tale, literally rooted to the spot. All he wanted was to make her look at him again.

  ‘Not reverend,’ he corrected her, finding his voice at last and speaking much more gruffly than he intended, ‘…Father Keating is fine,’ he added hurriedly, seeing the trace of panic scud across her face and recognising it as no moment to start explaining the business of ecclesiastical adjectives and nouns. ‘You’re doing a great job on that floor. Thank you.’

  The meeting flew by. For every agenda point, Vincent had an answer – an inspired answer, inspirationally delivered. The world not only glowed again, it was full of solutions. His ears strained for sounds in the hallway – the swish of the mop, a light footstep.

  And who was the new helper, he asked at last, once issues of bin-collection and social service involvement and fresh fundraising had been dispatched. He let the question out slowly, steadily, like a lungful of held-in air.

  ‘Oh, that’s Connie,’ he was told. ‘A real treasure. Turned up last week, needing a place to tide her over till she gets a new job. Problems in the past with alcohol. Estranged from her family, from what we can make out. Came with good references though, from St George’s, where she’s been working for the last year as a part-time receptionist. She’s so willing to help out, she puts everyone else to shame.’

  It wasn’t until much later, in the deep quiet of his own bed, fighting unseemly thoughts, that Vincent referred the matter to God. He waited, expecting scolding, warnings, suggestions for hair-shirts, but none came. Instead, the voice in his heart, the one Vincent had learnt to trust and listen out for, told him to be patient and follow his instincts and see what mysteries lay in store.

  Connie started appearing in his church soon afterwards, always sitting quietly at the back, her vivid hair peeping out of the edges of a headscarf. Vincent would feel her eyes on him as he performed his duties and when he stepped into the pulpit to deliver his sermon. It made him pull his shoulders back and stand taller. It made him speak with greater fluency, finding ever better ways to set the hearts and minds of
his small, growing congregation jangling with awe and understanding.

  Soon, Connie was giving more and more of her time to helping run the home. Schemes for raising money proved an impressive forte – bring-and-buy sales, renting the church out for concerts and keep-fit groups, bombarding the council with begging letters – she was tireless in her efforts to support not just the parish, but Vincent himself. He needed looking after, she would scold, arriving on the doorstep of his small, shabby church house with a basket of food, her long ponytail swinging as she dodged past him and his remonstrations in order to turn the contents of the basket into a meal. Vincent would follow, helplessly, a stunned rabbit in the glare of her radiance, all the more hapless for doing his best not to appear so. After she had gone, he would remember each detail of her clothes, every pleat and crease, every hemline. For, as Connie’s confidence grew, so her wardrobe had smartened, to tight-fitting skirts, dresses and tall shoes; outfits which presented the added complication for Vincent of making her lithe, ballet-dancer body even harder to ignore.

  He stopped sleeping. Connie might have been a heaven-sent inspiration, but Vincent wanted to have sex with her. More exactly, he wanted to tear her clothes off with his teeth and crush his mouth against hers until the thick red lipstick she had taken to wearing was gashed into smears across her cheeks and chin. He wanted to bury his face in every crevice of her body; to smell her, taste her, drink her, consume her. He prayed feverishly for guidance. The Anglican priesthood required no vow of celibacy, but Vincent had made one with himself anyway. He did not want to want Connie. He did not want to want to serve anyone but the Lord.

  Vincent took three days off and went on a retreat. By the last morning, he was longing to leave; longing to see Connie again. He drove back to London in a trance. The traffic, the world, streaked past. He did not see it, he saw Connie. The words he wanted to say to her tumbled round his brain. God had sent Connie. Not as a test but as a gift. Even more importantly, there was something in Connie that needed saving. She could not say it – no one who needed saving ever could. It was difficult enough to get her to speak about what she had been through; all he had gleaned were a few heartbreaking details – the family banishment, the blackouts, the mortification, the endless men who had let her down, the final brief terrifying period on the streets that had led to the rock bottom of a police cell and the decision to get proper help. The subsequent slow grind of sobriety and temporary jobs. She had endured so much and shown such strength, but the fear in her eyes was plain to see; the need to be properly cherished, kept safe.