‘She’s a woman, sir,’ Ted had interjected. ‘We have women in the Church these days, Bishop, sir.’
‘Eh? What? Oh. Very good. Carry on, soldier.’
She felt herself starting to giggle again at the memory.
Edward looked up. ‘Hopeless!’ he hissed, not even bothering to find out what was amusing her this time.
Annie tried to read the quotations in front of her, but found her mind returning to that flannelgraph. She had stared at it, rapt, as the preacher was saying, ‘And so, boys and girls, it’s no good thinking you can earn your way to God by going to Sunday School.’ His voice went kindly on, urging them to invite the Lord Jesus into their heart if they hadn’t already done so, while behind him the felt cross was slowly unpeeling itself from the board. It flipped to the floor without a sound, leaving God and Man as estranged as ever.
‘Right. Well. Any questions?’ asked Dr Mowbray, rubbing his hands together briskly.
Ingram, of course, had a question. He’d been sitting at the back reading a book to demonstrate that doing two things simultaneously hardly engaged one-fifth of his vast intellect. He shouldn’t even have been there. The lecture was designed for Coverdale students doing the Certificate in Theology, but Ingram was bright and therefore doing the university theology degree. He was attending this lecture simply to show off. Everyone knew he would get a first in his finals in June. Unless Annie was right and he wasn’t actually that bright, after all. It would all depend on whether the examiners had the patience to sift through his polysyllabic phraseology to see if an idea was lurking there or not. If they took him at his own estimation he would certainly get a first. Annie scribbled ‘Little Pinhead, Rambledon’ on a piece of paper and threw it to Ted.
Meanwhile, Ingram’s question had drawn to a close. Dr Mowbray looked thoughtful.
‘I’m not really sure what you’re asking, Ingram,’ he said at length. Annie smirked as Ingram flipped back his floppy hair.
‘I think what I’m saying is this,’ he said patiently, and off he went again.
‘Get your bloody hair cut,’ muttered Edward into his notes. This was overheard by half the room, but Ingram forged on, impervious to their tittering. Dr Mowbray answered him. He’s probably as intelligent as Ingram would like to be, thought Annie. Why doesn’t he just swat him aside like a bumptious bluebottle? But Dr Mowbray was endlessly long-suffering and unassuming. Perhaps he’d seen it all before. He must have watched hundreds of ordinands come and go over the years. He was stroking his silvery beard and saying, ‘Yes! Ah, yes, indeed! That’s a very good point,’ to a question from Dave. He tidied it generously into the proper theological categories as though this was what Dave had meant all along. Annie decided that Dr Mowbray should marry Barney and Isabella. She’d have to find a new name for him. Manning? Mayhew? Moore?
‘You may now kiss the bride.’ Barney did. Not a perfunctory peck, but a long, deep, passionate kiss. Isabella was on her toes almost squeaking with surprise. The moment went on and on. A bee droned up the aisle towards the mass of flowers and Dr Moore cleared his throat. The congregation, who had started to shift a little in their pews, laughed. Barney released her and gave her his wonderful slow smile. My God, thought Isabella. My God. What’s tonight going to be like?
Libby thumped her tail eagerly in her basket, and Annie snatched her thoughts back. What am I doing here? she wondered, in a kind of amused despair. She thought again about the hundreds of ordinands, picturing them like an early black-and-white film, shuffling with frantic jerky gestures into the lecture room, tackling tricky doctrinal or ethical issues, then juddering out again. Wave after wave of nice, white, middle-class people. We’ll go on to live out our faithful, not-very-glamorous lives in parishes up and down the country. What difference will we make? We stake everything on the belief that it makes all the difference in the world, but when we look around, what do we see? Empty churches. Locked churches. Redundant churches. What’s the point? We might as well not bother. Don’t think that way, she chided herself. Faith was like the apostle Peter walking on water. If you looked round at the wind and the waves and asked yourself how you were doing it, you were bound to sink.
How many others had slid despairingly under the waves in their time at Coverdale? Perhaps they had managed to thrash their way to the shore and were successful barristers and bankers now, attending church on Sundays, looking at the slightly pathetic figure in the pulpit and thinking, Phew. What would she do under those circumstances? She heard her mother tut angrily. You’re hopeless, Anne Brown. You’re always giving up. There’s that pegbag you never finished. You can’t go through life never finishing things, you know. But Annie did. Her whole history was a mess of loose ends. She seldom had the courage to cut things off properly and make a clean break. They just petered out. She was always trying to convince herself that she’d come back to them one day and maybe finish them. She still had that pegbag somewhere.
If she left Coverdale she’d have to skulk back to teaching. God, you’re so boring, Anne, Damn used to say; and Annie had to admit Damn was right. It would be nice to go out with a little style, for once. To scorch across Coverdale like a bad comet. But that wasn’t done, of course. Or at any rate, not often. The college had produced one enfant terrible in its time, famed for his boozing, bonking and bad language. It was ten years ago, but people still spoke of Johnny Whitaker with a kind of awe. He’d somehow managed to scramble aboard ship again and get ordained, so maybe there was hope. Annie had only contemplated these things, not done them. Maybe he’d sat listening to this very lecture ten years ago with a hangover, plotting the fate of the next sexy undergraduate. She smiled in fellow-feeling. There were several extremely attractive young men in Jesus College next door. Woof woof. Get down, Libby!
A bit of folded paper landed on the table in front of her. She opened it. ‘Much Blether’. She glanced across at Ted and grinned. He was looking as deadpan as ever.
That evening Annie looked again at the words They were just, and crossed them out.
‘Stop writing now, please, ladies and gentlemen.’
Isabella’s pen made a final desperate lunge towards the end of the sentence. Her arm was dropping off. It was her last exam, thank God, and she knew she had done disastrously. All around the students stretched and exchanged grimaces while the exam scripts were collected up. Isabella wiped her sweaty hands on the skirt of her cream slub-silk dress. It was new and outrageously expensive, and she had bought it in the firm belief that if you looked good, you felt good; and if you felt good, you worked well. The system seemed to have broken down somewhere, though. She was heavily overdrawn and felt lousy. Still, she thought, as she got to her feet, being overdrawn made the sums easier. You just added to your total. And in any case, her father would bail her out as usual if she went to him with a trembling lip and admitted she’d got herself into a bit of a pickle again. She shook the full skirt and filed out with the others.
It was hot. The air filled at once with the laughter and wails of post-mortem. Champagne was cracked open and the end-of-term annihilation began. Isabella wandered off across the marketplace to where she had chained her bike. I don’t feel part of it, she thought. Camilla’s law exams had finished two days earlier, so she had already spent forty-eight hours drunk. She would be waiting for Isabella with a whoop and a wine-glass. Isabella had seldom felt less like partying. And all because of Barney. She had turned the encounter in Latimer into a light-hearted romp for Camilla, and the two of them had giggled and shrieked over the story. But Isabella had been unable to edit out of her mind the memory of Barney standing and shaking his head at her. In disappointment. That’s what was so awful. He didn’t find her outrageous and irresistible. He was disappointed in her.
She searched along the railings for her bike. As the days passed she had gradually realized that she’d give anything to have him think well of her. Even behave well, for God’s sake. There was no denying it. She was in love with him. There was also no escaping that
it wasn’t mutual. He’d never made the slightest attempt to contact her. It was all so humiliating. She would rather die than let him know what she felt. If she bumped into him she was going to pretend that it was a huge joke, and he was only about number eight or nine on her list of intended scalps.
At last she spotted her bike against the crowded railings. God, I hate it when people park their bikes on top of mine. She struggled to untangle the pedals and handlebars. Some thoughtless, selfish bastard. ‘Some man,’ she muttered, seizing the crossbar and tugging it away from hers. Both bikes crashed to the ground and lay on the pavement with a wheel whizzing round.
‘Shit!’ She aimed a kick, then stopped. They were chained together! She looked up, and there was Barney.
‘Barney!’ She remembered belatedly that he must never know how she felt. ‘Unlock your bloody bike, will you?’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Only if you have lunch with me.’
‘What? But I – you –’
‘In Latimer. Not very exciting, I’m afraid.’ She gave in and smiled. Why bother to pretend the sun shone from anywhere other than out of his gorgeous backside?
‘I’d love to.’ He was smiling back into her upturned face. The busy marketplace surged on around them.
‘How was it?’ he asked.
‘How was what?’
‘Your exam.’
‘Oh! Terrible.’
People were tutting and trying to get past them and the fallen bikes. He bent and unlocked his chain. ‘Stop looking at me like that, Isabella.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re only going to be disappointed.’
Her smile wavered. ‘I am?’
‘Yes. I happen to know it’s only corned-beef salad.’ Her smile burst out again and she bent to pick up her bike. ‘Nice dress, by the way,’ he said. For a second she thought he was looking down the front of it, but he couldn’t have been, of course. They began to cycle to Latimer. The warm breeze tugged Isabella’s skirt and lifted her hair from her face. She might have been flying. They stopped and waited at the red lights. Isabella couldn’t help blurting out: ‘I thought I wasn’t ever going to see you again.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well . . . I thought you were kind of mad . . .’
He turned and looked at her. ‘Mad? At you? Isabella!’
Her heart was racing. His eyes, his voice, his smile – endless possibilities hinted at, then instantly denied. ‘I bet you’re magnificent when you’re angry.’
‘Mm. I think you’re safe. I have a very, very long fuse, Isabella.’
‘I know you have, Barney. Although size isn’t meant to be important, of course.’
His lips twitched. ‘And it burns very, very slowly.’
‘Good. I like a bit of staying-power in a man.’
He lost the battle against smiling. ‘You’re impossible.’
A car horn honked impatiently behind them and they set off again, laughing.
‘How old are you, Barney?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘I’ll be twenty next month,’ she supplied, when he failed to ask. They turned into Latimer Hall Road. A woodpecker thrummed deep in a walled garden as they drew up outside the college. The sound seemed to echo for joy in the woods.
Isabella felt uncharacteristically self-conscious as they entered the dining hall and joined the lunch queue. Perhaps it was the throng of chomping vicars-designate, or the po-faced clerics staring down at her from the portraits on the walls. She began to wish that her dress had something by way of a back to it. Barney, as he stood behind her waiting for his corned-beef salad, could have trailed a finger down each vertebra of her tanned spine. She felt as though the whole room was glancing at her in disapproval. At any moment someone might block her path like a guard outside an Italian cathedral and tell her to cover herself. There was nothing for it but to brazen it out. She turned and smiled up at Barney over her shoulder.
‘You’re not a vegetarian, are you?’ he asked.
‘God, no.’ She flared her nostrils at him. ‘I need my meat.’
His lips twitched again. ‘Isabella, if you don’t behave, I’ll turn the fire hose on you.’ He gave her a push, and she scuttled to catch up with the rest of the queue.
They collected their salad and sat down. Barney introduced her to the men already sitting at the table. She saw at once that they could only be priests in the making: nice, but drippy. Still, they were dealing out copious amounts of interest and attention, asking her all about herself and how she knew Barney. He was sitting opposite her, watching. Before long she began to feel like Scarlett O’Hara at the barbecue. She fluttered her eyelashes at him – Why, fiddle-dee-dee, Ashley Wilkes! – and finished her salad in a welter of male admiration.
‘And where do you worship?’ asked the man on her left, proffering the fruit bowl.
‘Where do I what?’ She took an apple and began to polish it on the front of her dress. ‘Oh, church, you mean. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a pagan, really. I don’t go unless it’s a wedding.’
A series of glances were exchanged around her like a coded message. After a moment she deciphered it. They thought Barney was trying to convert her. Hah! Was that why he was being so friendly all of a sudden? She looked at him and he raised an eyebrow.
‘Barney’s trying to convert me,’ she said, deciding on a pre-emptive strike. ‘Without much success, so far, I’d have to say. Which makes us quits, because I’m trying to –’ FIRE HOSE! said Barney’s fulminating glare. ‘– I’m just trying to understand it all. You know, God and everything.’ Whoops! She looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Her words seemed to have provoked an unnerving professional silence. They waited respectfully for more, and to her horror she found herself starting to witter about the Ten Commandments, and her granny dying, and what are we all here for, anyway?
‘And what about all the suffering in the world? If there is a God, how come he lets wars and famines happen?’ But it had begun to feel as though there was one, after all. One who liked her enormously and was terribly interested in her, but who didn’t approve of her one little bit. He was looking out at her through their eyes. She sank her teeth defiantly into the apple as they explained the concept of free will to her.
After the meal Isabella was pressed to join them in a game of croquet on the lawn. She intercepted a not-quite-Christian stare from one of the women nearby and was therefore about to accept when she remembered Camilla. She’ll still be waiting in college for me, thought Isabella guiltily.
‘I’d love to, but I’ve got to go and get pissed. Drunk, I should say,’ she amended, catching Barney’s eye. ‘Well, not drunk as such. Just a couple of glasses. You know, end of exams and all that. Everyone does it . . .’ she heard herself pleading. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I don’t have to explain myself to a bunch of sanctimonious celibate gits. ‘Well, ’bye, everyone. It’s been nice meeting you.’ She waggled her fingers at them and set off. Barney fell silently into step beside her like the wrath of God.
‘Thanks for lunch,’ she said, as they reached her bike. ‘Can I come again next term?’
‘No.’ He smiled at her stricken expression. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be here.’
‘But – Why won’t you?’
‘I’m getting ordained. I’ll be a curate in darkest Hertfordshire by then.’ It felt like a slap in the face.
‘Well . . . congratulations, or whatever.’ I’ll never see him again. She was sucking her hair and trying to blink back the tears. ‘Can I come with you and be your concubine?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? They had concubines in the Bible. Oh, please. I’ll cook for you. I’ll iron your cassock, even.’
‘Surplice.’
‘Surplus to what?’
‘No, surplice. The white nightie thing. That’s the one you iron. Cassocks you just dry-clean and hang up.’
‘Bugger the laundry,’ she said impatiently. ‘
I love you, Barney.’
‘Mm. You said.’
‘Yes, but now I really mean it.’ She could have shaken him in frustration. ‘It’s true. I’d do anything for you, Barney!’
‘Really?’
‘Truly.’
There was a thoughtful pause. ‘How about a blow-job?’
‘What?’ She stepped back in shock. ‘Did you say – Barney, do you have any idea what that means?’
‘Why? What does it mean?’
‘I don’t believe this!’ She felt herself getting redder by the second. ‘It means . . . well, oral sex, for God’s sake.’
‘It does?’
‘Yes. Oh!’ He laughed as she made to punch him. ‘Bastard. You aren’t supposed to have heard of things like that, let alone know what they mean.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you’re practically a vicar.’ He was grinning at her. Isabella was by no means as experienced as she would have liked everyone to believe. She pushed her hair back from her hot face and aimed for a casual tone. ‘And, besides, it’s a disgusting practice – like picking someone else’s nose.’
He considered this. ‘More fun, though.’
There was a short silence. Her bluff had been well and truly called, and she cast about for a cool exit line. None suggested itself. ‘Well, I’m late. I’d better go.’ She undid her padlock.
‘Did you find a partner for that ball, by the way?’
‘Oh, no problem.’ She made an airy gesture and was about to get on her bike.
‘And will you behave yourself?’
‘What’s it to you?’ He waited. His patient silence goaded her into saying, ‘I doubt it. I expect I’ll get pissed. Or laid. Both, probably. They tend to go together.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re worth more than that, Isabella.’
‘Fuck you!’ she exploded. ‘No, I mean it. Fuck you. Don’t you dare tell me how to behave! Who the hell do you think you are?’ He walked off without a word. Oh, no! she wailed inwardly. ‘Barney. Look, Barney, I’m sorry.’ He disappeared back into the archway. She let her bike crash to the ground and chased after him.
The Benefits of Passion Page 5