The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  The telephone rang again.

  ‘No,’ Anna said, ‘Mr Bouverie isn’t back yet.’

  Flora came up close and mouthed, ‘My flu-u-u-te. My flu-u-u-te.’

  ‘A wedding in May. I’m afraid he has his diary with him. Could you call back? Before seven-thirty, he has a meeting. No,’ Anna said, ‘no. He won’t mind that you aren’t churchgoers.’

  ‘He will, actually,’ she said when she had put the receiver back. ‘He will, but he can’t.’

  ‘My flute—’

  ‘Flora,’ Anna said, pushing her fringe off her forehead, ‘I can do nothing about your flute. Daddy has the car. And now I have to do an hour’s work.’

  Flora turned away and cast herself, face down, across the table, narrowly missing the sandwich.

  ‘It’s the end of the world,’ she said. ‘It’s intolerable.’

  She kicked one of her bags. Very slowly, its side seam split open and a flute rolled quietly out on to the floor.

  Anna worked at a little table in their bedroom. It was an Oriental table, donated by her mother who was an actress of the old school and given to lavishness of gesture. The table was made of bamboo, lacquered scarlet, and the top was painted with gilded peonies. It bore its load of textbooks incongruously, and a typewriter that a parishioner had given Anna, a weekender who worked on a London newspaper, and who had sworn, positively, that she had outgrown the thing, didn’t need it. ‘Chuck it in a jumble sale,’ she had said to Anna, trying to make it easier to accept.

  ‘I’ve got pride,’ Anna had replied, taking it, ‘but no false pride. Thank you very much indeed.’

  It was electric. It produced smooth, bland sheets of text that Anna’s publishers greatly preferred to the characterful efforts of her previous old portable. She sat down in front of it and looked at the half-page she had typed that morning. She thought of Peter. He would by now have left the Bishop, would be crossing the Close to find his car, would know what lay ahead for them both. She looked out of the window and saw the brown strip of plough, and then the line of willows marking the river, and then the green slopes rising, dotted now with the first sheep of the year. In a month, she thought, in just a month, I might be looking at quite a different view. And what is more, I might never ever have to look at German again except on a menu in a restaurant on the Rhine where we might go, like other people do, for a real holiday instead of borrowing mildewed cottages and cardboard holiday-houses from people to whom we then have to be disproportionately grateful. She looked up at the bedroom ceiling, where a pale stain recalled a burst pipe nearly fifteen months ago. Through that ceiling, and through the roof above it, lived God, omniscient, omnipresent God. ‘You try living your adult life on nine thousand a year,’ she said to Him, and bent, with a sigh, to her typewriter. The telephone rang.

  Luke Bouverie missed the last bus out of Woodborough to Loxford, so he thumbed a lift. This happened most nights and he had grown to think that it was an easier and more interesting way of travelling particularly as his looks and his load of schoolbooks and his thinness caused people to stop. They were mostly local people, often men from the villages who worked in Woodborough. Only once, last autumn, had there been an unnerving lift, a well-dressed man in a Mercedes, who had wanted Luke to drive on towards Devon with him, had offered him dinner and a night at a hotel, had put his hand high up on Luke’s thigh, and been altogether menacing. Luke, who had a reputation for staying cool, had panicked. He had heard himself squeak in a long-outgrown pre-pubertal voice, ‘You be careful, my dad’s a vicar!’ and the car had stopped and the man had sworn at him viciously, using some phrases Luke later regretted not remembering, and Luke found himself shaking on the dark verge a mile out of Snead. He had had to walk home, three and a half miles, but luckily his parents were out, at some deanery get-together, and Trish Pardoe, who helped in the shop, was babysitting Flora. Trish never asked questions; she was only interested in telling you things. That night, she’d said, ‘If you’d come out the Quindale way you’d never’ve got through; it’s flooded right across the road from Briar Farm to the old water tower, three feet deep, burst water main,’ and Luke had said, ‘Yeah,’ and gone out to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

  This evening, his lift was Mike Vinson who worked as an electrician for a firm in Woodborough and ran the Loxford cricket team. He and his wife had so done-over a cottage on the green that its original simplicity had been quite obliterated in an orgy of DIY neo-Georgian. Mike Vinson had a respect for the church. He never darkened its doors, but he thought it was the proper place for weddings and christenings and funerals, and he was always prepared to rig up lights for the annual parish nativity play, with a dimming spotlight to beam sentimentally on the Virgin Mary. He would say, casually, to his wife later that night that he had given young Luke Bouverie a lift home. ‘Nice lad,’ he would say. ‘Nice manners.’ He would go to bed with a small satisfaction at having given a lift to the Rector’s son.

  Luke said, ‘I’m hopeless. I always miss the bus.’

  ‘You’ll be driving soon,’ Mike said. ‘Own car, and all. Change your life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luke said, suddenly miserable. He had practised in the car, but there was no money for lessons and as for a car of his own! Even the family car had come from some Church-loan scheme. The application form for a driving test had lain, unfilled in, in the muddle on his bedroom table since his seventeenth birthday. Anna had promised him lessons – when they knew. Knew what? ‘Just wait,’ she had said, smiling. ‘Not long now.’

  ‘And what’ll you do with your life?’ Mike said. ‘Vicar like your dad?’

  Loyalty just prevented Luke from saying, ‘No fear!’ He said, ‘I want to do art.’

  Mike tried to imagine it, and failed.

  ‘Stage sets,’ Luke said, to help him. ‘Theatre design.’

  Mike nodded. He had no vocabulary to ask what he felt were appropriate questions. ‘Nice boy,’ he planned to say to Sheila later, ‘artistic, too. Interested in drama.’ Sheila liked drama. When he had found her, on holiday in Bournemouth, she had been very keen on amateur theatricals. She’d stopped for him, though. He didn’t like the thought of her kissing other men, even in Show Boat.

  ‘Father approve?’

  ‘I think so,’ Luke said.

  ‘And your Mum?’

  Mike’s voice was elaborate with nonchalance. In his view – a strictly private view aired neither to Sheila nor to the lounge bar of The Coach and Horses in Quindale – Anna Bouverie was, well, something; not just a looker, but something more, something—

  ‘She’s all for it.’

  Mike took a grip on himself. ‘Been here a long time—’

  ‘Yes, since I was seven.’

  ‘What happens,’ said Mike, abruptly interested, ‘what happens to vicars? I mean, do you get to climb the ladder?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chances of promotion. That’s what I mean. Where does your dad go from here?’

  Luke thought.

  ‘Well, he’s rural dean, so I suppose the next thing is archdeacon.’

  Mike slapped the wheel.

  ‘He’ll be a bishop one day! What d’you reckon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luke said. His whole soul had been so given over to dreams of leaving Loxford recently that he was startled to think his father might share them. ‘He’s happy here,’ Luke said stoutly. He did not want his parents to leave Loxford; just him to leave. He wanted them to be where he could visualize them.

  The Loxford sign gleamed briefly from the black hedgerows.

  ‘Lovely village,’ Mike Vinson said, ‘smashing. I grew up in Harlesden. You don’t know you’re born, growing up here.’

  Courteously, he drove to the far end of the green and let Luke out by the church.

  ‘Really kind of you,’ Luke said, getting out. ‘Thank you.’

  He turned up the drive. The Rectory’s windows glowed behind drawn curtains. His father qouldn’t be home yet because he would have turned h
alf the lights off again. Some evenings, his parents almost seemed to circle round after one another, his mother turning lights on, his father switching them off. ‘It’s the tiniest luxury,’ his mother would say and his father would reply, without looking at her, ‘No, it isn’t. It’s provocation.’ Luke thought that, as his father plainly was not home yet, he would use his absence to do a little preliminary softening up of his mother, about plans for the summer.

  She was in the kitchen. She was wearing the huge red skirt she had made out of some curtains someone had sent to the jumble, and a black polo-necked jersey, and she had tied her hair up with the Indian scarf Luke had given her for Christmas. She was slicing onions. Beside her, with a music book propped against a milk bottle, Flora was playing slow, unlovely exercises on her flute.

  Anna stopped slicing and offered Luke a cheek wet with onion tears.

  ‘You missed the bus.’

  ‘But not Mike Vinson.’

  Luke gave Flora a mild cuff. She squealed.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Not back yet,’ Anna said.

  Luke put his books on the table where they toppled sideways against the milk bottle which tipped over and spilled milk across Flora’s music book. Anna took no notice. She picked the onions up between cupped hands and dropped them into the frying pan on the cooker. Luke began to mop clumsily at the pool of milk with a teacloth. Flora stood frozen, torn between wishing to scream and giggle. Her dilemma was solved by the telephone ringing.

  ‘Do get it,’ Anna said, ‘I’m oniony. Say Daddy isn’t back yet. Say don’t ring till nine, after the meeting.’

  ‘Say don’t ring ever again,’ Luke suggested.

  ‘Hello, Ga,’ Flora said with pleasure into the receiver. ‘No, I’ve had an intolerable day. No, I’m not! I’m not! OK. I’ll get her.’ She held the receiver away from her with distaste. ‘Ga says I’m a little tragedy queen.’

  ‘It’s not put on, you know,’ Anna said to her mother, retrieving the telephone. ‘She isn’t making it up.’

  ‘Is he back?’ Laura Marchant hissed. ‘Is Peter back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hades. I left ringing till now because I was sure that he would be. Do you think his being so long is a good sign?’

  ‘I simply don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, such wild celebrations there’ll be! You can remove poor Flora from that sink of a school and send her to some nice nuns.’

  ‘Tonight’s celebration,’ Anna said, ‘is the Loxford PCC meeting in the dining-room. The secretary, who also organizes the church flower rota, has just resigned in a huff because she says the Sunday school has taken over some shelves in the vestry flower-vase cupboard without asking, so I have to take the minutes.’

  ‘My poor darling. Shall I come down and bring a breath of life and urban decay?’

  Anna shifted so that her shoulder was comfortably propped against the wall.

  ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘Next weekend—’

  Luke dropped the sodden cloth back on to Flora’s music book.

  ‘Here’s Dad, I heard the car—’

  ‘Peter’s back,’ Anna said. ‘I must go. I’ll ring you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Laura said, ‘yes. He must have it, he must. Or it’s to hell in a handcart.’

  Anna put down the telephone and waited. Luke and Flora waited too, by the table. They heard Peter slam the car door, then pull down the groaning metal garage door, then approach the house along the path of concrete slabs which were lethally glazed all year round with slippery green. He opened the kitchen door and came in and shut it before he turned to face them. He looked wholly unhappy.

  ‘It seems—’ he said, and then he stopped. ‘It seems I am not to be Archdeacon of Woodborough. The next Archdeacon of Woodborough is to be someone from the north, someone called Daniel Byrne.’

  Chapter Two

  Kneeling in the Rectory pew of Loxford church, Anna watched Peter preparing deftly for communion. He looked tired, in the bruised way that people who are physically slight do look tired, but not so much so that any of the congregation would notice. Anna was inclined to think that most of them would only notice if he looked disgustingly well, when they could say suspiciously to one another, The Rector looks all right, doesn’t he, wonder what he’s been up to? The rest of the time, they were not disposed to look at Peter as a human being, but only as a rector, a creature of whom standards of motive and conduct were expected that they did not expect of themselves. Anna’s one great clerical friend, a woman deacon in Woodborough, said that it was being a village congregation. ‘Towns are much more forgiving. Villages are crippled by people who can’t bear to have the veil torn from their fantasy of idyllic retirement.’

  Poor Peter. If anyone was crippled just now, it was Peter, by disappointment. In the three days since his interview with the Bishop he had scarcely been able to speak for the bitterness of his blighted hopes. He had lain wakeful beside Anna in the bed that had not been quite wide enough for twenty years and felt himself to be all at once boiling with misery and quite immobilized by it. A change of parish, the Bishop had suggested, a spell of team ministry, perhaps. He had not said, Frankly, Peter, you are not up to being Archdeacon, he had instead emphasized the need for someone from outside the diocese, for someone with ecumenical experience in urban work, for someone accustomed to ministerial care. Burble, burble. Peter lay in the dark and hated the Bishop. It was the only small luxury he could discover. He had telephoned the present Archdeacon of Woodborough, a valued friend, the friend who had indeed suggested and supported his application, and he had said that he simply did not know why Peter had been turned down, he had no idea. He was so sorry, he said, so very sorry. But then, he was going on to be a suffragan bishop in East Anglia and his sorrow and his support would go with him.

  ‘I’m not moving,’ Peter said to the Bishop. ‘I’m not leaving Loxford.’

  The Bishop waited.

  ‘I am Rural Dean, after all,’ Peter said, with a small defiance.

  ‘Indeed you are.’

  Peter looked round the Bishop’s study which was entirely lined with books. An academic, Peter thought with angry scorn. An academic! He’s never even had a parish.

  The Bishop, reading Peter’s thoughts, would have liked to have’put his arms around him, would have liked to have said, I cannot make you Archdeacon because you have insufficient judgement and experience, but you are a good priest, a conscientious priest, and I am wretched to disappoint you. Instead, he said gently, ‘When you have thought it over, you must come straight to me if you would like a change.’

  ‘I won’t change,’ Peter said.

  The Bishop’s wife had shown him out tenderly, as if he were ill. He imagined them putting the kettle on afterwards, making tea, saying, Oh dear, what an unfortunate business, so glad it’s over. They did indeed put the kettle on, but then the Bishop took it off again and said he needed a drink more, oh, that poor fellow; and his wife said, ‘And his poor wife.’

  ‘It would have doubled his stipend,’ the Bishop said, looking sadly at the remaining inch in the gin bottle.

  ‘Don’t,’ said his wife. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘And will he never go further?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’d share your gin,’ the Bishop’s wife said, ‘except that it would make me further inclined to cry.’

  Anna had not cried. It had all gone too deep for crying. She rather thought Luke had cried and Charlotte certainly did, on the telephone from Edinburgh. Peter did not think Anna should have told the children anything about it, but she was not, as she frequently said to him, that kind of mother. She hoped she had given Peter the chance to cry, if he had wanted to, but he had not taken it. Flora had roared, without knowing why, just knowing something was violently the matter. Anna had said to God, while she dug her prolific vegetable patch, ‘I think You are a toad.’ Now, kneeling on one of the Jubilee Year hassocks organ
ized by the county Women’s Institute, she was not inclined to think differently. She looked at Peter’s back – she had not, she observed, done a perfect job this week on ironing his surplice and old Miss Dunstable, who was Mistress of the Robes at the Cathedral, but lived in Loxford, would both notice this, and point it out – and wondered what would become of him. Not in a career sense, because the leaden weight that lay on her heart told her that his career was now Loxford with Quindale, Church End, New End and Snead until relieved by the trumpets of Doomsday, but as a person. He would be changed by this; he couldn’t avoid that. Even the gradual assimilation of his disappointment would leave scars and blights, like a landscape after fire. What a thing to do, Anna accused God, what a thing to do to someone who serves You. God said nothing. He held Himself aloof. Anna looked at Peter again and said to herself in a guilty whisper, ‘Will he become even more difficult?’

  She wondered if a stranger could tell that he was difficult, just by looking at him. Would such a person, watching Peter now, reading the prayers of Rite B in his level, pleasant voice, notice that resentment lay, like his blood, just under his skin, because the life he had chosen had not turned out as he had expected it to? Anxiously, Anna had sometimes wondered if Peter had lost his faith. As for herself, she was uncertain she had ever had any, and yet, for all that, she sometimes joyfully felt that she knew what it was about. She had tried to explain this fleeting instinctive comprehension to Peter, but he had said, ‘I think you are confusing faith with emotion,’ so she had not tried again. Peter had grown afraid of emotion; he considered it messy stuff that could lead one into a fatal labyrinth of self-forgetfulness. He had once said to Anna, in a touching burst of confidence, ‘You know what’s the matter with me? I’m just clever enough, and no more.’

  Those limitations had been a great attraction to Anna, when they first met. The only child of parents whose steady outrageousness was only charming to outsiders – oh, the luck, Anna used to think as a child, oh, the sublime luck of being an outsider! – Anna, at university, sought out friends who seemed to be defiantly normal. Even the dullness of her room in a hall of residence possessed, for her first year at least, a kind of charm. Reality, in the form of banality, seemed very precious to Anna, a token of having stepped out of a nightmare into the sanity of the waking world. This overreaction was not to last, but, while it was still strong upon Anna, while she briefly favoured neat cardigans and regular library hours and institutional meals, she chanced upon Peter Bouverie.