The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  She liked his name. She liked his quiet manner, his bookish looks, his thin hands emerging from the voluminous sleeves of jerseys knitted for him by his mother who plainly, in her mind’s eye, saw him as a strapping youth of six foot two. He was reading theology, a subject which seemed to Anna both mysterious and sophisticated. He too was an only child, the son of a widow: his father had died of cancer when he was seven. Mr Bouverie was a solicitor, Peter said, but he had wanted to be a priest, had intended to try for ordination if cancer had not prevented it. His mother was called Kitty. He showed Anna photographs. Kitty Bouverie looked like an eager little lap dog, bright eyes hopeful under a curly fringe. ‘My father adored her,’ Peter said.

  He made it plain, quite quickly, that he was poised to adore Anna. She rather liked it, not least because it was wonderful to have someone of her own, someone she could talk to. One of Peter’s best qualities was his ability to listen. Anna told him about her childhood, about the house in West Kensington that resembled a gigantic, filthy theatrical props cupboard, smelling of face powder and cats and old ashtrays, where a five-foot plaster saint, dumped on the drawing-room sofa three years before, as a joke, by one of her mother’s lovers, had subsequently never been moved. The same lover had made palm trees out of Edwardian ostrich feathers and tied them to all the newel posts of the four-storey staircase. They were thick with dust, Anna said, but they too would never be removed. Peter said, ‘My mother has never had a lover. I don’t think she is interested in men now. I think there was only ever my father, for her.’

  ‘But your father wasn’t queer,’ Anna said.

  Peter, who was drinking coffee, stopped drinking. ‘Is yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said loudly, full of pride and shame.

  Peter looked at her speculatively.

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘Oh, he can do it with women,’ Anna said. ‘He’d just rather do it with men. So the house is always full of men. Men for my father and men for my mother.’ She was suddenly overcome by the drama of her situation. ‘Don’t sit there like a stuffed owl!’ she shouted at Peter. ‘Say something! Do something!’

  He put his arms round her. Then he kissed her. After a while he took off her cardigan and his jersey and then the rest of their clothes, and made love to her on the folk-weave bedspread of her university bed. Anna did not say that she was not a virgin, that she had been to bed with two of the men in West Kensington and had been, at seventeen, much inclined to suppose herself in love with one of them. She liked Peter’s smooth, clean skin, and his childhood-smelling hair, and the way he gazed at her with huge eyes without his glasses.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ Peter Bouverie had said to Anna then. ‘We’ll do things together.’

  He had wrapped her in a blanket off her bed and made her more coffee. ‘Which saint is it,’ he had said, ‘the one on the drawing-room sofa?’ And his question, making Anna laugh, drawing off the poison, sealed the success of his courtship of her.

  Anna’s mother loved him. She treated him as a malnourished curiosity, swooping down on him with tender cluckings, and seductive titbits – a crab claw, a lychee, a chocolate truffle – asking him to describe God, or Heaven, or sin, treating him as a confessional, trying to dress him up as a cardinal, showing him off to her friends. To Anna’s amazement, Peter did not mind. He did not seem to like it very much either, but he was perfectly good-natured and only jibbed at the dressing up. He even showed a quiet courage.

  ‘Say it,’ Laura Marchant demanded of him. ‘Go on, little padre, say it. Say this is the most toweringly revolting house in all Christendom. Don’t just sit there and ooze the thought at me. Say it!’

  ‘It’s so disgusting,’ Peter said calmly, ‘that I’d rather not have meals here, and sometimes I have to put my shirt on my pillow.’

  Laura adored that. She embraced him in a clash of bracelets and beads. He then, with equal calm, cleaned part of the kitchen. ‘For Anna and me to use,’ he said. Anna’s father, an actor of no great distinction, said to Peter, ‘Marry me. Marry me at once. you are wasted not being a wife.’

  Peter made Anna, for the first time in her life, fond of home. Lifelong bogeys became jokes; the long tunnel of what had always seemed to her exaggerated behaviour and elaborate unorthodoxy had a light at the end of it, the light of a life with Peter. She was certain his faith would be infectious; that, like maternal love being born fiercely with the baby, her belief would spring to life with marriage. Her future mother-in-law, peering worriedly at her, said, ‘You’re sure you can cope with God? I mean, He’s very full-time.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Anna said, not understanding.

  ‘You know best,’ Kitty Bouverie said, fidgeting the flowers she was arranging. ‘You know your own mind, a clever girl like you. But between you and me, I’m not sure I could have managed. With God, I mean. Perhaps it’s a blessing—’ She broke off. ‘There now. All that messing about and I’ve broken a lily.’

  Little Kittykins, Laura called her. Anna’s father called her Madame Bovary. She perched in the drawing-room beside the recumbent saint. ‘Completely flat-chested, you see,’ Anna’s father said, indicating the saint, and offering a jaggedly opened tin of caviar and a kitchen spoon. ‘So she must be St Agatha. Breasts sliced off—’ he held out a glistening spoonful; Kitty blenched – ‘for refusing to submit to the lustful wishes of one Quintian. Eat up, Madame Bovary, eat up.’ He licked his lips.

  Kitty said, in her little voice, ‘I’m afraid I can’t bear caviar.’

  Joyfully, the Marchants elected Kitty to the same category of quaint but endearing knick-knack which they had devised for her son. Like Peter, Kitty did not seem to mind. ‘Your mother,’ she said to Anna, ‘thinks you are so clever to have found us.’

  Anna said hastily, ‘She doesn’t mean to be patronizing.’

  ‘Of course not!’ said Kitty in surprise. ‘She is so kind.’

  Anna stared.

  ‘And brave,’ said Kitty, taking out her needlepoint.

  ‘Brave?’

  Kitty unwound skeins of pink and beige wool.

  ‘Brave. I’m not brave, so I always spot it in others.’

  A fortnight before Anna and Peter were married, Anna’s father was knocked down in the Fulham Road at two in the morning by a van driving without headlights. His companion managed to drag him into St Stephen’s Hospital, where he died within the hour. Anna, neither knowing what she felt, nor what she would like to feel, went to her mother expecting to find Laura in a similar confusion of relief and distress, and treating her loss as occasion for a fine theatrical flourish.

  But Laura was sad; deeply, quietly sad. She sat in the dishevelled shabby glamour of her bedroom and stared out of the window for hours at a time. Gently, Anna tried to suggest that a life free of an ageing queen had a great deal to recommend it. Laura said simply, in reply, ‘But I loved him.’

  Anna said, ‘How—’ and stopped.

  ‘If I had not loved him, I should have left him,’ Laura said. ‘But I did love him. And he loved me. He loved me more than anyone.’

  In consequence of his death the wedding was very quiet. ‘Barely audible, Kittykins,’ Laura confided, putting on a brave show of a scarlet hat and a velvet coat stamped with heraldic signs in gold. Kitty wore powder-blue. Anna wore a short cream dress, from which her long legs emerged, seemingly, for ever.

  After the service, Peter said, ‘I wish we hadn’t slept together. I wish tonight was the first night.’

  ‘Are you being romantic or religious?’ Anna asked, wanting to know.

  He looked at her. ‘You should know me better than to have to ask that.’

  They had a peculiar little wedding breakfast in West Kensington. St Agatha was lifted from the sofa and stationed at the window in a bridal veil, to the electrification of passers-by. They sat, with some of the lovers, and with Peter’s startled Uncle Roland, at an improvised round table draped in shawls, and ate seafood and drank Guinness and champagne. Anna felt, with a sudden pai
n, huge affection forher mother, for the house of her childhood, at last for her dead father. She looked at Peter, gravely answering the teasing of one of the lovers, and wondered if what she felt for him was the same quality of feeling that her parents had known and relied upon. Then Kitty kissed her, and gave her a pearl brooch, shaped like a lily of the valley, which had been her mother’s and they climbed into Peter’s Morris Minor and drove away to Wales, for a honeymoon. They stayed in a pub, near Penmaen Pool, and walked for miles and miles each day. They only had a week. On the last day, Peter bought Anna a Welsh wool shawl she had craved, striped like the summer sea, and, when they packed to go home, she deliberately left all her cardigans behind, in the rickety chest of drawers of the pub bedroom.

  At theological college, near Oxford, the docility of most of the wives of other students irritated Anna. She said to Peter, ‘I won’t be, in inverted commas, a “clergy wife”.’ She said sometimes to the other students’ wives, ‘I married the man, not the job.’ Only the older ones, the ones whose husbands had been engineers and farmers and management consultants fiijst, agreed with her. They often looked very strained to Anna, as if they were holding on to their loyalty for dear life. Loyalty was not yet a problem for Anna. She worked in a language school in Oxford, and returned home at night with coffee and flowers from the covered market, and a fine little air of independence. Peter admired her for it; he liked the way she stood out from the other wives. She made a friend at the language school, a fellow teacher called Eleanor Ramsay, who was married to a young don and wished to be a writer. In turn, Eleanor introduced her to someone else, a young woman named Mary Hammond-Heath, who had been at Oxford with Eleanor, and who was not much interested in being married. She had read law as an undergraduate and was now reading for the Bar. She came home to Oxford at weekends, and she and Eleanor and Anna spent Saturdays together, and often the husbands joined them for supper. Peter called Mary and Eleanor The Friends. They were Anna’s first women friends of significance.

  When Peter was made curate in a northern suburb of Bristol, Anna celebrated the event by becoming pregnant. Eleanor Ramsay did not become pregnant until three years later. Anna and Peter had a small, yellow terraced house with a garden, and Anna worked part-time as a clerk in the almoner’s office of a nearby hospital; the Ramsays had only a flat, off Norham Gardens in Oxford, and even less money than the Bouveries because they were supporting Eleanor’s widowed mother-in-law, who had senile dementia. Mary Hammond-Heath, still not a qualified barrister, lived in a room in a house in Clapham, and came to see the Bouveries on the long-distance bus, because it was cheaper. They none of them had much money, but the Bouveries had a house, for which they did not have to pay rent. It was also a pleasant parish, and the vicar’s wife was very kind to Anna and shielded her from exploitation.

  ‘She is so young,’ she said to her husband. ‘And she’s such an appealing girl. I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s more than looks. It’s a kind of sparkle, and it would be such a shame to extinguish it with duty. She hasn’t had time to have any freedom yet.’

  That brief curacy was to be the best of her freedom. When Charlotte was born, Anna stopped working. The parish was very interested in Charlotte, and supportive, but Anna could no longer be independent. Her baby and the parish, like water flooding slowly across lowlying land, began to claim her, as did a new and unwelcome preoccupation with money. Without her earnings, and with the addition of Charlotte, money seemed to have dwindled to nothing. Anna was twenty-three.

  It was the first occasion in her life that she had had to take stock of it. She had no idea whether she was early or late in doing so, and was inclined to chastise herself for self-indulgence. She wrote a long and intimate letter to Eleanor describing her state of mind and her new and disturbing sense of isolation, but Eleanor was working on the first draft of her first novel, and replied at length but not to the point. The lives of her characters were more preoccupying to her than Anna’s life. Anna read the letter with incomprehension, then put Charlotte into her secondhand pram – donated by the Young Wives’ Group – and went out for a long and significant walk.

  It was significant because during the course of it two things became very plain to Anna. The first was that, although several people recognized her and stopped her and peered into the pram saying ‘Ah’, to none of them could she have begun to say what was on her mind. In none of them, even in the young woman who was almost her age and who had a baby Peter had just christened, could she confide. They were friendly and nice, but she was the curate’s wife and somehow, therefore, in a separate category of human being. If she had entrusted one of them with her secret thoughts, made one of them into a particular friend, it would have created immediate parochial difficulties, rifts and divisions and jealousies. There was, Anna saw with clarity, no possibility of intimate friendship within the parish, and never would be. Later, much later, when she had occasion to meet a policeman’s wife, a woman who had been beaten up by her husband for taking a lover on the nights he was on duty, the wife said to her, ‘Well, you ought to understand. You should know how lonely it is for us.’

  The second thing that struck her was on a different plane, but was another restriction. She was suddenly hungry, being young and having pushed Charlotte for several miles on a cold October afternoon, and longed for a bar of chocolate. She had braked the pram outside a newsagent and was just stooping to pick up Charlotte and take her inside for the chocolate, when she thought: I mustn’t. She had enough money with her and the chocolate wasn’t going to be expensive, but chocolate was not what her money – Peter’s money, their money – was for. She took her hands away from Charlotte and thought of the half-loaf at home. She must go back and eat that. She must get into the habit of using what she had, loaves instead of chocolate, herself instead of other people.

  She was not, at twenty-three, in the least cast down by either of these realizations. Pushing Charlotte home in the dusk, she felt rather exhilarated, as if she had made a discovery. It did not cross her mind – and would not, for several years – that Peter could not supply a complete companionship and that she would intermittently always yearn for metaphorical chocolate. When she got home, she answered an advertisement in the parish magazine for a baby minder (how simple; why had she not thought of it before – she was at home minding Charlotte anyway, so why not several more?) and offered herself to the Vicar’s wife for parish duties. The Vicar’s wife gave her the magazine to edit and type up.

  The moment she had settled to this, Peter was given his first parish, a little parish in a country town to the south of Bristol. The vicarage was half a huge Victorian house – once it had been the whole – and the parish was elderly and sedate. Within weeks, it became perfectly plain that the parish was in the inflexible grip of a powerful and intractable laity who would not let go. Peter, unable to bear such a pedestrian first appointment (he saw himself in those days as a fervent worker priest), chafed almost from their arrival. He badgered his local rural dean, wrote letters to the nearest archdeacon and then to the Bishop, complaining of his frustration and begging he might be relieved of it.

  Infected by his impatience, Anna grew restless too. There were no small industries around the town, so few working mothers, so no call for the baby minding she had grown accustomed to. There seemed to be nobody to teach, and the quiet, firm lay organizers of the parish were not about to allow a girl of twenty-four to interfere with the way things were done. They disliked having so young a couple in the vicarage and they made that plain. When Laura came to stay, and swept into church in an Easter bonnet of her own devising which quivered with artificial lilac, and laughed out loud at a tiny joke in Peter’s sermon, to encourage him, one of the churchwardens wrote to the Bishop.

  Bored and thwarted, Peter and Anna turned to one another. The result was Luke, born two weeks after Anna’s twenty-fifth birthday, and almost called Benedict, whose Rule Peter was then enthusiastically studying. They argued contentedly about which saint
emerged as the more attractive personality: St Benedict won on grounds of religious influence, St Luke on those of influence over secular life, because of his gospel. In the end, Anna won. Benedict Bouverie, she said, was affected in any case, because it alliterated. The day she brought Luke home from hospital Peter was offered a slum parish in another diocese, in Birmingham; sole charge, a mighty challenge. They celebrated in the cavernous vicarage kitchen with a shop pork pie and a bottle of local cider, both of which later gave five-day-old Luke colic.

  To The Friends, Anna’s life in a slum had radical chic. Eleanor’s husband had secured his first lectureship, and her first novel had been acclaimed in literary circles. They had bought their first house and were expecting their first baby. They drove to Birmingham occasionally and were deeply, seriously interested in the problems of such a parish as St Andrew’s. Mary Hammond-Heath had distinguished herself as junior to a QC in a fraud case that had made national headlines, and was inclined to regard the Bouveries’ life as an excellent test case for some of her theories. She had also become agnostic, and could see no sense in expecting a God to take the slightest interest in St Andrew’s. But she quoted the Bouveries in London, as the Ramsays quoted them in Oxford. Anna, knowing nothing of this, and battling to come to terms with the violence of her surroundings, while The Friends seemed to expand and achieve by the month, succumbed every so often to the demon envy.

  It was also evident that St Andrew’s was almost too much for Peter, even from the beginning. He took everything too seriously, and was apt to shoulder all burdens, all responsibilities, to initiate too many schemes for battered women, delinquent children, alcoholics, drug abusers, prostitutes, the old and the destitute. Anna, determined not to be able to reproach herself for not trying, took on the women and children. There was no peace. The kitchen and the one spare bedroom were constantly, noisily occupied, the doorbell rang at all hours, and once, answering it, a man she had never seen struck her on the side of the head with an empty bottle and told her to leave his wife alone.