The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  They put a chain on the front door and bolts on the ground-floor windows. Anna only went to her meetings if she was accompanied, and never after dark because she trusted no-one else to guard the children. One Guy Fawkes’ night, she found the children’s bedroom window shattered and a half-brick on the floor, so Peter tacked chicken wire across the frame inside. Anna was so frightened she grew furiously angry with Peter and screamed at him and accused him of putting God before herself and the children. He said, ‘I am doing what I have to do.’ Incoherent with rage and terror, she threw a dictionary at him and caught his temple. He bled copiously and went about the parish for a week adorned with a large piece of sticking plaster, like a clown. But he emptied the house of its demanding lodgers, some of whom subsequently abused him when they saw him in the Street. In the eyes of the more docile he read their unsurprised acceptance of the fact that even God would not help them. He wondered sadly aloud to Anna whether experience could finally make one more robust. Anna, worn through to her nerve ends, said she thought one would probably drop dead before one ever knew. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Anna put her hands over her face. ‘Please don’t be. I haven’t the strength left to comfort you.’

  One day, taking the children into central Birmingham, Anna saw from the bus window the name of the language school she had taught at, in Oxford, on a board outside a small office block. She got off the bus at the next stop, and went back to the building, pushing the children in a collapsible pushchair, which had a propensity only to collapse when occupied. Yes, it was the same school, just another branch. Yes, there was a vacancy for part-time work. Yes, Anna might apply for interview. Anna went home via St Andrew’s Church, where she apologized to God and then thanked Him. She then went home – there was a man asleep on the doorstep whom she took care not to waken – and apologized to Peter. He said, ‘It’s hard, isn’t it? I never knew it would be so hard.’ They held each other soberly, and Anna noticed he was as thin as a ruler, all bone.

  He’s too thin now, Anna thought, kneeling in Loxford. St Andrew’s nearly killed both of us, in various ways, but Peter couldn’t say so. He had asked to be tested. Now, in a way, he has asked to be rewarded. He failed the test and the reward has gone to someone else and it is not, Anna said fiercely to herself, pressing her palms to her closed eyes, it is not fair that he should never know what he cannot do, that he should always set himself targets he can’t achieve, that he should never be allowed to progress.

  Around her the congregation rustled to its feet, indicating that she should go up to the communion rail first, as was fitting, as was customary. Peter did not look at her as she walked towards him up the chancel: he stood waiting, holding the paten, the first moonlike communion wafer ready between finger and thumb. She knelt in front of him and raised her crossed hands. There is no gaiety in Peter, she thought, bending her face to the wafer, no real pleasure in living, just an anxious shrinking from everything except duty; obligation has become his Rule, he clings to it, it stops him drowning. The communion wafer glued itself to the roof of her mouth. She pressed it with her tongue, as she had pressed hundreds, thousands now, over twenty years’ worth of these papery discs stamped with crosses, made by nuns. I take communion too often, Anna thought, I take it to show the flag, Peter’s flag, and I never think what I am doing.

  ‘The Blood of Christ,’ Peter said softly, stooping to her with the chalice. She took it in both hands. She loved the chalice, made in 1652, used in Loxford church for over three hundred years. She took a sip of wine, sweet and strong. Peter, with a square of folded white linen, laundered by Anna among all the Rectory sheets and pillowcases, wiped the place on the chalice that her lips had touched, and moved on.

  Chapter Three

  Miss Dunstable decided to say nothing about the Rector’s imperfectly ironed surplice. She decided this on Monday afternoon, having seen Anna digging manfully in the vegetable garden she had made behind the Rectory. The apple trees beside it, to Miss Dunstable’s eye, also looked properly pruned. Miss Dunstable surveyed this evidence of – to her mind – most proper domestic industry, from a hundred yards away, on the footpath to her favourite walk, and made up her mind on the side of tolerance. So firmly did she make it up that she even waved her stout walking stick in the air, and hallooed at Anna.

  Anna straightened up, looked round, and hallooed faintly back. Triumphant and satisfied, Miss Dunstable marched away. Anna returned to the task of removing the last, fibrous, old leeks of winter which would make, oh groan, yet more soup. She was proud of her ability to make things grow, a new skill, developed at Loxford, but a garden was a tyrant as well as a satisfaction, and this garden was regarded by her family as very much her business. Luke would mow, or sweep leaves, very occasionally, but with the air of one earning himself exemption from such tasks for months to come. Flora was only a nuisance, stopping after seconds of weeding to write her name in pebbles on the lawn (all ready for the tender teeth of the mower blades) or float daisy heads in a puddle, and Peter was never so galvanized by holy necessity calling from the far side of the parish as when the garden was mentioned. Anna thought he did not much notice the country, earth, growing things; but then he had not observed city things much, either.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Isobel Thompson said.

  She had rung the doorbell, but as no-one had come she had walked round the house to the garden. She wore a fawn mackintosh and a scarf patterned with neat flowers. Straightening up for a second time, Anna thought Isobel looked more like a librarian than a deacon. Was one of the problems with the public perception of women deacons the fact that they did, often, look so like librarians?

  ‘Peter,’ Anna said.

  Isobel stepped on to the earth, and kissed her. ‘That’s why I’ve come.’

  ‘It’s really nice of you, but if you say one word about the Will of God, I shall hit you with my fork.’

  Isobel said, ‘Would you like me to dig too, or will you stop and make me a cup of coffee?’

  ‘You can’t dig,’ Anna said. ‘Not with your little white deacon’s hands. And you’ve got trim little parish shoes on.’

  Isobel Thompson took off her scarf and ruffled her grey curls. ‘Goodness me. You are cross.’

  ‘I’m angry. And miserable. Peter deserves better.’

  ‘Shall I go away?’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  Isobel said, ‘I don’t expect Peter minds as much as you do.’

  ‘Why? Because of his vocation?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Anna stuck her fork in the earth and scraped mud off her boots against it. ‘I think you overestimate vocation.’

  ‘How is Flora?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  ‘And Luke?’

  ‘He wants to travel, this summer. Some friends have clubbed together to buy an old van and they think they are going to drive to India. I don’t blame him, but we can’t help him. I wouldn’t mind driving to India.’

  They began to walk back towards the house. Isobel put her hand on Anna’s arm.

  ‘I’m sorrier than I can say. Truly I am. But might it not draw you and Peter together?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Anna,’ Isobel said pleadingly, ‘Anna, don’t so set your face against things—’

  Anna whirled round.

  ‘My face! My face is set against nothing! It’s the damned Church, Isobel, that’s what it is! Slammed doors, refusals, hierarchy, muddle, divisions, loneliness. I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of seeing what it’s doing to Peter—’ She stopped and took a breath. ‘It’s a prison, you see,’ she said in a calmer voice. ‘It may not be spiritually so, if you are lucky, but socially it is a prison. I can’t be myself. I can’t be an individual, only someone relative to Peter, to the parish, to the Church. I’m forty-two and I don’t expect I ever will be myself now. The parish has become the other woman in my life – our lives – I don’t blame Peter for that, he has to believe in its importance in order not to feel he has
wasted everything. I expect that for other clergy wives whose husbands are less disappointed than Peter God is the other woman. Do you understand me? Are you listening?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Isobel said sadly.

  They had reached the back door and the muddle of trugs and boot scrapers and milk-bottle crates that lay outside it.

  ‘Of course I’m not tidy,’ Anna said, following Isobel’s gaze, ‘of course I can’t be. I’d go mad if I had to be tidy as well as everything else. Come in and I’ll make you coffee.’ She paused and opened the door. ‘Actually, I think I shall go mad. It seems to me the only thing to do.’

  When Isobel had gone – dear, patient, wise Isobel whom she loved and to whom she was often so unreasonable – Anna ran water into the empty coffee mugs and stood them in the sink. It was two o’clock. There was time to start on the parish magazines before the school bus came, a job which had reverted to Peter because he was not good at asking people to do things he did not like doing himself. So Anna did it, on foot, delivering the magazines to the twenty-seven households in Loxford who took it, chiefly, Anna suspected, for the useful directory on the back page of plumbers and decorators and taxi services. They also liked it – as did the other villages – for the spiteful inter-village competitiveness that lay under the seemingly innocent accounts of the Snead Women’s Institute going on an Easter outing to Weston-super-Mare, while the Quindale branch could only muster a local dried-flower expert whose crisp and solid arrangements, adorned with bows of florist’s ribbon, they could all have recognized in their sleep. There was also the monthly parish draw – top prize, £5 – a ‘Children’s Corner’ (rabbits and a cross to colour in this month) and Peter’s ‘Letter from the Rector’, which Anna had given up reading because she could not recognize the man in the message. ‘Is it a myth that the Church is just for Sundays?’ he had written. Exchanging her shoes once more for Wellington boots, Anna wondered if he found such phrases in a ‘How to . . .’ book.

  She carried the magazines in a plastic bag from Pricewell’s, the supermarket in Woodborough. It was the combination of the carrier bag and the boots and the voluminous purple cloak that had been a present from Laura that attracted the attention of the man at the first-floor windows of Loxford Old Rectory, the man who had decided to buy it.

  Patrick O’Sullivan, whose Daimler stood at the elegant, twin-leaved front door below, turned to the present owner of the house and said, ‘Who is that?’

  Susie Smallwood peered out under the festoon blind. As was usual with Susie, she was being uprooted by her restless husband the moment the last blind was in place, this time to Oxfordshire. She didn’t particularly mind leaving Loxford. At least the new house was close to the M40 and thus to London. She said, ‘Oh, that’s the Rector’s wife.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Susie turned away from the window. ‘She always dresses like that. Causes a lot of talk. Her mother’s an actress.’

  Patrick O’Sullivan went on watching as Anna walked along the lane.

  ‘What is the Rector like?’

  Susie had never been to church.

  ‘He seems all right. Bit dreary.’ She sighed. ‘Do you want to see the main bedroom again?’

  Anna walked on, swinging her bag. It was a dead time of day in Loxford, with only a handful of people out in their gardens – she would have to have the usual shouted conversation with Mr Biddle among his brassica stumps, and a whispered one with Mrs Eddoes, who treated life as a giant conspiracy – and nobody in the shop or on the green. She always began her delivery among the less picturesque groups of cottages on the south side of the green. These cottage front doors were never used – some even had rows of flowerpots across the sill as a deterrent – and Anna had to go round to the back to find a resting place for the magazine. There was no sentimentality about these cottages. Their back doors were protected by makeshift porches of ribbed plastic, and the gardens grew as many derelict motor bikes as they did dahlias and cabbages. Only the windows had been modernized, with the old, many-paned windows replaced with blank sheets of glass through which Anna could see the inhabitants, burrowed deep in the comfortable fusty layers of their living-rooms, mindlessly absorbed in the relentless quacking of the television set. These were the people, Anna thought affectionately, who knew the rules of village living, as of old. She wedged their magazines between old paint tins and imperfectly washed milk bottles and towers of flowerpots, and crept away.

  The north side of the green was another matter. The prettier cottages here faced south, and were divided from the green by a stream which necessitated a little stone bridge to every garden gate. Here the Vinsons lived, and the Partingtons, and the Dodswells, all newcomers to country life who had decided ideas, gleaned chiefly from magazines as to how to live it. Their cottages had scarcely survived their attentions. It gave Anna real pain to post magazines through one new front door hinged and studded so as to resemble part of the set for a pantomime of Robin Hood, and then another, moulded and classically pedimented, between half-pilasters made of fibreglass. The third had a goblin lantern, and stone frogs cemented (for fear of theft) to the little bridge and the nameplate which read ‘The Nook’. Yet Elaine Dodswell, who inhabited The Nook, produced the annual Sunday-school Christmas Play, and organized the parish hospital-run for those visits to out-patients’ departments at Woodborough so cherished by three-quarters of the population. ‘You,’ said Anna to herself, squeezing a magazine into The Nook’s small and fancy wrought-iron mouth, ‘are a snob. God is not a snoh. God values Elaine Dodswell because she does what she does with a good grace. Which is more, my girl, than can be said for some.’

  The Nook’s door opened.

  ‘I’m so glad to catch you,’ Elaine Dodswell said. She wore a tracksuit and an expression of deep sympathy. ‘I heard. I just heard. I’m ever so sorry for you both but of course I’m ever so relieved. We don’t want to lose you.’

  Anna stared.

  ‘Colin heard in Woodborough. In the pub, he said. The Coach and Horses.’

  Anna leaned weakly against the varnished door jamb.

  ‘Nothing’s private, is it? You can’t breathe in a village—’

  ‘Come in,’ Elaine said. ‘Come in and have a coffee.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got eighteen more houses before the school bus. But thank you.’

  ‘Is Peter ever so upset?’ Elaine asked cosily.

  ‘Oh no,’ Anna said, ‘I think he’s relieved. He was advised, you know, but he loves it here.’ She stood upright again. ‘It would have been an awful wrench.’

  Elaine nodded.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure it would. I’ll tell Colin, then.’ She began to push the door to. ‘He’ll be ever so glad. We were so worried, that Peter’d mind.’

  The door closed and then Elaine pulled the magazine in, from inside, causing the letter box to snap shut smartly. Anna made a face at it before she turned away. Damn, damn, damn. No face to save, no place to hide. She crossed the bridge between the frogs and set off for the far end of the green, where the lane led up into the council estate. As she turned uphill, a dark-red Daimler slid by, and blew its horn at her. She stood and stared after it.

  ‘It’s the new chap!’ Mr Biddle bellowed from his potato bed across the green. ‘It’s the chap that’s bought the Old Rectory.’

  Anna waved in acknowledgement Poor Susie Smallwood, she had always said to herself, poor Susie, with her discontented little face and her sports car and her Rolex watch; but now enviable Susie who could, and would, albeit with a show of petulance, leave Loxford and begin again.

  ‘’E give four ‘undred thousand!’ Mr Biddle shouted. ‘Bloody crackpot!’

  Anna turned away from the green and climbed the hill towards the council houses, in whose gardens interminable lines of washing were guarded by yellow-eyed German shepherd dogs. She could not help reflecting, as she pushed a magazine into the first letter box, that a world in which Daimler drivers could pay four hundred thousand pounds for a country
house while she could not even muster a couple of hundred for Luke’s modest share of an old transit van had a certain imbalance to it.

  The school bus was late, so Anna was on time. Someone said to her, ‘Made it all right today, then, Mrs B?’ and she said, ‘I know. It’s a bit of an achievement, isn’t it?’ and bravely smiled. They had watched her, in the council estate, they knew what she had been doing. They were not unkind people, not mean-minded, but it would never have occurred to them to offer to help. The parish magazines were Church business: Anna was the Rector’s wife.

  When the school bus pulled up, there was the usual avalanche of nine children, and then a pause. It was quite a long pause. Anna moved towards the bus steps and saw the driver looking behind him down the length of the bus, waiting. After several seconds, Flora came, as slow as a snail, bumping her bags down the steps, head bent.

  ‘Flora,’ Anna said. ‘Darling—’

  Flora raised her head a little. Her face was blotched and swollen with crying.

  ‘Oh Flora,’ Anna said, holding out her arms.

  Flora stopped in front of her, and leaned tiredly against her, still holding her bags. The village mothers and children watched in uneasy silence. Flora said something. Anna could not hear it. ‘What?’ she said, stooping.

  Flora whispered, ‘I can’t bear it any more.’

  Holding her, Anna looked up at the others. They began to shift and move away. One of them, taking the lead, said loudly, ‘It’s a shame. Poor kid. You want to tell the headmaster, Mrs B. That’s what you want to do.’