‘I’ve got a deanery meeting,’ Peter said.
He stood in the kitchen, half into his depressing mackintosh.
‘Will you be late?’
‘Nine-ish—’
‘On the way to your meeting,’ Anna said, piling supper plates, ‘would you think about Flora?’
Peter shrugged on his second sleeve and began to button himself up, collar neat, belt buckled.
‘Please—’ Anna said in exasperation. ‘Please.’
‘What?’
‘Must you do yourself up so – so trimly? Must you look so utterly suburban?’
‘I am suburban.’
‘Flora,’ Anna said. ‘Just think about Flora.’
‘I was. It was you—’
‘I know. I know, I’m sorry. I’m on edge because of Flora.’
Peter finished buttoning and buckling.
‘What do you suggest we do?’
‘Take her away from Woodborough Junior and send her to St Saviour’s.’
‘But that’s Catholic!’
‘Same God.’
‘No,’ Peter said.
‘So bullying is better?’
‘Why St Saviour’s?’
‘Because it’s the cheapest private alternative in Woodborough.’
‘How cheap?’ Peter said.
‘Six hundred pounds a term.’
He let out a yelp. ‘Six hundred!’
‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘Kind nuns. Small classes.’
Peter seized the black document-wallet he always took to meetings. ‘You must be mad. Where can we find six hundred pounds three times a year?’
‘Borrow it,’ Anna said, beside herself, not caring if the remark were a red rag to a bull.
Peter gasped. He glared at her, wrestling with himself, then he went out to the garage, banging the kitchen door behind him.
The telephone rang at once.
‘Anna?’
‘Yes—’
‘Anna, it’s Celia Hooper here. Just rang to remind Peter—’
‘He’s gone. Just left.’
‘Oh good. Splendid. Just rang to make sure. You know.’
Celia Hooper, secretary to the Deanery Synod, one of what Anna thought of as Peter’s groupies.
‘Thank you, Celia.’
‘Not at all. Must fly. Bye!’
If we haven’t got the money, Anna thought, putting the telephone down, and we can’t borrow it, we must make it. She visualized more hours at her red lacquer table. Well, if needs must, they must. She considered telephoning Laura, and Kitty, both of whom were long on sympathy and short on cash – so strange that Peter’s orthodox solicitor father should have left his widow quite as poorly provided for as Anna’s unconventional one had left Laura – and decided that it would be unfair. What could they do, except be made miserable by impotence?
She went upstairs. Flora was lying on her bedroom floor doing her homework. Through the wall came the thump of rock music which was Luke’s required accompaniment to doing his.
‘Flora,’ Anna said.
Flora rolled over and peered up at her mother. She looked terribly tired. Anna sat on the edge of Flora’s bed. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I think you’ve had enough.’
Flora waited.
‘I don’t quite know how we’ll manage it,’ Anna said, ‘but we will, somehow. You won’t have to stay at Woodborough Junior much longer. I promise.’
‘St Saviour’s?’ Flora said. She had seen the nuns in Woodborough. They had appeared to her like grey gulls, mysterious and soothing.
‘Is that where you would like to go?’
Flora considered. Girls at St Saviour’s wore dark-green skirts and jerseys, not their own clothes.
‘Could we afford the uniform?’
‘I should think so. Secondhand, of course, but we’re used to that.’
Flora, suddenly flooded with relief, said stoutly, ‘But we always have new toothbrushes.’ She got up from the floor and sat on Anna’s knee. ‘Soon?’
‘I have to do a bit of planning. And talk to Sister Ignatia. You’ll just have to bear it for a little while longer.’
Flora leaned back and Anna put her arms around her.
‘Did you pray?’
‘No,’ Anna said.
‘I did. I expect Daddy did. If you had, I might have gone to St Saviour’s last term.’
‘It isn’t as simple as that.’
Flora wasn’t listening. She began to play with the string of amber glass beads round Anna’s neck (Oxfam Shop, Woodborough).
‘Perhaps I’ll have a best friend,’ Flora said.
Laura came down from London on the long-distance bus. She had never learned to drive and disliked the train because, she said, you were too low in a train to see properly. A coach was just right; like being on a very tall horse, or even an elephant. And nowadays coaches had lavatories and armchairs and dear little hostesses whom Laura liked to induce to tell her their life stories.
‘Do you know, Anna, my darling, that the poor child longed, only longed, to be a concert pianist but was literally forced by her ogrish father to nurse him while he died of drink and now her spirit is quite broken and all she can bring herself to do is dispense plastic cups of repellent coffee to OAPs going to Ferndown to see their married daughters?’
Laura travelled in style. She had a leather suitcase which bore the remains of labels from pre-war Oriental hotels, a hatbox and an immense carpet bag which sighed out little puffs of dust every time it was set on the ground. She also had a tattered travelling rug – ‘Purest cashmere, darling, just feel, adorable little goat’s tums’ – and a string bag full of books and apples. As the bus came to a halt in Woodborough bus station, Laura slid open the window and lowered her string bag down to her son-in-law.
‘Darling. Too thrilling. Take this, do. Reminds me of Port Said, and you’re a little bumboy in a boat.’
The travelling rug followed the string bag, and then the driver came round the bus to release Laura’s other luggage from the boot. She swept down the steps and embraced Peter warmly.
‘Oh my darling, I’ve wept for you. I can’t bear it.’
Leaning against her with an almost childish relief, Peter said, ‘I’m not at all sure I can.’
‘And Anna?’
‘What do you think?’ Peter said. ‘What else can she feel but utterly let down?’
‘Not by you.’
‘Oh,’ said Peter crossly, freeing himself and seizing Laura’s luggage. ‘Who else could it be but me?’
Laura opened her mouth to say, The Church, of course, and shut it again. Tact, as she often proudly said, was as alien to her as hygiene – ‘The sign of a bourgeois mind’ – but this was an occasion for affection above even a fine disregard for tact. If Peter were encouraged to despise and disbelieve the very authority he had given his life to, where would that leave him, but spinning in an abyss? So instead, Laura said, ‘She’s just desperate with disappointment for you.’
Peter, half hearing, said, ‘Oh, I’m desperate all right,’ and gave a little barking laugh, and set off across the bus station to the car park, grasping Laura’s luggage.
Dear heaven, Laura thought, trotting after him with her string bag and her blanket. Dear merciful heaven, is this what happens to a thwarted man of God? She cast her eyes skywards, muttering soft curses. A man, passing her, took one startled look and reflected anew what a very unwise policy was the current one of closing nineteenth-century asylums and turning the inmates loose into an alarmed and inadequate society.
By bedtime, Laura was exhausted. She lay in Charlotte’s bed and looked up at the ceiling that Charlotte had festooned with shawls and old curtains and Indian bedspreads (there was a definite small weight in one of those hammocks: what lay there? The body of a – mouse?) and considered the household now shut away around her in the spring darkness. They had all come to her, one by one, during the evening, an evening harried with telephone calls – ‘I don’t think,’ Anna had said at one point
, ‘that we have eaten an uninterrupted meal in twenty-one years’ – and they had all explained to her how awful they felt, and how guilty they felt about feeling awful, because it wasn’t anybody’s fault, and that made it worse, having nobody to blame.
‘I know Mum and Dad can’t help with the van,’ Luke said. ‘And I’d like to make the money myself, I mean, I could, easily, at the Quindale garage, but I haven’t time because of A levels and the others are all going at the beginning of July.’
Laura, thinking privately that she would telephone Kitty and propose £100 each (St Agatha must be worth something, silly to hang on to her for sentiment, even though she had now become something of a friend, someone waiting when Laura came home to what was, to be honest, a deeply, darkly dire apology for a decent flat), patted Luke and said, ‘Mmm.’
Luke said, ‘I don’t suppose you think it matters.’
She turned huge eyes on him. ‘But I do! I’m plotting.’
‘The thing is,’ Luke said, encouraged, ‘I don’t want to give Mum a lot of grief about it, but you do get hacked off with being patient, a bit.’
‘Wait!’ Laura held up a forefinger burdened with an enormous cameo ring. ‘Just wait! And trust!’
‘Sounds like a bloody dog,’ Luke said, grinning.
If Luke needed £200, Flora needed uniform. It had not crossed Flora’s mind that St Saviour’s might need payment for teaching her, only that her place there depended upon her ability to have the right uniform, all the uniform, down to the last sock garter and science overall.
‘They must be green,’ Flora said to her grandmother, ‘with my name here—’ she patted the left side of her nightie-clad chest – ‘in chain stitch. Mummy can’t do chain stitch.’
‘Immaterial,’ Laura said, gesturing. ‘Chain stitch, satin stitch, feather stitch, stump work, back stitch, smocking, tacking—’
‘Chain stitch,’ Flora said loudly. She had been in the habit of anxiety and tension for so long that she could not stop now, merely because the menace was being taken away. ‘Chain stitch, chain stitch,’ Flora cried, bursting into tears. ‘It has to be, I’ve seen one—’
Chain stitch, Laura thought, eyeing the weight in the ceiling cloth (had it moved?), chain stitch and £600 a term. She could only sell St Agatha once, and there was precious little left besides to sell.
‘I don’t mind more work,’ Anna said, ‘but I have to confess that my heart does rather quail and fail at the thought of three times as much French jacquard-weaving machinery specifications to translate as I have already.’
‘Defy the village,’ Laura said. ‘Take pupils! Teach French!’
Anna, sitting on the side of Laura’s bed wrapped in a bath towel, looked miserable.
‘If it was just defying the village I wouldn’t think twice. But if I defy the village – the parish – I automatically defy Peter. And truly I can’t do that to him now, on top of everything.’
‘I’ll think,’ Laura said, shutting her eyes. ‘I’ll cudgel my brains. Cudgel, cudgel.’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Anna said, standing up, ‘I’m not giving up. I’m just stuck. I can’t think what to do next, except the same things. The same old rather fruitless things.’
Me too, Laura thought. Whither now, at sixty-five, with an agent who sends me postcards from abroad as conscience sops, but never telephones because what work is there for such a one as I (or is it me)? And is it better to be poor Kittykins, in that dull ground-floor flat in the wrong part of Windsor, for whom life’s highlights have dwindled to pension day and nature programmes on the telly box? Gnash teeth, thought Laura, roll eyes, tear hair. She turned on her side so that, if the mouse on the ceiling began a stealthy movement, she would not see it. And then, as was her wont, she began to declaim ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to herself, to chant herself to sleep. ‘God in his mercy, lend her grace,’ she muttered, thinking of Anna, her Anna, who had grown from being such a dull child into a truly engaging woman, a woman so richly deserving of being lent a little of God’s grace. And why, why in hell’s name, didn’t He?
On Saturday morning, Peter went off to do his rounds of parish patients at Woodborough Hospital. Luke went with him, to see schoolfriends and to get out of Loxford. Flora sat in the kitchen, laboriously practising chain stitch on a rag torn from an old shirt of Peter’s, and Anna, who was in charge of the cleaning-rota, went off to the church to see if it actually had been cleaned. Being medieval, she thought it was unsuitable for the church to be visibly glittering, but, if the pews and the brass weren’t polished, it quickly looked sad and Anna did not like it to look sad. She had an affection for the building, as if it were a sturdy and uncomplaining beast that had stood and endured human volatility and neglect since 1320. It demanded very little and gave a good deal in return. When she was alone in it, she would, in affection and gratitude, pat the squat stone pillars that held up the nave roof. Laundering its altar linen and hoovering its aisle carpet often seemed like the instinctive care she gave to anything dependent of which she was fond. Today, only the altar candlesticks had been forgotten (it was Elaine Dodswell and Trish Pardoe’s week and they could at least be relied upon) so Anna gathered them up and took them home to polish. On the way back, she met Miss Dunstable with an armful of pussy willow intended for the church porch.
‘Action, action!’ cried Miss Dunstable, indicating the candlesticks. ‘Good for you! Only way!’
‘Only way to what?
‘Get anything done!’
‘I think,’ Anna said a minute later, setting down her brass burden on the kitchen table, ‘I think I have had a little revelation.’
‘An angel!’ Laura said.
‘A tweed one,’ Anna said, thinking of Miss Dunstable. ‘A tweed one in a mackintosh hat. Action, she said, action. I’ve got to act—’
Flora, whose notions of acting were confined to the village nativity play, tugged in puzzlement at her sweaty chain stitch.
‘As long as I do something outside the parish,’ Anna said, ‘does it matter what I do?’
‘Teach again—’
‘I can’t. My qualifications aren’t enough for state teaching, only for private language schools.’
Laura flung out her arms.
‘Does it matter? Petrol pumps, shop assistant, filing clerk, who cares?’
Anna looked at her.
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
Chapter Four
The administration manager at Pricewell’s seemed to Anna very young. He was slim and dark and he told her his name was Steve. (His office door – an office the size of a cupboard – had ‘Mr S. Mulgrove’ on it.) He said consolingly to Anna, ‘The lack of experience isn’t a problem. Most of our school leavers don’t have any experience.’
It had been an impulse, appealing to Mr S. Mulgrove. Anna had been suddenly struck as she pushed open Pricewell’s double glass doors, by the ‘Vacancy’ notice pasted to the inside of it. ‘General staff wanted,’ it said. ‘Full- and Part-time. Stock and checkout assistants. Apply the Administration Manager.’
‘May I take your name and address?’ Mr Mulgrove said. Anna gave it. He did not flinch when she said ‘the Rectory’. Perhaps he didn’t even realize what the implication of living in a rectory was.
‘I don’t mind what I do,’ Anna said.
He said delicately, ‘Stock involves quite a lot of ladder work, in the warehouse . . .’ as if Anna might not be up to such physical strenuousness.
‘I think I’d rather climb ladders than sit at a checkout.’
Mr Mulgrove rather wanted to say that her voice and appearance would be an asset on the checkout, good for Pricewell’s public image (a cause dear to his heart), but he was uncertain how to put this.
‘I wouldn’t like you to be in the wrong situation . . .’
Anna, emboldened by the energy of taking action, said, ‘Would I be paid more for one than the other?’
He shook his head.
‘What would I be paid?�
��
As Anna was the sort of person Mr Mulgrove associated with being a customer rather than a member of staff, he was suddenly embarrassed. He flicked, with much throat-clearing, through a plastic-sheeted folder.
‘Three twenty-one an hour.’
‘Three pounds and twenty-one pence—’
‘Yes.’
‘Heavens,’ Anna said. ‘You see, I need to make at least fifty pounds a week for thirty-six weeks a year.’
He could not look at her: he was overcome by her directness. He said, ‘That would mean twenty hours a week as a part-time assistant. Four hours a day for five days.’
There was a little pause.
‘You’re on,’ Anna said. She held her hand out to him. He took it doubtingly.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled at him. ‘Yes. It also means no Church and no village for twenty hours a week.’
He did not understand. He wondered if he were making a mistake. He said, ‘Of course, there has to be a three-month trial—’
‘Oh, of course.’
‘And you will have to work under supervision for the length of that period—’
‘Why do you think I might be difficult?’
Mr Mulgrove went scarlet. Give him a school leaver any day, or a nice, motherly woman going back to work once her children were grown-up, or an obliging pensioner, prepared to collect trolleys from the car parks . . .
‘I won’t be difficult,’ Anna said gently, to comfort him. ‘I need a job and I’d be really grateful if you would let me have one.’
He looked at her, for the first time. Why on earth did she need a job? What was she doing? Bravely he said, ‘You’re not having me on?’
‘No,’ Anna said, ‘no. My youngest child is being bullied at school and I want to send her to St Saviour’s. That’s all.’
Mr Mulgrove relaxed. His sister had been to St Saviour’s. He stood up.
‘If you’d like to come this way, Mrs Bouverie, I’ll show you the warehouse and the rest room.’ He held the door for her to squeeze past. ‘There’s a bonus scheme, of course,’ he said, ‘for good work. Some people get awarded it before the trial period is up. It would mean an extra ten pence an hour.’
The Rector's Wife Page 5
