The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I can go in on the morning bus with Flora,’ Anna said, ‘and home on the early-afternoon one to Quindale. It’s perfectly simple. And they were so nice. They said I could work just in termtime as long as I give them notice of the definite weeks a month in advance.’ She looked at Luke. They were sitting either side of the kitchen table, in the debris of supper. Peter had gone to the New End PCC meeting. ‘I will wear a navy-blue overall with a checked collar and cuffs, and a little badge saying, ‘I’m Anna. Can I help you?’ She waited for Luke to laugh.

  Luke did not laugh. People who are drowning in mortification do not find it easy to laugh. Luke would have said that politically he stood way to the left of his mother and way, way to the left of his father, but somehow he could not reconcile himself to the thought of his mother stocking shelves in Pricewell’s. With a badge on. He had a lump in his throat and he felt his skin prickling with shame at the thought of his friends and his friends’ mums going in to Pricewell’s and seeing Anna unloading ketchup bottles with ‘Can I help you?’ pinned on her overall.

  ‘Oh Luke,’ Anna said. She used the tone of voice she had used when he was little and she caught him doing something he had been expressly forbidden to do. ‘Won’t your principles stand being acted upon?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Luke shouted. He glared at her. She’d promised him money for the van, which she would make wearing that bloody badge. He didn’t want money made that way; he didn’t want the humiliation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said, ‘I didn’t mean to tease. But really you must try to be a little consistent. And practical.’ She stopped. She had been about to say, You’re just like Daddy, but that, though true, would not have been fair, or kind. So she said, ‘What’s so different about my working in Pricewell’s from your working at the garage?’

  Luke squirmed. He could not say that the garage was macho and Pricewell’s was naff, because she would tease him again. He was unable to imagine what she was after, why she had chosen this way out, why she seemed so bloody cheerful.

  ‘I’m not qualified to do much else,’ Anna said, in the gentle voice she had used to Peter. (‘It’s deliberate, isn’t it?’ Peter had said. ‘Just rubbing my nose in it.’) ‘It won’t be for ever.’

  ‘Why can’t you do something where people can’t see?’

  ‘Ah,’ Anna said, ‘I see. You do think like Daddy, don’t you?’

  ‘What’s Dad think?’

  ‘That I’m doing it to show off. That it’s Ga coming out in me, a kind of exhibitionism. Why can’t I go and be a clerk in the Council offices where no-one can see, is that it? Well, I’d rather work in a shop, among people.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Luke,’ said Anna, leaning forward, looking intently at him, ‘Luke. I want to be normal.’

  He held her gaze for a couple of seconds, then dropped his own.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This doesn’t have to be a big deal. This has to be a practical way to rescue Flora and get you to India or wherever. You and Daddy seem to expect a freedom for yourselves you have no intention of awarding me.’

  Jesus, Luke thought, I’m going to cry.

  ‘If your friends’ mothers despise me for working in a supermarket, then they are to be pitied. But they won’t. They’ll understand. Women do,’ Anna said with vehemence.

  Luke rubbed his hand across his eyes and nose.

  ‘You ought to know,’ Anna said more gently, ‘you ought to know by now that things you want don’t just fall off trees. There’s Charlotte on the most basic grant, you dressed entirely from the Pakistani stalls in Woodborough market, Daddy miserable because he can’t just magic up school fees for Flora. It’s a struggle, isn’t it? You know that.’

  Luke nodded. He understood all right, but he had a dim feeling that dignity was all the same compromised by what Anna proposed to do. He thought he would not begin on all that, so he got up from the kitchen table.

  ‘Well, Flora seems pretty happy—’

  Anna smiled. ‘Now she has cracked chain stitch, she’s fine.’

  ‘I liked Woodborough Junior.’

  ‘You’re a very different kettle of fish from Flora.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘And from me.’

  Luke turned in the kitchen doorway and said suddenly, ‘Mum, you OK?’

  Anna nodded. Luke looked relieved. ‘I’ll go up then,’ he said, and went.

  On Anna’s first morning at Pricewell’s, she caught the early bus with Luke and Flora. Flora clung to her, like a limpet. As the bus swung slowly round Loxford green, Anna saw that two immense removal vans were parked in the drive of Loxford Old Rectory. The Smallwoods were off to Oxfordshire. Anna made a mental note to go in that evening and wish them well: Peter would like it; poor Peter, who had broken down in bed the night before, and wept that he had failed her, failed her as well as – but he couldn’t actually articulate that.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she had said, hardly knowing what she meant.

  ‘It is, it is. I’ve failed everything I’ve attempted.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Anna said. ‘I think the goalposts have been moved. Godly goalposts.’

  It was two in the morning. She had been downstairs to make tea.

  ‘Are you lonely?’ she said to Peter, handing him a mug.

  He seemed reluctant to answer, doubtful. He said at last, ‘I’ve got you,’ in a slightly hearty voice. She waited for him to ask her if she was lonely, but he didn’t, merely drank his tea obediently, like a child with hot milk.

  ‘Do you want,’ Anna said, embarking impulsively on the thinnest ice, ‘do you want to reconsider everything? I mean everything? Our lives, where we live, even – even what you do?’

  He stared at her.

  ‘Heavens, no.’

  ‘Sure?’ she said, persisting. ‘I wouldn’t be afraid, you know.’

  ‘No,’ he said loudly. He set the mug on the tray. ‘I can’t just throw it in because I haven’t succeeded yet. The test is part of it all.’

  ‘Part?’

  ‘Part of holiness,’ Peter said rapidly. ‘To be tested is to suffer. Suffering is part of spiritual progress. You know that, that’s child’s stuff.’

  ‘So is listening.’

  ‘Listening?’

  ‘To me,’ Anna said. She jerked a glance upwards. ‘To Him.’

  Peter made an impatient noise.

  ‘So you think I don’t pray?’

  Inside herself, Anna shrank away. They had had this kind of conversation before and it always ended with her frustrated and him defiant.

  ‘No,’ Anna said tiredly, ‘I don’t think that. I was only trying to help spring you from a trap if you felt you were in one.’

  ‘I’m not in a trap,’ he said, ‘I’m just in a dark bit of the wood.’

  ‘Sure?’ she said for a second time.

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  He’d slept then. In the morning he looked holloweyed, but he’d gone off, with dogged cheerfulness, to take prayers at Snead Hall, a sad, second-rate little girls’ public school, where he was Chaplain, and the rest of them had caught the bus. He had not, Anna tried to remember, wished her luck.

  Flora had to be detached from Anna physically as the bus approached her school. Luke had to pull off her hands, one by one, and half carry her along the bus and down the steps. When he got her on to the pavement, she sagged against the school wall and would not move. Luke shouted up to Anna that he would take Flora in, and then walk on to the sixth-form college. ‘You’re a hero,’ she mouthed back. She felt sick, and tearful at Luke’s goodness. He waved and grinned at her and jerked a thumb upwards. The bus pulled away from her children and headed for the market-place.

  ‘Anna,’ said Mr Mulgrove with an effort (he would so much have preferred to call her Mrs Bouverie), ‘this is your supervisor.’

  ‘Hi,’ said the supervisor. He looked about sixteen. He had red hair and a bad complexion and huge ears. But he was smiling broadly. ‘I’m Tim.’

  �
��I’m Anna,’ Anna said, anxious to do what was expected of her.

  ‘We’re on grocery,’ Tim said, ‘we’re doing bottled sauces and mustards this morning.’ He waved a batch of papers at her. ‘Stock reports,’ he said enticingly.

  Rustling in her stiff new overall – Mr Mulgrove’s administrative eye had rested in disappointment on the extra foot of Anna’s grey corduroy skirt that hung below it – Anna followed Tim out of the warehouse and down a grim cold staircase on to the shop floor. It was like coming on stage in a theatre, out of the dark wings into warmth and light. Tim loped off down an alleyway lined with pet food, and halted before a tier of shelves of bottles, brown and red bottles, ochre and copper and olive-green.

  ‘Got to do your facings,’ Tim said.

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Know about facings?’

  Anna thought about the needlework classes of her schooldays, in which she had been such a conspicuous non-success. Facings had been something of a nightmare then, a closed book of mysterious rites that led, finally, her teacher assured her, to the temple of tailoring.

  ‘No,’ Anna said with complete honesty to Tim, her supervisor, who was certainly young enough to be Tim, her son, ‘I know absolutely nothing about facings.’

  Tim looked delighted. He turned behind him to a metal trolley where neat regiments of jars and bottles waited breathlessly under sealing plastic. Tim considered them, glanced back at his shelves, noticed a gap and pounced upon a rectangular block of tikka masala sauce.

  ‘Now,’ he said. His ears glowed with satisfaction. ‘Check your stock sheet. Column one: numbers of items in case.’ He held out the block; this was a game for Anna to play with him. She counted obediently.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘No need to look. Stock sheet tells you that. Second column: shelf allocation?’

  Anna peered.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Right. Twelve jars to go two abreast. And the front two,’ Tim said with emphasis, ‘must touch the shelf rim exactly – that’s called presenting – and,’ he paused, ‘they must all face the front. That’s called facing up. Now you put them on the Shelves, and I’ll check you.’

  It was not, Anna reflected, unlike doing the church flowers, except that Tim was being so much nicer to her than Miss Dunstable or Freda Partington ever were. He stood three feet behind her with his adolescent arms folded inside his blue overall sleeves and said, ‘That’s right. You’re getting there. Cheers,’ at intervals.

  When Anna stepped back, she said, ‘I think I’ll go straight home and face and present the larder.’

  Tim did not understand. He said, wagging a forefinger, ‘No coffee break till ten-thirty-five!’

  At ten-thirty-five, a stout woman in a blue overall with plain, pale-blue collar and cuffs to denote her seniority came up with a clipboard and said, ‘Tim and Anna. Ten minutes coffee.’

  Anna said, ‘I’ll just finish the teriyaki sauces.’ They had a pretty label with almond blossom and a blue cone of oriental mountain printed on them. Tim and the stout woman looked astonished.

  ‘It’s coffee break,’ Tim said reprovingly.

  He led Anna back up the gaunt staircase to the dining-room Mr Mulgrove had shown her when she came for interview. ‘Two-course lunch with fruit juice, ninety-five pence,’ Mr Mulgrove had said, and then, indicating a brightly coloured graph on a notice board, ‘Our wastage display. We try and beat it every week.’ He had looked very grave at the thought of all those rotting star fruit, those superannuated pies and fizzing yoghurts.

  ‘Smoke?’ Tim said.

  Anna shook her head. She was suprisingly pleased to sit down.

  ‘Getting engaged, Easter,’ Tim said, lighting up and drawing deeply.

  ‘Are you? How are you going to ask her? Have you planned it?’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ Tim said. ‘Her mum said why didn’ we get engaged Easter so we said yeah.’ He pulled a photograph out of his shirt pocket inside the overall, and held it out to Anna. ‘She works at Crompton’s, on the industrial estate. Wages clerk.’

  Anna looked at a plump little person with a determined mouth. She wore jeans and a black leather jacket.

  ‘Will you be married in church?’

  ‘She wants it.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Bit old-fashioned, i’n’it?’ Tim said.

  ‘You could excuse God for thinking He was perhaps beyond fashion—’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Anna said, ‘thinking aloud.’

  Tim looked at the clock.

  ‘Time’s up.’

  Later, silently passing each other little stone jars of French mustard, Tim said, ‘I never heard anyone say God ’cept for swearing. Seems a bit rude to say it otherwise.’

  ‘God and death,’ Anna said, marshalling jars, ‘two of the rudest words in the world.’

  This was going too far. Tim said loudly, to quell her, ‘We run six’n a half thousand lines in Pricewell’s. Six’n a half thousand.’

  He left her only once, to go to the lavatory. He was gone perhaps for five minutes. During those five minutes, while she was reading the history of the poppadom from the back of a packet, a female voice said to her, in a strangled way, ‘Mrs Bouverie?’

  She looked up. There, poised and trim in a camel jacket (probably Jaeger) and a plaid skirt (undoubtedly The Scotch House), stood Mrs Richardson. Mrs Richardson, wife of Colonel Richardson (church-warden, Diocesan Board of Finance, Red Cross, Council for the Preservation of Rural England) of Quindale House. From her suavely coiffed pearl-grey head to her excellent shoes polished to the gloss of a new conker, Mrs Richardson radiated amazement.

  ‘Mrs Bouverie. Anna?’

  ‘Heavens, Marjorie,’ Anna said, ‘I quite forgot about you.’

  ‘Forgot?’

  ‘Forgot that, occasionally, you shop in Pricewell’s.’

  Mrs Richardson looked round.

  ‘Are you an employee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With your husband’s consent?’

  ‘Only reluctant, I’m afraid,’ Anna said. Tim was coming loping down the aisle. ‘Needs must where the devil drives, Marjorie. This is my supervisor, Tim. Tim, this is Mrs Richardson, from Quindale.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Tim said cheerfully. ‘Anna’s first day.’

  Marjorie Richardson swung her trolley in a neat, brisk semicircle.

  ‘I shall telephone you,’ she said to Anna.

  Tim watched her walk away from them, upright and outraged.

  ‘She a friend?’

  Anna checked her stocklist for the shelf allocation for the poppadoms (plain, spiced, garlic and chilli, ready-cooked) with all the slick professionalism of three hours’ experience.

  ‘Not any more, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Was it very dull?’ Kitty Bouverie asked her daughter-in-law, on the telephone.

  ‘Yes. But quite peacefully so. I am instructed by a boy who is getting married because his girlfriend’s mother has told him to.’

  Kitty Bouverie was not really listening. Since hearing of Anna’s job, she had been fired with restiveness, pacing round her small green-and-magnolia sitting-room, peering yearningly out of its single window at the narrow terrace which was all of the outside world that she owned.

  ‘How old,’ Kitty said, ‘were the oldest people working at Pricewell’s?’

  ‘I should think in their sixties.’

  ‘I’m in my sixties!’ Kitty cried.

  Anna waited.

  ‘There’s a branch of Pricewell’s here,’ Kitty said. The flat seemed suddenly as small and confining as a birdcage. ‘Was it difficult, what you did today?’

  ‘Oh no. And you are helped.’

  The word ‘help’ seemed like a balm to Kitty. Nobody helped her beyond the poor sad girl at the library to whom she was kind and who now bounded about the romantic fiction section for her, feverishly pulling down titles she thought Kitty would like. Neither of them cared for the sexually exp
licit – ‘Rather like having an operation described to one, don’t you think?’

  ‘Do you suppose,’ Kitty said now, ‘do you suppose that there is even any point in my going to the manager and asking?’

  Anna thought not, and could not say so.

  ‘I would so like it,’ Kitty said wistfully. ‘I would so like to be with people.’

  ‘Isn’t there something gentler?’

  ‘I’m tired of gentleness,’ Kitty said crossly. ‘I feel like an old Marie biscuit that someone’s left under the sofa.’

  ‘Then go to Pricewell’s,’ Anna said, closing her eyes at the thought of telling Peter. ‘Go and good luck to you.’

  She had hardly replaced the receiver, when the telephone shrilled again.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My dear, it’s Harry Richardson here. From Quindale. I wonder if I could just pop over. Have a quick word?’

  On the second day, Tim showed Anna the system in the warehouse. On the third, he explained how to use the computer for reordering. On the fourth day he was off sick, and Mr Mulgrove asked Anne if she thought she could manage, and to ask Heather on flours and dried fruits if she wasn’t sure of anything. She said she would be fine. Indeed, to have a whole morning undisturbed by any thoughts profounder than wondering why on earth the people of Woodborough should consume so much tandoori curry powder, while ignoring pesto sauce, was quite luxurious. But Colonel Richardson came between Anna and the tandoori curry powder; personable, kindly, inflexible Colonel Richardson, who had sat in her insufficiently tidy sitting-room in his beautiful old tweed jacket, and had said to her that she was harming her husband, the community and the Church. She had explained to him about Flora, thinking that his undoubtedly benevolent heart would be touched. It was. Harry Richardson appalled Anna by offering to lend her Flora’s school fees, interest-free, for as long as she needed them.

  ‘Be glad to,’ he said.

  Anna sat dumbstruck.

  ‘Marjorie mistook you,’ Colonel Richardson said. ‘Didn’t understand. Thought it was defiance. No idea about Flora. Too bad. Poor girl. Frightful places, these great state schools can be. Such a pity. Noble experiment, state education. Like the welfare state.’