The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Later, while sitting at the kitchen table making a special list of people to help with Easter flowers, and a subsidiary list of those who might be approached to donate Easter lilies, Anna and her conscience had a little tussle. Anna’s conscience said that she must report the whole of her interview at St Saviour’s faithfully to Peter, and then they could rejoice together that prayers had been answered, and that Pricewell’s could be abandoned. But Anna found herself wholly disinclined to listen to her conscience. She discovered that she had no intention of making Sister Ignatia’s offer plain to Peter, and no intention of giving up Pricewell’s. Pricewell’s, whatever its reality, represented the best taste of independence that Anna could remember since those far-off days in Oxford when Peter was a theology student. Twenty years was a long time to bear dependence if your spirit craved something stronger and your intelligence rebelled at continual submission to powers who neither, Anna felt, knew or cared how she and Peter lived. Pricewell’s gave Anna that inch or two of dignity she had felt so sorely in need of and that she now felt she could never again surrender. What Eleanor and Mary took for granted in their lives Anna was just creeping towards, as a novice. If, she said to herself, writing Marjorie Richardson and Lady Mayhew and Miss Dunstable down for Easter lilies, if I do everything in the parish that I should do, and I keep the garden going and the meals and the house (sort of) and the translation, then where can be the harm in doing this other undeniably humble little thing that so curiously makes me feel strong and alive? And if I promise myself that, once Peter has calmed down, I will tell him of Flora’s free place, where can be the danger of a little, temporary deception? She waited. Her conscience said nothing, it felt as if it were holding its breath. It was, of course, poor thing, out of practice at making decisions of the kind she had just put to it; it had, Anna considered, been given an easy ride for twenty years. She put her hands over her ears. ‘That’s settled then,’ Anna said loudly, to whoever was listening.

  Peter sat in Celia Hooper’s sitting-room in Quindale. Her house was a new one, built of bright reconstituted stone, and her sitting-room was full of blue Dralon armchairs, and occasional tables, each bearing a single china ornament, mostly whimsical animals. Celia Hooper’s husband was a bank manager in Woodborough, and it was he who tended so ferociously the disciplined garden beyond the patio doors. Celia, who had trained as a physical education instructor, now ran the Loxford parish Guides, a swimming group for the disabled, and was Peter’s Deanery Secretary. She was formidably efficient. Her minutes were works of precise art. She believed – and frequently declared – that the rural deaneries were the grassroots of the Church of England.

  Peter sat in one of the blue chairs. At his elbow, a little table bore a cup of coffee and a piece of shortbread on a plate that matched the coffee cup. Celia Hooper – seated opposite him in just such a chair and situation, so that they resembled two bookends without intervening books – was suggesting that she should draw up a basic plan for the annual deanery party, which happened at Loxford Rectory after Easter, a get-together for all the priests of the deanery, eight of them, and their wives.

  ‘If I do the planning, you see,’ Celia said, turning to a clean page in her notebook, ‘that will spare Anna.’ Mindful of the proprieties, Celia was not going to mention Pricewell’s.

  Peter said quickly, ‘Anna won’t mind. She’s so used to it—’

  ‘I thought perhaps this year, if I just rustle up a few quiches, buy some French bread—’

  ‘Very kind of you, Celia, but really I think Anna would like to do it.’

  ‘She has so much on her plate. We all know that.’

  ‘No more than usual,’ Peter said loudly.

  Celia looked at him. Her face was full of sympathy.

  ‘I have no one to talk to,’ Peter said suddenly, without meaning to.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Celia said softly, ‘I don’t think you ought to assume that the laity doesn’t notice. Or understand.’

  He looked at her, at her neat, gleaming brown bob, at her clear outdoor skin and eyes, her new-looking, well-kept clothes. He said, ‘Do you know, I sometimes think that the laity are the only people who do understand.’

  Celia began to write in her notebook.

  ‘Quiche, then. Several varieties. And some nice mixed salads. Mustn’t forget, must we, that John Jacobs is a vegetarian—’

  ‘Please,’ Peter said protestingly, thinking of Anna.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, thinking of her too, but differently, ‘I’ll ring Anna. Don’t you worry.’ She gave him a little glance of understanding. ‘You’ve got enough to worry about. You leave what you can to me.’

  On the way home, filled with an indigestible mixture of relief and regret, Peter observed that there were removal vans once again outside Loxford Old Rectory. The new owner – a man on his own, gossip said, a wealthy man – was plainly moving in. He would of course require a pastoral call even if he did not – and his car did not bode well – look like the kind of man Peter might hope for, as a breath of fresh air on the PCC; as a possible churchwarden in place of old Sir Francis Mayhew who said he’d done fifteen years which was more than enough; or even as a parishioner willing to raise the £25,000 that the diocesan architect had said would have to be spent on Loxford church roof within the next three years. Peter drove slowly past the gates – the dignified gates through which most of his predecessors had stepped on their way to the church – and, as he did so, the new owner came out of the front door and clearly observed the dawdling and curious car.

  Peter pulled up. He got out of the car and crossed the deep, luxurious gravel of the Loxford Old Rectory drive. He felt faintly foolish. The man on the steps was middle-aged and authoritative-looking, and wore well-pressed jeans and a brass-buttoned blazer. Peter said, ‘This isn’t really a visit. It’s plainly no time for that. I was just passing—’

  ‘Patrick O’Sullivan,’ the man said, holding out his hand. He smiled.

  ‘Peter Bouverie.’

  ‘I’ve seen your wife.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’d ask you in—’

  ‘No, no,’ Peter said, ‘not now. Just passing.’

  ‘Lovely place, this,’ Patrick O’Sullivan said.

  ‘I hope you will be very happy here.’

  ‘So do I.’

  Peter backed away a little. Two removal men came past him carrying a huge painting shrouded in a blanket. ‘Goodbye,’ Peter said, ‘and welcome. I mean, welcome to Loxford.’

  Patrick O’Sullivan put his hands in his blazer pockets. He was still smiling.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Peter got back into his car and started the engine. That had not been, on reflection, a successful impulse, nor a socially accomplished two minutes. He thought of his mother-in-law. ‘What,’ Laura had said, on her first visit to Loxford, ‘what! Put you in that – that kiosk – and expect your parishioners to admire your humility? Why are you not where you should be? How can you retain any kind of status in that council house? I promise you, the village won’t think you’re one of them because you aren’t in the proper rectory. They’ll simply think you haven’t any clout.’

  Patrick O’Sullivan, standing easily on the steps of Loxford Old Rectory, had looked to Peter a man on first-name terms with clout.

  Patrick O’Sullivan went back into his house faintly amused. He was not conscious of having had any contact with a clergyman since school, where religion had been regarded as an unavoidable mixed dose of discipline, cissiness and mild buffoonery. In his address, the bishop who had confirmed Patrick and his year had urged compassion in sexual matters upon them, which had decided them all finally that the Church was a refuge for old women, and that Christianity was somehow neutering in its effect. When he left school, he forgot entirely about the whole business, forgot about it for a couple of decades, forgot until this thin, tired fellow, looking so very much like his old school chaplain, came and hovered in the drive, the epitome, it seemed to
Patrick, of the doubting kind of modern Anglican clergyman.

  He went into the kitchen where his housekeeper was filling cupboards with pans. ‘I met the Rector!’

  Ella Pringle, who was heavy with misgiving about the move from London, merely grunted. A rector was, in her view, part of the traditional and comic cast list she had expected to find in the country, along with the squire and the village idiot.

  ‘Looks just as I expected,’ Patrick said, plugging in the kettle. He sounded pleased. ‘Shall I go to church?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know how to behave in church,’ Ella said from inside her cupboard.

  ‘I could learn.’

  She came out abruptly. ‘Learn? Whatever for?’

  He was looking out of the window at his lovely new garden, at the exquisite magnolia just breaking into its goblet-like, glowing blooms which were, since Monday, also his. He had never owned a magnolia before nor a view. He said, ‘Because my life is going to be different here. It is why I have come.’

  Ella thought it was a fad, a passing and Toad-like enthusiasm for something novel. She had been Patrick’s housekeeper for fourteen years, through his brief and disastrous marriage, through his long and complicated liaison with a woman who had left a year ago, telling Ella that there was no point in waiting any longer for Patrick to marry her. He never would, she said, because he didn’t need to. He only ever did things he needed to do, and someone as economical with their emotions as that was not good lifetime material. Ella liked having Patrick to herself. She treated him as if she were his prep-school matron. When he said he was moving to Loxford to start another life before it was too late, she thought of abandoning him but she did not think it for long. He was, in any case, very persuasive. He needed Ella. He now said, ‘Where’s the tea?’

  ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘honestly. We move in seven hours ago and you expect everything to be in order.’ She got up from her knees and made shooing gestures. ‘Get out. Go into your garden. Come back in ten minutes, and there’ll be tea.’

  He went out through the glazed garden door at the back of the hall. There was a terrace outside, with a low balustrade and several graceful lead urns filled with early blue pansies – they don’t look right, he thought. Wonder why – and then a great green carpet of lawn, and shrubs and trees, and, way beyond them, the far hills. He stood and breathed a bit, in and out, deeply. Then he went across his terrace and down on to his damp spring lawn.

  It was a majestic lawn. It rolled away from the house for a couple of hundred yards, its length deceptively magnified by little outcrops of planting here and there which hid its true limits. To the right, as he walked down it, he could see nothing but the trees of his own orchard and, beyond them, the decorative ridge of a thatched roof, crowned with a squat brick chimney. To the left, he could only at first see his own garden, his tennis court, the old wall that screened his vegetables – to eat what one has grown, actually to eat that! – but then, across a low hedge and a fence that needed repair, he found he could see into the garden of the new Rectory, whose impersonal little back windows faced the same way as his own. He could see grass, and a long dug strip – vegetables, too? – and a few fruit trees. He could also see a line of washing, which included, he realized to his delight, the clerical undergarments. He must be the only person in the village with a view, if he chose to take it, of both vest and surplice. While he looked the back door opened, and a woman came out, calling over her shoulder to someone in the house, as she came. She wore a swirling dress with something bright wrapped round the waist, and she carried a laundry basket. Patrick leaned in satisfaction on a fence post. The Rector’s wife.

  He watched her. She went over to the vegetable patch and looked at the earth for a while. Then she carried the basket to the washing line and unpegged the clothes rapidly, chucking them down in a wind-blown tangle (Ella folded things as she took them out of the tumble drier. He would have to train her to a line. In his orchard? He thought of his Jermyn Street shirts blowing in the orchard, with pleasure) and then, for a second or two, she stood quite still, looking down, the back of her hand to her forehead under her dark fringe. When she stooped and retrieved her basket, and went rapidly back to the house with it, Patrick wished he had said something, that he had called out to her.

  He went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Now I’ve seen the Rector’s wife. Again, actually.’

  ‘Thrills and spills,’ Ella said, pouring tea into a mug for him. ‘Now see if you can find the gravedigger. Good game, this. Might even keep you quiet for an hour or two.’

  Patrick took his tea and went up to the first floor, to the long landing window which looked over the village green. Smoke rose from several chimneys, straight blue columns in the still air, signs of habitation. All those cottages had people in them, Patrick realized, people and televisions and plates, of fried fish and dogs and Wellington boots at the back door. He swallowed some tea. He was charmed by his thoughts, charmed by the look of his new village, like a doll’s house with the front enticingly shut. And there, if he looked hard to the right, was the tower of the church, like a benevolent old watchdog, keeping an eye on things, protective, changeless. He looked down at his clothes, on an impulse. They looked wrong, suddenly, too blue, too urban. He must buy some corduroys.

  Chapter Six

  Isobel Thompson had been a missionary in West Africa for seventeen years before she became a deacon. She had loved it. She had loved the sense of purpose and the freedom and most of the Africans, and she had always supposed that she would stay there all her life, and finally die there, and be buried, like David Livingstone’s wife, under a baobab tree. She prayed steadily, all those seventeen years, for guidance, for confirmation that she was still fulfilling divine purpose, and was only interrupted at last by her mother’s voice, demanding in a querulous letter that Isobel should come home and nurse her while she died – as she had been told she soon would – of cancer.

  She took five years to do it, five years of remissions and declines and suffering borne with no patience whatever. She was furious with Isobel for preferring God to any man, and thus denying her the status of grandparenthood, and furious with her husband for dying before her. She lay in her carefully, fustily feminine bedroom in her little house in Woodborough, and tormented Isobel. Nothing was right, from her physical misfortune through Isobel’s appearance to the strength of her early-morning tea. Isobel began to feel that her life had been the wrong way round, that Africa had been no training at all, with its comparatively easy, impersonal requirement of Christian love, for these savagely difficult demands for daughterly love. Praying was ten times as hard as it had ever been in Africa, so was steering clear of hatred, a problem Isobel had never encountered before. She told herself that she must confine herself to anger only, but it was easier said than done. Standing at last in Woodborough parish church – dedicated to St Paul – watching her mother’s coffin being lowered on to trestles below the chancel steps, Isobel was so riven with thankfulness she could hardly keep upright. Her dedication would now be complete, an offering made from a full heart and an intimate knowledge of mental pain. There was to be no more Africa, however much it beckoned. Isobel would enter the Church as a deacon, would tackle the domestic problems of Woodborough. If she had failed to love her mother, she the missionary, what must it be like for people who, without God, had not even got a Christian obligation to try?

  Sometimes, in the years that followed, she longed for Africa, like a lost love affair. Yet she also knew that if she had succumbed to her longing she would not have been satisfied, knowing what she now knew of the terrible difficulties of love. She also came to see that, as a woman, she understood the psychology of this difficulty of human love better than most of her male colleagues who were often, she considered, almost callous in their disinclination to feel the emotional agonies in which some people laboured, shackled to delinquent children or senile parents or destructive marriages. You could not just say, Christ will help you bear
it. That was opting out. You had to show that you understood the suffering, knew the price it exacted, as a fellow human being, before you even thought of bringing Christ into it.

  It was such a discussion that had first brought Isobel and Anna together. The last Archdeacon of Woodborough, a genial and easy man, had invited all the priests of his eight deaneries to a fork supper laid on with great relish by his wife, a woman whose every fibre rejoiced at being a clergy wife. In the Victorian Woodborough Vicarage, the priests and their wives milled through the ground-floor rooms with plates of cold chicken and ham, and glasses of encouraging German wine. The atmosphere was of an end-of-term party given by a headmaster in his study for the prefects. Anna and Isobel, finding themselves together in front of a bright watercolour of a Cornish harbour painted by Archdeacon Neville on one of his walking holidays, fell into conversation.

  It was an easy conversation from the beginning. After a while, they left the watercolour (‘Not a very adventurous subject,’ Isobel said) and found two chairs in a corner. Isobel, who had told nobody about her mother, found herself telling Anna. From there, they progressed to the enthralling problem of human and divine love. Isobel said that, personally, she found the latter much easier, but that she felt that the former was, in every sense, her job.

  Anna said, looking round the crowded room whose noise-level had risen considerably with alcohol-released confidence, ‘Do you think most of the men here feel like that?’

  ‘I do. And what is more, I think most of them give in. How much easier and publicly commendable it is to devote yourself to the parish, however demanding, than to a wife having a nervous breakdown at home.’

  ‘Oh Isobel,’ Anna said. They looked at each other. ‘You don’t even need to be having a nervous breakdown to become a burden to a priest husband, you know. You simply need to ask to be visible, to be seen as a human being, not an unpaid curate. That’s all the amount of nuisance you have to be to drive a man into the arms of his parish.’