The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Isobel said, ‘Are you speaking personally?’

  Anna felt herself colouring. She had gone too far. ‘Some husbands,’ she said, pulling herself together, finishing her wine, ‘get very disheartened. There are so many demands, so little help. Were you lonely as a missionary?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Isobel said. ‘Never. I felt like the nineteenth-century missionary, Annie Besant, who wrote in her diary on Christmas Day, in a blizzard on a Tibetan mountain surrounded by absolutely untrustworthy tribesmen, “Quite safe here with Jesus.” Africa was wonderful. It was in every way so much easier than here, but then the love required was simpler, more childlike. It was, looking back, a kind of holiday at times.’

  Anna stood up. ‘Come and see me,’ she said, ‘any time. Just come. I could do with a friend.’

  Isobel smiled up at her. ‘So could I.’

  It was not a friendship Peter understood. He liked Isobel well enough but she seemed to him to bring, as did most of the other women deacons in the diocese, a fussy, housekeeping approach to Christianity, a domestic preoccupation with women and children and primary schools, that irked him. She did not, in his view, understand ritual and language, she did not speculate about theology, she used her heart too much without her head. He could not see why Anna did not find her dull. But he could not complain of the unsuitability of the friendship between his wife and Isobel, and at times it was extremely useful. Isobel could be, occasionally, a channel to communicate through, with Anna. It was obvious now that Isobel should be the person to talk to Anna about this job in Pricewell’s.

  Isobel objected at first. ‘It seems harmless enough to me.’

  ‘In itself, of course it is,’ Peter said. They were in the sitting-room of Isobel’s little house, the house she had inherited from her mother. It looked across the street at one of Woodborough’s dental practices, so that people passed the windows all day in various stages of apprehension and relief. ‘The job itself is innocent. It’s the motive, and the effect.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Isobel.

  ‘Anna was terribly shaken by Daniel Byrne’s appointment. She couldn’t bear to feel helpless, to be passive. But there is nothing I can do, we can do. She has relieved her most understandable feelings by taking this job.’

  ‘Do you think she is defying you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘And possibly the parish, too.’

  ‘I don’t mind so much about them.’

  ‘They mind,’ Peter said. ‘I can’t go anywhere without falling over references to it. I’ve even had a letter from Lady Mayhew who before she realized who it was, found herself asking Anna for the whereabouts of Dijon mustard.’

  Isobel said, ‘Bother Lady Mayhew.’

  ‘She is my parishioner. I have to live in such a community. You may think Loxford light years behind Woodborough, but it is my patch, where I live and work, however anachronistic. I’ve just got all the apples into the cart, and it looks as if Anna has upset the lot.’

  ‘Why have you come to me? Why don’t you go to our nice new archdeacon?’

  ‘I don’t know him. He doesn’t know Anna. He doesn’t know this area. He said he knows nothing of rural ministry.’

  ‘Typical,’ Isobel said. ‘All right. I’ll try.’

  In the Loxford Rectory garden Anna was in tears. In front of her, close to tears also, stood Luke with his chin thrust out mulishly. She had taken him out into the garden to show him various easy spring tasks that must be done, and for which she would pay him, and he had refused. He didn’t want to garden and he didn’t want her money. Anna, exhausted by all she was trying to do, plummeted from fury to weeping.

  ‘Don’t you understand, you stupid child!’ she screamed at Luke. ‘Can’t you see? I’m earning to pay you to help me! To save your blasted dignity since you think a supermarket beneath you!’

  Luke muttered, ‘I don’t think that.’

  ‘What then? What do you think?’

  Luke shuffled. He put his hands in his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders.

  ‘You’re making Dad look a fool. And me. And Flora. You’re making us look pathetic.’

  Anna said tiredly, sniffing, ‘We are pathetic.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to broadcast it,’ Luke said, gaining courage from her ceasing to shout. ‘You don’t have to advertise it, do you? Other vicars’ families manage, don’t they?’

  ‘We aren’t other families. We are us.’

  Luke said in relief, ‘Here’s Isobel.’

  Anna looked up. There was Isobel, coming up the path in her fawn mackintosh. She waved.

  Isobel waved back, all smiles, then saw their faces and said, ‘Oh dear. I thought I heard shouting.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Will you tell me why?’

  ‘Luke will,’ Anna said unfairly, turning away and looking at her beautifully dug earth, and thinking how much she would just like to lie down on it and sleep.

  Isobel looked at Luke. He wore an expression of the deepest misery. ‘No,’ Isobel said, ‘you will. And Luke can correct you if he needs to.’

  There was a silence. Then Luke said, ‘I do want to help. Just not this way.’

  Anna put a hand out to him. He took it awkwardly. She said, ‘I’m so sick of being limited, tyrannized. Whenever I turn to try and get out of the cage, someone is offended or upset, says I’m defying them or humiliating them. I have a space to occupy on this earth, you know, I have a space with just as much validity to it as yours or Dad’s or – or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. But I don’t hedge you about with my objections or complaints, do I? I don’t criticize you for enterprise or initiative. Do I? Do I?’

  Tears slid down Luke’s face. He said with difficulty, ‘But you’ve still got the power—’

  Anna dropped his hand. ‘How mistaken you are.’

  Luke turned and fled. Isobel came over to Anna and said, ‘I suppose this is all about Pricewell’s.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Peter came to see me.’

  Anna fumbled about in her pockets for a handkerchief.

  ‘So this is a little pastoral call to dissuade me.’

  ‘If it’s defiance, yes.’

  Anna’s eyes, visible over the top of her handkerchief, were enormous. ‘Defiance?’

  Isobel said steadily, ‘If you are aiming somehow to shame the Church establishment for what you see as its treatment of clergy families, and you imagine that this might be achieved by humiliating Peter, then yes, defiance.’

  Anna blew her nose ferociously.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘So I am somewhere near the truth?’

  ‘Isobel,’ Anna said. Her voice was not at all steady. ‘Isobel, would you please stop being a deacon and be a human being for a moment? If I don’t do something, take some action, in our present situation, then I shall not have one atom of strength left to support Peter. I want to support him, I am doing so, even if he refuses to acknowledge that just now because it’s easier for him to bear what has happened if he pretends it is me who is more broken than he. But I can’t just play the pawn any more. I can’t just bear and endure. And don’t,’ she said with sudden vehemence, ‘don’t tell me that suffering is part of the Almighty package.’

  ‘But marriage—’

  ‘What would you know about marriage?’

  Isobel turned and began to walk back towards the house. Anna watched her, tense with the impulse to run after her, say sorry, throw her arms round her, make up, be friends again. Isobel did not turn. Anna did not move. Isobel vanished round the house and after a while Anna heard the engine of her little car start up and putter away down the drive.

  Ella Pringle only let Luke into the Old Rectory because he said he was the Rector’s son. He had knocked on the back door while she was kneading the first batch of bread dough she had ever made in her life – something to do, she thought crossly, with coming to the country – and she had gone to answer him with flou
ry hands and a frown. He said could he speak to Mr O’Sullivan and she said no. He said please, he was Luke Bouverie, he was the Rector’s son, and Ella, uncertain of village etiquette, acted out of character on the safe side, and allowed him in. She left him in the kitchen examining the espresso coffee machine with wonder, while she went to Patrick’s office.

  Patrick had made it a rule that he was never to be disturbed in the mornings, but that she might bring him urgent interruptions in the afternoon. Ella was doubtful of Luke’s urgency. She knocked and opened the door and saw Patrick asleep in his wing chair. Ella considered daytime sleeping decadent. She said loudly, ‘You have a visitor.’

  He woke calmly. ‘I do?’

  ‘The Rector’s son. Shall I send him in?’

  ‘Of course!’

  A minute later, Luke said diffidently, ‘In here?’ His face came round the door.

  ‘The Rector’s big son, I see. I thought you might be conker-age.’

  Luke came in and looked round him. ‘Wow.’

  ‘How to run a business at arm’s length.’

  ‘We do computer courses at school—’

  ‘Would you like tea?’ Patrick said. The boy’s face looked faintly smeared, as if he had been crying. But of course, boys that size did not cry.

  ‘Oh,’ Luke said, his face lighting up. ‘Yeah. I mean, please—’

  Patrick went out to the kitchen.

  ‘A vast tea,’ he said to Ella. ‘Everything you can think of. Bunter-style.’

  She looked pointedly at the front curve of his new olive-green Shetland jersey.

  ‘For my guest,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I see.’

  Back in the office, Luke was standing in an attitude of longing in front of Patrick’s computer.

  ‘Suppose you tell me why you’ve come, and then we’ll enjoy ourselves.’

  Luke said, going scarlet and looking out of the window, ‘I wondered if, I mean, do you need, I mean, would you have any job you could give me? Anything, I mean, I don’t mind what, logs, digging, you know—’

  ‘A job.’

  Luke nodded.

  ‘What,’ said Patrick, ‘is the basic industrial wage?’

  Luke swallowed. ‘If you’re over eighteen, two seventy-five an hour.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ Luke said.

  Patrick, who was enjoying himself, eyed his visitor. ‘And what experience have you?’

  ‘I help Mum and stuff—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Garden, firewood—’

  There was a pause. Luke spent it wishing he had never come, dreading tea, dreading having to say he didn’t mind, that it was quite OK, he quite saw, shouldn’t have asked . . .

  ‘All right,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ll pay you two fifty an hour for as many hours as you can put in these holidays. Does your mother know you are here?’

  Luke gaped.

  ‘I see. Then should we ask her? When we have had tea, I think we should go home together and ask her. Don’t you?’

  Luke said, ‘She won’t mind—’

  ‘But I might. I’m a newcomer here. Don’t know the rules, don’t want to tread on any toes. Now, while we wait for tea how would you like to send a fax to New York?’

  ‘It’s four afternoons a week,’ Kitty Bouverie said down the telephone to Anna. ‘Four, and sometimes five if the owner’s busy.’

  She sounded full of triumph. She had combed the shops of Windsor looking for work, and at last had found some.

  ‘I suppose it’s a gift shop really. Birthday cards and little ashtrays with pictures of the castle on them and necklaces and keyrings. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Kitty. You’re so clever!’

  ‘I know,’ Kitty said, ‘but I’d never have thought of it without you, it just wouldn’t have crossed my mind. The owner’s so nice, another widow. She has a Pekinese. She wants to open a coffee shop next door. If she does, I could make cakes for it, couldn’t I, and jam—’

  ‘What about the adding up?’

  ‘I have a calculator,’ Kitty said proudly, ‘made in Japan.’

  ‘Oh Kitty, I think it’s wonderful. I’d get Peter, so you could tell him, but he’s out—’

  ‘There’s no point telling him, is there? He’ll only sniff. No, it was you I wanted to tell. How’s Flora?’

  ‘On the verge of seventh heaven. St Saviour’s next term. She’s practising for Catholicism. Draws pictures of the Virgin Mary and writes, “Our Lady” underneath—’ Anna broke off. Through the window, she could see Luke coming up the drive accompanied by a strange man to whom he seemed to be talking animatedly. She said, ‘Kitty, I think I have to go. Luke seems to be bringing a visitor. I’m so pleased for you. And admiring. I’ll ring you in a day or two.’

  ‘I’m admiring too,’ Kitty said. ‘I’m so pleased with myself, you can’t think.’

  The back door opened, and Luke ushered in his companion.

  ‘Mum, this is Mr O’Sullivan—’

  Anna held out her hand.

  ‘Anna Bouverie.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘Welcome to Loxford.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Anna said, ‘Come through. Come into the sitting-room. Luke, put the kettle on.’

  ‘No. No thank you. We are groaning with tea. Aren’t we, Luke?’

  Luke looked tremendously happy. ‘It was brilliant.’

  Anna looked at them both.

  ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘We have just had tea together,’ Patrick said. ‘Luke came to me looking for work, and we sealed the bargain with egg sandwiches. Now we have come to ask if that’s all right.’

  Anna said, startled, ‘Yes, of course, what kind of work?’

  ‘Gardening, logs, that kind of thing.’

  Anna looked at Luke. ‘Gardening?’ He blushed.

  ‘Is he no good?’

  ‘Oh, I think he’s perfectly good. His goodness seems to depend upon who asks him.’

  Luke said hurriedly, ‘I’ll go and see to the sitting-room fire.’

  When he had gone, Patrick said, ‘Is this all out of order?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘I felt I should come and ask you—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘—but what I really wanted to ask you,’ said Patrick O’Sullivan, putting his hands in his jacket pockets, ‘is what is a woman like you doing in a place like this?’

  And then Luke came in and said the fire was fine and that he’d bashed the cushions up a bit, to make it all OK for them.

  Woodborough Vicarage was the largest space Daniel Byrne had ever occupied. In Manchester, he had shared a simple, newish little house with a succession of curates, and he rather thought, pacing his new Victorian Gothic halls, that he would like a whole army of curates with him now. The last three archdeacons had had sizeable families so that the Vicarage, though impractical to run, had at least been filled. Yet even though Daniel had spread himself as far as he could, including making himself a primitive chapel out of an east-facing bedroom, there was still a good deal of vicarage left over.

  The diocese had found him a housekeeper, a Miss Lambe, who was as small and anxious as a hamster, and who had taken a tiny, remote bedroom as her burrow, and already filled it with crocheted mats and pictures of the Royal Family. Daniel had explained to her that he liked very simple food that he could eat with one hand, because of his inability to eat without reading, and so, for supper his first night, she had brought him scrambled egg on a piece of toast that she had already cut up into precise and helpful squares. He thought, eating it, that he must be careful not to be too metaphorical in his instructions, since, in her anxiety to obey him to the letter, she might feed him a diet of unrelieved soup and rice pudding.

  Miss Lambe helped him to unpack his books, holding each one with as much reverence as if it had been the Sacrament. It took for ever. In the middle, she went away to make tea, and brought it back wi
th digestive biscuits she had broken into quarters.

  ‘You will have to get used to my peculiar sense of humour,’ Daniel said.

  Miss Lambe blinked at him. ‘I quite like a joke,’ she said bravely.

  He pinned a huge map of the diocese on his study wall, and then outlined his own archdeaconry in red. Eight deaneries lay within it, of which only one – Woodborough itself – had any kind of urban character. The rest were a maze of villages with names that sounded like the refrain for a pantomime song, villages whose lives were as far removed from those Manchester lives he had known for so long that it was as if they inhabited another planet. He had wanted this change, not least because he felt that the rural Church was being neglected, that progressive Church thinking was forgetting to take into account that huge section of the population whose rhythms were dictated by quite other influences than urban ones. He had also felt that, contrary to popular supposition, a dangerous loneliness might afflict priests living and working in rural places, however lovely. Looking at his map, and thinking of such men – men who were much less resilient than those to whom a more evangelical and dogmatic faith appealed – Daniel Byrne thought of Peter Bouverie. No doubt, it was for such men as Peter Bouverie that he felt he had been called to come south.

  Peter himself, robing in the vestry at Quindale for the last of the special Lent evening services – theme: ‘Can there be change without sacrifice in a Christian world?’ – was not thinking of Daniel Byrne. He was thinking instead of the twenty minutes he had spent at home between a difficult hour persuading the voluntary organist at New End (a retired primary-school headmistress who felt she was being taken for granted) to continue, at least temporarily, and this service of compline at Quindale. In those twenty minutes, Luke had told him that he had found part-time employment at the Old Rectory, Anna had told him that his mother had found employment at a Windsor gift shop, and his mother-in-law, Laura, had telephoned to say she had landed three lines in a television commercial for an Irish stout, dressed as a pearly queen.

  Peter had heard all this, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, and a sandwich made for him by Anna to sustain him to the far side of compline. While he ate and listened, the telephone rang three times on minor parish business and Flora badgered him to read a pious poem she had just written which began: