The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘Yes, she is. (Don’t scowl, Flora.) Next term—’

  ‘Mrs Bouverie. Good morning. We seem to have struck lucky with our new Archdeacon, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, I do—’

  ‘Anna,’ Daniel Byrne said as the press bearing her along bore her to him where he stood shaking hands in the porch, ‘Anna, I would like you to meet my brother, Jonathan.’

  Jonathan Byrne was taller than his brother, less sturdy, and without spectacles. He held out his hand to Anna. ‘How do you do.’

  ‘Welcome to Loxford,’ she said automatically. ‘Your brother took the service beautifully,’ Anna continued in her parish voice.

  ‘Did he? Should that matter? Is it like comparative performances of Hamlet?’

  The children, who detested their visibility at such moments, hissed at Anna that they were going, now, and went, ostentatiously.

  ‘Yours?’ Jonathan Byrne said.

  Anna watched them. Charlotte was actually running, which seemed exaggerated of her.

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘What is it like, being a rectory child?’

  Anna gave him a quick glance.

  ‘I expect you can imagine it. What is it like, being an archdeacon’s brother?’

  ‘Touché,’ he said.

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Byrne, but I ought to – speak to people.’

  He stood aside and sketched a little bow.

  ‘Of course.’

  She hesitated. She wanted to say something grateful about Daniel, something that his brother could pass on over the fraternal lunch-table, but could think of nothing quite right. So she simply said, rather uncertainly, ‘Goodbye then,’ and felt foolish.

  By the lich-gate a few minutes later, she met Patrick O’Sullivan. He wore a blue blazer with brass buttons and a boldly striped shirt which had been ironed with visibly professional skill. He said, ‘I hope I look quite different. That’s the first time I have darkened church doors except for weddings and funerals since I was at school.’

  Anna resisted saying, but do you feel different? and merely said, ‘Well, you were lucky. Because of the Archdeacon, I mean,’ and then hurried away from him to catch up with Trish Pardoe and ask how much the Brownies’ Easter Cake Bake had made.

  ‘Twenty-three pounds! But that’s marvellous!’ It was necessary to say that, whatever the sum. Brownies, like rectors and mothers-in-law and Flora, and probably archbishops as well, always needed encouragement.

  ‘They were ever so disappointed,’ Trish Pardoe said, ignoring her, ‘broke their hearts, really.: The Quindale troop made twenty-seven pounds and forty pence.’ She looked round her. ‘But what can you expect, from this village?’

  On Easter Monday, Patrick O’Sullivan took Charlotte and Luke to a point-to-point. Charlotte, disapproving of such events on social grounds, was poised to decline the invitation, even to the extent of preparing a little speech in her mind, to that effect, to make to Patrick; but Anna and Peter had a quarrel at breakfast, and Charlotte’s antipathy to seeing the braying classes at play was dwarfed by her antipathy to the atmosphere in the Rectory. When Patrick manoeuvred his gleaming car up the Rectory drive, both Luke and Charlotte – carefully attired to stand out from the green-gumbooted crowd – were actually ready and waiting.

  Patrick got out of the car and looked hopefully about for Anna. He was pleased to be taking these attractive children out, but the splendid picnic that lay shrouded in napkins in the boot had unquestionably been ordered with a view to good reports being made of it later. He said, ‘Right then. Should you sign off before we go?’

  ‘She’s gardening,’ Luke said. She was, furiously, digging the main-crop potato bed as if her life depended upon it.

  ‘Shouldn’t you—’

  ‘No,’ Charlotte said. She eyed the car. The windows had mysteriously tinted glass.

  ‘Sorry,’ Patrick said, opening the door for her, ‘habit. I have to tell Ella if I’m even going to post a letter—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Luke said. He turned and dashed round the house to the vegetable garden. Anna had her back to him, her hair held off her face with a red handkerchief.

  ‘Mum—’

  She stopped digging, and turned.

  ‘We’re off,’ Luke said lamely.

  ‘Have a good day. Win lots of money.’

  ‘Mum—’

  Anna waited.

  ‘Sorry,’ Luke said. He gestured at the potato bed. ‘I mean, sorry to go out, not to—’

  ‘You go,’ Anna said. ‘I’m not fit for anything but digging, not today.’

  Luke hovered. He wished very much to make it plain that he loved her, but found himself quite unable to think how. After a long pause he said, ‘OK then,’ and she said, ‘Go on. Don’t keep Mr O’Sullivan waiting,’ so he went. When he reached the car, Patrick and Charlotte were sitting in the front together, and laughing.

  Anna stuck her spade in the earth and went down to the end of the garden, to the rough patch where cow parsley bloomed profusely in May and dandelions flourished their downy clocks about, unchecked. In one corner of this little wilderness was Anna’s compost heap and beside it was a low wooden gate, leading into the pasture beyond, a gate Anna had imagined herself using every day for regular, healing country walks. Reality had, of course, proved quite the opposite. She had scarcely opened the gate in ten years and an annual growth of convolvulus knitted itself round the latch. The nearest she ever got to a walk was – as now – to lean briefly on the gate’s splintering top bar and gaze at the dark copse on the furthest hill and try to recapture that feeling of combined serenity and adventure that the view had first inspired in her.

  Today, however, it inspired nothing. The view lay in all its pretty layers of green like some ingenious tapestry done by the Women’s Institute – decorative, controlled, passionless – and had no message. Above it, the sky hung in a tranquil perfection of pale-blue and white. Around her, birds sang casually of this and that, and from the village came the occasional and distant shout of a child. It was all in order and quite remote.

  In the house behind her, she had left Flora inventing a newspaper at the kitchen table – The Loxford Post; editor, Flora Bouverie; reporter, Flora Bouverie; cartoonist, Flora Bouverie; nature notes, Flora Bouverie; assistant, Emma Maxwell – and in his study, Peter and his sore feelings would be plunged in deanery files. Even if, by going in to him and putting her arms round him and suggesting that they were reconciled, she might have made things better, Anna had no heart for it. She had felt not just anger at breakfast, but dislike; sudden, fierce dislike for Peter’s unsmiling, shuttered face, his refusal to look at her, his adamant insistence that, while he was not free to choose how to act, she was – and had chosen to oppose him.

  He had, it seemed to her now, leaning on her gate, rejected her. All those years of defending him, of understanding him, of trying to interpose herself as an insulating layer between him and his disappointment, appeared to have gone for nothing. He had made it plain over the debris of breakfast that not only did he feel betrayed by her – and after all she’d done! – but that he did not really want her near him. She had tried to touch him at the end of the quarrel, but he had shied away from her, folding himself into himself like the spines of a rolled umbrella.

  I am lonely, Anna thought. An exploring tendril of ivy was growing along the gate, and she began to rip it up, in little bursts, tearing its dry brown suckers from the wood. I am, in all essential senses, alone, because it would be wrong, or unfair, to burden anyone close to me with my isolation and my frustration. And it is more than that; it is that Mrs Bouverie is taking over from Anna, and, if even Peter does not want Anna any more, then what is to become of her? Is she to become just a competent Pricewell’s worker with a blue overall and a jolly plastic badge? Is that to be Anna? She looked up at the innocent sky. ‘Do you want Anna?’ she demanded. The sky smiled on, not heeding her. God was probably as little inclined to indulge such silliness as Peter had been. Why was it that she w
as made to feel that her claims had no validity, that her existence was only permitted by everyone as long as it remained relative? How did people, Anna cried to herself, how did people get to be primary people – the ones who made others relative? And why, if you picked up a different burden, was it then assumed that you loved your burden and would gladly carry it for ever and ever . . .

  ‘Anna!’

  She turned. Peter was standing by the potato bed.

  ‘Yes?’

  He made no move to come forward. He called, ‘You have visitors.’

  ‘Who?’

  He called again, without answering her, ‘I think you should come,’ and then he turned and went back to the house. Glaring at his grey-wool back with something approaching loathing, Anna followed him.

  In the sitting-room, Celia Hooper and Elaine Godswell were standing together on the hearthrug. Peter had invited them to sit down, but had not observed that, unless he did some preliminary clearance, there was nowhere for them to sit. Five people over the Easter weekend had left the Rectory deep in the litter of family living.

  Anna appeared shoeless in the doorway.

  ‘Do forgive us, Anna, on a Bank Holiday Monday too, but we knew we’d find you in—’

  Anna said, ‘That’s perfectly all right.’ She moved to the sofa and began to subdue billows of discarded Sunday newspapers. ‘Would you like coffee?’

  ‘We’d hate to put you to any trouble,’ Elaine said.

  Anna said briefly, ‘No trouble.’ She collected Charlotte’s ostentatious scatter of books from an armchair. ‘Please sit down.’

  ‘So naughty to interrupt your gardening.’

  ‘I’d stopped.’

  ‘Robert’s hard at it too,’ Celia said cosily. ‘First cut of the year. He’s fanatical about his edges.’

  Anna went out to the kitchen.

  ‘Ought my cartoon to be political?’ Flora said.

  ‘I think that would be terribly difficult. A political joke—’

  ‘Perhaps I could do something a little bit rude about the Queen—’

  ‘She’s certainly easier. If I put all these things on a tray, will you make coffee when the kettle’s boiled and bring it in?’

  Flora didn’t look up. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Mrs Hooper and Mrs Dodswell.’

  ‘Pooper and Plodswell.’

  ‘Yes. Shh.’

  ‘Mummy,’ Flora said, ‘Emma’s mother plays golf.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Lots of mothers do. Emma’s mother said would you like to but I said you spent all your time doing Pricewell’s or the garden or German.’

  ‘What a help to my image you are,’ Anna said. ‘Don’t forget the kettle.’

  In the sitting-room, Celia and Elaine were having a carefully anodyne conversation about the church fête. When Anna came in, Elaine was saying, ‘Well, you can’t ask Mrs Berridge to do teas again, not after last year, with the tea stone cold and flies on the rock buns—’

  ‘Flora’s bringing coffee in a minute,’ Anna said. She sat down on the sofa and looked at Celia. ‘How can I help you?’

  Celia leaned forward. ‘Oh no. It’s quite the other way about. We’ve come to ask how we can help you.’

  Anna stared at her. She stared at her blue-and-white weekend jersey and her matching blue weekend trousers.

  Elaine, who was genuinely fond of Anna and was disconcerted by her expression, said hastily, ‘It isn’t interference, Anna, really it isn’t. It’s a Christian helping hand.’

  Anna turned. ‘In what way?’

  ‘There’s so much for you to do, you see—’

  ‘The cleaning rota, the flower rota—’

  ‘Attending all the parish clubs and services—’

  ‘The parish magazine—’

  ‘And I expect the telephone never stops!’

  ‘And then, of course, the deanery entertaining responsibilities—’

  ‘And your own life—’

  ‘Oh yes, Anna, your own life.’

  ‘We just thought,’ Celia said, never allowing her smile to slip, ‘we just thought it was all too much for one – for one busy person like yourself, so we have come to offer ourselves as – as your deputies.’

  The door opened uncertainly and Flora wavered in with the coffee tray. Anna got up.

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  ‘I spilled a bit—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ said Celia Hooper. ‘What a helpful girl.’

  Flora, who had abandoned the Loxford Brownie troop after two sessions because of what she termed all the ‘icky helping’, looked lofty.

  ‘You will excuse me,’ Flora said firmly, and returned to the kitchen.

  Anna, whose hands did not seem as steady as she could have wished them, handed round the cups of coffee. She said, offering Elaine sugar, ‘Did I hear you right? Are you offering yourselves as deputy rector’s wives?’

  Elaine looked at her with great earnestness. ‘Yes.’

  A mild hysteria seized Anna. She fought with the urge to say, In every sense? and won, by the simple expedient of remembering that, for the last eighteen months, her and Peter’s nights had been purely for sleeping.

  ‘Have you spoken to Peter of this?’

  Celia looked shocked, largely because she had wished to, and Elaine had prevented her. ‘Of course not.’

  Anna returned to the sofa. A dull misery was settling on her like fog. ‘What exactly do you propose?’

  ‘Well,’ Celia said. She leaned forward and looked very, very caring. ‘We thought we could relieve you of all the mundane things – cleaning, flowers, magazines, etc – and perhaps some organizational things too, like the nuts and bolts of deanery entertaining, and leave you, as is only proper, the public roles. Being in church, visitors, attending functions. That sort of thing. We have a little team in mind, seven ladies—’

  Anna closed her eyes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Elaine said anxiously.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine—’

  ‘There you are. Worn out—’

  ‘Please,’ Anna said.

  Elaine stood up. ‘I think we should go. You think about it.’

  When they had gone, Anna went back to the sofa and lay on it, in a stupor.

  After a while, Flora came in and said, ‘Why are you lying down?’

  ‘Because I’m tired.’

  ‘Why are you tired?’

  ‘Because I think I’m vanishing,’ Anna said.

  Flora looked at her, up and down. ‘Emma’s mother,’ Flora said, ‘would think that was a very silly way to talk.’

  Later that day, Anna tried to explain to Charlotte. Charlotte had enjoyed the point-to-point, to her amazement, and had won £6. Luke had been allowed to drive the Daimler on a quiet side road, and they were both rather anxious everyone should know that they had been given smoked salmon sandwiches, and then sloe gin to wash down fruit cake. After supper at the Rectory, Luke returned to the Old Rectory to sluice the day’s mud off the Daimler, and Charlotte said she would wash up. Anna said they would do it together then, and, when Charlotte protested, explained that she wanted to talk.

  Charlotte, however, did not want to talk – or at least, not in the way Anna wanted to. Anna wanted to describe the morning, and her visit, and to attempt to decide, by thinking out loud, why this offer of apparent help should seem to her so deeply depressing, almost offensive. The two women had, after all, proposed to lift chores from her shoulders, but they were chores which, in a curious way, gave her an identity, and at the moment she was truly afraid of having no identity at all. She tried to explain this to Charlotte, to explain her sense of isolation and of losing what little control was left to her. She said, ‘You see, being married to a priest means such a different kind of marriage to a secular one. It is rather like having a crucial relationship with someone who is always half turned away from you.’

  Charlotte listened, sloshing soapy water about th
e sink, but she didn’t reply. It seemed to her that her mother was being relieved of all the most demeaning parish duties and that she ought to be absolutely thankful, and accept at once, and go out and find a decent teaching job instead of this obscene supermarket one. She had quite a lot of sympathy for her mother – she found her father impossible just now, quite unapproachable – but she couldn’t see why Anna clung to just that society-enforced female stereotyping that Charlotte and her friends were staking their lives upon overturning. She also, at bottom, was not deeply interested. After two weeks at home, she was beginning to feel stifled, and to need the reassurance of her Mends that she was independent and free-thinking. She lifted a bunch of knives and forks out of the water and dumped them, clattering, on the draining board.

  ‘You must just do what you want, Mum. You’re in charge.’

  Anna said, ‘Luke says that. But it isn’t true. The constraints may be invisible, but they are very strong.’

  Charlotte began to dry her hands very carefully, before fitting back on to her fingers her armoury of Indian silver rings. ‘It’s no good, being passive—’

  ‘I know that. But being trapped is different.’

  ‘Look, Mum,’ Charlotte said, ‘I’d accept if I were you. And get a decent job. What’s going on just now is pretty silly—’

  ‘Silly?’

  ‘In all honesty,’ Charlotte said, ‘I can’t support this supermarket.’

  Anna turned away and began to stack the clean plates in cupboards. Charlotte watched her for a while and then she said, almost without meaning to. ‘Sorry—’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Anna said. They did not look at one another. ‘You go off now—’

  Charlotte sidled round to the back door.

  ‘Patrick said to join him and Luke for a drink after Luke had washed the car—’

  ‘’Course—’

  ‘Won’t be late.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Cold air rushed in with the opening door. ‘’Night,’ Charlotte said, in a voice rich with relief, and vanished.

  On the first morning of the summer term, Peter elected to take Flora to St Saviour’s. This meant that they all drove into Woodborough together, and, after Luke had been dropped at the sixth-form college gates, Anna was let out, with elaborate lack of comment, at the staff door of Pricewell’s. Peter then escorted an extremely overexcited Flora to St Saviour’s.