The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  She found she was shaking. Had these unseen hands also been through her drawers, her medicine cupboard, her linen shelves, looking for letters and tranquillizers and compromising underclothes? She went back unsteadily to her bedroom. Her translation table – oh, the guilt about that, weeks and weeks behind and the silence from the publishers so ominous – had been discreetly but definitely tidied. Whoever had done it now knew about it, just as whoever had ordered their books knew what they were reading. A new thought came to her. She sat heavily on the edge of the bed, too stunned even to take pleasure in creasing its smoothly plump surface. Peter must not only know about all this, but have sanctioned it, given permission for his pyjamas to be folded, his toothglass polished, his wife’s sad little collection of cosmetic jars marshalled, to – whom?

  The doorbell rang. Anna got up off the bed and went slowly downstairs. She opened the door to Elaine Dodswell, whose face, above one of her weekday tracksuits in jade-green with a white stripe, wore an expression of mixed welcome and apprehension.

  ‘I just came—’

  Anna held the door a little wider. ‘Come in.’

  ‘You’re only just back, I know, I saw Patrick’s car. I just wanted to say welcome home, you know. Did you have a nice rest?’

  ‘No,’ Anna said.

  She led the way into the sitting-room. The furniture looked as if it were standing to attention. The cushions were bosomy; there were no newspapers.

  Elaine said, almost in a whisper, ‘Oh Anna, I’m so sorry—’

  ‘I ought to be grateful,’ Anna said, softening at her evident distress. ‘I should be, but—’

  ‘I wasn’t at all certain we should do it, I mean, I said, look it’s her home, but when Peter—’ She stopped.

  Anna sat down on the sofa. She patted the cushion beside her for Elaine to sit down too.

  ‘Was it Celia?’

  Elaine said, loyally, ‘It was the group, the new parish group.’

  ‘And what has the new parish group left for me to do?’

  ‘Anna,’ Elaine said pleadingly, ‘we were worried. You must see that, what with your taking a job that’s, well, that’s beneath you and looking so tired, and having to put a brave face on your disappointment over Peter, we wanted to help, we wanted to show we understand, I mean, we’re women too—’

  Anna took her hand. ‘I know. I believe you. I think you are a kind woman, Elaine. But – and this will seem harsh and ungrateful to you – I need the sort of kindness that is tailored for me, not just the unimaginative sort that it suits other people to give. Do you understand me?’

  ‘No,’ Elaine said. She took her hand away. ‘It took three of us all yesterday and two hours this morning. Celia and me and Trish Pardoe. We haven’t moved anything.’ She got up and said in a voice now tinged with resentment because Anna had failed to soothe her anxiety with comforting, understanding gratitude, ‘Peter was ever so pleased. He said the house hadn’t looked like this in years.’

  Anna stood up too. ‘And if Colin said that about your house, after someone else had cleaned it, and the cleaning of it was usually your responsibility, what would you feel?’

  Elaine stared at her for a moment. Then she went bright-pink. ‘He’d never say it!’ she almost shouted. ‘He’d never have cause to! I keep my home like a new pin!’ And then she ran from the house.

  Anna and Peter ate lunch almost in silence. Peter, Anna observed, looked much better for her absence, not so bony and with even a little colour. He ate Celia’s brilliant salad with relish, wiping his mouth at the end with the little scallop-edged paper napkin she had so daintily provided. Anna blew her nose on hers.

  By the time Peter had come home, Anna had had a private tantrum in the garden, and had washed her face and prepared herself to be calm but not particularly friendly. Peter clearly felt the same. She did not mention the spotless Rectory, so neither did he. Nor did she broach the subject of the parish group, a sleeping tiger he was clearly not going to poke awake. Instead he told her of uncontroversial parish matters and she told him of Eleanor’s troubles and neither commented upon the other’s information. When lunch was over, Peter gave Anna a brief kiss, said it was good to have her back and that he must go, to take prayers for the Thursday Club at Snead. As he went out of the back door, he was humming. He sounded almost jaunty.

  Chapter Eleven

  When he had gone, Anna washed up, brushed her hair, found the quilted Indian jacket that Charlotte had discarded as being reminiscent of a sixties earth mother, and locked the house. There were no afternoon buses from Loxford into Woodborough, so she walked the mile and a half to the main road, and caught a bus there. She had brought shopping bags because she told herself that she was going to buy supper before she collected Flora, but she had also brought the paperback copy of Ariel, which she had not read, because she knew she was really going straight round to the Vicarage. She did not, as she sat on the bus and stared out of the window at the prosperous fields of wheat and barley, and the blazing fields of rape, allow herself to articulate why she would go to the Vicarage. Instead, she permitted herself half an hour of mindless luxury of having a purpose that would also be a pleasure.

  The door of the Vicarage was opened by Miss Lambe. She stood, as she always did, holding it only six inches open and peering up at Anna in an anxious and mouse-like way. Anna stooped a little and asked in a very kind voice for Mr Jonathan Byrne. Miss Lambe whispered that he was working and wasn’t to be disturbed until teatime.

  ‘In that case,’ Anna said sadly, ‘would you give him this? Say that I’m returning it. With many thanks.’

  Miss Lambe nodded and shot out a paw for the book. Behind her, in the cavernous hall, a door opened and Daniel Byrne ushered someone out of his study. He was saying, ‘I do agree with you, but I don’t want to do it so delicately that it ends up looking apologetic,’ and then he saw Anna and said, ‘Mrs Bouverie! How extremely nice. Come in, come in.’

  ‘I was just returning a book—’

  ‘Can’t you just come in, too? Mrs Bouverie, this is our new Methodist minister, here in Woodborough. We were having an ecumenical discussion about a joint confirmation service.’

  The Methodist minister looked as if he thought the subject of their discussion ought to be strictly private. He nodded stiffly to Anna.

  ‘Miss Lambe,’ Daniel said, ‘could you rustle up yet more coffee?’ He shook the minister warmly by the hand. ‘It’s been such a useful discussion. Thank you so very much for coming.’

  When the front door had closed, he said, ‘A good man but he swallowed a poker.’ He took Anna by the arm. ‘How very nice it is to see you. Come in, come in.’

  She allowed herself to be led into his study and installed in a wing chair upholstered in faded tobacco-coloured corduroy. Daniel seemed entirely at ease, pottering round her, moving books off a stool for her coffee cup, stuffing papers into a cardboard folder, talking comfortably. He talked about Methodism for a little, and then about a Christian therapy group he had been asked to lead – ‘They all complained of the sensation of being lost, of not knowing where they were going, but I said what about starting with the notion that you can only be lost if you have no destinations, and if you are Christians, as you say you are, then surely you do have destinations?’ – and then about Miss Lambe – ‘A rare little bird, indeed, but her innocence is such a responsibility’ – and then he settled himself in a chair opposite Anna’s and said, ‘Now. Let’s get down to business and talk about you.’

  She said, ‘I might behave just like your therapy group.’

  ‘You have a sense of humour—’

  She looked down. ‘And a sense of shame.’

  ‘My dear girl—’ He leaned forward. He waited.

  She said reluctantly, ‘I’m very much afraid of sounding self-pitying. Self-pity is so absolutely disgusting.’

  ‘I think you should simply speak.’

  She looked up. He was watching heir, his head on one side. She would very much hav
e liked to cross the room and sit on his knee, and her eyes widened involuntarily in horror at herself.

  ‘Anna,’ Daniel Byrne said, ‘concentrate.’

  She blinked. She said, in a sudden rush, ‘I’ve been away for a week in Oxford, staying with a friend. It should have been a release but somehow it wasn’t, it was simply quite foreign. And I came home this morning glowing with good intentions, and found that a newly formed parish support-group, with Peter’s blessing, had scoured my house from top to bottom. All very well meant and yet absolutely outrageous. I am so offended, I hardly know how to express it, and yet I know any outsider would think me an ungrateful cow.’ She paused, took a breath, and hurried on. ‘The thing is that the validity I am assured, almost commanded, that I have as a Christian, seems not to be carried out in my human life. I seem to have less significance not only than my husband but than most of the parish. I’m not a person, I’m simply a sort of function, and a pretty lonely sort of function at that. And when I think about love,’ Anna said, warming up, leaning forward, ‘which I know to be absolutely vital, I can only think, except for what I feel for my children, of something rather monochrome and tired and dutiful. It isn’t that I don’t try, I try like mad, and then of course the lack of result seems even harder to bear. Sometimes, I’ve been known to yell at the sky just trying to get an answer.’ She stopped, wondering if she had overstepped the mark. She shot him a little glance. He looked exactly the same.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  She took a breath. ‘Have you ever felt like this?’

  ‘Of course. The dark night of the soul.’

  ‘I suppose, though, if you were a monk—’

  ‘If you mean sex,’ Daniel Byrne said comfortably, ‘it stopped mattering quite simply when – and because – other things of much greater importance came to fill its place. But it was a shocking trouble before that.’ He put his hands behind his head. ‘I wonder if you are confused about love? You are so determined to strive and struggle, to bash away. But divine love – don’t look away – is about receiving, not giving. That’s why it’s so different, so instinctive, also why it’s the easiest.’

  The door opened, Jonathan put his head in. His face lit up.

  ‘Anna!’

  Daniel said, ‘That was a tactless bit of Porlocking. Haven’t you the discretion to knock?’

  Jonathan came right in. He was wearing jeans and an enormous dark-blue jersey and his hair was tousled. He said, ‘In case you have a choirboy in here?’

  Daniel ignored him. He said to Anna, ‘I find you very brave. It’s so wrong to think that spectacular courage is the best bravery. The noblest bravery is battling against these dreadful daily assaults, often very minor, on one’s spirit.’

  Jonathan came to sit next to Anna. ‘Can I join in?’

  Anna looked up at him. Her eyes were shining. Sitting here in this shabby, untidy, human room with the Byrne brothers suddenly seemed perfection, a happiness she could hardly bear to abandon. She said sadly, ‘I have to get Flora.’

  Jonathan said, ‘Then I’ll drive you back to Loxford.’

  ‘The bus—’

  ‘No,’ Jonathan said with vehemence, ‘no. Don’t always object to everything. Don’t be so bloody difficult.’

  ‘She’s not difficult,’ Daniel said.

  ‘I know that. I know that really. She’s lovely.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Anna said. ‘Stop it!’ She was laughing.

  Daniel got up. ‘You just hold out your cup,’ he said to her, ‘just hold it out and let it be filled.’

  ‘Like letting me drive you home—’

  ‘Only if that’s what she wants.’

  ‘Do you?’ Jonathan said, turning. She nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘I’ll go and find the keys.’

  When he had gone, she said to Daniel, ‘I thought it was a requirement of maturity, and of grace, to be very hard on yourself, as hard as you were generous to everyone else.’

  He put his hand briefly on her shoulder. ‘It’s all a deal, a two-way business, if it’s man to man. That’s what makes us undivine. But you try a little taking from God. Just relax into it. And in a while, we’ll talk some more.’ He moved away, back to his desk. ‘We aren’t all the same, you know. We all need something different, we all hear different messages.’ He paused and then he said softly, ‘So many people just lack the capacity to live richly, at any level. You aren’t one of them. It’s too easy to defend a castle that’s never been attacked. Don’t be afraid. And now here is your chauffeur.’

  It was a strange drive home. Flora had begun to write a play in her English lesson, and was so absorbed in her second scene (an encounter between her orphan heroine and a mysterious cloaked stranger) that she actually elected to sit in the back of the car and scribble furiously in her notebook. Jonathan had pleased her by saying seriously, ‘Ah, the second scene. Of course, it’s the second act that is always notoriously so difficult,’ to which she had gravely nodded. From the back seat, she watched the back of his head and wondered if he would serve as a model for her stranger, when he removed his cloak and shed his mystery.

  Jonathan talked most of the time. He drove better than Daniel with an instinctive ease that freed him for talking. He talked with energy and fluency, mostly about the education of the feelings, and how important it was, and how feelings make or break men and women and give them their best capacity to understand other people. He told Anna that Stendhal had declared that you had to look into your own heart to discover who you were. He said that one of the messages of literature is that everything is different in the grip of strong feelings, and that is why passion is dangerous as well as wonderful.

  Anna listened. She simply lay back in her seat and watched the sky swoop past through the windscreen, and listened. There was no need to say anything.

  Jonathan said, ‘We all overlay our feelings with too much thinking. We are afraid of our feelings because they are arbitrary and volatile, and we often need literature to make our feelings intelligible to us, to make us see that our reaction to what we can’t choose and what we can is what shapes our lives.’

  The journey was over too soon for Anna; she saw the village green slide by with apprehension. She said, ‘It’s so nice of you. Just drop us by the church.’

  The car stopped. Jonathan said, ‘You see, it is so terribly important to stay alive,’ and then, without warning, he picked Anna’s hand from her lap, and kissed it.

  Later, Flora said, ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘Because it’s awkward to shake hands sitting side by side in a car.’ (Well done. Quick thinking.)

  ‘You couldn’t,’ Flora said clearly, ‘do that to a man—’

  ‘But I’m not a man.’

  Flora regarded her. At the end of scene two, the mysterious stranger might take the heroine’s small cold hand in his great gloved one and kiss it. ‘Telling me,’ Flora said.

  In Woodborough Vicarage, Jonathan looked without enthusiasm at the slab of pork pie lying palely on his plate and said, ‘Can I ask what Anna came to see you about this afternoon?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Was it to tell you that she didn’t love her husband any more and to ask you what to do about it?’

  ‘If you knew what she came for,’ Daniel said, putting down his knife and fork, ‘why do you ask me?’

  The evening passed with rigorous politeness. Luke had much enjoyed his week living in Woodborough and listened enviously to Anna’s account of Eleanor’s sons’ lives in the wild paradise of Oxford. Flora explained about her play – ‘It’s a tragedy so of course the end will be awful’ – and Peter and Anna avoided looking at one another. After supper, Peter said he would wash up, but the telephone rang and a young woman from Church End said her father had died that afternoon and she couldn’t do a thing with her mother, so he had put down the washing-up brush, and put on his jacket, and gone. Luke and Anna washed up instead, and Luke sensed that Anna didn’t want to be back at home any more than
he did, but he didn’t wish this to be the case, so said nothing. Instead, Anna told him about coming home to find her gleaming, burnished house, and Luke said, ‘Interfering old cows. At least my room defeated them,’ and they laughed. Then he said, ‘I’ve got two hundred and eighty pounds towards India,’ and she said, ‘Wonderful. Well done,’ and he nodded, and the doorbell rang.

  It was Elaine Dodswell. She was holding a pile of parish magazines for May. Luke looked at them. Elaine said breathlessly, ‘Would you give these to your mum? We thought perhaps – I mean, we know she likes to do them herself, so after all we thought—’ She stopped.

  ‘OK,’ said Luke, after a while, ‘if you want.’ He took the magazines.

  Elaine stepped back a little. ‘Tell her—’ Luke waited. ‘Say I called,’ Elaine said. ‘No hard feelings.’ She turned and hurried down the path.

  Luke shut the door and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Who brought them?’

  ‘Elaine Whatsit. From that house with those gross frogs. She said no hard feelings.’

  Anna sat down. ‘Do you know, I think they believe that by handing back the magazine round they are somehow restoring my raison d’être.’

  ‘Don’t do it, then.’

  ‘I have to,’ Anna said. Luke was suddenly afraid she was going to cry. ‘I have to. I’ve painted myself into a corner.’

  Three days later, in the early evening, as Anna pushed a folded magazine into the gleaming brass letter box of the Old Rectory, the door was opened from the inside.

  ‘Come in,’ Patrick said.

  Anna shook her head. ‘Thank you, but I can’t—’

  ‘Just for a moment. I want to talk about Luke.’

  ‘Luke? Why, has he—’

  ‘Don’t look worried. He’s wonderful, a real asset. No, it’s a scheme I have.’

  Cautiously, Anna followed him into the hall.