The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  He thought. Even six months ago he would have said he wanted her to be a loving wife, a helpmeet, an ally. Now all he wanted was to have her out of his study. He said in a voice that shook with the impact of this realization, ‘If you can’t see that, I can’t possibly explain it to you.’

  ‘Mummy.’

  Anna looked up. Flora’s nightied figure was dark against the dim landing.

  ‘Flora! You should be in bed.’

  ‘I hate it when you cry—’

  Anna came up the stairs. ‘I’m not crying, darling.’

  ‘All that shouting,’ Flora said, ‘I hate it. Why are you quarrelling?’

  ‘Money,’ Anna said.

  Flora’s chest contracted. ‘About St Saviour’s?’

  ‘No, no. St Saviour’s is quite safe. It was a very dull adult quarrel. Nothing to worry about.’ She reached the landing and put her arms around Flora. ‘Isn’t it quiet without Luke?’

  ‘Horrid,’ Flora said.

  ‘He’ll be back soon.’

  Flora said into Anna’s shoulder, ‘I don’t want to be Emma’s friend any more. I want to be Verity’s.’

  ‘Can’t you be both?’

  ‘’Course not,’ Flora said scornfully.

  ‘No unkindness to Emma, Flora.’

  Flora tensed a little. ‘No unkindness to Daddy then.’ She withdrew from Anna’s embrace. ‘I’m going to sleep in Luke’s room.’

  ‘All right.’

  Flora marched across the landing. She put her hand on Luke’s door and pushed it open. Anna didn’t move. Suddenly, Flora didn’t like her little victory. She turned and scuttled back to Anna, dissolved in tears, and Anna, soothing her, thought that all these years of her own self-sufficiency seemed to have conditioned her for nothing, since all she now longed to do was to telephone Jonathan. Which, of course, she couldn’t.

  Patrick told Ella he was going away. In the past, this would have meant nothing, Patrick was always going away, but since coming to Loxford he had hardly stirred. His business, those mysterious companies in which he played an unspecified but clearly significant part, had taken him to Germany a good deal, to Frankfurt, and Munich, and also to America. He always brought Ella something if he was away for more than a week. She couldn’t help noticing that, after the past months of rural life, she was running low on duty-free scent. She had always liked the fact that Patrick bought her scent.

  When he announced he was going away, Ella felt a huge relief. She had put off going to see Peter because she found she could hardly face it. It wasn’t just the errand itself, but having to confront, because of it, the fact that Patrick was wildly attracted to Anna. His long-term mistress had been someone Ella could assimilate, an idle, witty, impractical creature with none of the qualities Ella thought important, because she possessed them herself. But Anna was different. Anna was original and attractive, with a suppressed wildness about her, like something caged. Ella herself had no wildness; as a quality it alarmed her and so she disapproved of it.

  Her sister, Rachel, had prophesied that Ella would fall for Patrick if she went to work for him, but Ella had snorted and produced her good sense, her age and her pragmatism as evidence that she was proof against a thousand Patricks. So it had been, and a relationship had developed that had never overstepped the mark into either formality or informality, its tone dictated, Ella was sure, by her own cool head. Patrick could be such a boy . . . But he was a man, too, and the man in him had clearly now got the upper hand and was bearing him away to Germany to collect his wits.

  ‘He’s going to Germany,’ she told Trish Pardoe in the Loxford shop. ‘For three weeks.’ The shop was full, it being a Friday, but she lowered her voice all the same. ‘I think he’s come to his senses.’

  ‘She looks terrible,’ Trish said. ‘I saw her getting on the early bus. White as a sheet.’

  ‘Perhaps he said something.’

  Trish rootled in a box of crisp packets for the cheese-and-onion-flavoured ones. ‘Will you go and see Peter, all the same?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not if—’

  ‘Leave well alone, I think.’

  ‘But you thought—’

  ‘I was upset,’ Trish said, ‘wasn’t I? It was a shock, seeing them. But I’ve got enough to worry about, what with Mum and the Brownies being threatened with amalgamation with Quindale. I ask you! Poor little mites. Might as well send them into Woodborough and have done with it. There now. I always put these on top, because they’re the most popular.’

  ‘Then why,’ said Ella, nettled, ‘don’t you put them at the bottom?’

  She packed for Patrick with exaggerated care, feeling that this trip was of great significance. He seemed, she had to admit, very cheerful, almost jaunty, and not in the least like a sober adult taking a blow bravely. But then, Patrick was resilient. When his mistress had left, Ella had heard him whistling while he shaved less than a week later.

  He surveyed his suitcase. ‘You’re a pearl.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘I’m paid for it.’

  He grinned. He said, ‘I may not be a whole three weeks, of course. Why don’t you go away, go to your sister? You don’t want to be stuck here—’

  ‘To my great chagrin, I like it here.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She set her mouth. ‘Time you got away, though.’

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know perfectly well.’

  He laughed. He picked up his case and started across the hall.

  ‘I read your mind like an open book, Ella. Keep an eye on the Rectory for me while I’m gone.’

  She said grimly, ‘There’ll be nothing to see.’

  He stopped at the front door and turned to her. ‘Oh, I hope there will. That’s the chief reason I’m going. Absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder.’ And then he let himself out into the sunshine.

  Anna read the letter several times. It was quite a courteous letter, but it was firm as well. It was from the publishers of her translations, a firm in Bristol. They were sorry, they said, to have received no work from her for some months now, despite frequent reminders (oh, help, those envelopes pushed into the kitchen-dresser drawer in the hope of their just vanishing) and assumed that she was no longer in a position to work regularly for them. As they themselves were now under increasing pressure from European manufacturers extending into the British Isles, and vice versa, they had to be certain of the reliability of their translators. They therefore thanked her for past work, requested the return of anything unfinished and begged her to regard this letter as the termination of any arrangement between them.

  It should be a relief, Anna thought, and it’s the reverse. She felt a sudden, irrational affection for that mad Oriental table upstairs at which she had sat for so many resentful, disciplined hours, coupled with a sharp nostalgia for those past times when things had seemed under her control. She might not want to translate another word, but she might not want to see it go from her either. This was not in the least logical, she knew, but sometimes the least logical things were the ones that twisted a slow knife in you until you cried out.

  She went upstairs and looked at her books and papers. The last manual – of which she had only done twenty pages – was the German specifications for a machine that laminated plastic. She closed it sadly, and made a little pile of it, and her few typed pages of translation, and another manual, in French, that she hadn’t even opened. Then she typed a letter to the publishers, saying that she was sorry, and took everything downstairs to make a parcel.

  Later, she showed the letter to Peter. He read it without comment, and handed it back to her.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘I assumed this would happen.’

  The parcel, ready for posting, lay on the kitchen table between them. She longed to pick it up and hurl it at him.

  ‘Aren’t you triumphant? Isn’t this what you wanted? I’ve got no job now, nothing. You can disband the parish group, if yo
u want. Here I am, Peter, here I am. Just the Rector’s wife.’

  He looked at her. After a pause he said, not unkindly, ‘I’m afraid, Anna, that simply saying it doesn’t make it so.’

  The telephone rang. Peter made no move to answer it. Anna picked up the receiver.

  ‘Anna? This is Celia. How are you? Good, good. Now, I hardly like to trouble you, knowing how busy you are, but what I’m going to ask won’t take much time—’

  ‘Celia,’ Anna said, interrupting, ‘just ask away. I’ve got all the time in the world.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  On Anna’s last day at Pricewell’s, she was presented with a double begonia in a china pot and Mr Mulgrove said to all the staff who were assembled for their lunch break that it had been a pleasure to have Anna working for them, and that they would miss her. Anna, clutching the curious and unEnglish flower, felt slightly tearful and said she would miss them too. Only Tim, her erstwhile supervisor, who clearly felt a personal betrayal at her departure, asked her why she was going, just when she’d got used to it. Anna, shackled for new reasons by old habits of loyalty, said, ‘Because I ought to be at home more.’

  Tim looked unconvinced. In his world, the women were always out, took all kinds of jobs, seemed to feel no obligation to do anything they weren’t inclined to do. His own mother had weekly rows with his father over both her job at a launderette and her regular expeditions with girlfriends to watch the male stripper down at The Royal George. Tim was used to seeing his father’s apoplectic flailings at his mother’s independence; he thought it was something that probably afflicted you as you got older. Perhaps it had hit Anna’s old man, perhaps he’d said she’d got to stay at home and visit the sick or whatever vicars’ wives did. But then Anna didn’t seem to Tim like the kind of wife who took orders, even from a vicar.

  He said, truthfully, ‘I’ll miss you. I don’t know anyone like you.’

  Mr Mulgrove said, ‘I’m really sorry about this. We hoped you’d have a future with us.’

  Heather from flours and dried fruits said, ‘Don’t blame you. Who wants to spend their life stacking bleeding sultanas?’

  Anna took her last pay envelope, drank her last cup of subsidised canteen coffee, hung up her blue overall and went out into the market-place. In her bag, she carried the plastic badge she had worn, the badge which said, ‘I’m Anna. Can I help you?’ Glancing up at the sky, behind whose high summer clouds dwelt that inscrutable power whose presence she could not quite get out of her mind, she thought of her badge and its slogan, and said to herself: It wouldn’t hurt You to wear one . . .

  Being market day, Woodborough was full. The country buses brought people in after breakfast and took them away before lunch, their carrier bags bulging with fish from the woman who travelled up from Devon, jeans and T-shirts from the Pakistanis who travelled down from Birmingham and cheese from the man who made his own from herds kept in pastures not five miles from Woodborough. Threading her way among the stalls, Anna bought some vacuum-cleaner bags, a bargain box of soap powder and a punnet of strawberries for Flora, who had crept into her bed at dawn that morning and said uncharacteristically, ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m fine.’

  ‘Mothers always say that. Verity says when her mother says it, it means she’s got a migraine.’

  Flora couldn’t cuddle, never had been able to. She lay awkwardly against Anna for a few minutes, then bumped a clumsy kiss on her, climbed out of bed again and padded back to her room. Peter didn’t stir. Missing Flora, Anna took revenge upon his stillness by wishing the bed was just hers.

  Now she looked at the strawberries. Should she buy another punnet for Peter? Would he notice? Was he remotely concerned as to whether she gave him strawberries or a banana? Or a black eye? She glanced at her watch. Half an hour before she collected Flora, half an hour in which to dawdle about Woodborough while her mind scurried round and round its new trap, like a mouse on a wheel.

  She left the market-place and turned down Sheep Street, a narrow street forbidden to traffic which Woodborough Council had dotted with tree-shaded benches usually occupied by clumps of dismal teenagers waiting, without much hope, for action. Ahead of Anna, a tall young woman was pushing a pram. She stopped the pram outside a newsagent, stooped to pick up the baby (it was new, Anna could see, from its size and the swaddled oblivion of its tiny head), and then, as if recollecting something, abruptly put the baby back, tucked it in decisively and pushed the pram onwards. Anna, who had not thought of it for years, suddenly remembered her twenty-three-year-old self outside a newsagent in a Bristol suburb, making the abrupt decision not to buy chocolate. She had half lifted Charlotte from the pram, even, just as that young woman had done. She could see Charlotte clearly, a neat, small baby with a dark, downy head, and her own hands holding her, hands emerging from the sleeves of a scarlet duffel coat Laura had given her, a stiff, thick coat with a hood and black-lacquered toggles. That was twenty years ago, that October afternoon, twenty years, nearly half my life . . .

  Anna crept to one of the benches and sat down. There was a gloomy girl at the far end, her feet thrust into huge, black shoes, smoking ferociously. She didn’t look at Anna. Anna sat cradling her parcels, inhaling the peculiar, synthetic, red smell of the strawberries, grappling with herself. Where had she come, in the last twenty years, but round in a huge, slow circle? Even the children, even now Jonathan, were they enough, was he? Should she now just break cover and run for dear life, literally for her dear life? But it wouldn’t do to run to Jonathan, she could only do that if she was running a hundred per cent away from something else. All the same, thank heavens for Jonathan. She thought she could hear him, she was sure she could hear his voice. She looked round, enchanted, and there he was, coming leisurely up Sheep Street, accompanied by Luke. Luke looked just as usual, in jeans and a T-shirt, his denim jacket slung over one shoulder. He was listening intently to Jonathan, slightly turning his head towards him. Jonathan was deep in explanation, gesturing for emphasis. They walked slowly past Anna, quite absorbed, not seeing her. As for her, after a first, quick, involuntary gesture of greeting, she didn’t move, simply sat there and watched them drift obliviously by.

  The girl on the bench had watched them too, particularly Luke, with resentful interest. Anna said, on impulse, to her, ‘That’s my son.’

  The girl stared. Then she shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and I’m the Queen of England,’ and slouched away.

  Flora ate her strawberries on the bus, throwing the hulls out of the window. Anna told her about seeing Luke, and Flora said Luke had been to St Saviour’s and seen her, too, and he’d said living in Woodborough was great and she thought she’d like to stay with Verity for a few nights and live in Woodborough as well.

  ‘Suppose,’ Anna said, ‘just suppose I wanted to live in Woodborough?’

  ‘You couldn’t. You have to stay in Loxford.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Flora ate the last strawberry. ‘You know you do. That’s what happens.’

  The village green was already showing signs of summer wear. The mothers, waiting for the bus, had trampled their habitual spot in a depressed, yellowing circle, and there were bare patches in front of the two benches and the litter bin. Anna and Flora climbed down the steps of the bus and the mothers said, ‘Warm enough for you, Mrs B?’ and, ‘Like your hat,’ to Flora, who scowled and put her convent Panama behind her back. They trailed together across the green, Flora bumping her school bag behind her like a recalcitrant dog, and Anna holding her begonia tightly, as if it were a talisman.

  From the landing windows of the Old Rectory, Ella watched them. She hardly knew Flora, who seemed to her a precocious and unattractive child with none of Luke’s undoubted warmth of heart. She glanced at Flora, in her striped St Saviour’s summer dress, red and white, and thought, for a brief and disquieting moment, of motherhood, a state she could hardly even visualize. Anna was a mother, and Anna interested Ella far more. Walking beside
Flora in a long, full-skirted, dark-blue dress sashed in buttercup yellow – why, Ella thought crossly, why were Anna’s clothes so irritating? – she looked as if she belonged to Flora, and was, at the same time, separate. She looked, too, thoroughly despondent. Ella studied her. Her shoulders drooped a little, her head was slightly bent, both noticeable in a woman who usually carried herself with assurance. She seemed to be bent over some lurid, pink-flowered plant she was carrying, as if she were protecting it. Ella took a breath. It couldn’t be a plant Patrick had sent. Could it? It didn’t look Patrick’s style; he would send lilies or an orchid, something exotic and showy. She thought of Patrick. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ he’d said as he left. Looking at Anna, Ella now thought, with a sinking heart, that perhaps he might have been right.

  Anna put the begonia on the kitchen table.

  ‘It’s an awful colour,’ Flora said.

  ‘I know. But I feel very fond of it.’

  Flora began to rummage for biscuits. ‘What job’ll you do now?’

  ‘Celia has given me a piece to write for the parish magazine. To try and encourage people to help clean the church. I think you should have bread before a biscuit’

  ‘That won’t take long,’ Flora said, finding two digestives and ignoring the bread bin, ‘that’s not a job.’

  ‘No. I’ll find something else. Don’t worry.’

  ‘You keep saying that. You said that to Luke.’

  ‘I mean it’

  ‘You can’t just switch off worry,’ Flora said. ‘You can’t just take an aspirin.’

  Anna ran water into the kettle. ‘What exactly worries you?’

  Flora spread her arms, showering crumbs. ‘The feeling here.’

  Anna said nothing. She put the lid on the kettle and plugged it in.

  ‘When I grow up,’ Flora said to her mother’s back, ‘I’m never, ever going to marry a vicar.’