The Rector's Wife

by Joanna Trollope

  Kitty couldn’t see her prayer book for tears. She couldn’t believe that she was not simply a widow now, but childless too. What have I been for? she asked herself over and over again. When the fragment of feather alighted on her book, she thought it was a spider for a moment and gave a little shriek. Behind her, the congregation murmured in sympathy. Poor little woman, and Peter her only child! She mopped and blew, and around her feet crumpled paper handkerchiefs gathered like fallen petals. Must pull myself together, she told herself, stand up like Laura. It won’t help Anna if I give way, or the children, it won’t help anybody. She heard her father’s voice of half a century before saying, ‘Tears, Katherine, should only be shed for others.’ But I can’t, Kitty thought desperately. I can’t, I can’t; I only know how to cry for myself. Silently, majestically, Laura passed her an enormous handkerchief of plum-coloured silk.

  As the priest who had known Peter the longest, John Jacobs climbed into the pulpit to give the address. He said how sad he was to be in Peter’s pulpit on such an occasion. He said how his heart went out to Peter’s family. He described Peter’s great spirituality and his devotion to duty and his kindness and his work for the diocese. He spoke of a man of God who had understood the needs of the rural church. He spoke of a priest who had never, for all his faith, compromised his family. He spoke for a long time and illustrated his address with anecdotes about Peter that seemed appropriate to almost any clergyman in the diocese except Peter. He concluded by saying that if ever a priest had been a square peg in a square hole, that priest was Peter in Loxford. The congregation listened politely. The Bishop looked out of the south chancel window. Anna looked mostly at the floor.

  Then they all filed out into the churchyard for the burial. It was a proper burial, in an old-fashioned grave, as Peter had wished, his father having had a full burial before him. Luke led Flora away from the graveside and sat on a tombstone, holding her on his knee. Charlotte took Anna’s arm. Kitty took Laura’s hand. When the coffin had been lowered in, they all threw flowers down after it.

  ‘You OK?’ Charlotte hissed. Her arm clamped Anna’s to her side.

  Anna nodded.

  ‘What?’ Charlotte demanded. ‘What, what?’

  Anna turned and kissed her.

  ‘I’m so relieved,’ she said, ‘so relieved. For him almost more than for me.’

  There was tea afterwards at the Rectory. The parish group had made it, plates and plates of sandwiches and scones and ginger biscuits and slices of fruit cake. They had set up the Mothers’ Union tea urn in the kitchen, and borrowed the Loxford village-hall teacups, all six dozen of them, and it looked as if they would all be used. Anna, feeling tea was somehow not sufficiently encouraging, had bought some bottles of sherry from Pricewell’s, and Luke was detailed to be butler. He came upon Anna, with his tray of glasses, and said to her, ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  She looked at him. She wanted, violently, to embrace him, tray and all. She said, ‘You drink one of those. Straight down. We’ll talk later.’

  The atmosphere in the sitting-room was heady with relief. It was full of people holding plates and the plates were full of food. The Bishop was slowly eating sandwiches, one after another, almost absently. He said to Anna, ‘You are all so much in our prayers.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ his wife said. She looked keenly at Anna. Anna was very interesting to her.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ Anna said.

  The Bishop looked mildly alartned.

  ‘Not about the past,’ Anna said, ‘about the future.’

  The Bishop thought of housing, of the three Bouverie children. His brow cleared. ‘Of course.’

  ‘No,’ Anna said, reading his mind. ‘About my future, what I should do.’

  He peered at her. His wife watched.

  ‘I’m not putting this well,’ Anna said, ‘and I don’t suppose now is the time. But I have a plan, you see, a plan that will involve the diocese. At least, it ought to involve the diocese.’

  The Bishop said, ‘Come and see me. In a week or so. Just ring my secretary and come and see me.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled up at him. Celia Hooper appeared with a plate of sandwiches, flagged ‘cucumber’, smiling too, but in a hostessy way.

  ‘I say,’ said the Bishop, taking two.

  ‘His favourite,’ said his wife. She looked after Anna, who had moved away. ‘Wonderful, really. So composed.’

  ‘One always hopes there won’t be a reaction,’ Celia said.

  The Bishop’s wife looked at her. ‘There’s usually a reaction,’ she said crisply, ‘if there’s guilt. Guilt is much harder to live with than grief.’ She thought of Peter Bouverie coming out of her husband’s study when he knew he would not be Archdeacon. ‘I wish,’ she said with some vehemence, ‘I wish I had taken the trouble to get to know Anna Bouverie months, years, ago. I wish—’ She stopped. Celia and the Bishop looked at her.

  ‘Have some of Mrs Pardoe’s fruit cake,’ Celia said.

  ‘I say,’ said the Bishop.

  Daniel found Anna in the kitchen. She was refilling the urn with kettles of boiling water, her hand muffled in a tea towel.

  ‘My dear.’

  She put the kettle down. Daniel took her in his arms. She said, ‘I’ve only said this to Charlotte, but I’m so relieved—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The service was terrible, so false, except for the lovely bit by the grave.’

  Daniel let her go, and she picked up the kettle again. ‘The burial service,’ Daniel said, ‘is the most triumphant, the most exhilarating of all the services. I know no music as resoundingly confident as the English of the burial service. Perhaps that very confidence is what people shrink from now.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Anna said, pouring. ‘I’m thankful for it. I’m desperately sad that Peter got so empty and that we grew so far apart, but there wasn’t a remedy. It was all too deep in him and in us, and too complicated.’

  ‘Did he know about Jonathan?’

  Anna looked straight at him. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh Anna—’

  ‘Why?’ Anna said. ‘Why, “Oh Anna”?’ Her gaze was candid. ‘Why should I feel guilty? I’m not guilty. While he was alive, I was always wracked with guilt, but now he’s dead it’s stopped. I know I was a good wife to him. I was a good wife until he didn’t want me any more.’

  She turned away to fill the kettle again and plug it in.

  ‘You had an affair with Jonathan.’

  ‘And is that morally worse than having an affair with duty? The withdrawing of the essence of yourself, of your emotional and imaginative generosity, is what kills relationships. I never withdrew mine. Look,’ Anna said turning back, ‘I’ve come to love you dearly, and to admire you, but there are things about men and women that I now know better than you.’

  Daniel bowed his head. Anna watched him and thought of the previous evening when poor distraught Ella Pringle had come round and had told Anna that she had been the cause of Peter’s car crash. Anna, who had never liked Ella much, had found herself being genuinely tremendously sorry for her. She had taken her into the sitting-room, and had sat beside her on the sofa, soothing and patting. Ella’s story seemed to her a sad and scruffy little business, and not significant.

  ‘It was pure coincidence,’ Anna said, Over and over again. ‘You are not to blame. He was in a very sad state, very wound up.’

  ‘I’m leaving Patrick,’ Ella said. ‘I can’t stand his attitude any more. I believed him. I believed he had a relationship with you.’

  ‘No,’ Anna said, ‘he was playing a game.’ She looked at Ella. ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘No,’ Ella said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s harder to leave than to stay,’ Anna said. ‘If it’s any comfort to you, I had decided to leave, the very afternoon Peter was killed. I came down from the copse to tell him that, and found the policeman. I’ve been given freedom, but I would have left. You must, too. Patrick is too ar
bitrary to live with, too tyrannical.’

  And Ella, who disliked touching women, leaned across and kissed her.

  ‘I’ve learned so much in a week,’ Anna said now to Daniel, ‘that I’m quite exhausted.’

  He smiled. ‘Life certainly never gets any easier. Or simpler.’

  The kitchen door opened. Elaine Dodswell came in, followed by Trish Pardoe. They were carrying piles of empty plates.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ Elaine said, looking from Daniel to Anna, ‘I’d no idea—’

  ‘You weren’t interrupting,’ Daniel said. ‘Nothing that can’t be resumed.’

  Elaine said to Anna, ‘Oh, I do hope you’ve eaten, you must eat, you know, it doesn’t help not to eat. Oh Anna, I’m so sorry, I’m so terribly sorry. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elaine said. She put the plates down and gestured at the kitchen, at the table and the cream-painted units and the blue-checked curtains overprinted with vegetables that had been a present from Kitty. ‘What are you going to do, poor Anna, now that you aren’t the Rector’s wife any more?’

  Anna stood by the front door so that they could all say goodbye. Most people, particularly those she hardly knew, kissed her with fervour. The sherry had clearly been a good idea. Flora came and leaned tiredly against her, and so got kissed as well. Her eyes, behind her glasses, were swollen and tender from crying.

  Isobel Thompson kissed Anna warmly. ‘Come and stay. Don’t be alone. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Anna said.

  ‘Sometimes it’s so much easier to talk to a woman—’

  ‘I’ll talk to you because you’re Isobel. Not because you’re a woman or a priest.’

  ‘Oh Anna,’ Isobel said. ‘You don’t change—’

  ‘Oh, but I have. I’ve stopped pretending.’

  ‘Yes,’ Isobel said uncertainly, moving back a little. ‘Yes.’

  Colonel Richardson embraced Anna with relief. ‘My dear,’ he said. He knew what to do with her now; she had stepped back into a category he could manage, the plucky little widow putting on a wonderful front. Damned good-looking, too, good carriage, great dignity, never a public tear. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘Marjorie and I are always there. Anything you want. Only have to ask. Anything. Frightful business.’ He wrung her hand.

  Marjorie Richardson brushed her face with a powdered cheek. She looked at Anna oddly, as if about to speak, but said nothing.

  ‘Mummy,’ Flora said.

  Anna bent. ‘Yes, darling.’

  ‘Where,’ said Flora, her eyes widening in alarm, ‘where exactly did Daddy go?’

  Several people were waiting. Anna looked round at them; Lady Mayhew, Miss Dunstable, that poor deaf man from Snead, even Mr Biddle in a bursting, decent, dark suit. She said, quite clearly, to Flora, ‘To paradise.’

  Ella put Patrick’s chicken casserole for supper into the Aga, and went upstairs to brush her hair. She also put on some scent, her new lipstick and her pearl earrings. She felt she must be armoured.

  Patrick was in his small sitting-room, in the armchair Anna had briefly occupied on the night he had heard her crying in the lane, with a tumbler of whisky and a financial newspaper. He had not been to the funeral; he had not commented, even, on Peter’s death, beyond saying to Ella in a tone she didn’t at all care for, ‘I wonder what triggered him off?’

  She said now, ‘May I speak to you for a moment?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He got up and indicated a chair. ‘Drink?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I see. So I’m in for some kind of wigging.’

  ‘No,’ Ella said. She sat down and crossed her legs. He surveyed her with approval.

  ‘How was the funeral?’

  ‘Sad,’ Ella said. She waited for him to ask her about Anna, but he didn’t, he simply went on watching her.

  ‘I’ve come down to say that I am leaving at the end of the month.’ She paused.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And why are you going and what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ve applied to be matron at Snead Hall.’

  He laughed. He stared at her and he laughed. Then he sat down again.

  ‘My dear Ella, they’ll pay you half what I do and you’ll moulder—’

  ‘Anything,’ Ella said, ‘anything is better than staying with a man who plays games with other people’s feelings.’

  ‘Who have you been talking to?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I can guess,’ Patrick said. ‘She doesn’t matter either. Not now.’ He looked at Ella with a queer sideways glance. ‘I didn’t play games with Anna Bouverie, you know. She played them with me. She used me. It’s never happened to me before and I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Ella said.

  ‘I’ve had everything generous I’ve done thrown back in my face. Luke, Anna, now you. Can you imagine how I feel?’

  ‘Oh yes—’

  Patrick leaned forward. ‘Please stay. All the usual inducements, of course, more money, more time off, but really because I need you to. I want you to.’

  Ella stood up. ‘So sorry, but no. I’ll stay until the end of August. Then I shall go. You’d be better off with a couple to look after you, in any case. There are so many jobs for a man.’

  ‘I may not even stay here—’

  ‘I didn’t think it would last long.’

  Patrick looked up at her. ‘I believed in it all, you know.’

  ‘All I know,’ said Ella briskly in her usual voice, ‘is that now Anna Bouverie is free for the having, you don’t want her any more. And that you are furious with her for that.’ She marched to the door. ‘If I ever marry, Patrick O’Sullivan, I shall make sure that my mate for life is a decent woman, or even, maybe, a book.’ And then she went out quickly before he had time to collect his wits to reply.

  Anna lay in the centre of her and Peter’s bed and gazed up into the pale summer darkness. The doctor had left sleeping pills, but she thought she wouldn’t take one until it was perfectly plain that she wouldn’t sleep naturally. All around her in the Rectory’s other bedrooms lay her relations, also probably, except for Flora, staring into nothing. Anna had climbed into bed with Flora and held her until she slept. On the floor beside her bed lay the dictionary, where Flora had wanted to look up ‘paradise’. The dictionary had said that it was an ancient Persian pleasure ground and a place of bliss and the final abode of the blessed dead. It went on to describe paradise fish and paradise birds, gorgeous in colouring and plumage, and Flora’s brow had cleared a little. She looked very small, to Anna, small and childish. It was a relief when her body relaxed and Anna could see she was truly asleep.

  Then there had been Kitty. Kitty was not to be comforted with descriptions of Persian pleasure grounds. Kitty sat and nursed a tiny glass of sherry and said that her human landscape had quite fallen away and that she was not only desolate but absolutely no bloody use to anyone. No-one had ever heard Kitty swear before. They looked at her with new respect. She blushed and tossed off her sherry and said loudly that she’d do her best to die soon, too, so that Anna could have her savings and her amethysts, and then she burst into tears again.

  Laura said why didn’t they have a suicide pact? She thought they might dress in black velvet and do it with poison at midnight. She meant to make Kitty laugh, but Kitty cried harder. Laura took Charlotte into the kitchen and they fried bacon and eggs and discussed the future. Laura said she was going to sell her flat and offer the money to Anna, and Charlotte said she was going to leave Edinburgh and get a job, any job. They took the bacon and eggs into the sitting-room and distributed the plates around to Anna and Kitty and Luke. Kitty said she couldn’t face it, so Anna fed her little bits, like a baby, and after a while she stopped crying and ate by herself, until her plate was empty.

  After supper, Laura took Kitty up to Charlotte’s room, which
they were sharing, and Charlotte said was it all right if she made a phone call.

  ‘She’s got a new bloke,’ Luke said, when she had left the room.

  ‘Oh? What sort of bloke?’

  ‘He’s called Adam. He’s reading engineering.’ He looked across at Anna. ‘Mum—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She was so tired she felt as if she was floating, as if her mind was hovering some distance above her body like a little spotter plane.

  ‘It wasn’t Patrick, was it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was Jonathan.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Luke dug himself out of his armchair to come and collapse on the floor by the sofa where Anna lay.

  ‘I’m not going to India.’

  ‘Oh Luke—’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Don’t decide anything,’ Anna said. ‘Not yet. It’s too soon. One longs to decide everything, it’s a kind of reaction, but we mustn’t. We’ll decide the wrong things.’

  ‘Are you going to decide about Jonathan?’

  Anna turned her head to look at Luke. ‘I decided that before Daddy died.’

  ‘He’s a great bloke.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  Anna put out a hand and ruffled Luke’s hair. ‘I’ll tell you that the minute I’ve told him. Promise.’

  ‘And Dad?’ Luke said.

  ‘The funny thing is,’ Anna said, ‘that now he’s dead I feel I can be fond of him in peace.’

  Luke rolled over so that his face was buried against Anna. ‘I want to love someone.’

  ‘You will.’

  He gripped her hand. ‘It’s the waiting,’ he said. ‘That’s what I can’t stand, the waiting.’

  When Charlotte had come back into the room, she carried a little private glow with her. She sat down beside Luke and described Adam the engineer. He was six foot two and his parents lived in Cheadle Hume. He played the clarinet and she had known him three weeks, at least, three weeks seriously, although of course he’d been around all her time at Edinburgh. She said he’d offered to come down and sort of be around, if it would help.