The Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  Esme looked at him. “It’s Miss Trigg, isn’t it?”

  Marcus shifted uncomfortably and looked down at his feet. “Miss Trigg is a force at Wiles Green, certainly,” he said, and then, valiantly, “What would Wiles Green Chapel be without her though, eh?”

  “A lot nicer,” interjected his fellow steward, without turning from stowing the hymnbooks. Marcus looked discomfited.

  “I absolutely didn’t hear that,” he said, his face clouding. “Esme, they’re a long time coming out this morning. You stay here to shake people’s hands, and I’ll go and fetch you a cup of coffee.”

  As she greeted her flock straggling out of the church and through into the afternoon of that day, Esme continued to brood on the problem of Miss Trigg. She wished something would alter or give in the situation without direct intervention. The church had to have a place for everyone, an unconditional acceptance of even the most awkward personality. The difficulties came when one individual was so hard to relate to that the community as a whole became discouraged, newcomers felt alienated, and the faithful unobtrusively drifted away. Given that Miss Trigg had already lived eighty-one years, a natural solution lay in the not too distant future, but Esme hoped a less negative possibility could be found. Besides which, Miss Trigg looked as tough as baked leather, with plenty of life in her yet.

  She was still on Esme’s mind after the close of worship in the evening. Esme had been preaching in her superintendent’s chapel at West Parade, in the next town along the coast from Southarbour. She drove across country toward Wiles Green, tired at the end of the day. Sunday preaching always drained her of energy, and the habit she had acquired over the summer of spending an hour with Jabez and Ember had transformed the feeling of Sunday evening from a fretful, spent, overweariness to a satisfied sense of completion.

  She turned off the road and up the unmade track that curved behind Jabez’s cottage into his yard with a sense of homecoming. She felt that she belonged here as she knocked on the kitchen door and let herself in.

  In the cottage, although the evening was warm, as dusk approached Jabez had lit a fire in the sitting room, and Ember sat in her usual chair with her knitting while Jabez had a book on his lap in his armchair by the fire. He had left the Rayburn to go out, and their kettle stood on a trivet, fastened to the grate, that could be swung round over the flames.

  Esme curled up in the corner of the sofa and told them about her day. She asked Jabez about being in Miss Trigg’s Sunday school class, and he smiled, and reminisced about the other children and their experience of chapel fifty years ago. He spoke about going to evening worship with his mother, about how much it had meant to her, and how pleased she had been by his own devout leanings in those days.

  “Yes. I gave my life to Jesus. I suppose he’s still got it. I don’t seem to have one myself. And I invited him into my heart. And—” he looked at Esme with a sudden defiance, “—he’s still there, whatever Miss Trigg may have told you. Somewhere. Bit dusty perhaps. The poor carpenter of Nazareth.”

  He bent down and picked up the poker, prodded the logs together on the fire, and poked the trivet, on which the kettle had begun to whine, aside from the flames. Then he relaxed his hand and let the end of the poker rest on the hearth.

  “Dear Lord, what must it be like?” he said quietly. “All these years. A prisoner in the heart of such as me. ’Tisn’t true then, what they say about hell. He’s there, too. We were quite a stretch there together.”

  With a sudden smile of mischief, Esme remembered and recounted to them Miss Trigg’s glowering remarks on the state of Jabez’s soul, his ignominious condition as a backslider, unfit for the kingdom of God. She laughed at the memory, but Jabez said nothing.

  Ember startled them both by spitting with sudden force into the fire, which hissed back at her. She looked into the flames for a few seconds, and then turned her fierce gaze upon them.

  “I like to know,” she said belligerently, “what kind of kingdom this kingdom of heaven be; all peopled with Miss Triggs and slamming its doors on Jabez Ferrall. Sounds a hell of a place to me. I choose my word with care. No wonder their God’s always so miserable. I’d be the same myself if I had the governing of it. Such a kingdom as knows nothing of the meaning of gentleness. Trouble with chapel is all their eternity offers them is a choice of one hell or the other. No wonder they all look as though they got indigestion. ’Tis all that doctrine; it repeats on ’em. Heaven defend us from their salvation if it has no part in the life of such as ’e.”

  She shut her mouth like a trap on the close of this vehement speech, her small eyes snapping and sparkling with her fury. Then, holding Esme’s gaze, less angry but no less compelling, she added, “Jabez is a good man, and you know it well. And if you let that eyesore tell you different and you never contradicted her, then I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.”

  Esme could not think of any adequate reply to this. Without bringing it into consciousness, she vaguely registered the sense of dragging weariness that underlay everything in the years since she had been ordained. It came in no small part from the inescapable exposure to the relentless expectation and excoriating blame of strong-minded old women. Somehow she had become trapped in a life that forever held her in a direct glare demanding, “Well?”

  She could feel herself blushing.

  Jabez did not look at her, but he was swift in his rescue.

  “I never could stand up to Miss Trigg myself,” he said, “and she’s right, I am unfit for the kingdom of God. I thought we all were. I haven’t even aspired to be fit for it. I’d been hoping for mercy, I think. And Miss Trigg has the edge on me, because I haven’t even done myself credit in the kingdom of earth, which is less fussy and more forgiving than the kingdom of heaven. At least she’s held down a steady job and earned herself a pension: All I’ve achieved is a terror of the human race and a lifetime scraping by repairing bicycles. I admire her. She was a doctor’s receptionist for forty years and very competent. She nursed her mother fifteen years an invalid in her own home. And she runs that chapel like clockwork.”

  Silence followed these words, but not for long. Jabez had his head bent, turned away to look toward the fire, but he couldn’t ignore Ember’s gaze boring like a power drill into the side of his head. He shifted uncomfortably.

  “What?” he said defensively.

  “Do you lie in bed at night practicing these ’umble things to say, or does it come natural?” Ember demanded. “Because they trip off your tongue with an ease that astonishes me. Lucy Trigg is a horrible old woman and you know it.”

  “Practicing? Ember, that’s just not fair!” His head jerked up to look at her, his face flushed with indignation. “Horrible old woman, is she? Well, it takes one to know one, anyway.”

  Ember grinned at him, taunting, her eyes sparkling. “That’s more like it,” she said, her gaze holding his with the jaunty confidence of a very experienced combatant.

  But Jabez looked tired. Esme could see that whatever he thought of it rationally, Miss Trigg’s indictment had found its mark and hurt. She wished she had never mentioned the conversation and felt unsure of how to salve the wound she had made.

  “Bike running all right?” Jabez found a way out of the impasse, setting Miss Trigg aside. “You came in your car tonight, didn’t you? I thought I heard you turn into the yard.”

  “That’s right—it’s partly why I came, actually, but I forgot about it after I got here. I think the brake’s broken in some way. I was coming down Stoddards Hill quite fast into Brockhyrst Priory, and I slammed the brakes on for a squirrel out thrill seeking, and they went. I managed okay just going gently enough to use my foot as a brake, but I wanted to ask you if you would fix them for me. Will you be coming out to Southarbour sometime soon? I’m not sure I’d be quite safe coming all the way out here without brakes.”

  “You certainly would not! Cable snapped, by the sound of things. I thought I’d checked the brakes out carefully; they should have lasted you longer t
han this. I can come over tomorrow morning—will you be there? Give me the key to the shed if not. I’ll just pick the bike up and bring it back here, that’ll be the easiest.”

  “D’you know,” said Esme, still mindful of the hurt she had caused before, “it makes so much difference to me to have you here. There have been all manner of things you’ve fixed and mended for me: You give me tea and toast and you check the oil in my car—you make me feel so safe and well looked after.”

  Jabez’s eyes shone in a sudden smile and then, shyly, he bent to push the kettle back over the fire. “You’re welcome,” he said quietly as he did this, “you’re welcome. You’re just part of the family.” He glanced across at her, happy but slightly embarrassed. “Would you like a cup of tea, Esme? Ember?”

  Esme laughed. “I never knew anybody drink as much tea as you two do—but yes, please.”

  “Tea’s good for you.” Jabez took the pot to empty the dregs from their last drink and put new tea leaves in. “It’s cleansing for the system,” he said, as he came back to the fireside and intercepted the now shrieking kettle.

  “Is it?” asked Esme in surprise. “I thought too much tea was bad news.”

  “You take a peep at the inside of Jabez’s teapot, my love, if you want to see for yourself how cleansing it is,” said Ember, who had picked up her knitting needles and was casting on a new row. “His gut’s as full of tannin as his lungs is full of tar. I ’spect he got furred-up arteries, too, from living off those eggs from his chickens. Not a tube in his body but will be blocked with some kind of gunk. One way or another his innards is probably coated with stuff a more frugal man could harvest and sell in tins for shoe polish.”

  “Thanks, Ember!” Jabez stirred the tea in the pot, pouring Esme’s first because she liked it weaker.

  “I don’t like you smoking,” said Esme softly, as he handed her the mug of tea. “It’s so bad for your health.”

  Jabez began to look slightly harassed. “I don’t smoke much indoors, not when you’re here.”

  “It’s not that I mind it for me—I think your tobacco smells quite nice. It’s the damage to your body that worries me.”

  “Don’t you fret about Jabez, my love. Smoke? He don’t really smoke. You ever seen Jabez with a cigarette properly alight? Besides, he’s not got the money to smoke. He rolls they things so thin I could pass one through the eye of a darning needle.”

  “Oh,” Esme laughed. “He doesn’t smoke Camels then!”

  Ember looked at her blankly.

  “Camels,” Esme prompted. “The eye of a needle? Never mind, Ember, it’s nothing—it doesn’t matter. Camels—they’re a kind of cigarette.”

  Jabez sat down in his armchair behind his cup of tea. “Does this have an end?” he asked, amused but looking somewhat cornered, uncomfortable at being the focus of their conversation. “I haven’t got many vices. Compared with shooting crack and hunting foxes, tea and cigarettes is fairly innocuous, isn’t it? Esme, are you hungry? Did you have a bite to eat or did you come straight from church?”

  She admitted that she was hungry and accepted gratefully the offer he made of cheese sandwiches. While he was out in the kitchen making them, she said to Ember, “Jabez has been so kind to me—and you have. Things get a bit wearing when you’re on your own. Really, I’m ever so grateful.”

  Ember turned her knitting and sipped her tea. “You made a difference to him, too, my love. Do anything for you, would Jabez. You given him a great deal.”

  “I have?” Esme looked at her in surprise. “I sometimes feel a bit guilty because I come here so much and let myself be fed and looked after and don’t give anything in return.”

  “That’s the thing you given him,” said Ember, the dark brightness of her gaze amid a thousand wrinkles contemplating Esme over the top of her knitting. “Jabez isn’t happy without he got someone to love. Been like giving a puppy to a child, having you turn up here as you did. Done him the world of good. Suits us all.”

  It was with a sense of well-being that Esme parted from them later in the evening. They had chatted about this and that and nothing, discussed the parasite infection troubling the legs of one of Jabez’s hens, and the promising crop of apples ripening in his orchard. Ember described to Esme the various garments she had knitted and the mixed reactions when she presented them as gifts, and her vivid account made Esme laugh. When she went on her way, the concerns of her work had receded, and she felt at peace.

  Jabez came out into the yard with her. “Go carefully,” he said, as he often did when she got into her car. “I’ll be over in the morning, to see to your bike. Just leave the shed unlocked if you go out.”

  The stars were shining as Esme left, with the first scent of autumn in the night air.

  “Your cable’s snapped.”

  Esme had a staff meeting in the morning and returned to find that Jabez had called and taken her bike. She had several visits in nursing homes to make in the afternoon, but drove out afterward to Wiles Green and found Jabez in his workshop, squatting down to examine her bike, his cat stretched contentedly in the ashes by the comfortable glow that smoked under the flue.

  “I wonder if it would take one a bit thicker. Anyway, I’ve been thinking from what you said I might have tightened the pivot bolts too much when I put the brake arms back. It’s been so wet and muddy for the time of year, more wear and tear I expect—I better look at them. Don’t want you having an accident. Put another stick or two of wood on the fire, and sit you down by there—it won’t take me long.”

  He lifted her bike onto a stand, and knelt down beside it, looking critically at the brake system. “Can you pass me the Allen key?” He looked up at her swiftly, smiled at her blank incomprehension, and got to his feet to fetch it himself.

  Esme pushed together the glowing remains of firewood in the bed of soft grey ash and added some small twigs to rekindle a flame.

  “You were very nice about Miss Trigg last night,” she said.

  The dry sticks caught fire, and she placed some larger pieces in a pyramid on top.

  “I believe in being nice about people,” he replied, and she watched his fingers deftly removing the anchor nuts and the wire from the straddle yoke, setting the bits carefully beside him, dismantling its mysteries with competence. “Besides,” he added, flashing her a glance of mischief she thought almost reminiscent of Ember, “Miss Trigg’s done a lot for me—more than she knows.”

  “Has she?” Esme looked at him in surprise, pleased and relieved to hear something good about Miss Trigg.

  He had the bits on the floor and looked at them all, wiping them with an oily rag, turning them over to look for faults. He reached across to a tin on the ground near him and selected a piece of emery paper, sanded a metal stud, examined it again, sanded it some more, then reached the paper back into the tin and wiped down the part he had smoothed.

  “Go on,” said Esme. “Miss Trigg.”

  Jabez hesitated.

  “Well?” she said curiously.

  He took a breath, uncertain, then proceeded. “I got married in the 1960s. I was twenty-six and Maeve was nineteen. We hadn’t been anywhere much, we weren’t sophisticated people. Brought up church and chapel, we were—a bit innocent. I don’t suppose you remember the 1960s.”

  “Not much, not really. I mean, I was born in 1959, so I was little while it was all happening. But what’s that got to do with Miss Trigg?”

  Jabez was satisfied with the state of the bits he had before him, and fetching a length of cable he began to reassemble the cable housing, threading the wire through the hole in the yoke anchor bolt. “At that time, Miss Trigg ran a young people’s fellowship at the chapel. I never went and Maeve was church not chapel, but Maeve’s friend Susan always used to go.” He pulled the tin toward him with his free hand and rooted in it for a spanner. “Although you were only a babe in the ’60s, I’m sure you know it was a time of revelation to us young folk then. There were books and magazines and things—pamphlets even.
‘Things you always wanted to know and never dared ask.’ Are you with me?”

  “Yes,” said Esme. She sensed a certain reticence in him, and felt so curious as to what he was going to tell her that she hardly dared breathe in case he thought better of it and withdrew.

  “Yes. Well, Susan—I don’t know who she got it from, a girl from work I think; she worked in a dress shop at Southarbour—she had this booklet that had come free with a magazine that told you all kind of things.” He rummaged for his cutters and trimmed the wire, then got up to find a cable end-cap from a tobacco tin on his workbench. “About making love,” he explained, unnecessarily.

  He fitted the cap onto the cable wire and crimped it on tight with a pair of pliers.

  “There was everything you could imagine in this little book,” he said, “and a few things you’d never imagine and wouldn’t like to try.”

  He tossed the pliers back into the tin. Esme waited, fascinated.

  “Susan gave the booklet to me and Maeve for a laugh, you know—’cause we were getting married.” He stood up and tested the brakes, shaking his head at them. “That still isn’t quite right.” He squatted down by the bike. “It had pictures,” he added.

  “I think I need a smaller Allen key.”

  He found it and adjusted the little center screw, tested the brakes again, “That’s better,” and turned his attention to looking over the rest of the bike.

  “But Susan, she was a bit of a stirrer, and she enjoyed baiting poor Miss Trigg, who must have been about your age at the time, though she looked ancient to us. That spoke’s not right. Darn, where’s the spoke key now?”

  He searched on his workbench. “Here it is,” he said and returned to the bike, removing the tire and the tube from the wheel.

  “So she asked her about this booklet. I don’t expect she told her all that was in it—I hope not anyway—but a lot of it, and she asked her what a young Christian person should think of it.”