The Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  She sat planning the format for Portland Street’s service of Advent Light scheduled for the first Sunday of December in ten days time. Piled on her desk were files of previous Advent services, carols-by-candlelight liturgies, Christingles, and school end-of-term winter services, intended to offer her inspiration. So far none had.

  She pulled a lined pad toward her. “People, Look East,” she jotted down, and “O come, O come, Emmanuel” and “When the Lord in Glory Comes.” Changing tack for a moment, she reached for her card file, flicked through to find the telephone numbers of the choir mistress at Brockhyrst Priory and Southarbour’s worship bandleader; these she wrote down in readiness at the bottom of the sheet of paper. Suddenly, her attention was caught by something green pulling up alongside the pavement beyond her garden wall. “Good Lord! It’s Jabez!” she said aloud, wondering as she left her desk and went to open the front door, if it was right to feel so pleased at the interruption.

  “Hello!” she called out to him, happy at his unexpected arrival. He had been about to take something out of the back of his truck, but hearing her call, left it, and came toward the house. Esme delighted afresh in the curious, shy, “I’m not here” mode of his approach. How does he do it? she asked herself, smiling at the sight of him in his huge waxed jacket and rivers of silver hair.

  He lifted his eyes in one bright glance as he came to where she stood on the doorstep. “I thought you might be glad of your leaves raked,” he said, nodding toward the damp mass obscuring her small front lawn. “And round the back,” he added. “I popped in yesterday while you were out, but no rake in the shed, so I came back today. All right?”

  “Oh, Jabez! You are a darling! That would be absolutely wonderful! Would you like a cup of tea first?”

  He smiled. “Well, you put the kettle on while I make a start on these. Cup of tea be most welcome, but I haven’t come to hold up whatever you’re busy with.”

  Esme shook her head, laughing. “Oh, no! Please do! I shall be glad of an excuse to stop! Have you got a rake then? Is there anything else you need?”

  “No, I got all I’ll be wanting in the back of the truck. Esme, you got no proper compost bins here, have you? If I find a spare morning and I can pick up some forklift pallets or something somewhere, shall I pop in and knock up a place for leaf mold and for your kitchen compost down the end of the garden? Rots down better if it’s properly contained.”

  “Does it? Well, yes, that would be lovely.” Esme didn’t dare tell him she recycled nothing and threw all her kitchen waste out with everything else for the dustman to take to the landfill site—or that there wasn’t much kitchen waste anyway because most of what she bought was ready-meals in the first place. “I’ll put the kettle on then,” she said, changing the subject.

  When, having made a cup of tea and put some flapjacks out on a plate, she returned awhile later to the front doorstep to invite him in, she found him with the leaves raked into neat piles, which he was collecting onto a tarpaulin he had spread on the tarmac drive. She observed that he had brought a yard broom with him, and presumably, intended to sweep up the fallen leaves thickly edging the driveway, too.

  “With you in a minute,” he said, glancing up.

  In the once or twice she had seen him since his visit to Samuel in Shropshire, Esme had at some point mentioned in conversation the despair she felt at her inability to tend her garden adequately. “It’s such a tangle,” she had said. “I quite like gardening, but it’s a bit big for me, and there are so many other things to be done. The minister before me never did anything in the garden, but the one before him was a real enthusiast, so there are all these dead things and weeds that have colonized the bare earth of the veggie patch. Really horrid weeds too. Ground elder and bindweed and things with deep roots. And now the leaves are falling, I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to catch up with it.”

  “I am just so grateful,” she said, as he perched on the high stool at her built-in Formica breakfast bar. “Have a flapjack. Have two. It’s so nice of you. It feels like the cavalry coming over the hill. Whoever else in all the world would turn up out of the blue to rake up all these blessed leaves for me? Thank you so, so much.”

  Jabez blinked, pleased and slightly embarrassed.

  “Steady on,” he said. “I got a free afternoon, that’s all. I’m glad to be of some use, I rarely enough am.”

  Esme smiled at him. “You’ve a large crumb of flapjack lodged in your beard,” she observed.

  “Have I? That’s nothing new.” He felt for it and fished it out. “There are some things that don’t go with beards, like professional advancement and spaghetti bolognaise,” he remarked, “but it’s handy for catching the crumbs, it saves on shaving stuff, and I get up quicker in the morning.”

  Esme laughed. For a moment there was silence between them.

  “D’you know,” she said then, “nobody else comes to help me with the difficult things like you do. I’ve thought about it often, because it’s a curious thing about women in ordained ministry. Sometimes the question is raised as to whether it’s more difficult for women to be ministers, whether there are practices of discrimination or prejudice that we should attend to. In my own experience, I have never met any sense of individuals intentionally making life difficult—I mean, there are plenty of people like Miss Trigg, but then as you said, she’s entitled to her point of view as much as I am to mine. And yet … oh, it’s hard to put my finger on what the difference is, it’s just little things all the time; ordinary, mundane things that nobody notices—even I don’t notice most of the time. You know, I’ve sat in the Synod at lunchtime, and all the ministers are undoing their sandwiches, opening their plastic boxes and their cling-film packets—and I’ve heard the men saying things like ‘What’s this then? I’ve never had one of these before’; which makes it clear they didn’t pack their own lunch, nor yet did the shopping that enabled the packed lunch to be made. Once I made a remark to a male colleague comparing one grocery store to another; he smiled with a sort of polite interest and then said he didn’t really know because he hadn’t been in any of them—his wife does all the shopping. That man’s wife doesn’t sit at home polishing her nails the rest of the time either; she’s a community psychiatric nurse. And our superintendent, at a staff meeting, will look at his watch and say, ‘I’ll have to be back by one, because Jean will have the dinner ready.’ I’ve sat in a committee at Westminster, a roomful of men and me the only woman except one—and she was the secretary of one of the men, there to take notes, you know? And we sat round the table before the meeting began, polite chat. The talk was all about recently visited London art exhibitions and the latest computer software. A couple of the men were having hard times. One of them said his secretary was off sick, and the other one said his computer had crashed—or was it the other way round? Then the door swung open, and into this elegant chatter—I mean, the committee was to discuss poverty in Britain today, and the Methodist church is supposedly a scrupulously egalitarian institution—in walked two black ladies bearing platters of sandwiches. And I asked myself, is this the church of Jesus Christ? Is this how it’s meant to be? But, Jabez, what really gave me the creeps is that nobody else thought anything of it!

  “And in my own life, if I were a man alone—I know this is true from the experience of male colleagues—they’d bring me chocolate cake and ask me round to dinner and offer to help me clean my house. But because I’m a woman, they expect me to help run the bazaar and take an active interest in making the coffee after worship and bake buns for church teas. It’s so unfair! If I were a male married minister, my wife would probably do half my pastoral visiting and help me with all the socializing and remember Christmas cards and relatives’ birthdays, as well as get the shopping and vacuum the floors and cook the tea. But if I as a woman were married, my husband would go out to work and that would probably be his contribution to the household. Full stop!

  “Sometimes as I’ve been driving seven miles out to Wiles G
reen along rutted lanes with a fruit salad or a huge vat of soup on the passenger seat, on my way to an event where I have responsibility for all the proceedings as well, I ask myself, Why am I doing this? If I whine about it to any other women minister, she just looks at me over her pack of sandwiches (not the one her husband made, the one she stopped to buy at the garage shop when she was filling up with petrol on the way to Synod) and says, ‘Well, why are you?’ And I’ll tell you why, Jabez, it’s because although I can preach and chair a meeting and do all that the job requires, underneath it all I’m not a modern woman; I’m not sure of my role, and something in me mourns the passing of tradition.”

  He looked at Esme. One eyebrow twitched expressively, and there was a smile in his eyes. He said nothing until he was sure she’d stopped, and then, “Um, men do vary,” he ventured.

  Esme gazed at him hopelessly. “Jabez, I’m so, so tired,” she said.

  Jabez nodded. He sipped his tea and sat quietly. Esme looked at him, his body relaxed but aware, his eyes thoughtful; she saw a poise in him that she had seen in wild things, not often in human beings.

  In the course of her life, Esme had usually had a special friend. When something interesting or important happened to her that she was bursting to share, she would find that whoever she told, she hadn’t really told it, not felt she had really been heard, until she told her special friend. Over the last few months she had begun to find, without consciously realizing it, that so it was now with Jabez. Whatever her news or her trouble might be, if only she could tell Jabez, nothing more needed to be said.

  “Four years ago, my husband left me.” Esme’s fingers picked up a till receipt that lay among other discarded papers on the breakfast bar. Absentmindedly, she began to fold and refold it. “I trusted him, you know. He told me he loved me, spun such dreams for me, till I was caught in the silken threads of romance like a fly in a spider’s web. He promised me he’d love me always, take care of me. He called me his princess and he said the moon was a silver ball and he’d climb up to heaven and bring it down.” She broke off, feeling foolish. Truly she had fallen for the loveliness of it all, the wedding and the happiness of being chosen, of achieving something her family might admire; of being, for a man who had seemed so clever and accomplished and sophisticated, the Only One. Except she hadn’t been. “It was all right for a while,” she said. “I mean, we managed fourteen years together, just about. We were happy, more or less, right up until the time I was accepted as a candidate for ordained ministry. I don’t know what happened, it was as though he saw me as a competitor. He’d always insisted he supported the idea of me following that path, but …”

  Her voice trailed away, and she sat for a while remembering. Then she stirred, and looked at Jabez. It intrigued her, the way under a veil of quietness in his face, lights and shadows of his soul dappled and flickered. He sat without moving, impassive, but so alive. He waited for her to speak, but she felt understood; she had no need to say any more.

  “Esme, I better get those leaves done,” he said after awhile, finishing his tea. He got down from the high stool, took his mug to the sink, rinsed it, and looked round for the dishtowel to dry it.

  “My experience is limited,” he said, glancing at her with a shy smile as he dried the mug, “but I guess you have to be wary of eloquence. In general, if a man is in love—I mean really, deeply in love—you won’t get much more out of him than the bleat of a strangled sheep when he tries to tell you how much he cares for you. Never trust the staying power of a love that can be expressed as ‘I adore you, darling!’”

  Esme laughed. “I see!” she mocked him. “So you could go weak at the knees at the sight of me, and you’d never be able to tell me so!”

  He put the mug back on its hook with the others, and hung the dishtowel back on the rail it had come from.

  “That’s right,” he said quietly. “Now I better get on with those leaves.”

  SEVEN

  Esme woke early, with Advent on her mind. Tuesday today, first Sunday in Advent coming up. Through her childhood, and as a young woman, Advent had been a season of excitement and happy anticipation, a magical time of year. All that seemed to have been crushed out of it now, by the weight of too many events. She had organized her Christingle service for Portland Street, with a modest prize for the child with the best decorated orange. She had contacted the Scout leaders from Brockhyrst Priory to arrange a small band of instrumentalists for the Advent service of light. She had appealed for carol singers from all three churches for carol singing round the village at Brockhyrst Priory. Her Christmas service details were in to the local paper, and she had written three pastoral letters for the church magazines of each of her three chapels, remembering to include a plug for the Covenant service in early January, there being no January magazine. The watch-night service on New Year’s Eve was sorted and the Christmas midnight communion, too. The carols services at each of her three chapels had been scheduled so that she could officiate at all three—it meant Wiles Green taking the 4:30 slot again this year, but they didn’t seem to mind. In her diary she had noted a number of social occasions; the circuit staff and stewards’ New Year’s party (all ladies to bring a dessert, the superintendent’s wife to provide the main course; Esme was on fruit salad again) and the Portland Street choir dinner at a two-star hotel in a side road a few hundred yards in from the seafront. The choir went there every year, securing at a knockdown price a cheerful evening with a mediocre meal. The youth leader had invited her to the Brownies’ and Rainbows’ Christmas party, and she had been approached with a request to take a small service for the playgroup that met at Portland Street. She had been invited to the Christmas celebrations of five house groups; in each case Esme was to give a Christmas message, after which there would be a party with finger foods. She had been asked to give the Christmas address for the Multiple Sclerosis Society carol service, taking place in Brockhyrst Priory chapel for the first time this year, and she was to say a prayer at the conclusion of the annual junior school Christmas concert in Portland Street chapel. There remained outstanding some arrangements to be made about the donkey belonging to the livery stables, in preparation for the Living Crib that the vicar of St. Raphaels at Wiles Green masterminded each year. It had occurred to him that ecumenism would spread the burden of forward planning, and he had invited Esme to be part of the proceedings, which involved her sourcing a recently delivered mother, a lantern on a hook, and a reliable donkey. The stable was a regular venue, so nobody had to fix that. On the first Saturday in December, which was AIDS week, Esme had promised to take part in a special service at the Anglican church in the center of Southarbour. She also noted that she had two planning meetings scheduled in early and late December for a bereavement group preparing special intercessions for the hospice anniversary service, which wasn’t till February but had to be planned ahead to enable fliers for distribution in the New Year.

  Suddenly remembering the preparatory planning necessary for the week of prayer for Christian unity in mid-January and the ecumenical service on Bible Sunday, Esme found herself very wide awake at six o’clock in the morning, which was early for her. Lying in bed mentally reviewing her various commitments and responsibilities for a while hardly seemed to improve them. Fervently hoping that no one would die and require a funeral before the end of the first week of January, Esme got up to make a cup of tea.

  Seizing the opportunity offered by an early start to the day, in a moment of resolve she took her copy of the Methodist Worship Book off the shelf and used the set form of Morning Prayer as devotions to start the day. Feeling virtuous, as light came, she decided to go for a ride on her bike as well. She ate a bowl of cereal and left the washing up in the sink for later, locked up the house, and got her bike out of the shed. As she cycled out in the direction of Brockhyrst Priory, encouraged by the emergence of a promise of sunshine after two weeks of drizzling rain, it occurred to her to push on in the direction of Wiles Green and drop in for a cup of tea wit
h Jabez and Ember, who she thought would most likely be up by now. The morning sunlight strengthened as she rode through the lanes. She encountered a number of people out walking their dogs and some schoolchildren walking along to the main road to wait for the bus. She went cautiously, because the postal delivery vans were busy in the lanes at this time, and other vehicles were hurrying to workplaces. Fallen leaves packed on the road surface made the way slippery, and in the places of shadow it was still icy. Esme felt glad to arrive in one piece at the Old Police House. She dismounted from her bike and wheeled it up the path to the cottage, leaving it propped against the wall of the kitchen.

  Knocking on the door, and then immediately opening it to let herself in, she found her friends in the warmth of the kitchen, chatting, the early sunlight streaming through the window above the sink that looked up the garden into the orchard. On the table, the remains of breakfast things still stood around the big brown teapot in its multicolored knitted tea cozy (Ember’s work). Ember sat in her corner by the stove, and Jabez sat by the table on one stool, his back resting against the wall, his feet up on the other stool. They each held a mug of tea, steaming. It was a companionable sight, and as Jabez put down his tea without question and reached up a hand to the shelf for a third mug, Esme felt a sudden impulse of happiness in the warmth of the welcome always there for her, confidence in friendship given.

  “You’re abroad early,” said Ember. “You had your breakfast, or will I make some more fried bread?”

  “Oh, dear, don’t give me fried bread!” It may have sounded ungracious but the words were spoken before she thought twice. “I mean, it’s ever so kind of you, but I just have to lose some weight. I cycled everywhere during the summer but I don’t seem to have lost a pound—it just made me hungry and I ate more.”