by Jill McGown
He put down his pen, and sat back in his chair, the better to contemplate the prospect. He had played a bit of soccer in his youth, and he still did some refereeing when he got the time. He’d kept in shape, more or less. Good enough shape for the lovely Mrs Langton to fancy him? He smiled to himself. Chance would be a fine thing. Though he still had all his hair – its sand colour was diluted here and there by silver, but that was distinguished, according to his wife. George believed in himself enough to be vain about his appearance, so that wasn’t it.
No, he had stopped believing that he believed. It wasn’t something that it had ever crossed his mind to wonder before. His family went into the Church. His grandfather had made it to Bishop, and there had even been rumours that he was on course to make it all the way to Canterbury, but George rather thought that his grandfather had started those himself. At any rate, he didn’t. It was taken for granted – by George as much as anyone else – that he would go into the Church. It was a career decision, if decision it could be called, not a spiritual one. There was the Church, the armed services, the Civil Service. George had chosen the Church.
He addressed himself once more to the pale lines of the A4 pad in front of him, but inspiration, divine or otherwise, eluded him. George had been expected to do well, to rise through the ranks as had his grandfather before him, and as his nephew was doing even now. But George wasn’t a company man. He was well enough connected to have secured a living in one of the prettiest villages in England, complete with a vicarage about which anyone might be moved to write poetry. Verdant lawns, bushes, shrubs, climbers; light-filled rooms with elegant lines, and old, good furniture. Wonderful views from its hilltop site, across three counties which today all lay under a shifting blanket of snow. And just twenty-five minutes from Stansfield, with its new-town bustle, its supermarkets and cinema, trains, and buses. The best of both worlds, and for twenty-nine years George had clung tenaciously to his well-behaved flock and his uncomplicated life. Lack of ambition, said his superiors. Pure selfishness, George knew now.
It would take rather longer than usual to get into Stansfield today, George thought, glancing out of the window as the wind whipped up the fallen snow. It was drifting badly on the road, and the cars were already having trouble on the hill.
It was no crisis of faith, for there never had been faith, but it was a crisis of the heart, and the words for the midnight service simply wouldn’t come. He put down his pen, and stood up, holding out his hands to the one-bar electric fire. Central heating would make the vicarage truly a poem. As it was, there was still a sliver of ice on the inside of the study window. The parish couldn’t afford central heating, and neither could he. Until now, he had accepted that as his lot, just as he had accepted everything else.
He had accepted God, to the extent of praying to him in church, and sometimes out of it. Praying for the rescue of people in peril: physical, in intensive care, or spiritual, in the back of a Vauxhall Chevette. Prayer perhaps helped those who prayed, but that was all. And then there was worship. George had never worshipped God. He had taken part in acts of worship – if saying a few words about the sanctity of life and tossing off a couple of hymns to the less than talented Jeremy Bulstrode’s organ accompaniment counted as worship. But it didn’t. Not in George’s book.
Worship was naked, open adulation, to the point of total selflessness. George had never lost his sense of self, not even on a morning like this, when the elements combined to put man firmly in his place. Not even when he had fallen hopelessly in love, at thirteen, with his cousin from Canada, five years his senior and only in the country for a fortnight. Not in the throes of more mature passion, or grief, or anger. And not, certainly not, in the pulpit of St Augustus.
And yet he knew how it felt, this loss of self, this giving over. Once, long ago, he had felt it. He walked to the window, and ran his finger down the sliver of ice, which melted to his touch. It wasn’t a woman, he thought, with a smile at himself. A few courteous and cautious walkings-out before Marian, and marriage. A happy, fulfilled marriage, but not worship. Joanna? No, not even her. He loved his daughter with all his heart, but it was still his heart. It was long ago, before any of that, before adulthood.
The dog. Of course, of course. His grandfather’s dog, whom he had had the privilege to know all his life until the old soldier died, when George was eleven. Perhaps only a child could truly worship, for he would have died instead, if he could have. So, he thought, as the sun shone blindingly on the white carpet below him, he had broken the first commandment.
Come to that, he had spent all summer spraying greenfly in a deliberate act of destruction. Did greenfly count? Birds did.
His father had shot birds; George had joined him once or twice on shoots, but he was a miserably bad shot, and had barely inconvenienced the game.
He had loved his father and mother, but that was no big deal. It wasn’t hard to love people who loved you, and it certainly wasn’t an honour to be thus loved. If honouring them meant putting flowers on their grave on the infrequent trips to his remaining relatives, then it was Marian who did the honouring. If it meant being straight with them, then he had dishonoured them by joining the Church.
And by joining the Church, he broke one commandment regularly, every Sunday. The Bible might not count taking Sunday services as work, but he certainly did. Standing in the pulpit, in the ever-present draught that gave him a stiff neck, seeing the same old faces staring back at him, not expecting anything from him. They were there, like him, from habit and custom; presumably they did find something that they needed in the chill air and the stained-glass light, but he never had. Whatever kind of fulfilment he sought, it was not to be found in St Augustus on a Sunday morning.
Could Mrs Langton provide it, he wondered? VICAR IN PLAY GROUP LOVE TANGLE. Except that she probably hadn’t given him the eye; it had probably never occurred to her that his mind ever dwelt on such things. But it had. Not News of the World stuff, then. A question on a game show, perhaps.
‘We asked one hundred vicars: Do you ever have sexual fantasies about the mothers in your church play group? How many vicars said yes, they did have sexual fantasies about . . .’
‘I’ve brought you some coffee. You must be frozen.’
He jumped at the sound of Marian’s voice, and turned from the window.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Were you working or day-dreaming?’
He smiled. ‘Oh, day-dreaming,’ he said, walking back to the electric warmth.
‘I’ve got the fire going in Joanna’s room,’ Marian said, handing him the mug. ‘It took about six fire-lighters, but it’s caught now. And George,’ she said, in her scolding voice, ‘must you leave your overalls in a heap on the hall floor?’
‘Sorry. I was looking at the car.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Marian asked.
‘Nothing. I was just—’ But she had never understood his love for things mechanical, so he didn’t try to explain. He put both hands round the mug of coffee, and stared at the empty pad on the desk.
‘Are you having trouble?’ she asked.
‘You could say that.’
Marian wasn’t what he thought of as a vicar’s wife. Even he saw the situation comedy notion of Vicar’s Wife, when he thought of the actual words. Vicars’ wives were either dowdy, shy and full of good works, or blue-rinsed, tweedy and full of good sense. Marian had short, curly, dark blonde hair, and mischievous eyes. Her fiftieth birthday had just passed, and those eyes had tiny wrinkles that he supposed had once not been there, but which were a part of her that he felt he had always known. She had the suggestion of freckles on her nose, and a wide, generous smile. She wasn’t tall, and seemed even less so once Joanna had grown up to become three full inches taller than her. He smiled. His adulterous thoughts had made him feel quite frisky, and vicars weren’t supposed to feel frisky at ten-thirty on a Wednesday morning, especially not on Christmas Eve.
‘Which one?’ Marian asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Tonight’s or this afternoon’s?’
He stared blankly at her. ‘Sorry?’ he said again.
‘Which sermon are you having trouble with?’
‘Oh. Tonight’s. This afternoon’s for the children really. It’s easy to talk to children.’
‘Well, I hate to break it to you, but Jeremy Bulstrode’s on his way over, in a state about something. He can’t play this afternoon.’
‘He can’t play, period.’
‘Something to do with his wife’s brother,’ she went on. ‘He’s on his way over for high-level discussions. What will you do?’
‘See him,’ George said, with a sigh. Ah well, it was highly unlikely that the vicar’s wife would want to know at ten-thirty on Christmas Eve morning anyway. And it just wouldn’t do for Jeremy Bulstrode to come in and find the vicar and his wife in flagrante delicto on the study floor. Would that interest the News of the World, he wondered? Or would it have to be the vicar’s wife who found him and Jeremy Bulstrode?
‘I mean about this afternoon. Shall I fix up the record player?’
‘Oh – no, that might not be necessary. Mrs . . .’ He hesitated over the surname, not in deliberate deception, but none the less deceptively. ‘Mrs Langton plays,’ he said. ‘I believe.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Marian.
Mrs Langton was a newcomer to Byford; eight weeks ago she had moved into the cottage at Byford Castle, with her two-year-old daughter.
‘I’ll pop round and ask her,’ George said.
‘But Jeremy’s coming.’
‘After Jeremy,’ he said.
‘I can go, if you’re busy.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. It’ll be a good excuse to get rid of Jeremy.’ He pushed away his pad. ‘Maybe visiting someone will give me an idea for this,’ he said.
‘What about tomorrow? Have you still got to write tomorrow’s as well?’
‘No. I say the same things every Christmas Day.’
‘Do you?’ She frowned. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘More or less,’ he said. ‘It’s the midnight service I like to get my teeth into. But the one I’d written won’t do.’
‘Why not?’
He looked at her. He couldn’t tell her she was married to a fraud. He couldn’t tell his congregation that they had been listening to a fraud all these years. He didn’t know what to say to her, or them. Perhaps seeing Eleanor Langton would help. He found it easy to talk to her, to be himself with her, and not the character actor that he had become, even with Marian.
Eleanor had told him a little of herself – she had been a research assistant, and was now employed by Byford Castle to work during the winter on preparing their archives for publication, and to oversee the guided tours in the summer. She was a widow, and she was lonely. She had told him that because he was a vicar, he assured himself; that’s what vicars were for. But he felt as though it was vaguely guilty knowledge, because he hadn’t imagined her interest in him, and she had seen and recognised his in her. Unspoken, unacknowledged, but it was there, and it had been for weeks.
‘George? Are you feeling all right?’
He smiled, almost laughed, at himself. ‘Just considering my suitability for getting into the News of the World,’ he said.
‘Do you want to get into the News of the World?’
‘Other vicars do,’ he replied.
She smiled. ‘You haven’t developed a passion for choir boys, have you?’
‘Good Lord, no. Nasty little brutes. Can’t think what all those unfrocked vicars see in them.’ He moved reluctantly from the arc of warmth, back to his desk. ‘And that’s another commandment gone,’ he said, sitting down.
Marian bent down and sniffed. ‘You’ve not been drinking,’ she said.
‘No. But I took the Lord’s name in vain. I do it quite a lot.’
‘Yes,’ said Marian.
‘I suppose,’ he mused, ‘if I worked my way through all ten commandments – that might qualify me for inclusion.’
‘Well,’ Marian said, picking up his empty mug. ‘I don’t care how much you covet it, you’re not bringing that ox in here.’
Judy Hill switched on full headlights as the drifting snow swirled round the car, reducing visibility to what seemed like three feet. Mrs Hill senior sat beside her in the car, and Mr Hill sat in the back, tutting at the weather. Judy felt as though she was somehow being blamed.
‘Idiot,’ she said, as a car swept past her through a gust of snow-filled wind.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing the new house,’ Mrs Hill volunteered, after a moment.
‘We haven’t finished decorating yet,’ Judy said. ‘But it’s looking pretty good.’
‘Michael says he’s thinking about converting the loft,’ said Mr Hill from behind her.
Judy slowed down still more as she felt her tyres become unsure of their grip on the deepening snow. ‘Yes,’ she said absently, peering through the flakes which were falling yet again. The windscreen wipers worked hard, piling snow into the corner of the windscreen, but the weather was beating them. ‘I’m not sure why,’ she went on. ‘There’s more than enough room for us as it is.’
‘Maybe he’s thinking of the future,’ Mrs Hill said.
Judy hooted angrily as a car cut in ahead of her. The future? My God, it wasn’t a granny flat she had in mind, was it?
‘Adds to the value,’ came the voice from the rear. ‘When you sell.’
Oh yes. Nobody actually bought houses to live in, not in Michael’s world. You bought them as a rung on some socioeconomic ladder.
‘It would make a nice nursery,’ said Mrs Hill.
‘Not too far now,’ Judy said, hearing a note of desperation creeping into her voice already, and they weren’t even installed yet. Michael didn’t even want his parents’ company over Christmas; he just wanted to show off his enhanced lifestyle. She signalled left with a mental sigh of relief. Almost there.
The little road was almost clear of snow, and her heart sank as she saw why. The driveway was inches deep, with snow piled up against the garage door. She pulled into the pavement, and stopped the engine.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Hill. ‘Someone will have to get busy with a shovel.’
You? Judy thought sourly. ‘Yes,’ she said, brightly. ‘Let’s get you settled in first.’
Mrs Hill got out, and fiddled unsuccessfully with the front seat.
‘I’ll do it.’ Judy tried hard to keep the edge out of her voice as she tipped the seat forward to allow Mr Hill to clamber out.
‘There’s a present here, ducks,’ he said, handing it to her.
Damn, damn, damn. She had meant to go via the police station, and drop it in to Lloyd. The weather had driven all thoughts out of her head, save picking up the Hills and getting them home in one piece. ‘Thank you,’ she said, putting it in the glove compartment. ‘It’s for someone at work.’
She led the way up the path, and kicked away the snow from the front door. ‘Go on in,’ she said, realizing that she had left her car lights on. ‘I won’t be a moment.’
Back at the car, she switched off the lights and opened the glove compartment, as if staring at his present would somehow magic it to Lloyd. She couldn’t just leave the Hills there, even if the thought of just driving away again did have a certain malicious charm. With a sigh, she closed the car up.
‘It’s a lovely big room,’ Mrs Hill was saying, as Judy went in, shaking the snow from her dark hair.
‘It’s a bit of a change from the last one,’ Judy said. ‘We swing a cat every now and then to celebrate.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing,’ Judy said, taking out her cigarettes.
‘Oh, now – I thought you’d given that up,’ said Mr Hill. ‘You should read what it says on the side of the packet before you light that.’
Judy lit it without improving her mind. ‘I only have one very occasionally,’ she said truthfully. When she felt she needed one. Like now.
‘I expect you’d like a cup of tea. Or something stronger?’ she added, hopefully.
‘Tea,’ Mrs Hill said firmly, as Mr Hill opened his mouth. ‘Thank you.’
Michael came in while Judy was in the kitchen, and she could hear his mother fussing over him. He wasn’t, apparently, wearing warm enough clothes.
‘The driveway’s blocked,’ he said, when he joined her.
‘I know. What are you doing home?’
‘Office party,’ he said. ‘It started at about half past eleven.’ He leant on the fridge.
Judy pushed him to one side as she got out the milk. ‘Aren’t you supposed to stay?’ she asked. ‘To mingle with the common folk?’
‘I pleaded bad weather,’ Michael said. ‘I can think of better things to do than trying to get my hand up some typist’s skirt, even if Ronnie can’t.’
Judy laughed. ‘Ronnie doesn’t turn into an office Romeo at Christmas, does he?’
‘Does he not.’ Michael looked through his double-glazed window at the weather. ‘I’d better start digging,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave the car out in that.’
‘The car’ was his car. His company car.
‘You won’t be able to get it out again if you put it away,’ Judy pointed out.
‘What you’ve just said would have had Ronnie in stitches,’ Michael said, with a smile. ‘Do you blame me for running away?’
Judy smiled too, shaking her head.
Michael stood, still looking out, momentarily lost in thoughts which Judy knew she didn’t share, his thin face slightly, pink from the cold air. They were doing well, so far. A good five minutes without a cross word. She set mugs on a tray, and Michael, back in the real world, looked pained.
