Pleasure and a Calling

by Phil Hogan

  She seemed almost delighted with herself. I was dazed by it. It was dreamlike. I remembered what Mrs Sharp had said about the anonymous note she had received. ‘Was it you who sent his wife the photograph of Sharp in an embrace with the other woman—’

  ‘In an embrace!’ She laughed. ‘You are funny. But, oh God. I truly wish I hadn’t done that. That’s what set it all off. That’s why she went for him. When I heard, I was sick with guilt. I couldn’t tell anyone. Do you remember? I had to take time off. I had to ask the doctor for some soothers. You know what your trouble is?’ she asked suddenly.

  My mind was trying to think how it would end. I couldn’t be – I refused to be – seen like this. I wanted her to stop talking, but I was afraid of what might happen when she did.

  ‘You’re too nice,’ she continued. ‘Wanting to help everyone. I can see you walking right into the middle of the Sharps’ fight, or rather when she’d already hit him with something. A baseball bat. Or, no, wait … it was next morning, wasn’t it? OK, obviously it must have all flared up again, and Mrs Sharp was in a state when you arrived, and you could see it was an accident, or that she hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. You always see the best in people! And you thought, what about the Cooksons’ place? Because obviously she couldn’t move him on her own. But why didn’t you think what might happen next?’ She shook her head. Oh boy. ‘And you really oughtn’t have gone to see her quite so often afterwards. No wonder the police want to talk to you every five minutes.’

  She stopped to take a sip from a glass that seemed to materialize from nowhere and I saw now that there was a bottle on the floor, three-quarters gone.

  ‘What’s happening here, Zoe? What are we doing exactly?’

  She stood up now and came over to me. She was wearing scent. She looked into my eyes and kissed me full on the lips.

  ‘We are sorting you out, of course,’ she said.

  We had dinner and champagne at the Two Swans, which wasn’t my idea of a relaxing evening. As usual, Zoe did most of the talking and drinking. I can’t remember what we ate. She said nothing of what she had seen at my flat, which was unnerving. I do remember she had sweet ideas of how she could help more at the agency. How she could take on more of my workload. I was too good to my staff; there must be some cost savings to be made or more tricks to maximize profits.

  ‘And yet,’ I said at one point, ‘we are the most successful agency in the district. We must be doing something right.’

  Exactly, she told me. Imagine how much more successful it could be if we really pulled together!

  Despite myself, I was touched by her concern. The truth was, of course – and she wasn’t to know this – I already had more money than I needed, and I already had the business running in the friendly, ungrasping way that tended to get me where I wanted to be.

  Yet in every way she wanted to ‘help’.

  ‘The problem is, we give far too much away,’ she was saying in the taxi back to her flat.

  ‘You’re right of course,’ I said. ‘I must think about that.’

  ‘You’re too nice.’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  ‘Oh, William …’

  Things progressed, though progress was not the word.

  Together we would make a great team, she insisted as we snuggled beneath her duvet after a bout of self-consciously energetic sex. And if the police continued to cause a fuss with regard to my whereabouts on the morning in question, she said, the plan now was that I would simply confess our secret relationship. For her part, Zoe would back me up, since she hadn’t been in the office that morning anyway. It was simple: I had gone back to her place. We had made love. Yes, I would admit that I should have gone back to the office, but I just couldn’t keep my hands off Zoe for five minutes. That’s how crazy we were for each other, though obviously it had to be kept from the rest of the team until such time as we made it official, so to speak.

  ‘Official?’

  She nuzzled into my shoulder. ‘Just kidding,’ she said, though of course she wasn’t.

  At the office she brushed her fingers against mine when our paths crossed, just as she had during our earlier, ill-advised romance. At one point she brought a single chocolate heart from the upmarket gift store in the precinct and laid it on my desk beside my coffee.

  For now I had to stay focused. I spent the next two nights with Zoe. I told her I wouldn’t be around at the weekend, explaining that I had to drive out to Norfolk to speak to my cousin about an aspect of family finance. Zoe made a glum face.

  ‘You know what they say about absence,’ I said.

  She consoled herself by stroking my hair while asking long searching questions about my family. I replied with equally long mendacious answers. I did have one question for her, of course.

  ‘Zoe, do you think I might borrow your binoculars tomorrow? I seem to have lost mine somewhere.’

  ‘Actually, come to think of it, so have I,’ she said. ‘In fact I don’t think I’ve seen them in ages.’

  On Friday, while she was busy at the office, gaily plotting a hike in our rates or cuts to our benefit packages for first-time buyers, I drove to her flat and let myself in. I made use of her laptop. I thought about the tiny dimensions of her two rooms. I opened and closed doors. I had brought my tool roll and a bag of dusters. At the risk of impugning the weaker sex in a single sweeping observation, I do think women living on their own can often take their eye off the ball when it comes to the greasier end of essential household maintenance. Zoe’s broom cupboard, for example, contained a particularly ancient Dreadnought floor-standing boiler. Judging by its patina of grime I doubted it had been serviced in years, if ever. I unwrapped my tools and got to work adjusting the burner pressures. The Mark II in particular had proved reliable down the years for accidentally asphyxiating homeowners while they watched TV. If the flame turned yellow, carbon would block up the heat exchanger, eventually releasing enough carbon monoxide to down an elephant. The appliance notably lacked a fresh-air inlet, which meant it needed to take oxygen from the room. Which meant that, first, I had to go round checking all the ventilators, removing the plastic covers and folding a fresh new duster into each. Finally I swept my work areas for stray screws and debris and packed away my tools. If there was any pleasure in this, it was merely that of a job well done, if that’s not too perverse.

  In the evening we bought an Indian takeaway and settled in front of a martial arts film drinking wine until I made excuses about having to hit the road early in the morning. Which was not wholly a lie.

  ‘Drive safely,’ she said, yawning already.

  I fully expected her to be dead by Monday.

  I SUPPOSE IT HARDLY matters that I lied to Zoe. I took the train, first south to London and then north from King’s Cross. In Leeds I hired a car and continued west through the small former textile towns and semi-rural communities on the edge of the Dales. I killed an hour sitting in a tea room with a pleasing panorama of the Aire valley before eventually rolling into the parish of Wollesworth some time after lunch.

  I dropped my bags at the nearest B&B – a village pub – and set out to explore. A lane bordered on one side by a housing estate and on the other by a field of indolent cows led after a mile of strung-out cottages to a decent-sized square and a busy open-air market where shoppers – mainly women loaded with carrier bags, their necks craned, looking for bargains – made their way from stall to stall, sometimes trailing one or two small children, or trying to manoeuvre a pushchair through the narrow thoroughfares. At one side of the square the guildhall was still used for some formal purpose, but the corn exchange had long been converted to an indoor shopping precinct emblazoned with 1970s lettering, while neighbouring buildings – once no doubt the pride of solid traders and merchants – housed discount stores, betting shops and cheap cafés. A group of boys in sportswear sat beneath an ancient stone cross smoking cigarettes and passing two large brown bottles between them. Occasionally one or the other of them would spit
on the worn grey pavement. Much of their language – you could hear it from twenty yards away – was unsuitable for a public place on a Saturday afternoon. Outside a fast-food outlet was a lone busker – a yellow-eyed man of probably no more than thirty, balding, thin and grizzled – who sang and played an acoustic guitar with two of its strings missing. I threw a pound coin into his Tupperware box and was rewarded with his desperate rictus.

  Could this really be the place?

  I heard the peal of bells, working up to chiming the hour, and I followed the sound, out of the square. I walked for a minute and, reaching a bend in the road, saw the mass of a medieval church some way ahead, set back from the traffic and surrounded by a wall and railings. I entered through a black iron gate and mounted three brickwork steps into the churchyard, assailed by the smell of the grass, freshly mowed between uneven stumps of gravestones, some sunken with age but many bright with pots of flowers. Above, a steeple rose black against the pale sky, marred by a giant red-and-white barometer showing how the fund for repairs was coming along. Which was not well.

  I carried on, skirting the church, past a building in its own grounds – identified by a disfiguring sign as St Alban-in-the-Dale Church Hall and Community Centre, but probably the original rectory – and out at the other side. Here, in its own cul-de-sac, was a featureless 1970s brick-built detached house. A dusty path lay to the side of a large rear garden partly obscured by a short stretch of untrimmed privet. I was aware of a tapping sound and a dog barked once as I approached. I couldn’t see the dog but, as I passed, the figure of a man rose abruptly and faced me across the gate. His hair, a pale nest of straw, was as unkempt as his privet and he wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. He squinted at me in a peculiar way for a moment, a smear of grease on his chin. He was holding a can of something, and I saw now the frame of an old motorcycle standing nearby, its chrome parts laid out on sheets of newspaper, where he had evidently been crouched when I came along.

  ‘Hullo!’ he said.

  I responded with a smile. ‘Repairs?’

  ‘Just cleaning her up a little.’

  I nodded and hurried on, uncertainly, wondering if this had been a mistake. The path narrowed and sloped downwards into the trees.

  Behind me his voice called out again. ‘Hi there, hullo!’

  I turned. He was hurrying after me. He was a burly man and faintly bowlegged, but moved with surprising ease.

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t get across the stream at the bottom there. The ford’s up two feet.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Perhaps I’ll …’

  He squinted at me. He was wearing a smile, which now widened slightly. ‘I know you.’

  ‘Yes, I think you probably do.’

  ‘Heming?’

  ‘The Reverend Marrineau, I presume.’

  ‘Well, well,’ he said simply. He appraised me with his good eye, the other staring cold as marble beyond me into the bushes. What did he know?

  We shook hands and marvelled at our meeting as we walked back to his gate, where the dog stood in the garden, wagging its tail.

  ‘Here’s Toby,’ he said.

  ‘Not Fido, then?’

  ‘Aha!’ He chuckled. ‘I see your little joke there. Very clever.’

  He must have guessed I wasn’t here by accident, but only asked if I’d come far and commented on the heavier than usual traffic on account of the Shepping Fair. He had urgent business there himself, he said, this afternoon, and when I told him I was staying nearby he looked at his watch and suggested we go out there together now. ‘Give me five minutes,’ he said.

  I waited on an uncared-for wooden bench in the yard under the querying eye of Toby. The garden enclosed an apron of hard, flattened dirt and a raised area with an expanse of scrub lawn, untamed brambles and ivy, a shed and a rusting swing and slide set. An array of T-shirts and underwear hung motionless on a rotary washing line. It would be the work of twenty seconds to cut through the brake pipe on his bike, should anyone find they had an axe to grind. Or a heavy candlestick to the head. This town was probably full of violent drunks with no money, and vicars were a soft touch.

  Marrineau re-emerged in a baggy cream suit with clerical dog collar and a dramatic black eye-patch. ‘Forgive the fancy dress,’ he said.

  We drove to the fair in his old car. This was his day off, he said, but he had agreed to referee the children’s touch rugby and later award prizes for chutneys, sausages and pies. When we arrived, a succession of people greeted him or pulled him to one side to speak to him, their eyes eager and expectant. They called him David. I wandered off. A brass band played, sheepdogs ran an obstacle course, a woodsman turned a lathe fashioned from ropes and tree branches. Then, there he was, bulkier but graceful as ever, moving among the boys in his absurd cream suit and eye-patch – and I suddenly recalled that this was exactly what he was doing the last time I’d seen him twenty years ago, dashing among the Minors at school with a borrowed teacher’s whistle on a cord and a bandage across half his face.

  At Preserves and Pies, he made a humorous speech and my heart went out to him again – the golden boy who had wounded me with his cool disregard and cruelty, remade into this man of God, loved by all again but also now bestowing love in return. The applause for the winners of best jam and chutney was charged with admiration for him.

  ‘My own two boys are usually here,’ he said as we drove back. ‘But my sister and her husband have taken them to Florida for the week. Sarah and I can’t compete with that,’ he said, laughing. He dropped me outside my B&B. ‘I have a couple of calls to make. But please join us for supper tonight. Unless you have a better offer. I feel we have lots to talk about. Shall we say eight?’

  He hadn’t mentioned the wife and I hadn’t seen her. I wondered if – I worried that – Sarah might be the Sarah. The birthday girl at the party. It turned out that it wasn’t. But whoever his wife was wasn’t there in any case. ‘No,’ he explained as he manoeuvred a dish out of a hot oven, ‘it’s just me and Toby now. Sarah left a couple of years ago. Three, actually. Frankly, I didn’t blame her,’ he said, cutting into the steaming crust of one of the prize pies from the afternoon and serving it up with chips and peas. He licked his fingertip. ‘She put up with me for fifteen years before she made her escape. But I still see her almost every day, and the children often. They’re not far away. We divorced so that she could remarry. Nice chap. She met him on a retreat, believe it or not. A man who could give her a little more comfort. She still feels terribly guilty, I can tell, though she needn’t. Penury was our undoing, as I’m afraid it is for many in the ministry. It’s the modern way.’

  He paused and closed his eyes – suddenly overcome, I thought, with a moment of regret; but no, he was just hollowing out a silence in which to say grace. ‘Thank you, God, for this splendid pie – and for bringing my old friend William to share it with me.’ He looked up. ‘Do tuck in.’

  It was odd to hear my Christian name being spoken so often in recent days.

  I brought up the subject of his visit to my aunt long ago, but he dismissed it. ‘I was rather overzealous, I think,’ he said, slowly loading his fork and then quickly unloading it into his mouth. ‘I felt I had been saved and was eager to try out my new skills.’

  ‘Saved from what?’

  ‘Myself, of course. And Sarah was the girl who saved me. We were at Cambridge together. Sarah was reading divinity, I fell for her wisdom and good looks, and she persuaded me to change from geography. The rest was history,’ he added with a laugh. He raised his knife high like a cross brandished against evil. ‘I had been lost and now was found, as the song goes – was blind and now could see. Or half see. That was the problem, needless to say. My sporting career was over. I could put on the brave face, but I was being slowly poisoned by despair. I had the idea that nothing was more important than cricket. I couldn’t imagine being somewhere else entirely.’ He ate as if he hadn’t eaten all day. ‘I hope you don’t feel bad about the eye. I can say now that you did me a favou
r. Taught me a lesson. Made me think. And look at me now.’ He laughed again. ‘You changed me. You.’

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t know about the eye.’

  He waved away what he took to be my concern. ‘Of course. It was a gradual loss, starting with nerve damage, an infection that spread and refused to clear up, then aggravations. It was compounded, hastened, by a rugby injury. But, as I say, here I am.’

  I nodded agreeably. Marrineau had forged something useful out of the past. He wasn’t dwelling on it. He mentioned the old school – not twenty miles from here – and old Mr Stamp, who he said had died recently. But we didn’t return to the act of violence that had had me expelled. If there was a moment I might have stabbed Marrineau to death with one of his own unmatching table knives, it had passed.

  ‘This pie is excellent,’ I said.

  ‘You arrived on the right day. Yesterday was sausages with a jar of curry sauce. And yoghurt to finish off with. Today we have apple cake!’

  He was delighted to find that I had survived my expulsion from school and prospered with my own business.

  ‘We are both small-town people,’ he said, turning his one soft grey eye on me. ‘We each have our flock.’

  I was so struck by this remark I could barely swallow. It was as if he saw in a moment through to who I was, to my own sense of mission. My own love for people. It seemed like a parable when, later, he told me about a man, a former parishioner, whom he regularly saw on his visits to a secure psychiatric hospital. The man, a farmer, had shot three men and a woman with his shotgun, killing the woman. ‘They had been intruders,’ he said. ‘He believed that they had plotted against him and his wife. There was no evidence for it, of course. They were innocent ramblers, out walking, rucksacks, boots. They weren’t even on his land. Who knows what evil he saw in them. He couldn’t elaborate. He just knew it to be true. He felt it in his heart and in desperation pursued them and gave them both barrels, so to speak. Perhaps twice. I know nothing about guns. Of course it was a terrible crime, but this man cannot even now be separated from that belief. He is insane, of course – officially it comes under the umbrella of schizophrenia. He had been sectioned more than once before. But at the extreme it is also an example of blind faith.’