St Mary’s held its carol service earlier than most parishes. Otherwise, said the admirable and wise Richard, Christmas was an indigestible lump.
Once again, St Mary’s had been decorated - over-decorated in the opinion of some - by Dainton’s army of flower-arrangers (which this year did not include Prue). Swags of ivy hung from the pillars, snaked over the pulpit and lectern and wreathed anything that possessed a circumference and did not move.
The much-argued-about candles had been lit in their dozens and the effect was magical, both familiar and yet mysterious. The church smelt of hot wax and was spiced with evergreens. Every last seat was taken, and parishioners who could not face the trials of Series B and tub-thumping, hugging and kissing matins, which Richard insisted on for younger members of the parish, were there in force to store up their annual tally of grace.
Once-in-Royal-David’s-Citying, the choir progressed up the aisle with Richard in tow, his expression serene. We must live and let live, it said. (Anyway, only a moment’s reflection brought a forward-looking vicar to the conclusion that the majority of those who clung to the old ways would be dead quite soon.)
Violet had stayed behind at Hallet’s Gate, declaring she needed a bit of peace or she would go mad, but Jamie had come. Standing in the pew beside Jane, Jamie on the other side of her husband, Prue felt sick and shaky and, perhaps for the first time in her life, completely alone.
‘What about Jane?’ she had whispered to Max in the hall as they collected their coats. ‘What about her?’
‘I think about her more than anyone,’ he had replied.
‘Why didn’t you talk to me first? In fact, we must talk, Max . . .’
It was then that Prue saw Max was crying. She wanted to tear her heart out of her chest in expiation and give it to him to do with as he wished.
‘Max . . .’ She tried to touch him, but Max put up his hand to shield his face and turned away.
The Angel Gabriel saluted the Virgin Mary and, via St Luke, gave her the news of her impending pregnancy, which Molly read out at gunfire pace. Clearly, she did not feel easy with the subject.
‘Il est né, le divin enfant’ intervened in Prue’s thoughts. It was sung in a jolly fashion by the choir, and then St Luke took up the story again, read beautifully this time by Mrs Paulton who owned the village stores.
In the pause, as choir and congregation gathered for the assault on ‘Adam lay y-bounden’, Prue felt the candlelight lap her like a second skin, and its tongues of flame run through her body. She turned her head and looked at Jamie.
A hunger has woken in me, she thought, and it will be impossible to quiet it yet, for I am not yet old and dried up.
The high, clear voice of Jane beside her singing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ made Prue screw up her eyes in pain. Where had her hunger led her?
‘Do you believe you are in a state of grace?’ was the trick question posed to Joan by Cauchon, her inquisitor at her trial. The question was so unfair that one of the other judges (who were there, after all, to condemn her) protested. But canny, passionate Joan knew that there are many answers to a question. Always.
‘If I am not,’ she said, ‘may God put me in it, and if I am may God keep me in it.’
How did they take the reply, these men of God? Actually, not so much men of God as men of the Church – which was different. Further, they were men of the Church caught up in a civil war and those trying Joan in Rouen had chosen to work with the English and the Burgundians. To be fair, the Duke of Bedford and Philip the Good of Burgundy represented a decency and order that neither Joan’s schizophrenically inclined Charles nor his cohorts could match.
Middle-aged, celibate, learned, these men were faced by a young, obstinate, extraordinary female who went to a great deal of trouble to hide her sex. They were men of peace. She was a woman of war. Her message was political - unheard-of for a woman.
You can imagine their horror, their bafflement, their fury that their authority and stature - the existing structures of Church and state - should be, thus, so undermined.
When she was brought to face the court and the crowd at the cemetery of Saint-Ouen at Rouen (she had been in prison for over nine months and was weary from ceaseless questioning), Joan was placed at all times so that she could see a waiting cart and executioner. Unlike many martyrs, she did not see out pain and had a healthy wariness of suffering. Perhaps the sight of that silent bringer of death was too much.
Joan recanted. She disavowed her voices, she renounced her male clothes, she submitted fully to the Church.
What agony she suffered as a result can only be conjectured especially when she discovered she would not be set free. Her voices angrily informed Joan that she had committed a crime in confessing, and the rough English soldiers made her cell almost unbearable with their daily petty assaults. Joan was probably at the end of her tether when the more imaginative among them took away her woman’s clothing so that she was forced to resume doublet and hose.
Once Joan had done this, the die was cast. Her determination returned with them and she was again ready for battle. Anyway, she would rather die, she told Cauchon, ‘than endure longer my pain in prison’.
Then she informed him that it had been solely her fear of dying by fire which had made her sign the confession.
Nothing could have been more satisfactory to Cauchon, who desired only her death and, with those words, Joan had delivered up to him the disposition of her physical body.
She had also made a choice: to die. In the wrong done to her and the wrong she had done to herself by confessing, there had also been a rightness.
I was wrong, thought Prue of her own actions, but also right. And I think that because nothing is black and white and people need the grey as much as they need absolutes. I did not know that before.
At the end of the service - Prue swore she would never willingly sing ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ again - the congregation filed past the collection tray by the door into the cold, dark world. Prue put in five pounds, Jamie twenty.
‘Buying your way into good grace,’ she muttered at him.
‘Correct,’ he said. ‘It’s traditional at Christmas.’
After exchanging greetings, the congregation dispersed and groups, breath streaming into the cold air, walked briskly back to their homes. Max had gone ahead with Jane and Molly, and Prue tugged at Jamie’s arm. ‘Wait.’
He half turned, and she sensed at once how tense he was. ‘Max has won, hasn’t he?’
Their faces were barely discernible in the dark. Prue permitted her hand to linger on the smooth cashmere nap of his overcoat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Max entirely. But the whole thing. It is too much to ask of us all.’
‘Hasn’t Max decided to make the break? That’s what I assumed.’
She stopped by the recent grave of Molly’s sister and stared down at it. ‘I don’t know because I haven’t talked to him about it.’ Jamie did not reply.
They walked past the other graves with their uneven headstones, their carvings obliterated by lichen, and plodded up the slope from the church to the lane above. The grass was slippery and treacherous. Prue tripped, and landed on her knee. Jamie waited until she had brushed herself down. Then he said, ‘You mean it is over?’
Further down the lane, a large, shambling figure beside Molly came to a halt.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Prue looked up at Jamie, felt the dust clogged under her fingernails. No glossy television drama, no scriptwriter, no director could convey the impression that she was being cut into pieces, the rawness and anguish of her feelings, or the answering pain and desire on her lover’s face. Neither would a director choose a backdrop of a sloping piece of grass slicked with dried mud.
The dialogue would not have passed muster either. Neither Prue nor Jamie was capable of saying much, certainly not capable of articulating what this moment felt like or how they perceived the future without each other.
He licked his finger and scrubbed a
t her cheek. ‘You’ve got a smudge.’
Prue submitted to his finger. ‘Do you think Violet has any idea? It seems impossible that all this feeling is being expended and she hasn’t sensed it.’
‘No, I don’t think she does.’ Jamie considered Violet. ‘That is her strength.’
‘Don’t ever tell her, will you, Jamie? Not even when you’re old and grey.’
‘That’s my business,’ he replied savagely.
‘We don’t all have to fall down.’
‘What?’
‘Ring-a-roses. Atishoo, and we all fall down.’
‘I thought that was about the plague.’
‘Exactly.’
Negotiating his way in the dark, Jamie sighed, full of regret, and aware that he was thoroughly netted. Not so much by his wife, but by being his age, a parent, and by who and what he was. Depression lowered a blanket over him.
‘Won’t you reconsider, Prue?’ he asked abruptly.
She swallowed, and Jamie waited. Two or three seconds stretched out, and slipped into the past.
‘No,’ said Prue. She scrambled up the slope and into the lane, and contemplated a life once again simple and conducted on one level. ‘I can’t explain, but I know you know.’
At this point, Jamie probably understood less than Prue imagined. What he knew for sure was that he was wading through a quagmire.
‘ I didn’t know how much it would hurt. That’s all,’ he said, after a moment, frowning with the effort of talking sense.
Nothing he had said before had cut up Prue so much. Nevertheless, she managed a half-smile while she battled to put her life back on straight lines, to return it to the mundane where preoccupation with sausages, clean sheets, cat fleas and Hoover bags would help to blot out the radiant, shining, scented, achingly happy landscape that she had walked with Jamie.
‘The others will be back by now and wanting supper,’ she said.
Without warning, Jamie pulled Prue towards him. For a couple of seconds, she allowed herself to lean against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
Moving circles of light in the lane indicated the torches shone by returning parishioners. They dipped and swayed, an aurora borealis sweeping back to base for gin and sherry, comfortable in the knowledge that church had been done, some even having found nourishment in the service.
‘I say,’ said Molly to Max, ‘shouldn’t you go back and see what Prue’s up to?’ It was too dark for Max to see Molly’s expression.
It was at that instant that Max stopped walking. ‘I’ll see you on Sunday, Molly.’
‘Right,’ she said and, shrugging her dreadful tweed coat more tightly around her, set off home where Keith was waiting for her to serve him yet another supper with cabbage.
Max’s large shadow moved back along the patched and rutted surface of the lane, dipping in and out of the light directed by the wind ripping over from the ridge, which was sending clouds scudding across the moon.
Max was about to call out: Are you coming Prue? when the words were stillborn.
In the freeze-frame, looping and spooling in slow motion, he watched his wife, who was outlined in the light from the church porch, climb the bank and lean towards his son-in-law. He saw, too, Jamie’s hand touch his wife’s cheek, and pull her to him. Then he understood.
Prue looked up from Jamie’s shoulder, the rough fibres of the material rubbing her cheek and saw a large figure back away, then turn and run.
‘Oh, my God, Max has seen us,’ she said.
And with that, Prue pushed Jamie away and also ran, like an animal, its hunting finished, streaks home.
At the entrance to the drive, she skidded to a halt, her feet sending a spume of gravel across the grass verge. Something moved and the security light flooded the area. Then she froze. ‘No, Max,’ she said, her hand across her mouth. ‘No, not that.’
For Max had materialized out of the darker patch of shadow where the car was parked. The gloom made him appear even bigger, his face more set and white than she had ever seen it. In his hands gleamed the polished barrel of his father’s gun.
‘Where did you get it?’ asked Prue in a stupefied fashion.
‘It was in the car,’ said Max.
‘But you always put the guns away.’
‘I didn’t this time, did I?’
‘Get back, Prue,’ said Jamie urgently from behind her. ‘Get out of the way.’
But Prue was not listening. She took a step forward but Jamie’s arm swept out and pushed her aside. The shock made her gasp and she stumbled.
‘What are you doing, Max?’ Her voice rang thinly in the night. The gun shone into her face.
Max loomed over his wife. ‘I want to kill you,’ he said calmly. ‘Painfully and slowly.’
She scrabbled at the fluff in her coat pockets. ‘Max, where’s Jane? Tell me where Jane is.’
‘I don’t know. Inside I imagine.’
Husband and wife stared at each other. The guns. Those guns had been there all their married life, waiting to be used.
‘Max,’ Prue inflected her voice into that of a supplicant, ‘please don’t do anything silly.’
A second later, she thought, How funny that I never realized the gun barrel was the colour of beech leaves in autumn. Another second elapsed, and she reflected: Max is going to kill someone. How will Jane cope with a murderer for a father?
‘Put the gun away, Max.’ Jamie sounded in control. ‘It doesn’t solve anything.’
‘I know the truth now.’ Max moved the barrel up to the level of Jamie’s chest. The truth . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Jamie. ‘And I’m sorry.’
‘That makes it worse. At least, if you’re going to fuck my wife you should be wholehearted about it. If you were going to betray my daughter—’
Max could not finish the sentence and took a gasping breath. Jamie was silent, and edged an inch or two across the gravel so that part of his body came between Max and Prue. ‘I am. I was wholehearted. And this’, he gestured at the gun, ‘is not a resolution.’
‘Shut up,’ said Max.
Every movement the trio made appeared magnified, and so was the silence, broken by the shuffle of their feet, and their urgent whispered conversation.
How strange, and yet how not strange, thought Prue, grasping at straws. I thought we were so civilized. Then she remembered the wild hot lust and tumbled bodies, the urgings, pantings and satiations, the greed for more, the ruthlessness that went out and took it, and knew that, ultimately, no one was civilized. Why should Max and a gun be any different?
Max felt a darkness fogging his brain, the rage he had been hiding from himself for so long. For a lifetime. Slowly and patiently, he lifted the gun and pointed it at his wife.
‘What’s the pattern, Jamie? A quick foray and then off? Do you hang around to estimate the damage? Is that the form?’
‘Believe me,’ said Jamie, breath streaming into the night, ‘I do not make a habit of it.’
‘Max.’ Suddenly Prue was furiously angry. ‘You know that’s not what you think. You know what’s been happening and you sat on the sidelines. You cannot take issue now.’
He looked steadily at his wife. ‘I never thought you were stupid before. Adulterous . . . maybe. A liar . . . of necessity. There are worse things. But stupid.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Prue understood. ‘It’s because of Violet, isn’t it? Not me.’
She stretched out her arm. ‘Max, my darling. Listen, listen to me—’
With a gasp of rage and pain, Max tightened his grip on his father’s gun. ‘Was it not enough that you had your freedom, Prue? I could take that. I could manage it, and understand. And cope. Just. But I can’t forgive that you have transgressed against my daughter.’
‘Max!’
‘Was it some sort of revenge for having to take on Violet when you married me?’
He only married you for convenience.
I hate you, Prue.
‘Max. Shooting me or Jamie is only a ge
sture. It won’t erase what’s happened. What happened, whatever the suffering, is worth more than just a gesture.’
Prue’s teeth chattered uncontrollably and inwardly she wept with pity and grief. She was frightened, my God, she was frightened. Demons invade the wronged, even gentle, wounded giants like Max.
‘Max,’ she said, knowing now that it was she that Max wished to kill, not Jamie and, strangely, accepting it, ‘would you like me to get down on my knees?’
Down she went on to the gravel, the sharp stones biting her flesh like toothed animals. A St Joan of the shires. Penitent, but hungry. Awoken but grieving.
Sensing that this exchange between a husband and wife excluded him, Jamie remained motionless where he was. He found he could not bear the sight of the figure kneeling in the drive and he turned his head away.
‘You threatened Violet’s happiness, Prue. That is your greatest sin against me.’
‘Is it? Are you sure?’
Prue would never understand fully the complicities of her marriage, and terror blunted her responses.
‘To harm my daughters is to harm me,’ said Max heavily. ‘How could you think so little of it?’
The wind was rising. A dead, cold smell of winter blew in with it, and the silence of suspended life settled around the group in the drive. Prue’s knees ached and stung and the shapes under them indented her flesh, but no less punishingly than Max’s words stung and wounded.
Somehow, in the dark woods and ravines of blindness and folly, reason, humour and wisdom had to be found. Prue got to her feet.
‘You must understand, Max, it did not seem like that,’ she said, savouring (for the last time?) the beat of passion for Jamie deep in her body. ‘You must appreciate that I saw it from a different angle.’ Prue took a deep breath. ‘If you kill me, Jane will suffer.’
Jamie’s eyes suddenly narrowed as he saw that Max’s aim had slackened.
Prue raised her arms in a gesture asking for forgiveness. ‘The awful thing is, Max . . . that it doesn’t have anything to do with you, or with Jane. It was to do with me, that’s all.’ She pointed towards the gun. ‘Max, please let me have it.’
Perfect Love Page 34
