“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.”
Having laid aside the tube he removed the rim tape he had put in, unscrewed the nipple, and drew the spoke out from the hub flange.
“Miss Trigg, as you might guess, told her it was all the Devil’s work, wickedness and sin and a certain road to damnation. Like so many other things Miss Trigg never had the chance at. Dancing and the London theaters and an evening at the pub.”
He drew the bent spoke through his fingers, examining it: “How’d you do that then? You been riding off road?”
He took the spoke to the back of the shed and measured it against some that he kept there, until he was satisfied he had an exact match. He brought them both back, laid the old one on the ground. “Bent bicycle spokes and tinfoil make good bird-scarers for the peas,” he remarked, and spun the wheel to the place that he wanted.
“I suppose Maeve and me had a bit of rebellion in us, else we wouldn’t have left off going to Sunday worship. Anyway, when Susan told us what Miss Trigg had said—” he pushed the spoke head through the eye in the flange and with gentle pressure flexed it to weave in to relation with its fellows, “—we thought we’d have a try at the things in this book.”
He threaded the spoke through the eye at the rim and pushed the nipple onto the end.
“Will you pass me that can—not the three-in-one, the synthetic one—yes—thanks. And the little screwdriver. That one. With the red handle. Thanks.”
He tightened the nipple, looked critically at the tension, tightened it a little more, then looked round for his file, and worked at the small protrusion of the spoke end on the wheel rim.
“Me and Maeve,” he said softly, “we had no idea how much pleasure was in our bodies. The things you could do with hands and tongue—maybe I shouldn’t be discussing this with you, but you’ve been a married woman; I think you know.”
He began to turn the wheel, plucking each of the spokes gently at their midpoint, his head cocked like a bird, listening to the pitch of their tension.
“Not all that was in the little book appealed to us. We just liked what was gentle.”
He stopped at the spoke opposite the one he had just fitted, tightening it half a turn, listening again to the tension.
“So I think maybe I owe Miss Trigg something for forty years of the sweetest pleasure in my marriage bed. It heightened my respect for God, which I have to say is more than anything else much did in my dealings with her.”
He turned the wheel slowly, feeling with his thumb for any protrusions.
“Did you ever make love outside, in the fields, under the sky?” asked Esme, wistfully. He smiled.
“We did not. There’s a lot of flint in the ground in this part of the world; and plenty of thistles.”
He lifted the bike from its stand and upturned it on the floor to rest on the handlebars and saddle, setting the handlebars straight.
“Making love,” he said, squatting down behind the front wheel, checking the alignment with the back one, “should—in my opinion—be done in bed. ’Tis a thing of tenderness, and it should be warm and comfortable.”
He stood up and bent over the tin to look for chalk.
“And private.” Spinning the wheel, he brought the chalk slowly against it to mark the high points on the rim. “You make your bed in a field and ten to one the likes of Seer Ember will have chosen that hillside for an evening ramble, and have things to say that leave you hardly knowing where to put yourself.”
He made some more adjustments to the spokes, loosening, tightening, going over the whole wheel. “That should do it,” he remarked, and replaced the tape, the tube, and the tire, and set the bike upright.
Taking the air pump from the frame, he said, “However did we get onto this subject anyway?”
He inflated the tire till he was happy with it and continued, “You got to keep these tires properly inflated, Esme, or you’re more likely to get a puncture. You should go for the pressure level they give you on the tire wall, but don’t be too gingerly with it, you could take it to twice that before you blew it off the rim. I think that’ll do now, the rest of it looks fine.”
She got to her feet and went to admire his handiwork.
He glanced at her shyly. “I hope I haven’t been too free in my conversation. I somehow feel I know you perhaps better than I do.”
As he stood before her, his roughened, oil-blackened hands resting light on the handlebars of her bicycle, his head a little bent and his eyelids veiling his eyes in awkward modesty, she hardly liked to say that her overwhelming impulse was to put her arms round him and hug him.
“You do know me better than you do,” she said, “and you’re a darling for fixing my bike.”
It is my ambition, Esme thought, as his head dropped still further to hide his face, shy but pleased at what she had said, to have this man able to look at me for more than two seconds at a time.
“Shall I put it outside while you tidy the things away?” she asked, just allowing her fingers to touch his as she put her hands on the saddle and the handlebars. He released them from his hands instantly, and took a step back, his heel crashing against the tin on the concrete floor, startling him.
“Thank you,” he said, “but just set it against the wall. I think it’s coming on to rain again, and—oh, but I’m sorry, maybe you must be going? I was just assuming you’d like a cup of tea. I know I would.”
Knowing she would be at his cottage later in the day, Esme had avoided tea all day, drinking coffee at her staff meeting, and declining the offers of drinks from kindly staff in the nursing homes.
In his kitchen, she sat on one of the stools by the table watching Jabez set the kettle to boil and then scrub the oil from his hands at the sink.
“Jabez,” she said, with sudden misgivings about the simple question she had to ask, “how much do I owe you for this work?”
Jabez looked at her briefly as he crossed the small space to the Rayburn and took a dishtowel from its rail to dry his han
ds. “You owe me nothing. My pleasure,” he said as he leaned past her to reach the tea caddy down from the shelf.
“No, really, Jabez, this is your living,” she insisted. “If you supply free parts, free labor, and free delivery to all your friends, you’ll be bankrupt.”
He spooned tea leaves into the pot in silence, fetched milk from the fridge, turned to shoo away a hen appearing in cautious inquiry at the doorway, took the kettle as it began to sing from the hot plate, and poured the boiling water into the pot.
“Jabez?” she said.
“You owe me nothing,” he repeated, quietly.
He poured milk into their mugs and replaced the bottle in the fridge. He sat on the kitchen chair alongside the table, pulling the other stool to him, and putting his feet up on its crossbar.
Into the silence, as he waited for the tea to draw, he said gently, “Let me have something to give you.”
Esme laughed. “Something to give? Jabez! You feed me, you give me tea by the gallon, you share your fireside, and your friendship. How about me having something to give? Let me pay you for this; it’s costing you money.”
Jabez poured the tea out into the mugs and pushed hers toward her, without looking at her.
“I think you don’t know—” he began, glancing at her fleetingly, but thought better of it and shook his head. “You owe me nothing,” he said again. “Here’s to drier weather in the autumn,” and he raised his mug to her in a toast.
“Oh, Jabez,” she murmured in reproach.
“I got ideas of my own about money,” he said, setting his mug down. It served all right for a refuge, but the tea was too hot to drink. “I believe that affluence and ambition are diseases. Like Saint Paul saying the love of money is the root of all evil and saying for himself he’d learned to be content with what he had in every circumstance of life. And Jesus saying the cares and pleasures of the world are like brambles that choke the light and life out of the tender shoot of integrity and compassion in a person. Human greed is at the bottom of half the troubles of the world. If you aspire toward a spiritual life, whatever religious system you practice in—be you Hindu or Buddhist, Christian or Humanist, Taoist or Muslim, or Jew; whatever—the gateway to spiritual path is simplicity, and unless you undertake a discipline of simplicity, your spirituality will be like joists with dry rot.”
He looked at her momentarily, his glance shy, but eager. That this mattered to him was very clear.
“When Saint Francis of Assisi taught his friends and followers about the way of Christ, he was adamant about simplicity—for that matter, so was Gandhi, so was Jesus, so was Lao Tzu. Francis talked about being in love with Lady Poverty—his bride, he said. He saw a vision of beauty in extreme simplicity; the beggar’s bowl, the borrowed donkey shed, walking barefoot. Humility, you know, and offering his time to serve other people as a gift of himself in love. He’s a bit of a hero of mine. I’m not man enough to scale the heights he did, but I can make little forays into the foothills. I can manage tiny bits of hospitality and the occasional act of kindness. Not often. And I know that Spirit, life, is a wildflower that doesn’t take to cultivation. You try to pick it to make it an image thing, a stylish ornament in a vase, the finishing touch to an affluent setting, and it’ll droop and die. To find it, you got to walk the sheep tracks, not ride the motorway. Frugality. Humility. Quietness. Working with your hands and finishing a job carefully and well. Doing what you do mindfully and with peace. Paying attention. Simplicity. Kindness. Looking after things. That’s my faith, and I can’t call it a religion, it isn’t systematic—but it holds together, it makes sense. Dogma and doctrine are too grand and overstuffed for the house where my soul lives. I’m not poor, Esme. I don’t need very much.”
Esme drank her tea, watching him. He spoke quietly and unpretentiously, almost with reluctance. What he had said came from very deep within him, she thought.
“So what may I give you in return for everything?” she asked him.
Jabez cupped his hands around the mug of tea.
“If I can choose, then I would treasure your friendship.”
“Jabez, that’s already given.”
“Okay. So we’re quits, and you owe me nothing,” he said.
Five
September was manic.
In a weak moment, which she now regretted, Esme had agreed to take on the management of the annual circuit service at the beginning of the Methodist year. She had invited the guest preacher a year beforehand, but now came the plethora of details to be settled as the event drew near. Esme had to weave into this annual event a moment of stardom for everyone concerned. All the areas of work in her circuit—a sprawling territory with fifteen chapels and a Methodist geriatric residential home, four pastors, and a lay worker—had to be represented. West Parade Chapel boasted a professional musician who had attracted a first-class organist and organized a stunningly good choir considering the raw material the choir mistress began with. In her chapel at Portland Street the congregation had a worship band with guitars and a contentious drum kit (this drum kit never found a happy niche in worship, being always just loud enough to antagonize the traditionalists and just quiet enough to frustrate the drummer). The teenagers from the various chapels had organized into a loose-knit youth fellowship that deserved a voice at any circuit event. The minister in pastoral charge and the lay worker were each expected to have their special area of responsibility in the service. The superintendent had to be allowed to make a speech of welcome at the beginning, but under all manner of threats be required to stick to his time limit, as the mainly elderly congregation didn’t like to be kept out late in the evening, the pews were uncomfortable, and if the guest preacher missed the 8:55, he wouldn’t get his train back to London till 10:20 on a Sunday night.
Esme sat with a pad of paper charting out the balance of traditional hymns with choruses, choir items with congregational singing, and apportioning the readings (chosen by the preacher to support his theme) and the prayers to the staff and circuit stewards. She hesitated over the offering. There had been a row last year because the youth fellowship had been invited to take up the offering, much to the chagrin of the West Parade stewards who had a “system” and said it hadn’t been carried out properly. She hesitated also over the readings. The guest preacher had requested a modern translation of the Bible, which meant not using the special lectern King James Bible recently dedicated at West Parade Chapel in memory of the senior steward’s wife, who had died after a miserable and protracted illness the previous year.
Then she remembered that she had ages ago invited a youth leader from Brockhyrst Priory to sing a solo. This secured the loyally supportive attendance of a number of leaders from the guides and scouts, but also put a greater weight to the desirability of a relevant, accessible act of worship, which didn’t matter so much if no one was coming except the Methodist diehards who simply wanted to sing some rousing Charles Wesley numbers and enjoy the visit of a dignitary from London.
Esme sat at her desk with her head in her hand, trying vainly to think of ways to fit it all into an hour-long act of worship. Eventually, in a fit of temper, she screwed up her sheet of paper into a tight ball, threw it across the room, and went out to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. While the kettle boiled she ate a flapjack. She knew how many calories they contain, so once the coffee was made she restricted herself to a plain biscuit to go with it. And a second one to save her coming back for another, knowing perfectly well she’d have finished the first one before the coffee had cooled enough to drink.
She returned to her study. The most difficult part about organizing the circuit service was that the draft had to be submitted to the superintendent, who would ask for a multitude of minor details to be adjusted, and then ask to check the redraft and make further alterations before she could type it up and print copies.
Esme made a list of the people to
be phoned. The youth fellowship wanted to do a drama but could only manage one they’d practiced already, which wouldn’t necessarily relate to the overall theme. Nonetheless, their title should be on the printed order, whether or not they changed their plans at the last minute. The choir mistress, she knew, would be ready with a list of beautiful but obscure and highbrow music—anything from Byrd to Birtwistle if the last two years were anything to go by—for Esme to dispose around the various liturgical moments of introit, offertory, anthem, recessional, and anything else she could think of. And she had to check the availability of her proposed readers, intercessors, and stewards.
And, Esme reflected, she’d better get on with it because it was happening in three weeks time, and as it was late this year, she had three church council agendas to put her attention to at the same time, as well as the pastoral committees, the finance and property committees, the mission and neighborhood committees, and the stewards’ meetings for all three chapels. Then, she suddenly remembered Portland Street had decided to hold their covenant service in September instead of January this year, and she had undertaken to make the necessary phone calls and publicity fliers to elevate it into an ecumenical occasion.
Her phone rang. Marcus asking if she was ready with Sunday’s hymns yet—no, she wasn’t, she said she’d phone him back. As soon as she’d replaced the receiver it rang again. One of her pastoral visitors from Portland Street—had she heard that Mrs Whitworth’s sister-in-law had gone into hospital for an operation on her varicose veins? No doubt Esme would be grateful to know. No, I’m not, Esme felt like saying. The woman doesn’t even come to church and doesn’t know me from Adam, and now you’ve phoned me, I’ll have to go and visit her, as if I hadn’t got enough to do already.
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