Catherine Fox was educated at Durham and London Universities. She is the author of four adult novels, Angels and Men, The Benefits of Passion, Love for the Lost and Acts and Omissions; a Young Adult fantasy novel, Wolf Tide; and a memoir, Fight the Good Fight: From vicar’s wife to killing machine, which relates her quest to achieve a black belt in judo. She lives in Liverpool, where her husband is dean of the cathedral.
First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Hamish Hamilton
Published in 1998 by Penguin Books
This edition published in 2015
Marylebone House
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Copyright © Catherine Fox 1997, 1998, 2015
Marylebone House does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.
Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Extracts from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright © 1946, 1952 and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Extracts from The Alternative Service Book 1980 are copyright © The Archbishops’ Council 1980 and are reproduced by permission.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1–910674–00–0
eBook ISBN 978–1–910674–02–4
Typeset and eBook by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
Manufacture managed by Jellyfish
For
Bridget, Mary, Katy, Kate
and the other Cathy
CHAPTER 1
Isabella Deane was downwardly mobile. Her elder sister Hermione, who was not, deplored this tendency. So did their mother. Their father was a solicitor and made no comment either way. Poor Isabella had always been like it, even as a little girl. She had gone quite happily to the local village primary school and made friends with girls like Debbie Ambridge – the sort of girl who used to do handstands against the school wall to show her knickers when the RAF apprentices were going past. Hermione had thrown a tantrum after her first day at Nettledon County Primary and had to be sent instead as a day girl to a little private school in the next town, where they wore a uniform and learnt to play tennis. Isabella and Debbie played in the quarry and on building sites or up on the railway line where Isabella was once almost cut in two by an express train.
However, she lived long enough to pass her eleven plus and join Hermione at the grammar school (the only kind of state school Hermione would countenance). Mrs Deane was optimistic about the school’s polite influence; but it soon became apparent that Isabella had waved goodbye to the likes of Debbie Ambridge only to meet up with the Tracy Wattses of this world, who were like Debbie Ambridge only they had brains. The sort of girl who rolled her school skirt over and over at the waist to make it short enough. She and Isabella and their kind went out illegally during the lunch hour to ogle the men, tacking back and forth across the busy high street (where Isabella was once almost crushed by a lorry) in pursuit of the local talent. They ate large slices of Black Forest gateau from the baker’s as they went. Walking the streets and eating! The headmistress was speechless when the matter was brought to her attention. Letters were sent to the relevant parents. Mrs Deane despaired. Mr Deane made no comment.
Then there was a turn for the better. Isabella, having lived long enough to reach the sixth form, surprised everyone by getting a place at Cambridge to read English. Mrs Deane was an old Girtonian herself and her spirits rose again. Hermione, now in her first year at the Other Place, was thoughtful when she heard the news. It was as though in some obscure way her younger sister’s success undermined the value of her own Oxford scholarship. On reflection she was pleased. She shared her mother’s belief that Cambridge would reverse the unfortunate downward trend.
Isabella’s wedding dress three years later – like an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth – showed them just how wrong they were. Tight oyster satin split to the thigh.
‘You look unspeakably vulgar,’ said Hermione as Isabella postured in front of the spare bedroom mirror a week before the wedding.
‘Barney will like it,’ said Isabella.
‘I imagine he will,’ replied Hermione coolly.
He did. Oh my, oh my – didn’t he just.
‘Barney, we can’t possibly!’
‘Why not? We’re married.’
‘But . . .’
She was on her back on the spare bed with the unspeakable dress ruched up round her waist. Voices and chinking glasses from the marquee on the lawn, and Barney on top of her, consummating their marriage in long, unhurried thrusts.
‘Barney, I can’t believe you’re doing this!’
He grinned.
A sudden cramp stabbed into her right hip joint and she squealed and squirmed, and in the end had to wrap her legs round his waist to dislodge the pain. This was mistaken for passion and the dress was in sudden crisis. She heard a couple of stitches crack, but those seams held. Polite voices on the lawn. She clung on like a shipwrecked sailor to a mast. A tap at the door. Her mother’s voice.
‘Everything all right, darlings?’
‘Just coming,’ said Barney. A pause. He came.
Isabella’s thighs shook as she scrambled into her going away outfit. She looked up and saw Barney rub a towel over his fair curly head and smile his slow smile at her. It struck her that marriage might be one long process of interesting discovery. But that was on her wedding day.
Annie sat cross-legged on a chair with her notebook. She was hovering about twenty feet above the lawn looking down on the guests and trying to decide what kind of weather to have. It should have been one of those blazing August days which melted the tarmac on the roads and turned the marquee into an oven, but as she watched she could see that a stiffish breeze was blowing and making Mrs Deane clutch her hat as she talked to one of Barney’s older sisters. Hermione seemed to shiver slightly in her bridesmaid’s dress, but it might simply have been a fastidious shudder. Barney’s family were decidedly not her sort of people. Her frown transformed into a frigid smile as one of Barney’s brothers-in-law bore down on her with a video camera. ‘Give us a nice smile, love.’ A wedding video. Good God. How incredibly tacky. The other bridesmaid, a tall blonde, received the camera’s attentions with amused contempt. The lawn was very green. Barney’s sisters’ stilettos (shudder) kept sinking into it.
Annie rose up higher for a moment and scanned the suburban gardens spread out beneath her. Lush as far as the eye could see. A rainy August, then. The tiny guests circulated. Annie watched the progress of Mrs Deane’s custard-coloured hat among the groups. She would be smiling and checking that glasses were full, glancing every now and then at her watch. What on earth was keeping Barney and Isabella? A stuck zip? A sudden flood of tears? Perhaps she should –? Annie watched her go into the house.
Some of Barney’s nieces and nephews had got underneath Mr Deane’s raspberry nets and were busy scrumping. There was Barney’s father’s bald head. He’d spotted what his grandchildren were up to. Little buggers. Still, no wonder they were hungry. Pinwheel smoked-salmon sandwiches. Fresh bloody dates stuffed with cream cheese. And only wine to drink. I ask you. Plenty of everything, he had to admit, but he kne
w that he and Maureen would be stopping for steak and chips that evening before they got halfway up the MI.
At last Annie saw the guests being herded round to the front of the house by the best man. He was tall and thin. Dark-haired. He flapped his long arms at them, encouraging them on with a kind of despairing good humour, like a shepherd who loves sheep tenderly but is under no illusions about their intellectual powers. Who was he? An old school-friend of Barney’s probably. Perhaps they had played cricket together in the First XI.
The guests gathered on the drive. The couple emerged. Cheers. Confetti. Photos. Isabella was wearing a minute black dress and a straw hat as wide as a cartwheel. Barney’s father winked and mimed some paternal encouragement to his son. His wife cuffed him, a practised back-handed blow to the chest. Her face did not change at all. Nobody was quite sure whether she liked Isabella. The couple climbed into a red car crammed with balloons, and bearing the shaving-foam motto ‘Vicars do it on their knees’. They drove off amid more cheers.
Annie watched the car climb the hill and head out of town, balloons bobbing and scraps of shaving foam blowing away in the wind. The guests stood about on the pink gravel drive. They looked like passengers diverted to a strange station on a Sunday afternoon. Barney’s father rubbed his hands together briskly and said, ‘Well, now.’ But everyone continued to stand.
The car was a red dot heading north, a mite crawling across an endless green carpet. Annie could hear the larks as her chair rode along in the sky.
‘Can I tempt you?’ Edward appeared beside her on a cloud holding out a treacle tart. Annie jumped in surprise.
‘Yes. Just a small slice, thanks.’
Edward peered over her shoulder. She shut the book, although it was written in her own secret shorthand. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Doctrine essay?’
‘Well . . .’ she shrugged to avoid telling an outright lie. The cloud had given way to grey theological-college carpet.
‘What about a cup of tea?’ His brown hair was wet from a recent shower. He’d probably been out rowing.
‘Thank you.’ He left the room. She listened to his brogues clumping along the corridor to the kitchen. The green August day had vanished and Annie could see the miserable north-eastern rain speckling her window. She hated February.
‘Earl Grey all right?’ He had a hearty voice. Coverdale Hall chapel sounded more like a packed stand at Twickenham than divine worship when Edward and his kind were in full cry.
‘Lovely, thanks.’
Edward began singing, ‘“Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son!”’ Annie waited, tense, wondering whether she could snatch another moment for her novel. ‘Milk?’
‘Yes, please.’ Silence. She opened her book again. The car crawling northwards like a –
‘How strong do you like it?’
Annie pounded her fists noiselessly on the desk. Just give me the tea and go!
‘As it comes.’ It was there the whole time, this murderous irritability, crackling away like background radiation. ‘“Endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won!”’ boomed Edward’s fine baritone from the kitchen. Clump, clump, came his brogues along the corridor. She reminded herself that Edward was a good friend and that she liked him. He brought in the tea and cake. The problem was hers, not his. She was guiltily aware she would have found him even more irritating if he hadn’t stood a good-looking six foot two in his rugby socks.
‘You’re busy,’ he said. ‘Shall I leave you in peace?’
‘Would you mind? Sorry, Edward.’
He was gone with a polite wave of the hand. She ate his cake and hated herself. Why do I feel like this? She had always assumed that the dark night of the soul was a noble thing. A solitary wrestling with your Maker. ‘Comforter, where, where is your comforting?’ But this felt like a case of permanent premenstrual tension. Waking one morning to find yourself doubting the divinity of Christ was one thing, but to be locked in perpetual crabbiness with your fellow ordinands was another. She looked down at her notebook again, aware that this was the one thing in her life that she enjoyed at the moment, but that there was always something else she ought to be doing instead. Preparing the prayers for tomorrow’s service, for instance. Later. Later.
Now, where were Barney and Isabella going on their honeymoon? Northumberland. A long journey, but that was nothing to the happy couple. Barney and Isabella would not have to broil for hours in contraflows like us lesser beings. Their red car could travel three hundred miles in seven words: ‘They arrived at last at the cottage . . .’ But how had they met in the first place?
Isabella first saw Barney in the catalogue room of Cambridge University Library and she hunted him down and married him. It was the summer term of her second year and she was fiddling around one morning looking something up and not revising for her part ones because it was almost time for the tea room to open. Ten minutes to cheese-scone time. She glanced around and there was Barney: big and blond and beautiful, walking through the catalogue room minding his own business. All thought of cheese scones fled from her mind and she pursued him through the library and up several flights of stairs to South Wing 4.
It was a room she had never previously visited and it looked out across some playing fields. He settled down to work not knowing he was a marked man. April sunshine was coming through the window and turning his fair hair into a halo round his head. He had a sort of bruised and bewildered beauty, like an overgrown cherub after a night on the tiles. You, she thought, are gorgeous. She pulled a volume at random from a nearby shelf. The New Testament and the People of God. Her jaw dropped. Don’t tell me this is the theology section. She looked across at the broad shoulders and fair head. You can’t be one of those Bible bashers. I won’t let you be. She brightened at the idea that he might only be there because it was a pleasant sunny place to study with a good view of the prep-school rounders matches if you got bored with your work. Isabella slid the volume back on to the shelf and stood watching him. She was sucking a lock of her dark hair, a vulgar habit she had never outgrown and which undermined the impact of her expensive bob. As she loitered past she noticed that he had a pile of books beside him with reservation slips in them. She bent down and whispered in her husky voice, ‘Are these yours?’
He looked up in surprise. ‘Yes.’
She whisked the slip of paper out of the top volume. B. Hardstaff. She tucked it into her pocket and smiled her nicest smile. ‘Thank you.’
She glanced back at him when she reached the doorway. He was watching her. Then she saw him shake his head briskly as though clearing the inexplicable incident from his mind before settling down to work again.
‘I’ve just seen the most gorgeous man,’ said Isabella to her friend Camilla as they went out through the library’s revolving doors a couple of hours later.
‘Yeah?’ said Camilla. They paused on the steps while she lit a cigarette. She shook out the match and threw it away. ‘What’s he like, then?’ Camilla herself was a tall blonde, aloof and cool as the stratosphere, the sort of woman who in a previous era would never have had to resort to lighting her own cigarette. Her expression implied that she found life faintly amusing.
‘Oh, he’s –’ Isabella broke off. ‘Don’t look! It’s him!’ Camilla looked. He walked past them down the steps. ‘Don’t you think he’s beautiful?’ But Camilla had her eyebrow up.
Her incredulity acted as a dare on Isabella. ‘Excuse me,’ she called. He turned. ‘I just want you to know you’re the sexiest man I’ve ever met and I think I’m in love with you.’
He stared at her in blank astonishment. There was a ripple of amusement among those close enough to overhear. Camilla laughed mockingly. Oh, Gawd, thought Isabella. Why did I do that? But then he smiled at her, a slow, broad smile. Her heart raced. He turned and walked off towards the bikes without a word.
‘I take it back,’ said Camilla.
‘Oh, you like him? Do you really?’
Camilla curled a wisp of smoke back up
her nostril then blew a cloud away. ‘He has a certain je sais exactement quoi. What’s his name?’ Isabella pulled out the slip of paper and handed it over. ‘Hardstaff. Hmm. That has a promising phallic ring to it. What does the B stand for? Barry? Bert? Brian?’
‘Oh, God! Please not!’
‘He’ll be bald and fat before he’s forty,’ said Camilla as he cycled past. ‘That sort always are.’
Isabella put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. ‘Hey, big boy – what’s your name?’
But there was no answer, just another grin. They watched him disappear along the road.
‘Self-satisfied bastard,’ said Camilla, almost to herself.
That evening they were in Camilla’s room finishing off a second bottle of wine because it was Friday, and anyway, there was a limit to how much revision a sane person could do. Smoke rose in a straight line from Camilla’s cigarette. She was lying on the bed with her feet up on the wall examining her legs. Her long blonde hair fanned out over the duvet cover and she looked like a 1940s advert for nylons.
‘I just wish I had nicer boobs, that’s all,’ said Isabella, from in front of the mirror. She scrunched them up in her hands and wondered if an underwired bra might be the answer. ‘I mean, they look so arbitrary. What are they doing there, exactly? If I didn’t have tits I’d look like a boy, wouldn’t I?’ There was some truth in this. She had a straight, slim-hipped figure and broadish shoulders. ‘They don’t work, do they? Be honest.’ Camilla blew a perfect smoke ring.
‘You’ve got good legs, though.’ There was a tiny pause in which Isabella did not say, as she should have done, So have you. Despite their length and slenderness there was just the slightest suggestion of teddy-bear ankle about Camilla’s legs.
‘But I’ve got piggy eyes.’
‘Brian won’t be looking at your eyes,’ said Camilla.
‘He’s not called Brian, for God’s sake.’ Isabella polished a smear off the mirror. ‘He’s Ben, or something. He has to be.’
‘Bruce,’ murmured Camilla. ‘Bernard. Boris. Bertram.’
The Benefits of Passion Page 1
