A Blessing In Disguise (5 page)

I had naively thought that after I was ordained my job would be to take the word of God to the people. I would be visiting the sick, comforting the dying, assisting at the Eucharist, explaining the scriptures, possibly even saving a soul or two. I had put from me the thought that once I had my own living I would also be elevated to Chief Fund-raiser, a role for which I am about as fitted as a lame man, blindfolded, is to walking a tight-rope.

I leave the hall and make for the Vicarage – how long before I will call it ‘home'? The day has turned chilly, there is an autumnal nip in the air and the leaves on the sycamores in the churchyard are turning yellow and brown. The first strong wind will scatter them on the ground. The Vicarage is no more than five minutes' walk away, built in Victorian times in the road next to the church. It is large, with lots of rooms and high, artistically moulded ceilings. On the whole this pleases me – I never did like living in a modern semi – but Becky and I, after Wednesday when we will be on our own, will rattle around in it.

I turn my key in the lock and walk in. ‘Hello!' I cry. My mother pops out of the kitchen at the far end of the hall.

‘Hello!' she cries. ‘Dinner won't be long. Are you going to have a sherry?'

My mother is from Yorkshire. When my father retired they moved south so as to be closer to me. A meal in the middle of the day is dinner, and in the evening supper. The word lunch is not in my mother's vocabulary. Sherry is my mother's tipple.

‘No thank you,' I answer. ‘I've started two half glasses of wine. I don't know what happened to either of them in the end. Do you want any help? Where is everybody? Where's Becky?'

‘She's in her room, with the door shut. Ann is packing, Dad's gone down to the newsagent's.' He will be buying the
Sunday Express
.

‘Shall I lay the table?' I ask.

‘It's done,' she says.

‘Then I'll go up and see Becky,' I tell her.

‘I wouldn't if I were you,' my mother counsels. ‘I'd leave her be for the moment.'

I flop down on a kitchen chair and take off my dog collar.

‘How long is this going to last?' I ask.

My mother opens the oven door, takes out the meat dish and proceeds to turn over the potatoes. A comforting smell of roasting beef fills the kitchen.

‘I don't know, love,' she replies as she puts the dish back in the oven, closes the door and turns the heat up high to bake the Yorkshire puddings which she will do, not under the meat, but in loaf tins. They will rise up and call her blessed, they will be golden and crispy on the outside and soft within. They will be served before the main course, smothered in onion gravy. If I were to say grace it would be before eating my mother's Yorkshire puddings.

‘Life's hard for the lass at the moment,' my mother says. She is quite right, but her words catch me on the raw.

‘It's not all that easy for me!' I say briskly.

‘I know that, love,' she says. ‘Don't imagine I didn't think what was in your mind this morning. But it's certainly worse for Becky.'

‘And how do you work that out?' I demand.

‘Easily,' she says. ‘And so can you. It was your choice to come here – oh, I know you didn't choose what went before, but you did choose to come to Thurston. You've got all the excitement of a new job, new challenges – and we all know how you like new challenges. You always have, ever since you were a little girl. Always ready to throw yourself into something new. It used to worry both me and your Dad, though it usually worked out all right in the end. But Becky's not like that. She doesn't have your push and go. She likes things settled. And right now she's the one who's had to give up everything. You've got to bear that in mind.'

‘I know, Ma! I will, and don't think I'm not sorry for her. I want to help – but how?' How terrible that sounds! Me, a priest of God and I don't know how to help my own daughter!

‘You'd do best right now to leave her be,' my mother repeats. ‘When I'm ready to dish up you can go and fetch her. In the meantime, why don't you take a turn round the garden?'

The garden at the back of the house is large, mostly lawn and shrubs, a lot of them evergreens. Not much colour. I shall change that. I enjoy gardening. The lawn is quite well kept and I hope I'm right in seeming to remember that a man, I think the man who looks after the churchyard, cuts the grass at the Vicarage.

At the bottom of the garden, beyond the mown lawn, there is a fence, and beyond that what I suppose it would be polite to call a wild garden, which sounds better than abandoned and neglected, which it is bound to have been since the Vicarage hasn't been lived in for several months. When I came earlier it was full of wild-flowers – buttercups, daisies, dandelions, red sorrel – and looked quite pretty. Now, the flowers being over, abandoned is the right word. In the wall which borders it at the bottom there is a rickety gate, leading to a path which climbs up to the Downs. I would like to explore this right now but very soon the Yorkshire puddings will be ready and one does not keep Yorkshire puddings waiting. On the contrary, my mother will insist that we are seated at the table before she will bring them in. Time, tide and Yorkshire puddings wait for no man.

I walk around a little longer then, impatient, I go back inside the house and, ignoring my mother's advice, climb the stairs to Becky's room. My knock on the door receives no answer, so I open it a crack and say, ‘Lunch is ready, darling!' Brightly, I say it, as though there is a clear blue sky between us. Still no answer. Deflated for the moment, I go downstairs. However, I am fairly confident that Becky will soon follow. She has a healthy appetite and it is unlikely, however black her mood, that it will include starving herself. And indeed it doesn't. With perfect timing she slips into her place five seconds before my mother enters, bearing the puddings aloft as if preceded by a fanfare.

Ann is already seated at the table.

‘You'll excuse me if I leave straight after lunch, won't you?' she says. ‘I brought work home with me and I haven't even touched it.'

Ann is secretary to a professor of mathematics at the University of Clipton, which used to be Clipton Technical College before they all became universities. She is a dear friend as well as my mother-in-law. And of course we have shared in the same bereavement, though to lose a husband and to lose a son are two different things and probably no-one who hasn't gone through either can understand them.

‘I thought everything went well this morning,' Ann says. ‘Philip would have been proud of you!'

There is a poem, ‘Slowly, the dead steal back into our speech' – I'm ashamed that I can't remember the author – but Ann has never hesitated to say Philip's name, usually in a matter-of-fact way. She is braver than I am and she is also right. He is never excluded.

Becky eats a hearty meal, her plate is clean, though she is as mute as a nun under a vow of silence.

‘I thought you and I might explore the path up to the Downs this afternoon,' I suggest.

She gives a single shake of her head, turning me down flat without having to speak to me, and the moment the meal is over she goes back to her room.

When we have cleared away Ann brings her suitcase down and I see her to her car.

‘Bear up!' she says, giving me a hug and a kiss. ‘It can't last.'

I am not so sure.

I join my mother in the kitchen, where she is washing up. This is totally unnecessary since I have a perfectly good dishwasher but she does not trust it to do the job properly. I offer to help her with this self-inflicted chore but she turns me down.

‘In that case,' I say, ‘will you mind if I go for a little walk – or perhaps you'd like to come with me?'

‘I won't if you don't mind,' she says. ‘As you know, I usually put my feet up on a Sunday afternoon. You should do the same. Your Dad's already well away.' Indeed he is; we can hear his rhythmical snores, fortunately muted by the distance between the kitchen and the sitting room.

‘I could do with some exercise,' I tell her. ‘I won't go far, won't be long.' The truth is, I want to be on my own. Since the company of the two people I love most in the world is not available to me I don't want any other.

I walk down to the bottom of the garden, go through the little gate, and take the path up to the Downs. (‘Why do they call them downs when they go up?' Becky once asked me when she was small – another of the many questions to which I couldn't give a satisfactory answer.) When we lived in Clipton the sea, on a clear day, was visible from the top of the Downs. In Thurston we are just that bit too far inland, but nevertheless the view is good. I look down on the village, noting how snugly it's contained in its hollow, the narrow High Street running in a straight line to join the Brampton road at the south end; the church –
my
church – in the centre, the Ewe Lamb and the Queen's Head, the two pubs, at either end. There is almost no sprawl of houses beyond the edge of the village, where it gives way to fields. Thurston, I'm told, has always been an agricultural village and from here I can see that it's still surrounded by farmland, though whether there are as many farms as there once were I don't yet know. There are cornfields, where the grain has been harvested, leaving a golden stubble, and other areas already planted with winter crops. Very little of the ground is level and I doubt if the harvesting will be easy, though being a townie I can't judge these things.

Philip would have liked this. Will I ever settle without him? Should I have come here? But the Bishop was right, I couldn't have stayed where I was.

The afternoon is cool and there are very few people about. A man comes towards me, followed by a Labrador. He gives me a nod as he passes me on the narrow path – the man, not his dog. I don't recall having seen him in the congregation. I walk around for twenty minutes or so, keeping to the main path though there are others which branch off it. I will explore those another time. Also, though what good it will do me I don't know, I want to be back with Becky. I can't bear the thought of her alone in her bedroom. I turn around and retrace my steps – there is no sign of the man or his dog – and twenty minutes later here I am, back at the Vicarage.

Dad is awake, doing the crossword, my mother has made a pot of tea and there is my daughter eating a jammy scone. Her stomach could be my salvation. Thinking of Becky I ask myself yet again, have I done the right thing in coming here?

‘You've just come at the right time!' my mother says, which seems a strange answer to the question I haven't put into words. She pours me a cup of tea. ‘Oh, and there was a telephone call for you. A Doctor Leyton. I've written her number down. She says will you give her a ring. She sounded pleasant. Will she be your doctor?'

‘Yes, she said she'd fit us both in. I'll ring her.'

‘It was just to suggest,' Sonia Leyton says when I do so, ‘that if it suits you it might be a good idea if you were to call tomorrow. We'll be through surgery at about half eleven. I'll introduce you to Nigel.'

‘That will suit me fine,' I tell her. ‘I'm seeing the Headmistress at ten o'clock, with Becky. I'll come along to you afterwards.'

At my mother's beckoning I follow her into the kitchen.

‘I've been having a chat with Becky,' she says. ‘She's all for going back with me and your Dad. I've told her it's not on.'

‘Quite right!' I agree. ‘That's definitely out of the question.'

A little later I go up to Becky's room. The radio is going at top volume and I have to shout over it.

‘I have to go to Evensong now . . .'

‘I won't go!' Becky says.

‘Fine by me. As you know, you don't have to. You never have. All I expect is for you to go to church on Sunday mornings, just as you always have done. It won't be any different.'

‘Oh yes it will!' she flares. ‘Everything will be different! I don't know anyone. I don't want to know anyone! Why do you have to be a Vicar? Who wants to have a Vicar for a mother?'

Monday morning, and since my most important job today is to go with Becky to the school, both of us to meet the Headmistress, I am not wearing my clerical collar. First things first, and this morning I am not so much the Vicar of St Mary's as Becky's Mum so I am dressed accordingly; blue jeans, trainers, and a thick red sweater my mother knitted for me. She is a dab hand at knitting, always has some on the go though usually these days to sell to send money to some good cause. She would feel more fulfilled if she had a clutch of grandchildren to make woolly garments for. Becky is most definitely not into home knits. They are not cool. Her attire today is almost the same as mine except that instead of the sweater she wears a trendy jacket declaring her loyalty to Manchester United. If the rest of the school are Liverpool supporters – and I have no idea about this but I fear the worst – she will be even deeper into what she sees as enemy country. It is not in her nature to change her ideas to suit someone else – not unlike me I suppose, which is why when our goals happen to be different there is no halfway meeting place – so she will be out on a limb again.

St Mary's Church of England Primary School is a ten-minute walk from the Vicarage. It was built in the early part of the twentieth century on land given by the one-time Lord of the Manor, though the present buildings are not more than twenty-five years old, since the first ones more or less fell down. We are due to meet the Headmistress, Mrs Evelyn Sharp, at ten o'clock and I have practically had to take a gun to Becky to get her out of the Vicarage. Heaven knows what it will be like come next Monday, the day she starts in earnest. ‘She'll be all right by then!' my mother says, with what I think is misplaced confidence.

The security at the school is tight. We have to ring the bell and state our business, through a grille, to a disembodied voice. After a longish pause, the door is answered, by which time it would not surprise me if we were submitted to a body search. Sad to think that these precautions are necessary, but I know they are, which is why I refuse to leave Becky alone in the house in order to attend an evening meeting. I expect I shall be the same even when she's older. There is a stream of callers at any Vicarage, many of them difficult, some decidedly strange, and they can be threatening, especially when you won't give them what they want, which is usually not a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea but hard cash. She's a sensible child, not at all fearful, but I wouldn't like her to have to deal with them.