A Passionate Man (11 page)

On Sunday mornings, Colin Jenkins turned the heaters on, on his way back from early communion, so that by the time the Sunday School assembled, they could only just see their breaths before them. It was the only Sunday School in the three villages, and provided a blessed child-free hour on Sunday mornings for parents who could be bothered to deliver and collect. Liza, armed with half a loaf – ‘Shouldn't it be pitta?' Archie had asked unhelpfully – and several small bread baskets, arrived to find a dozen little children sitting at a trestle table colouring in simplistic pictures of the raising of Jairus's daughter. Imogen, who knew the form, ran to battle her way into a place at the table and corner the crayons she wanted, but Mikey hung back and said he thought he'd just watch.

‘But why? Why don't you join in?'

He put his face babishly into Liza's side.

‘I don't want to.'

Lynne Tyler, a valiant and friendly woman whose husband was Richard Prior's cowman, came out of one of the lavatories holding by the hand a shrew-faced child clutching a blue plastic handbag.

‘We do this all morning,' Lynne said to Liza. ‘In and out. She won't go alone and she won't do anything when I take her.'

‘Can't you ignore her?'

‘Last time I did, we had a disaster. Now come on, Kirsty. You sit down and do your drawing.'

‘Wanna wee—'

‘No, you don't,' Liza said, lifting her firmly on to the bench next to Imogen. Imogen clamped a hand on the nearest pile of crayons.

‘Mine,' Imogen said.

Kirsty began to cry.

Liza said, ‘Let's just start. Mikey, let go. Do you usually start with a prayer?'

‘Oh no,' Lynne said, almost shocked at such a pedestrian idea. ‘We have a little song. Don't we? Imogen, you tell Mummy what we sing.'

Imogen fixed Liza with an implacable stare.

‘“Jethuth,”' said Imogen clearly, ‘“wanth me for a thunbeam.”'

‘There now,' Lynne said, and went to the piano.

All the children climbed off the benches and clustered round her, all except Kirsty, who sat where she was and watched a trickle of pee run from under her skirt on to the floor. Sighing, Liza went to the kitchen for a bucket and a cloth.

‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,' the children sang unevenly. ‘Jesus wants me for a star. I am Jesus's little rainbow. Shining, shining from afar.'

They subsided raggedly on to the Women's Institute carpet.

‘Hands together, eyes closed,' Lynne said, swivelling on the piano.

‘We pray for our homes and our families. Sit still, Adam. And for our mummies and our daddies and our brothers and our sisters—'

‘And our dog.'

‘And our dog, Stephen. We thank you for the lovely countryside. And our food and drink. And all our friends. And we ask you to look after everyone we know who isn't well. And now,' said Lynne, ‘Imogen and Mikey's mother is going to tell you the story.'

‘Wanna wee,' Kirsty said loudly.

Lynne got up patiently, but Liza seized Kirsty and dumped her on the bucket she had brought from the kitchen.

‘You can sit there and pee to your heart's content.'

Kirsty hit Liza with her handbag. Lynne looked deeply shocked at the whole episode.

‘Is she a Vinney?'

‘Yes,' Lynne said.

‘That explains it then,' Liza said heartlessly. ‘Don't worry. I'll face any music there is. Don't move,' she said to Kirsty. ‘Until I say.'

Kirsty subsided slowly down into the bucket until she was doubled up. Then she began to howl. At this moment, the door at the end of the hall opened and Blaise O'Hanlon came in. Everybody stared, particularly Liza.

‘Hello,' Blaise said. ‘Hello, kiddiwinks. Hello, Liza.' He held a hand out to Lynne. ‘Hello.'

‘What are you doing here?'

‘I came with a message from June,' Blaise said. ‘About Tuesday. Dan has ploughed up the telephone cable with the rotavator so she couldn't ring. I went to your house and your nice doctor husband said you were here with loaves and fishes. Why is that child in a bucket?'

‘It's the best place for her,' Liza said.

Blaise went over and pulled Kirsty upright.

‘You are very unattractive,' he said to her with enormous charm. ‘And you smell like a fishing smack. But I don't see why you should be condemned to a bucket.'

Kirsty gazed up at him with rapture.

‘This is Mr O'Hanlon,' Liza said to Lynne. ‘He teaches at Bradley Hall School.'

Lynne smiled at him, partly out of natural friendliness and partly because he had been kind to Kirsty.

‘What message?' Liza said.

Blaise was wandering about among the children.

‘I'll tell you afterwards. Mayn't I stay and help? I say, are you Mikey? I remember you from a football match. You run like the wind.'

Mikey blushed and nodded vigorously.

‘We'd be only too pleased if you'd stay, Mr O'Hanlon,' Lynne said. ‘Now, hands up who's going to be Jesus.'

‘I'll be Jesus,' Blaise said. ‘And then I can get this lot organized. Now, come on. I'll have you, and you, and you over there in green trousers, as disciples, and the poor bucket child can be the boy who brought the fishes. And the rest of you can be the multitude. Who can tell me what a multitude is?'

‘I'm so sorry,' Liza said to Lynne, ‘I really am. He's being impossible.'

‘Oh no. No, he isn't. You can see he's a born teacher. I think it's lovely he wants to help.'

Liza went over to a grey plastic chair and sat down, half indignant, half enchanted. In a matter of moments, Blaise had the multitude seated on the carpet – ‘Now don't go near the edge because it is the sea and you will drown' – and was standing before them with his arms outspread and the disciples jostling each other to be the ones completely next to him.

‘It had been a long, hot day,' Blaise said, half an eye on Liza. ‘And you lot in the crowd had been wandering about after Jesus all day without a
thing
to eat or a
drop
to drink—'

Lynne tiptoed round to sit next to Liza.

‘He has a real gift, hasn't he?' she whispered. ‘And he's ever so young.'

‘He's ever so naughty,' Liza said with emphasis.

‘Sweet face—'

‘And then one of the disciples – it'd better be you, Green Trousers – said, “Master, there's a boy here with two loaves and five fishes.” Or was it five loaves and two fishes? Can't remember. Doesn't matter. And then you, little Miss Bucket, come up – come on, come here – and show me and all the others what you have got in your basket.'

Kirsty held up her basket so high that nobody could see.

‘Can't see, can't see,' complained the multitude.

‘If you are tiresome, Miss Bucket,' Blaise said, ‘I shall deprive you of your starring role and dump you back in the chorus.'

Kirsty knelt on the carpet and put her basket on the floor and the multitude crowded round and pawed it and spilled the loaves and the fishes.

‘Pick it all up,' Blaise said. ‘Or I shall go away and leave you unprotected from frightening Mrs Logan.'

‘Poor little Kirsty,' Lynne said. ‘It's lovely to see someone take notice of her.'

‘And of course all the disciples said there won't be anything like enough for five thousand people and Jesus said just you
wait
. Now, Green Trousers, you take a basket, and Mikey another, and little Ginger Specs, you have this one, and take them round the multitude – and do you know, there was heaps and heaps, the baskets were always full and everyone ate so much they had to lie on the ground groaning like you do at Christmas. Oh dear, Miss Bucket, what are you snivelling about now?'

Kirsty held out a diamond-shaped slice of brown bread.

‘I don't like fish—'

‘Brilliant!' Blaise said. He spun round on Liza. ‘Hear that? Amazing. Oh, the power that is mine—'

Liza got up.

‘Which I'm now going to take away. Go and sit down and let Lynne and me finish in peace—'

‘I'm sure you're very welcome,' Lynne said loudly, rising too and determined to show Blaise some Christian courtesy. ‘Very welcome to stay, indeed. Isn't he?' she said to the children who all chorused enthusiastically in agreement. ‘Shall we teach him our butterfly song? Come along, Imogen. You show Mr O'Hanlon the movements we do.'

She went over to the piano and struck a chord.

‘If I were a butterfly, I'd thank you, Lord, for giving me wings. And if I were a robin in a tree, I'd thank you, Lord, that I could sing—'

Waving his wings and opening and shutting his beak, Blaise O'Hanlon smiled in triumph at Liza over Imogen's energetic head.

‘Well,' Liza said later, in the lane, ‘what was the message?'

‘What message?'

‘The message you came with so urgently from June who cannot telephone because Dan has inadvertently ploughed up the cable.'

‘There isn't one. And actually, the telephone cable at Bradley Hall is overhead and a very unsightly thing it is too.'

Liza stopped walking.

‘Then what is this pantomime all about?'

‘I wanted to see you. I couldn't wait until Tuesday. I had to see you. I had to see where you lived.'

‘We live at Beeches House,' Mikey said helpfully.

‘I know that now,' Blaise said. ‘But I didn't before and I longed to. So I came.'

Grasping Imogen's hand tightly, Liza began to walk very fast up the lane. Blaise and Mikey ran to keep up with her.

‘I can't think about anything else,' Blaise hissed.

Imogen began to grizzle and drag backwards.

‘Imo, come on. Blaise, I can't have this kind of conversation here. I can't have this kind of conversation anyway, I mean. Imogen, I shall spank you.'

Imogen wrested her hand free and flumped down on the road. Blaise dropped back and picked her up.

‘I won't embarrass you,' he said, hurrying after Liza with his burden. ‘I won't hang around. I just had to have a sight of you, that's all. Couldn't you just say one nice thing to me to keep me going until Tuesday?'

Liza said nothing.

‘It does seem a bit hard,' Blaise said, panting slightly. ‘You could spare me a crumb, really you could.'

Liza said, ‘You're making a fool of me—'

‘No,' Blaise said. ‘No.'

He stopped and set Imogen abruptly on her feet.

‘Look at me.'

Liza halted and slowly turned to face him six feet away.

‘You're not just lovely,' Blaise said almost diffidently, ‘but you're different. You're special. And the thing that turns my heart over is that you don't realize that you are.' He put a hand on Imogen's head. ‘If you only knew the power that is yours.'

Liza gazed.

After a moment, Blaise sighed and took his hand away from Imogen and said to Mikey, ‘I ought to go, you know. Would you like to look at my car before I do? It's a Morgan and although I terribly disapprove of showing off, I must tell you that it has wire wheels.'

Chapter Six

Stratton Farm lay a few hundred yards up the lane from Beeches House. The farmhouse was an amiable building on to whose Tudor and Jacobean ramblings a prosperous eighteenth-century owner had slapped a graceful Georgian façade. It was constructed of comfortable pinkish brick under a mellowed tiled roof, and, at a respectful distance from it, across a space of admirably kept garden, lay the farmyard and the stables. The whole looked thriving and unpretentious, a working farm whose owner's chief interests lay in horses and herbaceous borders. Even the pig unit – highly successful and the reason for the briskly authoritative columns that Richard Prior contributed to country magazines – was hidden behind a line of stalwart Victorian barns, and veiled in Virginia creeper.

The Priors had lived at Stratton Farm all their married life. The house and four hundred acres had been a joint wedding present from Richard's father and uncle, whose sole descendant he was. Twenty-five years later, the acreage had grown to over seven hundred, and pigs had brought Richard prosperity. Susan Prior had borne him two laconic sons and was an admired horsewoman and trainer of gun dogs. Richard, a lean, lounging man, was renowned for his lack of sentiment. ‘If it doesn't work,' he would say candidly at parochial church council meetings, of motions whose inspiration owed more to emotion than pragmatism, ‘then scrap it.'

The Priors' social moral code was essentially Whiggish. Their farm workers lived in sound cottages and were expected to return good labour for fair treatment. The Priors could always be relied upon in a crisis and equally to be very plainspoken about any kind of dishonesty or slacking. This paternalistic attitude spread to their view of the village. ‘I don't mind a few city ponces like you,' Richard often said to Simon Jago, who was a senior merchant banker. ‘But only a few. Villages are for villagers.'

‘Mr Prior,' Mrs Betts of the post office would confide to her planning officer friend on Saturday nights, ‘lacks what I call common courtesy. He may have been born a gentleman but I'm afraid you'd often never know it. Quite frankly, I wouldn't address a dog in the way Mr Prior sometimes speaks to the Vicar.'

‘Frightful woman,' Richard Prior said of Mrs Betts. ‘And as for Jenkins, you could wring him out. No wonder the Church of England is going to the dogs, full of lefty wimps like him.'

When he submitted his planning application for developing the field below Beeches House, Richard Prior knew exactly what his motives were. Half of them were businesslike – the best economic use for an awkward field that had never proved successful for grazing or planting – and the other half were social. Watching the Stoke villages fill up with weekenders and commuters to Southampton and retired people had disturbed him greatly. The miscellaneous cottages, which had once sat realistically and appealingly in gardens where cabbages, dahlias, washing, hens and motorbike spares jostled for space among the nettles, were increasingly being bijoued up into Hansel and Gretel dwellings, gleaming with new paint and fresh thatch and sprouting incongruous carriage lamps and fanciful name-plates. The gardens, fenced, hedged, trimmed up and squared off, were disciplined into anonymity, the flowerbeds dug so assiduously as to resemble chocolate-cake crumbs.