Is There Anything You Want? (17 page)

Dot knew that Ida would go straight home and start ringing other parishioners to boast about having met the new vicar. Once Ida had given her description to the other women they would want to check it out, distrusting her judgement as they were bound to. They would ring Dot. Well, what would she tell them? She thought she had better practise. She would say he seemed nice. Would that do? No, it would not. She tried to think what she would actually be asked: was he good-looking? Well, he had a nice face and a nice smile. She would say that. But was he tall, was he fat or thin, did he have blue eyes or brown, what colour was his hair? Dot stopped walking. Ida would have had all the answers. She tried hard to remember: no, he wasn't very tall, he was definitely thin, but she had no idea what colour his eyes
were or his hair, except that it was vaguely dark and plentiful. Another certain question would be: was he posh? No. Yes. Was he? She strained to recall his accent: faintly southern, but where? He was pale, she'd noticed that, quite strikingly pale. But then he'd been ill so, of course, he would be pale.

Dot was still standing there, a mere few yards along the road from the vicarage gates, when Mrs Hibbert saw her and pulled up, giving a light toot of her car horn. ‘Dot!' she called. ‘Can I give you a lift?' Dot looked startled, and then gathered herself together and trotted eagerly to the car. As she drove along with Mrs Hibbert, glad they were friends again, she related what had happened and tried her best to describe the new vicar. Mary wasn't interested in how he looked or in his age or accent, which was a mercy, but more in his previous experience and his education. Dot knew nothing about either, nor had she sounded him out on his views regarding women priests or the marrying of divorcees in church. Mary had strong opinions on these matters. She wasn't on the parochial church council, but she seemed to know a great deal about what had gone on at the meeting when the Rev. Maddox had been accepted. According to Mary, the bishop had more or less instructed the council to take him, and they hadn't liked this one bit. The other information she had mysteriously collected was that Maddox was an Oxford man and very clever. Dot wondered why, in that case, he had ended up coming to St James's, but she said nothing.

*

Cecil Maddox, prowling round his new home, was wondering much the same thing. Those two women had depressed him. He had known the moment the little one opened the door and stared at him with what looked like awe that he was not the sort of vicar she needed and wanted. He couldn't stand the thought of being depended upon. Trying to cope with the effusiveness of the fat one was worse. He was no good at being jolly and hearty, he couldn't respond to matiness. These were people with expectations he'd never be able to satisfy and he'd tried to explain this to the bishop when this parish had been
suggested, but his objections had been brushed aside, and he'd been told that after his illness the simple, good folk of St James's would be balm to his soul. He would be able, he was assured, to repair his damaged nerves once removed from the large inner-city parish where he had come to such grief in spite of his splendid efforts (it was the bishop who referred to them as ‘splendid efforts'). But the bishop had missed the point. It was ‘simple, good folk' who terrified him. He couldn't deal with either their simplicity or their goodness – both made him feel exposed and inadequate. If he had to work with people – well, of course he had to – he was best working with people like himself, neurotics, tortured minds, uneasy people. He liked to lose himself in big cities, too, and dreaded small towns or country villages. The bishop had said that he would be ready for the greater challenge of a city again when he had spent some soothing years at St James's.

Standing, looking out of the window of his dismal bedroom, Cecil felt the greater challenge had arrived already. He'd felt such dismay from the moment he had seen the valley at the end of which this town lay, long before he had reached the parish. It was impossible to account for the way the sight of those forested hills and that shining river had made him want to weep and run away. The peace of the scene, its beauty, made him want to scream. Who could he expect to understand that? It was insane to want traffic thundering along filthy roads, and blackened buildings, and ugly tower blocks and litter blowing everywhere, and exhausted people rushing around ignoring each other, but he did. He wanted to be lost in that sort of chaos, and yet it had brought him to what the bishop called grief. He opened the window wider and took several deep breaths – he had only met two women, only seen the inside of this house, and yet was basing a whole set of prejudices upon these brief encounters. He knew he should not have bundled the women out so quickly. Not a good start.

He decided to close the bedroom windows before he left the room. The scent of the honeysuckle made him feel sick. He wandered about the rest of the house slowly realising that it faced north and that at the back, where the sun shone so brightly,
there were only two small windows. The larger windows looked north or east. Someone had built the house expressly to shut out the sun. It felt cold even now, on a hot day. He could see no radiators, which meant there was no central heating: just as well, because he couldn't afford to use it. He poked about and located two storage heaters and an electric fire of ancient design, and noticed two of the fireplaces had coal in the buckets beside them. One of these fireplaces was in a small room off the hall, which he took to be a study. It had a desk in it, a rather ugly, dark wood thing, squat, and with the wood badly scratched and the handles missing from three of the drawers. There was a leather armchair in the corner with an antimacassar over its back and an embroidered cushion perched against it. He would live here, he decided. He would shut the sitting-room up. The kitchen he would have to use, though its size and chilliness were daunting, but he would never eat there. He would bring his food into this study on a tray. For a moment, he thought of dragging a mattress down here so that he could sleep in this study as well, but dismissed the idea as too ridiculous. Hiding in a little room was not going to help.

He couldn't think what
was
going to. This was a family house and he had no wife or children to humanise it. The silence made him shudder. It felt dangerous, as though it might suffocate him if he didn't do something about it. He hated the sound of his footsteps echoing as he walked around and every time he closed a door he winced at the absurdly loud noise. He hadn't unpacked a thing, or attempted to settle in, but he had to get out. Once he'd opened the front door, which creaked horribly, he felt a bit better. The thing to do was to stay out of the house as much as possible. The key safely in his pocket, he decided it was time to acquaint himself with the church. He'd passed it driving here. The bishop had told him it was a late nineteenth-century building, of no architectural merit but with a fine east window donated by a local merchant of the time. It had no spire or tower, and the limestone was from local mines. He walked to it along the tree-lined road, a mere three-minute walk, and entered by a side gate. The graveyard surrounding the church was in excellent condition, the grass neatly cut and flowers in urns in front
of many of the gravestones. He stopped and read some of these, noticing that Nicholson was a local name, from the frequency with which it occurred, and that gilt lettering on black marble appeared to be the preferred form of memorial. The church had a porch, not quite in proportion to the building itself, and the door was open. There were notices inside, pinned on boards to either side, but he didn't stop to read them – he knew what they would say and he didn't want to dwell on the inevitable bring-and-buy sales and fetes and teas. Inside the church at last, he paused. The east window, as promised, was indeed fine and commanded attention at once. He studied it carefully, imagining the morning sun turning the yellow of the angels' hair into a blaze of glorious light. Slowly, he advanced down the nave along the rush matting, touching the pews as he went. They were made of oak, he thought, and seemed light in the general darkness of the church. Reaching the altar, he knelt and prayed to find the strength to do good work here. This was what he wanted. This was what made him happy: a silent church, a stone floor beneath his knees, light coming towards him over an angel's wings. Here, praying, he was sure of his faith and of himself. Even the smell, musty, slightly acrid, pleased him. He breathed in deeply and bent lower, almost prostrating himself, the palms of his hands flattened on the cold stone. ‘O Lord,' he began, saying the words out loud, in a whisper, ‘O Lord, help me be worthy of thee . . .'

Even before he had finished his prayer, he heard someone enter the church behind him. They came in as quietly as he had done himself – he heard the light footsteps and then a pause. Bracing himself to encounter whoever it was, he stood up and turned round. A woman was standing stock-still in the middle of the nave, her hand at her throat and a look of utter astonishment on her face. He smiled and began to walk towards her, his arm outstretched to greet her, but in one swift movement she turned and walked quickly away. He couldn't shout to her, not in the church. He hurried after her, but was thinking, as he tried to catch up, that since she obviously hadn't wanted to meet him he ought surely to let her go. She had, in any case, vanished – by the time he came out of the porch all he could see was a flash of her skirt as she went through the gate, a good 50 yards away.
He stood still, wondering if she hadn't realised that he was the new vicar, but she could not have missed his collar even if his jacket and trousers gave nothing away. Somebody who wanted to be alone in the church, then, as he did. Alone on a sunny weekday afternoon. And he had spoiled her intended reverie, her need, perhaps, to pray. Another fine beginning.

He dreaded the thought of returning to the vicarage, so instead he sat on one of the benches placed round the graveyard. It was quiet, but not oppressively so. There was quite a bit of traffic running along the road into the town centre and he could hear a pneumatic drill working somewhere nearby, and lawn-mowers nearer still. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small notebook and a pencil, thinking he should jot down ideas for his first sermon here. It would, he decided, have to take the form of a confession – he would talk about his illness openly, about how his terror of people had grown until he could barely speak to anyone at all, and throw himself on the mercy of the congregation, asking them to help him overcome his inadequacies. It was a risk, of course. He might embarrass these people, or worse still, horrify them. They would want their vicar to be strong and confident, friendly and ready to help them, and not a man in need of help himself. There might be complaints lodged against him with the bishop. He stared at the blank page in his notebook, sighed, and put it back in his pocket. He felt the letter there, the only one that had been waiting for him at the vicarage. It was from St Mary's Hospital, asking if he would fulfil the same duties as the Rev. Barnes had done as a relief hospital chaplain and inviting him to a meeting of the Friends of the hospital. He supposed he ought to accept, though the last thing he ever wanted to have to do again was go into a hospital.

Eventually, after an hour of wandering around, he returned to the vicarage. He'd put it off as long as possible, pretending that he needed to familiarise himself with the locality so that he could set his new home in context. The context was much as he had surmised on his arrival. St James's was on the edge of a small market town stuck at the end of a valley cut off from the coastal plain by what seemed to him formidably huge hills. The town itself had little bustle about it – the general cleanliness and
orderliness were to him astonishing. There were no supermarkets or chain stores, just a succession of small shops selling mostly food. He noticed people standing talking to each other in the streets, with nobody hurrying, and greetings were called out across them. He walked down the tree-lined main street and round the square at the end, noting the ugly war memorial at its centre, and then back again to the unnerving emptiness of the roads around the church. There seemed to be no one at all about – a few cats prowling along the hedges, and that was all. The roads were clean, the gardens tidy. He'd made a square round the vicarage and by the time he turned into the right road again he was dismally aware that he'd landed in small-town suburbia. The vicarage now looked totally out of place among the semi-detached houses, gross in size compared to them and its gaunt stone exterior, incongruous next to their whitewashed, rendered-concrete fronts. Trudging up the short, gravelled drive, he wondered if he could find somewhere else to live. Couldn't the vicarage be let out, for a rent that would go into the church coffers and be useful? He only needed a bed-sitting-room. But this was not the sort of place that had such rooms to let, and in any case the vicar would be required to have the status an imposing vicarage conferred.

There was someone sitting on his doorstep. A man, middle-aged, or older, strong-looking, dressed in a tweed jacket and old-fashioned flannels. He got up as Cecil approached, and straightened his jacket, pulling it down firmly and buttoning the middle button, and cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to disturb you, vicar,' he said, ‘on your first day, and that, but could I have a word?' There was nothing Cecil could do but say yes, of course, but he felt flustered and dropped the front door key twice before inserting it in the lock, and then he had to fiddle with it before the wretched door would open. ‘Needs a spot of oil,' his visitor said. Cecil agreed. He stood in the bleak hall, wondering where to take this man, and decided it had to be the sitting-room, after all, a room he'd merely glanced into before shutting the door. He led the way fearfully, dreading the discomfort of not knowing where to sit, or whether to sit at all. There was a gigantic three-piece suite in the room, hideously covered in a drab, dark maroon
material, and two chairs facing the sofa with a small, glass-topped table between them. He gestured to one of the chairs. The man sat on the very edge, feet planted apart on the worn, brown carpet. Cecil sat opposite, the table between them like a barrier. ‘How can I help you?' he said. ‘As you see, I haven't settled in yet.' The man nodded. ‘I'm Ida's husband,' he said, and waited. Cecil raised his eyebrows enquiringly. ‘The lady who was cleaning when you arrived, the bigger of the two.' ‘Oh, of course,' Cecil said, relieved. ‘Very kind of her, of them, very kind.' The man smiled. He looked a nice man. Straightforward, decent, friendly. Cecil relaxed a little. Maybe this would not be too difficult. ‘It's about Ida I've come,' said the man. ‘I thought I'd come straight away, in case.' He paused, as though waiting for encouragement, but Cecil warned himself not to try to give it – it was one of the things he'd learned (if little else), always to wait. ‘She might bother you,' the man said. ‘She gets pretty desperate, and then she comes running, and you just have to be patient, not that I'm trying to teach you your job. The name's Martin, by the way. Martin Yates, pleased to meet you, I should have said it first, my name, I mean.'