Clear Light of Day (3 page)

When she reached the parsonage, and made the now almost familiar turn into her short driveway, Esme made a determined effort to muster the resolve necessary for tackling her desk work again as soon as she came in through the door. She began by visiting the kitchen to collect a cup of coffee and a biscuit (two biscuits—she ate the first while the kettle was boiling), which she carried along the passage to her study.

She turned on her computer and created a new file, set up the page margins, and font size and centered a heading:
Sermon Notes for Portland Street, 10:30, September 6th
. She pressed the return key and centered a subheading:
Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
. And she gazed at the empty screen, ate her biscuit, sipped her coffee, gazed at the empty screen, played a game of solitaire, and returned to the file she had begun.

The Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. “Ordinary Time.”

Esme thought about all the things that happen to ordinary people in their lives in ordinary time. A baby being born to a girl of seventeen in a precarious partnership, living on welfare benefit, and housed in a basement flat. A woman of forty-eight opening a doctor's letter telling her the ominous results of her smear test. A teenager who desperately wants to be a veterinarian waiting for the results of his university application. A five-year-old clutching his mother's hand as they walk together through the infant school gates at the start of the autumn term, trying to find the courage for separation. A housewife married twenty-six years, looking across the street at young lovers locked in passionate embrace, wistful for the passing of the years and so much that slips away almost unnoticed. A young man who has tried and tried to find employment, wondering about joining the army. Ordinary time is the place where people are born and die. It is full of hopes and regrets and scored over and over with moments of deep emotion.

And
ordinary
means also that which is ordained; the paths that cross, the eyes that meet, the decisions made, and bargains struck that shape the future. She thought of how as an eight-year-old child, during the school holidays, she had tagged along with her mother going to fulfill her turn on the church-cleaning roster. While Mother rubbed the fragrant lavender wax polish onto the pews with the stiff, waxy putting-on rag and then buffed them vigorously to a beautiful deep shine with a clean duster, Esme wandered about the church, touching the cool stone and squinting through the grating set in the floor, exploring the choir stalls, and eventually, greatly daring, climbing the steps into the pulpit, like a tree house just right for a child. She stroked the faded velvet cloth on the sloping pulpit desk, peered over the edge at the rows of pews below, and wondered what it would be like to be the minister, standing here preaching the Sunday sermon. She wondered if St. Raphaels had done something to reach that child buried under the passing years. An ordinary child in ordinary time, growing into an ordinary woman with all the ordinary griefs and doubts and insecurities. Memories might open a way back to the lost self hidden by her professional persona with its collateral brittleness and weariness. She reflected that
ordinary
means just normal and ordained; that even the casualness of every day is on purpose, meant to be. The net of heaven is wide. Not even the whisper of a thought slips through it. This imposes grave responsibility. Sometimes it brings hope as well.

Esme began to type. She had no formed ideas as yet. She was just copying the words of the Collect for the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time:

O God, you bear your people ever on your heart and mind. Watch over us in your protecting love, that, strengthened by your Spirit, we may not miss your way for us—
and then the phone rang.

On the upper side of the telephone receiver, to catch her attention before she lifted it from its cradle, Esme had attached a sticker on which she had printed in bold letters,
breathe. smile
, and drawn a little flower. Despite this, she felt a small frown of irritation and an involuntary compression of her lips as she grabbed the thing that had scattered her train of thought and said into it, crisply, “Hello. Esme Browne.”

“Um … Marcus Griffiths here.”

Esme recognized already the deceptively absentminded tone of her senior steward of the chapel at Brockhyrst Priory.

“Oh, hello, Marcus.” She tried to sound friendly, and then waited while he paused.

“Look—am I disturbing you? I mean, you aren't yet here, are you. Tell me if I'm intruding.”

Yes, you are, leave me alone,
thought Esme as she replied, “Of course not, it's lovely to hear from you. How can I help?”

“Oh, well—” he hesitated. “I mean really, feel free to say no—but really. Hilda and I thought that you might be relishing the peace, but on the other hand you might be lonely. And if you're not relishing the peace, if you'd like to—I mean, please, just say no—would you like to pop over for supper? This evening—if you'd like to? Not if you'd rather not.”

He sounded so thoroughly apologetic that Esme hadn't the heart to say no. She accepted his invitation, thanked him, and went back to her sermon notes, added a few observations on the lectionary readings and on what it meant to be ordinary. She made a list of appropriate hymns and then shut down her computer and abandoned her study for a hot bath.

And so, for the second time that day, as the evening chill mingled with the amber of late sunshine, she found herself driving out to Wiles Green, where Marcus Griffiths, a retired bookseller, lived with his wife, Hilda.

Their home proved to be a comfortable family house, with pleasing proportions and low ceilings, furnished with unpretentious but lovely antique furniture (fruitwood, rural craftsmanship with an unerring aesthetic eye), armchairs, and a generous sofa occupied by a truculent-looking border terrier who watched her out of one eye. The large open fireplace was filled, in these days still hot at the end of the summer, with an arrangement of dried grasses and seedheads. An assortment of paintings hung on the walls, striking modern oil or acrylic portraits mixing surprisingly successfully with more traditional landscapes and watercolor sketches. The ancient oak floorboards were softened with Eastern rugs whose colors glowed with the richness of silk. Taking all this in, Esme reflected that Marcus must have been a spectacularly good bookseller.

A tall, thin man, with sparse hair combed back from his brow, Marcus greeted her at the door with impeccable courtesy. A vague, indefinable abstraction hung in the air about him like the dust around an old easy chair that has had its cushions too roughly handled. His glasses provided a dual function—they focused the acute observation of his very intelligent gaze; they also served as a form of screen or hide for moments when he preferred to make himself absent. Esme thought he looked both perceptive and kind, which reinforced the impression she had received at their first meeting.

He stood aside to allow her to enter his living room ahead of him. Drawn to the view of the garden through the French windows framed in heavy linen floral curtains at the far end of the room, Esme walked across to look out at the profusion of late-summer flowers in the herbaceous borders, at the stone fountain in the lilied pond, and at the grouped shrubs, stone urns, and statuary that stood here and there, dwarfed by mature and graceful trees.

“Goodness me!” she exclaimed. “Your garden's massive!” adding quickly, “and so beautiful!”

Marcus wandered across the room to stand beside her.

“A little overblown, perhaps, at this time of year. I enjoy it at all times, but I prefer the sculptural qualities of a winter garden. So many flowers can be a little cloying at times. Rather an excess of pink, wouldn't you say? Wine?”

As he traveled across the room to fill with a generous helping of wine one of the heavy crystal glasses on the sideboard, Marcus bellowed, “Hilda!” in the direction of the door, and this was rewarded by a sense of energetic bustling that heralded his wife's arrival.

Stout and well made, a handsome woman conventionally and expensively dressed, wearing no makeup but with immaculately dressed hair, Hilda had bold, dark eyes and a determined chin that gave notice of a forceful character.

“Marcus, how remiss! I had no idea! Welcome, my dear, welcome! Won't you sit down? I didn't hear you come in—are you parked outside? It's not like me to overlook a car drawing up. I'm so glad you could come! Have you been offered—ah, yes, good—let me find a little mat for that glass. You do eat meat, my dear? I was most annoyed with Marcus—‘What if she's
vegetarian?'
I said to him. ‘You must check; you must always check, times have changed, these young idealistic types live on the most extraordinary things, lentils and wild rice,' but he wouldn't call you back to check, he
would not!
Not that we eat so much meat ourselves nowadays, a little savory pâté, a rasher of bacon, the odd chop. When the family was here with us, it was different; of course, it was all different then! My goodness! My brood could divulge a whole bird at one sitting!”

Marcus's eyes flickered momentarily as Esme registered the strangeness of this last remark, but he said merely, “
Do
you eat meat, Esme? If not, I've no doubt we can find something else.”

Esme reassured them that she did eat meat, though like most people, less now than once; and when later they sat down to dine (at an exquisite beech-wood dining suite, the table laid with Georgian silver and damask napkins), the selection of vegetables grown in the garden accompanying tender cuts of locally raised meat with delicious gravy made her glad she had accepted this invitation to supper.

Inevitably, their conversation drifted to matters connected with the chapel, and Esme discovered that in addition to Marcus's responsibility as senior steward, he and Hilda both were key members of the finance and property committee.

“It's been a difficult year for decisions. My dear, your wine is low—Marcus! Esme's wine is low! Driving? Then some tonic water? Marcus! Very difficult. It seems not five minutes since we were raising funds for the replacing of the windows—I won't say ‘replacement windows' because in a conservation area that's hardly what they are; and besides as Marcus says, it's such a quaint idea—I mean they are actually windows; but you know what I mean. But the thing is now that having made good and decorated, the awkward place with the damp has caused the emotion paint to the west corner of the chapel to lift, and I really think—more gravy? More carrots? More potato? Nonetheless, when Marcus comes to present the draft of the accounts—still to be audited of course, still to be audited, but he's rarely out—in the autumn, I think you may satisfy yourself that our heads are still above the parapet.”

Marcus laid down his fork and waved his hand in vague demur. “Water,” he said.

“Water? My dear, you have a full glass—Esme, too. I think sometimes you really should have your eyes checked again—try the other man this time, I'm not convinced Mr. Robinson isn't becoming questionably visionary himself!”

Marcus glanced at his wife with a kind of wondering incredulity.

“Mr. Robinson is a practical man, who could never have been described as visionary, questionably or otherwise. I am adequately supplied with beverages, and at Brockhyrst Chapel we may be considered still to have our heads above water, though, as you say, the year ahead presents its challenges.”

Hilda gazed at him, baffled. “Marcus, whatever are you talking about? You're simply repeating everything I've said and adding nothing to the conversation at all—and why on earth were you asking for water if you know perfectly well you've already got some? Really, you could try the patience of a saint at times—you can see my point, Esme, I'm sure! Heavens! Are we ready to move on to pudding, or is anyone still waiting for secs?”

“Seconds, Esme?” asked Marcus, with utter gravity, but a certain sardonic gleam behind the glasses and under the eyebrows lifted in inquiry. “I'd like you to be clear as to what you were being offered. Potato, maybe? Or meat? No? Pudding then, Hilda, I think.”

Feeling most comfortably replete after an excellent meal, Esme settled herself into the cushions of an armchair as the three of them returned to the sitting room to enjoy their coffee. In their absence, the dog had moved off the sofa and now slumbered peacefully on the hearth rug, snoring slightly.

For a short while, as Hilda set off purposefully to the kitchen to fetch the tray of cups, Marcus and Esme lapsed into silence, and she wondered if she should take some conversational initiative.

“I've been thinking about getting a bike,” she said, searching for something to talk about. “I spend so much time in the car, and the roads are so busy. Can you recommend a good place to go for a bike?”

Marcus considered. “How much of a cyclist are you?” he asked, at length.

“Oh well—I mean, I can manage hills and I don't fall off, but I shan't be going in for races. Just for a bit of exercise really.”

“I see. Then I think Jabez Ferrall might answer your purpose. He sometimes has something to sell, and he's in any case a useful man to know. I never met anyone so resourceful. He's in Wiles Green—not far from here, fifty yards past The Bull as you come into Wiles Green from Brockhyrst Priory. Back of the Old Police House, where Pam Coleman lives, you'll find him. He could certainly advise you and maintain for you, regardless of what he may or may not have in.”