Past Praying For (5 page)

She
could put a name to a good number of them by now; others she recognized, a few she did not know at all. Visitors, perhaps, or what they called Occasional Christians, though whether because they appeared on occasions like this, or because these appearances were so infrequent, she was never quite sure.

And
here was Piers McEvoy now, in camel coat and rollneck cashmere sweater. He was a short, flabby man with fair colouring and glassy, protuberant eyes, like a fat pale frog in a blond wig, Margaret thought. He had freckled hands, too, one of them now clutching at the shoulder of the scarlet military-style coat worn by a willowy brunette rather taller than he was. She wasn’t Mrs McEvoy – was she the young doctor’s wife, perhaps? – and if Froggy had wooing on his mind it was clear from the expression of his victim that he was out of luck.

She
had taken some time to sort out the women in the group that revolved around the McEvoys – they seemed to be of similar age, and tended to cluster at church or social functions – but she had it more or less straight now.

That
was Elizabeth McEvoy coming out, her face pale and tired-looking under a Black Watch tartan silk Alice band. She liked what she had seen of her, and perhaps presumptuously felt rather sorry for her, since however lavishly interlined her Colefax and Fowler curtains might be it could hardly make up for having to live with Piers. She was always beautifully dressed; tonight she was wearing a coat which looked as if it cost more than most women’s clothes’ allowance for a year, but she wore it as if, like a doll, she had been dressed in it by someone else.

Suzanne
Bolton, just behind, was the nurse, and looked it, with her crisp light brown hair always immaculately styled. She was the one who would give a hand with anything practical in the church, if you didn’t mind your other volunteers dropping out one by one because she couldn’t help trying to organize everyone else as if they were in an operating theatre. She was married to a businessman – what was his name again? Patrick, that was it. Had a business in the town nearby supplying some sort of engineering parts, which was going well now after a bad patch. He was coming out with his arm round the shoulders of Ben, their son. They were very alike, those two, with their dark red hair and brown eyes. The likeness was accentuated by the air they both had of expecting that someone would bark, ‘Get that sterilized’ at any moment.

Then
there was Hayley Cutler. She was the easy one to remember, leggy with wavy blonde hair worn long and that thick-as-clotted-cream American accent, which always seemed just a little exaggerated. She was chatting now to a man Margaret didn’t recognize, but as usual was making great play with her long thick eyelashes, and laughing her warm, throaty laugh. Mr Cutler had apparently fled the scene some time before, but Hayley certainly wasn’t the type to let that dent her social life.
Au
contraire
, if Minnie Groak – an amateur at cleaning Margaret’s house but a rigorously professional gossip – was to be believed.

The
fourth of the group – which was undoubtedly
the
group to be in with in Stretton Noble – was Laura Ferrars, wife of James, a lawyer who was one of the churchwardens. She was a deputy headmistress, with a manner which seemed cool but which might stem from being shy. Margaret hadn’t noticed them tonight; perhaps they were away.

‘
Ah, vicar,’ said McEvoy, with the sort of heavy facetiousness that made Margaret’s hackles rise. ‘Well done! That will have set me up nicely for another year’s sinning.’

I feel sure you don
’t need any encouragement.
The tart rejoinder sprang to her tongue, but she was practised now in the control of that unruly member, and smiled noncommittally as he laughed in appreciation of his own joke. The gust of his breath was stale and whisky-laden.

A
group of teenagers, giggling and jostling, passed on the far side without meeting her eye, though she was regarding them benevolently. There had been stifled whispers and muffled snorts of laughter from that quarter of the church, but their intoxication was mainly with the wine of youth, and if they had been to a party, at least they had broken off to come to church.

She
recognized one of them – Andy Cutler, a shamelessly good-looking sixteen-year-old with a black pony tail, black leather jacket and silver earring. Her eyes lingered on him fondly; just the type of young rebel she liked. The church was badly in need of a youth club, and it would take someone like this lad to give it any sort of street cred. She bet herself a half-bottle of her favourite Chablis, to be collected after its inaugural meeting, that she could pull him in as a founder member. He was definitely the brightest thing she had laid eyes on in her six weeks’ tenure.

The
last of them were straggling out now; a mother clasping a child, sprawled in sleepy abandon across her shoulder, elderly Mrs Travers, immaculate in her Jaeger coat and Gucci scarf, but clinging to her husband’s arm and walking painfully with a stick. They were the old guard, living in the original village manor house in its own park. He tended to see himself still in the position of squire even if nobody else did, but they performed what they saw as their duties with an old-fashioned courtesy which was hard to resent. Nobody had the heart to tell them that the commuters who had now gentrified the cottages the Travers family had once owned didn’t really consider themselves peasants any more. Now they paid the compliments of the season with appropriate cordiality, as Penny Jackson, the organist, shot past, her hair as usual in mad disorder, calling over her shoulder, ‘Left the pudding on! Merry Christmas!’

Margaret
went back into the church where Ted Brancombe, one of the churchwardens, was waiting to count the collection with her. He bent to kiss her cheek, a big solid farmer with grizzled fair hair and hands as hard as horn from years of toil and weather. He had checked the heating already, he told her, so it was all in order for tomorrow morning’s services.

His
wife Jean, a thin, anxious, small-boned woman who was blowing out night-lights and collecting the jam jars on to a tray with the practised efficiency of one who had performed the task many times before, pattered over with her Christmas greetings, and Margaret embraced her too with genuine warmth. She was aware of the dangers of having favourites among your parishioners, but there were, thank God (and that was not a phrase she used lightly), people you simply couldn’t help liking.

With
the collection safely counted and stowed away, and the service-books neatened for Christmas Day, they left Margaret to lock up.

She
went into the vestry to disrobe and came out again, buttoning her practical tweed coat up to her throat. She bobbed to the altar, snapped off the lights, and stood for a moment in the hushed holy darkness of the church. Her church.

The
light source was outside now, and she could see faintly the deep reds and blues of the ancient glass in the windows. It was all very beautiful and very peaceful.

Right
now, in St John’s Marketgate, they would be serving hot coffee and mincepies to people who, for one or another sad reason, had nowhere else to be. There would be people drunken and maudlin, or stoned and impervious, or weeping over past or present failures. Her successor, a decent young man, would be summoning up the last remains of his energy to cope with six simultaneous demands despite sinking fatigue, both mental and physical.

And
here she was, bursting with energy and nothing to do with it except go home and give her cat, the irresponsibly-named Pyewacket, a saucer of Christmas cream and perhaps a sliver of the smoked salmon she was allowing herself for Christmas lunch.

She
had sent presents for her old friends, the familiar dossers and winos who frequented the churchyard, and money for their Christmas feast, but would any of them at St John’s, she wondered, have time to spare her so much as a thought? She doubted it.

But
that was a self-indulgent, mawkish sort of reflection, and finishing the communion wine was hardly enough to give her an alcoholic excuse for such a pathetic and self-pitying attitude. But could this really be her destiny – the plan she was so sure God had in mind for her – or was she merely suffering the result of a Bishop’s whim? Though that, of course, was religion’s catch-all; God could use as an instrument the Bishop’s prejudices just as easily, and certainly more commonly, than Cecil B. de Mille-style thunderbolts.

It
was an odd sort of challenge, this parish of hers. She had followed an elderly priest, wise and much-loved, who had looked after his flock without ever feeling that their heels needed nipping. Margaret couldn’t quite see it that way.

If
only Stretton Noble weren’t so neat, so self-sufficient, so perfectly organized in its discreet worship of Mammon, with God kept tidily in this pretty stone box and propitiated with offerings (meagre enough, she thought wryly) to His Fabric Fund and His Organ Appeal.

She
had begun to stir things up already, with a sermon at the regular Sunday morning service today about the dual nature of Christ as God and man, which led naturally enough to contemplation of our own dual selves; the temptation to show a surface which was smooth and pretty, and totally at odds with the darker needs and failures and shame of our fallen state, which we denied at our peril.

It
was a departure from the usual ‘wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice’ sermon they tended to expect, and she had sensed the frisson every preacher recognizes when the message somewhere has struck home. At least she hadn’t had a single hearty, ‘Splendid sermon, vicar!’ on the way out, which had to be progress.

The
trouble was, she didn’t really know where to go from there. It reminded her forcibly of one of those very tasteful, highly-expensive educational puzzles in hand-crafted wood which children loathe and parents will insist on buying for them instead of Sonic the Hedgehog and Barbie and Power Rangers. Everything in Stretton Noble fitted together with just such smooth, forbidding intricacy, with no awkward protuberances and no disfiguring gaps.

She
sighed, looking down the length of the nave towards the altar. Oh Lord, she prayed silently, help me to be a catalyst for change. Help me to break apart this deathly smugness, and open up their hearts to real emotions once more.

She
did not recall a favourite saying of her mother’s, whose constant complaint it had been that her children never listened to a word she said. ‘Be very, very careful what you ask for,’ she had cautioned, ‘because you just might get it.’

But
Margaret’s round, cheerful face was sombre as she locked the huge oak door and set off with uncharacteristically leaden steps towards the two-bedroomed box in a recent housing-development which was the new vicarage, still thinking about the neat, smooth, impenetrable artefact.

She
did not, unfortunately, follow her own image through to its logical conclusion. Hand-crafted puzzles, once they are taken apart, are not readily reassembled. Without great patience, determination and skill, they are doomed to lie for ever in pieces at the bottom of the toy box. And already, though she had failed to notice it, the sections were beginning to slide apart.

2

‘Come on, come on! The night is young, and there’s still a few inches of whisky left in the decanter,’ Piers McEvoy was urging the group gathered outside the lych gate, which included those who had dined with him at the Lodge, now saying their thank yous and goodnights.

Patrick
Bolton, at the edge of the group, took deep breaths of the cooler air. He had drunk a little too much – somehow you always did at the McEvoys’ – and he was in the mood of philosophical disengagement which that state so often induces. He lit up a cigarette and drew on it, exhaling smoke which hung about his head in the dampness.

Throwing
him a look of contempt, Suzanne went past to join the others and was soon laughing and talking animatedly. He found himself looking at her with the eyes of a stranger; in his current detached state, he felt only an intellectual regret that this was so, and that the marriage which had seemed so solid before he became a failure in his wife’s eyes had become such a cold, uneasy relationship.

Yet
nostalgia was part of the Christmas package, wasn’t it, with all those corny carols and ‘There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus’ and all that stuff. It set him thinking back to their better times, their army days. They had both been so well-suited to army life, that was the thing. As the eldest in a family of six, he had been used to responsibility, and the protection duties of the modern military had suited him admirably. It had given him a deep satisfaction to think that, thanks to him, an aid convoy had got through or an IRA attack on civilians been thwarted.

Suzanne
had been the perfect soldier’s wife, following the drum cheerfully, and constantly resourceful and uncomplaining. It had never occurred to either of them that he would not be offered a further commission and promotion.

It
had been painful to adjust to life without the ceremonial and the comradeship, and even Queen’s Regulations, God bless ‘em, and he had taken a long time to find his feet in the engineering parts business, because his heart was not in it. It had been a great relief to find that Suzanne could immediately pick up a good nursing job in one of the London teaching hospitals, and even become the major breadwinner through the rough days of the recession when he was still on his learning curve. He had been neglectful then, perhaps, but when you’re fighting to keep your head above water you don’t have time to look at the scenery.