Late of This Parish (3 page)

It was a very small room, with windows back and front. Lionel craned his neck and was rewarded by the sight of young Phyllida Thorne, in a tight black sweater, an extraordinary hairstyle and a skirt of inflammatory length. Slamming the door of her little black MG and with a great display of shapely legs and a clinking of attendant chains and bracelets, she walked round to unlock the boot.

‘Gracious!' he said, echoing Miriam's exclamation a little faintly as at the same moment the passenger door opened and a young man of immense elegance slid out, ‘she's brought Sebastian!'

Miriam was halfway to the front door and didn't hear him. The Rector finished his sherry in one unwise swallow and felt the familiar disagreeable sensation in the pit of his stomach as he watched his only child walk round to join Philly and extract an ominously large holdall from the car boot.

When Laura walked into the sitting-room, her father was seated in his wheelchair in front of the french windows, facing the garden that plunged to the valley, the inevitable book on his knee. He didn't turn round as she came in, always a bad sign, and her heart sank. She forced a smile to her lips, cheerfulness she didn't feel into her voice. ‘Well, I see he came. Did you have a good old natter?'

The Reverend Cecil Everard Dalby Willard, sometime headmaster of Uplands House School, spun slowly round, looking pained. ‘Bernard Quentin and I had an interesting conversation, yes, if that's what you mean.'

‘And a good tea, too, by the look of what's left,' she answered, refusing to be needled by the veiled sarcasm in his clipped, dry voice.

She had come home at lunch-time and left everything ready. Homemade buttered scones and jam, a date and walnut loaf, Bath Olivers and gentleman's relish, a Dundee cake. The small table laid with her mother's best lace cloth and silver tea service, the electric kettle already filled. Her father could manage, he always made tea for himself and any visitors he had, but if not, surely even a bachelor don from Cambridge was capable of plugging in the kettle? No matter, she'd no intention of staying at home as her father clearly thought she should, as if her job at the school was a hobby she could pick up or discard as and when she felt so disposed, like knitting.

As she feared, he stayed wrapped in his black mood all evening. As a rule, Laura welcomed visits from his old friend Bernard Quentin for their therapeutic value. Her father's body might be weakened but his intellect remained unimpaired, as sharp and abrasive as ever, and the stimulus of conversation and argument with Quentin did him more good than a whole bottleful of his tablets, enlivening him and making him more like the man he used to be, less of the enfeebled and disagreeable old man his stroke had made of him.

Tonight, however, Quentin's visit seemed to have had quite the opposite effect. Her father was at his worst, querulous and demanding. He needed his pills immediately, he wanted to know why she was spending so long in the kitchen. He threw down unfinished
The Times
crossword, which he always saved to do during the half-hour before supper. Clearly, something had put him out. She thought at first it must be the saga of those wretched badgers again, and cursed Denzil Thorne and wished Mrs Oliver could bring herself to be a little more detached on the subject. Or that he might be going to bring up that business of Danny Lampeter again.

At supper, she learned that it wasn't either the badgers or Danny, this time.

‘Quentin is publishing his book on the Middle Eastern question', her father said. ‘At last.' Pushing aside his lasagne, he added petulantly, ‘I really cannot see why you insist on making this stuff, you know it's too rich for me. I can't eat any more.'

She was on the verge of apologizing (not for the lasagne, it was one of his favourite dishes) but stopped herself in time. She knew him better than that. Whatever disappointment he felt about his own unpublished work he would not want anyone, even her, to show they were aware of his disappointment. He had never at the best of times had the humility to take the slightest sympathy.

After she'd cleared the dishes and washed up, Laura sat drinking her coffee in front of the sitting-room window. She never tired of the view from here, the perspective it put on feeling and emotion. The feeling of littleness against the immensity of the landscape, surrounded by sky, was always overwhelming. Tonight, the sky was spectacular with a theatrical, Turneresque beauty. Purple thunderheads piled up in the west, shot with unearthly rays of silver light from behind. A band of clouds lay below, wine-dark streaked with gold. The river was a still ribbon of pewter far beneath her and tiny Dinky cars crawled imperceptibly on the curving road. And all of it in tune with her own excited apprehension, the tremulous fear that filled her whenever she thought of what she was about to do.

‘More coffee, Father?'

He was asleep, his mouth slightly open, and she sat watching him, filled with pity. She knew how deeply he felt about his failure to finish the book he'd been working on, a complicated study of the comparative religions of pre-Reformation Europe. The fact that it would have been completed now had it not been for his stroke must be profoundly galling to him. Intellectual faculties intact, he simply no longer possessed the considerable physical stamina necessary to sustain such a Herculean labour. He had seemingly accepted this, acknowledging that although contemplated for many years, the work had been begun too late in life, after his retirement and shortly before this illness overtook him. Whereas Bernard Quentin was twenty years younger and worked in the fullness of his health and strength. All the same, it was perhaps understandable that his friend's achievement should have upset her father. But why had it upset him so much?

The clock in the hall hissed the usual warning before booming out its nine deep strokes. Her father woke, reached out his good arm for his cup of weak, decaffeinated coffee and finished it. She took a deep breath and turned her back on the view, facing the room furnished with things familiar to her for most of her life: a long, low room, dominated by the number of books in it. The shabbiness of the furnishings had acquired a certain distinction through long association – the comfortable sagging armchairs, the worn old rugs, the faded brown velvet curtains, the set of black and white cathedral etchings and sepia photos of people long gone, known only to her father. There was nothing of her own personality stamped on the room, nothing to her own taste.

She decided to speak. Although aware that it might not be the best time to re-approach the subject that was uppermost in her mind, something in her naturally impulsive nature impelled her to do so. She had to give it one last try, to hope that he might make the effort to understand her. She said abruptly, ‘I do wish you'd meet David and talk with him.'

Her father didn't answer immediately. His eyes, watching her, were hooded, like an old turtle's. His withered neck, rising from the clerical collar he still insisted on wearing, reinforced the impression. ‘Illingworth and I have already met several times,' he said at last.

‘I mean to talk. To discuss our marriage.'

‘I fail to see any point in doing so, since as far as I'm concerned there can be no prospect of a marriage. You know my beliefs, and after a lifetime of seeing them work in practice I am glad to say they are still quite unshakable. A Christian marriage, once made, is for ever.'

‘Even when it's become a travesty? When it's tearing two people apart, when there's nothing left to salvage?'

‘There is always something left.'

‘Not always. Sometimes, divorce is the only way out. Father, I know how strongly you feel about this and I respect your views, but surely we can come to some sort of compromise? We wouldn't expect you to actually marry us, even though I've always hoped you would when the time came.'

‘I think,' he answered, reducing her to the level of one of his errant ex-pupils with a smile colder than was perhaps intended, ‘that isn't a proposition even you could have considered very seriously.'

She said nothing because in her heart she'd known not to expect miracles. He wouldn't change, perhaps he couldn't. The idea that his daughter might go against him and marry a divorced man despite his wishes seemed never to have entered his head. To him it was unthinkable. And perhaps it was, she thought drearily. She could never match him in argument and the habit of believing he was always right was hard to break.

‘Nor, I might add, will I support his claim to the Headship, on that and other grounds. I am still on the board of governors, don't forget – and there will be others who think as I do.' He paused as if about to add something else, but merely said abruptly, with one of his sudden swings of mood, ‘I'm sorry if you're feeling hurt over this, Laura. One cannot avoid that when faced with making moral choices, none of us can. But, my dear, are you sure you're not being led into something you would certainly regret because you are – how shall I put it? – of an age to think that life is passing you by?'

Her nails bit into her palms in an effort to stop herself answering. She would have liked to think he didn't realize how witheringly unkind his comments could be – but how could he
not
know? And what moral choices could he be faced with, sitting here all day? she thought, her resentment mounting. And what could he know of love? She was ignorant of the state of her parents' marriage. Her father had been middle-aged when she was born, she remembered her mother only as a pale, gentle ghost. But although she forbore to speak, what she was thinking must have registered on her face.

‘Oh yes, there are moral decisions that even I am faced with,' he said, looking at her with a kind of pitying understanding. ‘For instance, what should one do if one comes into possession of some potentially damaging information – which could destroy a person – but if not revealed could be equally damaging to others? Where does one's duty lie then?'

He knows, she thought, motionless with shock. Somehow he's found out. No, not found out. Specifically learned from Bernard Quentin who was a Fellow of the same Cambridge college David had recently belonged to.

It would be better for everyone, himself included, said a voice in her head, if he were to die now. The thought came unbidden into her mind, clear and fully formed. Appalled, it took her a moment or two to admit that in its unrealized state it had been there before, not once, but many times.

Wyvering was asleep, its lights extinguished. Below, dark as silk under the moon, the river flowed silently in the broad valley. Down in the beech hollow further along its course six badgers – a boar and a sow and four cubs – came out of their sett one by one and began to make for the clearing where the garden ended just above the river.

Still and patient through long practice, Catherine Oliver leaned her elbows against the sill of the summerhouse, watched and waited. Disregarding the stiffness in her joints, wrapped in many layers of clothing, a Thermos of hot soup to hand, she had spent many similar nights watching the badgers and other night creatures, just looking, committing to her unfailing memory the lines of their bodies and their movements so that she could later draw them.

The moon rose higher and an owl swooped silently to the ground. A small animal screamed in death. A few moments later the badgers arrived, lumbering like so many amiable old drunks, grunting and snuffling over the bread and milk, dried fruits and nuts she'd left out for them, a regular source of food they'd come to expect. But tonight the exquisite pleasure of watching them was marred by the thought of the badgers found dead last week. Shot, the RSPCA had said. It was an offence against man's laws and against nature. She suspected that old Willard was at the bottom of it, that the deed had been done at his instigation, but how could that ever be proved? Inoffensive creatures, the badgers were not rooting up his lawn for spite, only for food, for the leatherjackets and worms under the turf. How could he hate them so? But he did, and he had a gun; he shot grey squirrels from his wheelchair.

Another thing – how could Denzil Thorne have been such a crass fool as to tell Willard she fed them? Knowing as he must that it was calculated to enrage him?

Catherine Oliver was generally regarded as an unassuming and forgettable woman (when she was thought of at all as a separate entity from her husband), careful about voicing her opinions, as befitted a clergy wife. There was a gleam in her eye and a twist of irony to her unpainted lips that might have warned her detractors if they had but taken the trouble to look so far. At the moment her mouth was set in a hard, uncompromising line as she watched the badgers. Normally peaceable and tolerant, there were some things about which she was inflexible.

A sound fell on the night air. Only a soft footfall, but the badgers froze, and then they were gone. A figure in dark rollneck sweater, jeans and tennis shoes appeared in the clearing.

‘It's only me, Ma.'

‘Seb! Oh, Seb, you've frightened the badgers away.'

‘Wouldn't you rather see me than the badgers?'

‘Not at this particular moment. You're supposed to be asleep in bed.'

He laughed softly as the old childhood remonstrance came from her, as though he were still twelve years old. He stood for a moment silhouetted in the moonlight before coming into the summerhouse, a handsome, slimly-built figure just under middle height, the smile on his curly mouth showing very white teeth, his eyebrows winged above his slanting eyes. ‘Thought I'd like to talk to you on your own, that's all.'

‘Well, that's nice,' Catherine said, but she sighed as he entered. ‘Would you like some soup? It's homemade.'

He said very kindly, ‘No, thank you, I'm not hungry,' and forbore to shudder as she poured viscous unnameable brown liquid from the flask for herself. Leaning back against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, he watched her as she sipped. ‘Well, what's all this about this book, Ma?'