Faith Fox Read online

  And now that he was gone all that she wanted to do in the world was to talk to him, and not in her heart or her interior monologue but in her everyday easy voice. And likewise with prayer. Prayer was an intrusion. It was not God she wanted, it was Hugo.

  And, when it came right down to it, what had all this ‘communion with God’ really meant? Why ‘God?’ Why should there be ‘a God?’ She had never of course believed in a physical sort of God with arms and legs and private parts and so on, she was a bit better educated than that. She had read her A. N. Wilson. But she had believed in the God of the Apocalypse, in the great formalised throngs of the heavenly host, in precious stones and the horsemen prancing, the halo round the Light of Lights, the great eye that beholds.

  She had believed that inside the eye of light there dwelt the essence of love, of love for her, Pammie (and Hugo), whatever she did or said so long as she attended to her worship and said the General Confession in church every Sunday and behaved through the week with a weather eye on doing what is right. But then Holly Fox had died.

  A random nonsense.

  And now Hugo had died. Wordlessly. One minute drinking tea at the window, the next a sad lump over the mower. Gone. And where? To the hosts of the Apocalypse? To eternal rest? He’d had eternal rest ever since he retired and quite a supply of it before that. What had he ever known about himself? What had she ever really known about him? Why had he wanted to marry her? If she had ever thought to ask him, would he have been able to remember? What had he seen in her as the years went by? A woman tearing about. Church on Sunday, leaving the house in her car at seven forty-five sharp. She had always prayed for him but had of course never said so. Back to breakfast she had zoomed, boiled eggs, The Sunday Telegraph, drinks before lunch, snooze, Bridge or the garden, a few friends round, easy telly, supper on knees, bed. What on earth had it all been about? The day God gaveth. ‘A good Christian life,’ the vicar had said, but what on earth was Christian about it? Christ had said sell up, go out and preach. He had said He brought not peace but a sword. She thought of Hugo happily eating crumpets every day at four o’clock in the centrally heated lounge.

  Pammie considered Christ. She walked all round Him. She began to talk to Him, questioning Him keenly as if He were one of her old clients at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. What evidence had He for his doctrine of love? Why should God love her? Ridiculous, when you thought about it.

  And what about the texts? ‘In the beginning was the Word’—and yet Christ left behind words that now appear to be phoney or mistranslated or mischievous. It appears that we can’t understand a word of the Gospels now unless we know both Greek and Hebrew. Mary is no Virgin, just a ‘young woman’ loosely related to the goddess Diana. As for the Resurrection . . . Pammie had never had the least difficulty with the Resurrection until the bishops got on to it. And some of them were homosexuals. And some people say that Christ was one. And that Judas was only misguided and Pilate a tragic hero. ‘Do we all have to go out, then, and get ourselves a theological degree?’ she enquired of Jesus. ‘And where will that leave our good works, the fruits by which we are supposed to be known?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m having to cut down on my voluntary work,’ Pammie wrote round. ‘Since the death of my husband I am having a great deal to do with his financial affairs.’ This was not true. Hugo had left things magnificently trim. She wrote a great number of these letters. To the vicar she made a telephone call, not wanting to make her resignation from the flower rota too formal and wondering if he might suggest when he heard her voice that he come and talk to her. But the vicar took the news bravely and rang off.

  ‘What cock!’ was the next stage, ‘what absolute cock it all is!’ and, as she said so, something like a heavy old mackintosh she had never much liked fell away from her shoulders. ‘I don’t really believe a bloody thing,’ she said aloud and listened to herself. She prickled with excitement. She eyed the face of Jesus. (Because there’s no doubt that He had a face. She didn’t doubt the historical figure. She wasn’t saying some consortium of magic had made Him up. Oh no.) She eyed Jesus, the middle-class carpenter of Galilee, and said, ‘I can’t begin to see why we’re all so conditioned by You, a Middle-East cult figure with a three-year work span, dead two thousand years. Look where it’s got us. Inquisitions, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Crusades. Look at this country. Packed once with saints. Holy Ireland. My eye! Rivers of blood, rioting, louts, thugs, football hooligans, mugging, all the churches dropping down. North-South divide. The whole world is a north-south divide. Fighting over religion everywhere. From the beginning. Absolutely all the time. All of us supposed to be united by the Cross. There’s only the Catholics now that bother with the Cross and even the nuns didn’t send more than a note after all my years of Wednesdays.’

  And all this Muslim business.

  At this point the face of the Christ began to get hazy, much like the face in the coloured aquatint in Pammie’s Confirmation Bible where the hair hung down the shoulders in ripples and The Saviour of the World sat in a white nightgown beside a well, with flowers growing in and out of His toes in the grass.

  Well, you could see why Hugo had never bothered with any of it. Just sat rattling the newspaper. Oh, how she wished she had known how stupid she was being. He must have thought it. But he had known—how clearly she saw it now—he had known that her religion then, her church life, was all emptiness. He had never said so, never teased her, but he had known it was all show. Entertainment. Play. Oh, Hugo had been so wise. So clever. All the money he had made and without seeming to try. Tears came as she thought of Hugo sitting wisely, and saying nothing. The only man who had simply listened to her. Had loved her—well, had adored her. Look at all the things he had heaped upon her. She could go shopping and buy anything she wanted, anything in the world, and she still could, for the rest of her life. All she had to do was walk along to the bank. The bank was a limitless pot full of money. Or she assumed it was; she’d never been a spender. No time. Oh, beloved sweet Hugo, when you think of some men. When you think of the deep certain order of my life with him here, and then of those shipwrecked people in the North, that mad place. She meditated on the face of Hugo until it was surrounded by a great crater of light, Hugo swirling about somewhere in the depths or heights of it, and the trumpets sounding all about. Well, she thought, I suppose it’ll take time to get rid of the imagery. To reach full atheistical purity of thought. But I am on course now for a clean break.

  And when she next went to see friends for drinks it was Advent Sunday and someone was going on about Advent calendars for children. ‘Will Thomasina send one to the baby, I wonder?’ asked Jilly. Everyone else had rather laid things to do with Thomasina aside by now but Jilly took things slowly and rather hung on to them, and not too many of them since the gin had taken a stronger hold. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Nicky, ‘it’s only a baby. Poor brat, I feel like sending her a Christmas thing myself.’

  ‘Maybe you will, Pammie?’ said Didi.

  Pammie examined her nails and said, ‘Oh, I’ve given up all that rubbish. Christmas and so forth. I’ve forgotten all that Thomasina business. We can suffer far too much for other people.’

  An anti-Christmas, anti-Christian gesture she felt must now be made. It must cut right into the heart of her life to show the change in her. Good sense. An appropriate good time. The heart of her life, the place that reflected all she now stood for, all that dear Hugo had stood for, was her house with its silk chairs and matching footstools, its fat curtains, gold wallpaper. She would transform it now into the sort of place she was convinced that Hugo had always wanted. Something to proclaim his wider-than-suburban success.

  She would transform the house, beginning with this room. She would fling out the mahogany, sell the upholstered suite, give away the Victorian watercolours on the walls, replaster to remove all traces of the individual picture lights above each canvas, and she would throw away the huge portrait of
herself that Hugo had never really liked, had said looked as if she was dying to consult her watch. Yes. And she’d scrap the fitted carpets and have instead a room that Hugo’s young successors in the firm might envy, a young room that she should have made for him long ago. The floor would be black tweed; the walls, one coral and the rest white. Enormous floor cushions to sit on and in one corner an arrangement of Japanese lanterns, all hanging at different lengths, some almost touching the floor. She’d have oriental scrolls on pins and a tray of sand sculpture and a few big rocks on a glass table. She would get down to measuring it all out at once.

  Pammie walked over to the garage where Hugo had kept tools and plumb lines and measuring rods. It was the first time she had stepped inside since his death.

  The mower, of course, had been put away and all was tidy, but looking around for metal rods and measures she saw on a high shelf, almost out of sight behind the oil cans, the mail that Hugo had received the morning of his death.

  It was mostly nothing. A few charity things. Some junk mail. The telephone bill she was pleased to see because she had thought it lost. There was also a rather grubby-looking letter stuck over with a Save the Trees label. The address was written in copperplate handwriting and the postmark was Whitby, North Yorkshire.

  27

  The Missus had gone. One morning, a Monday, she was not at the stove of the Ellerby Priors kitchen crashing with pans. As everyone appeared for breakfast, one by one, a bitch of a wet day, rain trailing across the courtyard in curtains, swirling down off the moor and quite cold at last, there was no fire lit, no table laid. Philip and (surprisingly) The Smikes arrived first. Philip had to be got to school. They stood about and after some time in came Jocasta, who sent Philip up to The Missus’s room to see if she were ill. He came back to say that the room was empty and all her things gone, her car not under the gatehouse and how was he getting to school and it was maths.

  Jack came in from the chapel.

  This was unthinkable. The Missus had been about for many years, ever since she’d heard Jack preach in Rochdale the year he was ordained.

  The Missus, Alice Banks, a sharp little woman, fierce and silent. Her family had been in the mills. She was registered as a Card, was The Missus. She hated joy. Joy got to her. Her bête noire was Gracie Fields, the world-famous Lancashire lass of her youth whose nightingale voice had drawn the crowds around her like shawls in their mutual birthplace. A golden creature, all laughter. ‘I wouldn’t cross t’ street for ’er,’ had said Alice Banks, The Missus. ‘Loud clart. She were comin’ back round t’ mills that day and they give a holiday to stand int streets for ’er, yellin’ and carryin’ on. “Are yer not comin,’ then, Alice?” they said and I said, “I’d not cross t’ road till ’ex.” I went ower t’ church instead.’

  She didn’t say that Jack had been preaching that Friday, a young man like an angel, for she never discussed emotion or devotion. She had stayed behind after the service—the screams for Gracie loud in the street—and taken tea and buns with Jack and the slender congregation. Jack had asked her job and she’d said, ‘I don’t have un. They’ve closed t’ prints,’ and glared at him. ‘I can cook,’ she’d said, she never knew why. ‘That I can do,’ glaring harder, fit to kill. He had left with the impression that he had met a little bit of rough black jet that could cut you to bits but would never crumble.

  He remembered Alice Banks when he went to his first parish and a vicarage the size of a college, a kitchen floor glazed with damp, silverfish flitting between the loose wet tiles, and he had set about finding her. She was there within the week, mouth like a cut, unsmiling eyes, hair of a witch. She looked round the ghastly place and got out her apron and a bucket. And never left him.

  She never took a holiday (‘Where would I go?’) and seldom spoke directly to Jack, although she had made up her mind that he was now her life. She muttered as she worked, was unpopular in every parish, treated all-comers as honoured peasants lucky to be allowed audience, sent them all (including, once, a bishop) round to the back door, and returned meat to the butcher with covering notes saying, ‘This won’t do for his reverence.’ She had been seen in the henhouse haranguing the hens, urging them to point-of-lay. ‘Git yersens movin’, ’e ’as two eggs to ’is supper.’

  The Missus had few possessions and, it appeared, no family. At Christmas there arrived only a very few shabby-looking cards, to which she paid scant attention and often didn’t open. She was almost always silent, though if you did want any life to flow from her you had only to mention Gracie Fields.

  She loved Jack. Of course she did. She was not in love with him, although she thought about him most of the time, for she saw him as beyond desire; but she was obsessed, nevertheless, by his gentleness, his innocence and his loving looks. They had been the first she had known. The day when, some weeks after her arrival at the first grisly vicarage, she took it upon herself to attend to his laundry was as much a stage in her spiritual life as a novitiate’s first vows. Thereafter she rubbed away each week at his socks and underpants and shirts as at a sacrament, always washing by hand, hanging everything out ritually in neat even loops along the clothesline. She ironed and light-starched the oldest of his frayed handkerchiefs with the care of a wardrobe mistress for a star.

  She began to knit for him, polish his shoes, restore his chaotic shirts, change his sheets and pillowcases, buy his shaving soap, toilet paper, toothbrushes, which he never acknowledged or noticed and seldom paid for.

  Her cooking was dreadful, but Jack didn’t seem to notice this either. She spent hours at it, boiling potatoes and cabbages to pulp, turning chops to cinders. She stood over him watching it all go down, stamping in with the second course, puddings like stone, custards covered with mackintosh which she slopped all over the plate from a height. Her expression was at these moments at its least terrifying, its nearest to fulfilment; the Creator surveying Her handiwork and finding it good.

  Jack throve. Had it not been for The Missus everyone agreed that he would long ago have left the world, for he never ate unless food was set before him, and his appearance if left entirely to him would have been John the Baptist between locusts and unlikely to impress either the diocese or the Arts Council.

  He paid her whatever she asked, which was very little, and had no idea of her needs. She was never ill, never elsewhere. In none of his ministries or ventures had he ever entered the room where she slept. At one place it had been a mattress on the floor of a cellar, but she did not tell him. As evangelical adventure after adventure came to grief under Jack’s shining innocence and carelessness, she moved along with him to the next. She even went with him to Oxford, where he was housed for a time in a college, and found herself a job as a bedmaker and sat it out silently. Her conversation, when it came, when it was sometimes forced from her over cups of tea, harked back always to the same subject: Jack, the difficulty of working for him yet his obvious superiority to everyone else in the world. She had feared Oxford. She imagined that plans might be afoot there to trap him and tame him: Oxford, where Jack might forget the open air and where collars were not clean. When he went off with the gift of a disciple’s money to set up a centre for Christian farmers in the Yorkshire Dales, where agricultural suicides in the winter months are not uncommon, and when the centre turned out to be a roofless stone shed on the open moor, she set about finding The Priors. Some said helped him buy it. Some said bought it for him outright.

  She was growing old now, the cooking worse than ever, the cleaning long in abeyance, for her eyes were fading; but she was still there, still Jack’s angry-looking champion, and whatever curiosities appeared in his professional behaviour, whatever hours he kept, when he lay prone on the moor or said the Offices of his faith all night long in the chapel alone, she accepted it with respectful silence. This was the form. This was Jack. He was hers. The marriage had not shaken her. She had detested Jocasta on sight but saw in her a woman without an inkling of how
to put herself out for anyone, and therefore, she reasoned, Jack would need his housekeeper all the more.

  Far and near, the marriage had been an amazement. It had enthralled all those who had ever known Jack. Celibate, saintly Jack—and pushing fifty! However had it come about? What sort of proposal had there been? How had it ever been accepted by this smouldering, resentful-looking intellectual gypsy, a woman who never aimed to please, sat apart, never seemed to do more than tolerate even her own son? Jocasta, it was said, would mark the end of Jack’s greatest asset in life, The Missus.

  But Alice Banks had no concept of physical jealousy. The lusts of the flesh had never come her way. Vaguely she knew that marriage is brought on by passion as pneumonia is preceded by fever. Passion she called daftness. Children resulted from it, but the process by which children were attained sounded to her as unpleasant as hospital treatment, ridiculous as morris dancing or Gracie Fields. She could not see how it could be practised for delight.

  Poor, poor Alice Banks, how she hated happiness. Nothing so clamped her jaw as people appearing before her and expressing exuberant pleasure. When Holly Fox had paid a visit, prancing over the kitchen flagstones exclaiming and shrieking and lifting the lids off saucepans in a girlish, mischievous way, it had been a grim moment for The Missus. Holly’s sunny smile had got her nowhere. When she had reeled back with a startled but kind smile from a pan full of pink mince, saying faintly, ‘How delicious,’ The Missus had very nearly slapped her hand with a spoon. ‘Delicious, we’ll see. It’s what his reverence has Mondays, that’s all. There’s a table to be laid, young lady. It’s twelve o’clock.’