A Blessing In Disguise (37 page)

The awful thing was – and I don't know what came over me, or almost came over me – but, mixed with the annoyance, the episode gave me a feeling of fleeting, but distinct, pleasure. I was relieved that I had to hurry away because of Becky. If he tries it on today I shall be very sharp with him, and indeed with myself. And if he continues like this then there's no way I will go to his exhibition in December, not even to see my own portrait hung.

Fortunately, aside from the usual compliments, he doesn't try it on this afternoon. He asks me if I'll do another sitting next week and I tell him I can't possibly, I don't have the time. ‘Things are really hotting up in the parish,' I say.

He roars with laughter at that.

‘Oh, Venus, you are funny!' he says. ‘Things hotting up in St Mary's, Thurston? Whatever do you mean? Are the choirboys being naughty?'

‘If you ever darkened the doors of St Mary's,' I say, ‘you'd know we don't have choirboys. We don't even have a choir! But I
am
quite busy, laughable though you find that!'

‘OK!' he says, holding up his hands and pretending to back away from me. ‘OK, Venus! Don't be cross with me. And if you find you can spare an hour or two from your busy life, promise you'll let me know.'

‘I promise,' I tell him.

On Tuesday, when I leave church after the ten o'clock Eucharist, I take it into my head to drop in on Bertha Jowett. No special reason except that she's housebound, we both enjoyed the previous visit, and it's not at all out of my way. I won't stay long, just say ‘hello' and ‘how are you?' – and I did wonder if she might be all right for things to read. She must have loads of time to do that, especially as she's too ridden with arthritis to do much else. She doesn't come to the door, she calls out to me to enter. She's in her chair, the gas fire's full on and she's sitting close to it. Is it my imagination or does she look a bit down?

‘How are you?' I ask. ‘Are you all right?'

‘As right as I'll ever be!' She doesn't make it sound like a complaint, just a fact she must accept. ‘Excuse me if I don't offer to make coffee,' she says. ‘I'm a bit stiff today. Actually, I'm glad you've come. I've made a big decision and I want you to tell me I'm doing the right thing – though even if you say I'm not it won't change my mind.'

‘Would you like me to make you some coffee?' I ask.

‘Not yet,' she replies. ‘Come and sit down. Listen to me first, coffee after.'

What she has to tell me certainly comes as a surprise. I'm not sure why, except she struck me on that previous occasion as a woman who was comfortably in control, and accepting of her own life.

The decision is this. She has faced the fact that she can no longer manage to look after herself, and the cottage, even though she has a woman who comes in twice a week to clean and tidy.

‘It's beyond me! So I'm going into a retirement home,' she announces. ‘I should have done it earlier but I didn't want to. I fought against it; but now I have to acknowledge that I can't continue as I am. There's so much I can't do. Getting upstairs to bed is a nightmare and there's no room downstairs for a bedroom. It's not only that, though. It's just – oh, well, so many things! There seem to be more of them every day. Now tell me I'm mad!'

‘You're not mad,' I say firmly. ‘You strike me as being as sane as anyone I've ever met. You do surprise me, though I'm sure you've thought it over very carefully. But where would you go?'

‘Ah,' she says, ‘that's where I'm lucky! There's a rest home just outside the village – the Beeches – have you been there yet?'

‘Not yet,' I say. ‘But I intend to.'

‘It's well spoken of,' she says. ‘I once visited someone there and I liked the look of it. The rooms are a good size and well-furnished, the bed doesn't somehow look like a bed. It looks more like a comfortable sofa. There's an en-suite shower which is easier for me than a bath. You can have your meals in the dining room, or served in your own room – or you can make a hot drink and cook snacks, there's a microwave oven. And if you get to the stage where you need it there's nursing care available, so you don't get chucked out! I sound like an advertisement, don't I?'

‘It sounds pretty good,' I say.

‘As these places go, it is,' she agrees. ‘Expensive, of course, and I could only do it because I'll have the money from selling this place. But one of the problems is that they have a vacancy right now and they won't keep it open long: if I want it I'll have to get on with it. So that's what I've decided to do. I've no relatives to push me one way or the other. I can do what I like, I'm a free spirit!'

Bertha Jowett will always be a free spirit, I think. Confined to a room in a rest home, old, dependent, crippled by arthritis – she will still be more free than most people I know. But I wonder if the price for freedom is loneliness?

It's not until I've left that the full significance of what she's said sinks in. I'm back at home, making my lunchtime sandwich, when I realize that her cottage will be up for sale.

Pausing only long enough to look up her number in the book, I'm calling her. She's a long time in answering and I realize that if she happens not to be sitting near it it takes her quite a time to get to the phone.

‘Oh, Bertha!' I say. ‘I know you said you'd have to sell your cottage. Do you have a buyer in mind?'

‘Not a clue!' she admits. ‘I've only just made the decision. Why? Do you know someone?'

‘Indeed I do!' I say. And then I tell her about my parents. ‘I haven't spoken to them, I thought I must make quite certain with you first, but really it sounds just the job. Is it OK if I get in touch with them?'

‘Certainly!' she says. ‘I'll have to get it valued, I've no idea what the selling price might be, but I could get that done without putting the sale with an estate agent. Save a lot of money!'

‘Wonderful! I'll ring my mother at once, then I'll get back to you. Of course they'll have to sell their house.'

My mother is over the moon! Can't believe it! Tells me they've been to the estate agent in Clipton and he says their house should sell quite quickly, it's in a nice position and in good condition.

‘When can we come over and look at the cottage?' she asks.

‘I'll have to ask Miss Jowett, but I should think almost any time,' I say. ‘I'll let you know.'

I'm about to get back to Bertha Jowett but before I can do so my own phone rings. It's Imogen at the Dog Rescue Centre.

‘I reckon it's going to be OK about Missie!' she says. ‘We think you'd be a very suitable owner. Of course you'll have to go through the usual preliminaries and I'd like to come to visit you. When could I do that?'

‘The sooner the better,' I tell her. ‘Tomorrow if you like. Could you come when Becky's home from school? She gets in just after half-past three.'

‘That will suit me fine,' Imogen says.

I then ring Bertha Jowett and we fix for my parents to come over next Friday. ‘That will give me time to get a valuation on the cottage,' Bertha says.

Mum and Dad will probably stay for the weekend, I'm thinking – and then I suddenly remember that on Sunday afternoon I'm hoping to go to the concert with Nigel – I must give him a ring – and if my parents are here Becky will be fine with them, I needn't phone Sally Brent about Anna. That can be another time. Nice things to look forward to! It should be a fun weekend.

I'm so eager to give Becky the good news about the dog that at half-past three I find myself watching from the window to see her coming up the road, and five minutes later there she is. She bounces up the road, brimful of health and happiness. What a change! I have my daughter back!

I rush to open the front door.

‘Guess what!' I call out – I can't wait until she gets into the house.

She can read the good news in my face.

‘The dog!' she cries. ‘Missie!'

‘Yes! Almost certain!' We hug each other on the doorstep and a woman I vaguely know by sight nods and smiles at us as she passes.

‘Lovely day, Vicar!' she calls out.

‘Wonderful!' I reply.

At Becky's request I give her every syllable of Imogen's phone call. ‘So don't be late home from school tomorrow!' I warn her, though I'm sure there's no fear of that.

And then she's suddenly starving hungry so I make tea and toast some fruit buns and we sit down and talk about Missie; where she'll sleep, what she'll eat, what kind of collar we should buy – and I have to warn Becky that it will be a week or two before all this can come to pass. ‘But we can take her for a walk on Saturday. We'll arrange the time with Imogen tomorrow,' I promise.

‘And that's not all,' I add. ‘I have a bit of good news about Grandma and Granddad.'

Her cup runneth over – and so, I have to admit, does mine.

‘I'm going to phone Anna,' she says. ‘I must tell her!'

‘OK, but give me a minute,' I say. ‘I want to call Doctor Baines. If I leave it until later he might be doing his surgery.'

Nigel seems pleased that I can go to the concert.

‘It's a good programme,' he says. ‘Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto and Sibelius's Second Symphony. There's a talented young pianist.'

‘Wonderful! I love them both,' I tell him.

The visit from Imogen goes well. She likes the Vicarage, approves of the garden, which she says is happily not too formal and tidy to welcome a dog. This is the first time ever I've actually been approved of for having a less than pristine garden and I shall bear it in mind on those occasions, not infrequent, when I would rather read a book than mow the lawn or weed the borders. I arrange that we will be at the Centre on Saturday to take Missie for a walk, and Imogen says there is a training class earlier on the same day which she would like us to attend. Becky is totally excited. How will she ever sleep tonight?

Wednesday is the evening I set aside for wedding couples or for those seeking baptism for their infants. It's late in the year for weddings but this evening I do have one couple who would like to be married on a Saturday before Christmas.

‘I'm starting a new job in Manchester before Christmas,' the groom, John Carter (who looks like a schoolboy but turns out to be twenty-six), explains. ‘We think we've found a house there, but we'd like to be married and have our honeymoon before we settle in.'

‘John doesn't live in the parish, but I do,' Jean, the bride-to-be, says. ‘I'm afraid I don't go to church . . .' I wait for her reason for not going to church, hoping it might be something original, but even more interestingly, she doesn't give me one. ‘But I wouldn't like to be married
not
in church,' she adds. ‘I went to Sunday School.' And then as an afterthought she says, ‘. . . And I was in the Guides.'

They seem a nice young couple, sitting there holding hands. I go through the service with them, and we discuss practical things like the date and the time, the hymns, the organist, the bridesmaids, who will give the bride away, if and where they may scatter confetti, and so on; and then, as always, I talk to them about marriage, which is not the same as talking about the wedding. I talk to them about the life commitment of marriage. It's my firm belief, and I don't think I'm starry-eyed about this, that just about every couple who comes to me seeking to be married fully intends to make this commitment, in good faith, meaning every word of it. I can see it in their faces, in their eyes, and especially I see it later on when they stand at the altar making their vows. I am truly sad and upset when I hear of a marriage breaking down but it never lessens my belief that they meant every word they said at the time. If I didn't have that faith I'm not sure I could do this part of my job.

So I ask God to bless them and I tell them that if they have any further questions at all between now and the wedding they should feel free to ask me.

Soon after they leave I have an appointment with a couple who wish to have their baby baptized. They are not married, they tell me almost at once, a fact which I didn't know when I made the appointment but even if I had I would still have made it. Their baby girl is four months old and they very much want her to be baptized. I sense they have perhaps been pressurized into this by family (though if they tried to pressurize them into marrying then clearly they failed) but this turns out not to be so. It could be, and sometimes this is true, that they think that it is unlucky for the baby not to be ‘done'. Something unspecified but awful might happen. I usually tell them that I'm not a witch doctor. But after a few careful questions to this couple I discover that it is their true desire to have the baby baptized for the right reasons.

Now I do know that there are clergy who will not baptize a child whose parents are not married, or, going even further, will not baptize a child whose parents don't go regularly to church. I can't possibly go along with that. It's my belief, I once naively thought it was the belief of all clergy, that baptism is a sacrament in which the child is given the grace of God. And if it is, who am I to withhold God's grace from a child because of what its parents do or don't do? So this couple, I think a little to their surprise, find that there are no barriers to their baby's baptism. I might at some point mention marriage to them, but that isn't what they're here for now.

When they've left I see Becky off to bed. She's a very happy girl. In fact it's been a happy day all round, except that I don't take any joy in Bertha Jowett going into a rest home. There is just an inevitability about that with which she seems to have come to terms. I must talk to her more about it.

I had a domestic day yesterday. I'd determined that after the ten o'clock I would go back to the Vicarage and do some housework, which is piling up on me. Perhaps, I thought, I should become more methodical and make myself do it every Thursday. I had to yesterday because my parents are due for lunch today and my mother appreciates a tidy house. If it were messy she'd set to and sort things out; not in a chiding way, she'd be cheerful about it, but I would feel guilty. I would quite like to have a bit of paid help in the house – domesticity and I are not natural partners – but it doesn't come cheap in Thurston and I have to watch the money.