Cold to the Touch (12 page)

‘What on earth are you doing? You can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, panting.

‘It isn’t my house, it isn’t my carpet  . . . Oh bugger it, why not, indeed? I’ve wanted to vandalise this place so much it pains me. Oh look. A floor.’

Such a shared, wonderful joy, the finding of that floor. They stood and grinned at one another. Andrew wondered later if those who had discovered Australia felt the same unholy joy as he did on the discovery of a not-so-bad wooden floor. Not glorious, but OK. There’s no money to sand it, he warned, it costs a bomb. OK, Sarah said, we scrub it and bleach it, that’s what we do, just like you’d do with an imperfect soul you cannot make perfect, you do what you can. We could try sawdust and soap and water. First get rid of the crap.

It was one of the most refreshing and exhausting mornings he had had for ages, and the sun came out to cheer, briefly. He felt happy. Lord, he said, physical labour is good for the mind. By noon the carpet, which conveniently fell to pieces
as they attacked it, was all sitting on the damp grass outside and the room felt relieved by its absence.

‘The only problem,’ Andrew said, as they sat and surveyed it through the window and ate the sandwiches he had made, ‘will be when Mrs Hurly wants to come to tea. She won’t like this at all, doesn’t like change. It might have been her carpet in the first place, come to think of it, she was always donating things to the last incumbent; they were bosom buddies. I hope she doesn’t notice as she goes up the street. I’ve made a point of going to tea with her today, rather than the other way round, so maybe it’ll be all right.’

‘So you have to be bosom buddies with my landlady too, do you? Why’s that?’

He shrugged. ‘Donations, donations, donations. We can’t keep the organ going without Mrs Hurly and a couple of others, her most of all. And she claims huge affiliations with this house because her husband grew up here. He paid for a new roof here before he died and I’ve got every reason to be grateful for that. And the last vicar and his wife were so good to her daughter, blah, blah, blah. I’m being churlish. There’s a good woman in there: she’s just lost. She wants to open up, but she can’t so she criticises.’

‘You know what that sounds like?’ Sarah said. ‘It sounds like this bloody Mrs Hurly had the last vicar and his wife in her pocket and on her charity bankroll, and expects you to dance to order in the same way. Without the moolah, if you see what I mean. Just guessing.’

He sighed, looking at a callus growing on his hand with evident satisfaction. How fast things went when they were shared.

‘It’s not far off, for a guess. I don’t seem to have much choice. What else do you know?’

Sarah took a deep breath. It was high time this man knew there was a quid pro quo for painting his front room and getting rid of his carpet. Nothing was for nothing, even if it was a pleasure. He clearly knew more than he thought he did, if only obliquely. She liked the man and did not want to deceive him. The thought of silent Jessica still nagged away, whatever the distraction. She was present in this room: Sarah could feel her presence.

‘Look, vicar, sorry, Andrew, I may as well come clean. I’m a dual-purpose person, well, usually three at any given time. I’m here in Pennyvale, which I think is a wonderful place, apart from having such a twee name, because I wanted to be somewhere like this, not right here, necessarily, but somewhere with most of these ingredients: village, not town, roses round the door, all that stuff. I’m here in particular because Jessica Hurly, my young friend, introduced me to it and it turned out to be what I was looking for and her mother has places to rent  . . . and, and, oh never mind the ands. And because Jessica told me things, alluded to things, and I know she’s at odds with her mother and feels she can’t come home, I just thought, while I was here, well, you know, I thought I might try and fix it, even though I don’t know what’s to fix. I’m worried about her, she’s a bit messed up and everyone needs a mother, I should know and . . .’

Andrew was frowning at her from a distance, puzzled by all the ‘ands’ but listening intently. He would not judge her harshly. The mobile phone in his pocket went off.

‘Excuse me,’ he said again.

Sarah got up as he left the room and she opened the first can of paint. Ugh, dead white. She didn’t like dead white; it always had to be white with an undertone of something else, cream or butter, or pink or blue. Dead white was the colour of
dead skin and lard, but it would do for the first undercoat. She picked a brush from the equipment she had bought, dipped it in the paint and applied it to the purple wall in a tentative smear. Lovely, anything was better than that. She looked at her watch; at least a few hours of daylight for the task, they could do one whole coat if he helped. As long as he continued talking. She stripped off her sweater, revealing a sleeveless T-shirt, manhandled the ladder and stuck it up by the windows, start here by taking down the curtains. The room cried out for blinds, or no curtains at all. She was framed in the window stretching up, when Andrew came back. She might as well have been advertising herself to the street, a small, shapely body fully extended and with a straining bosom.

‘Speak of the devil,’ he said, ‘and the devil arrives.’ And then, as a spontaneous afterthought, ‘What a jolly good figure you’ve got. You look perfectly lovely up there.’

‘You’re not so bad yourself, Andrew.’

He sat down heavily as if shocked at the sight of her, framed in the light with her red hair blazing, a revelation.

‘Bugger. That was Mrs Hurly. She wants to come to tea after all. She has something very pertinent to discuss. Wants my advice.’

‘Ah.’

He stood up and shook himself. Sarah got down off the ladder, entirely aware of the effect she had had, and came and stood beside him.

‘You’re using me, aren’t you?’ he said sadly.

‘That’s what friends do, even new friends,’ she replied. ‘I’ll happily paint the walls for nothing, I’ll even pay for the privilege, but I need to find out Jessica Hurly’s history if I’m going to effect some sort of reconciliation. She didn’t ask, I volunteered. It isn’t much to ask, is it?’

‘Are we friends?’ he asked, his face breaking into the smile that transformed it.

‘Yes, we are – at least, I am. You can speak for yourself.’

The smile widened into a laugh. He should do more of that, too.

‘That’s all right, then. That means I’m perfectly free to break the secrets of the confessional and all for a Christian purpose. Look, I really don’t know the particulars of Jessica’s disgrace, it was before my time, she left as I arrived, but it can’t have been anything too terrible, youthful exuberance, oh, hell, yes, it was. Better come clean. She was the reason for the last vicar leaving, you see; she was how I got this job.’

He coughed: dust, embarrassment. She thought he was probably a compulsive divulger of secrets, given a chance. A perfect keeper of them too, just as she was. One day she might be able to tell him about her fear of fire, but not now; better to stick to the point.

‘How come?’

‘He couldn’t go on, you see. Not after she accused him of raping her. She did it in church, just as he was starting evensong.’

Sarah dropped the paintbrush back into the can and watched it sink. Well, well. Anxiety for Jessica started all over again – as if it had ever gone away.

‘Was it true?’

‘I’ve no idea. In light of the fact that she also accused the doctor, the butcher and a couple of others of something similar, and withdrew the allegations, probably not.’

‘I wish,’ Sarah said after a long pause, ‘that she’d told me that. Someone told you.’

‘Not her mother, for sure. A helpful member of the
congregation took notes and passed them on, and the dreadful do-call-me-Gavin left me a letter saying I should be very careful in my dealings with one Jessica Hurly. I also gathered that my chief qualification for getting this job was being gay, so I’ve been camping it up ever since. How times change. I should also be kind to her mother, who had once been a generous Christian.’

Village life, the pursuit of perfection, attention to detail. Sarah felt utterly dismayed. She looked at the smear of virginal white paint on the walls for inspiration, remembering how she should never believe anything without checking, felt sick with pity. True or false, it was equally pitiable. Andrew was looking distinctly shifty. No, not shifty as in deceptive; shifty as in confused.

‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘So where did all this sexual mayhem take place? Here? In church, in this very room?’

Andrew walked towards the window, checking the street.

‘I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know as much as I do know and it hasn’t seemed a good idea to find out the details. There weren’t any charges or investigations, just an  . . . outburst, so that was that, not discussed, everyone leaves and murmurs a bit, the Pennyvale way of doing things.’

He was looking at his watch, something he did involuntarily, as if it provided a solution.

‘Anything else?’

He shook his head, trying to downgrade the information as soon as he gave it, possibly the approach he adopted towards sermons. Sarah could not see him describing the real temperature of hellfire. He would try to mitigate the burden of that for the children at least. She had watched him with the children, warmed to his indecision, even as there was more clearing of the throat.

‘Not really. Only the
specific
thing Madam Hurly wishes to discuss and elicit advice on, which is . . .’

Cough, cough, cough.

‘She says her daughter was seen in the village yesterday. Mrs Smith told her. She shouted at her that Jessica, or
Jez
, as she calls her, was back.
She
thought Jessica might have come straight here, although why anyone should think that, I don’t know either. Apparently everyone in the hairdresser’s thinks she’s back, so it’s definite.’

Sarah only heard that
Jessica was back
.

‘So maybe now I’ll get the whole story,’ Andrew said. ‘Like I haven’t before. I thought I might put her in the kitchen, on account of redecorations, which are pretty obvious, what with all that carpet outside. God knows why she wouldn’t let me go to her, but she insisted. And perhaps you can sit in the scullery and eavesdrop. She’s due in fifteen minutes.’

They seemed to know one another very well; the instant recognition of strangers on a train, but the understanding was not yet entirely accurate. Sarah was cleaning the paintbrush against a wall, getting rid of the surplus, putting the lid on the tin of paint.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t keep still, you see. I tell you what, you get the whole story, then you tell me tomorrow. I’ve got to go.’

J
essica’s come home. She’s safe. Glory be
.

Sarah hurried uphill.

How did they pass news around here? Where was the conduit, the river running through it? Or was news confined to tiny cliques that did not impinge on one another, did they e-mail and text rather than speak out loud? How could you earn true disgrace around here, since no one seemed either to
notice or care what anyone did? Was the church, with its diminutive congregation, the only place for making actual announcements? She was racing back up the street, thinking Jessica’s come home, she might be at my house, she said she would come back after dark, and if she was here yesterday, where did she go?
Mummy owns lots of houses
. Is Mummy playing double bluff, and why didn’t I stay and listen?

It was suddenly colder, the sun forgotten, the clouds gathering, rain imminent. Sarah hurried out into the street, pulling her hood over her head, giving out the don’t-talk-to-me signal to the two single pedestrians she met going uphill before she was level with the butcher’s. The school bus created a traffic jam by depositing a dozen children who ran away in the thin veins of roads and houses leading off, clutching mobile phones and screaming insulting goodbyes.

Jessica would be there, listening out for seagulls, or in the kitchen, chopping herbs, ready to tell the truth. Sarah had such a conviction of this that she wanted to call out her name. It was darkening, mid-afternoon on a spring day and it felt like the middle of the night. She hesitated outside the butcher’s shop, but it was relatively full, three or four people in there, ordering, talking, delaying departure against the rain, Sam holding forth, gesturing, with a knife in his hand. Sam, a seducer of innocence, or merely a public figure it was fun to accuse? She waved as she went by: Sam was too busy to notice, but Jeremy did and waved back extravagantly, motioning her to come in, come in. She shook her head and carried on. That was the place, the only place, where the real business of talking was done. That would be the place for announcements and news, far more effective than church.

She checked her mobile phone. No word from Jessica, Jessie, Jezebel,
Jez
.

The rain was coming down by the time Sarah unlocked her door, giving way to the temptation to call out, ‘Jess? Are you there?’ The instinct to shout born of nothing but nights of bad dreams about her.

Silence in here. No messages, no response to the number she rang.
This person is unavailable
.

But all the same, someone had been here.

‘M
y daughter wrecked my life,’ Celia Hurly said to the vicar of Pennyvale. ‘But that’s what children do, don’t they?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘Being gay, I’m not likely, etc.’ He always mumbled around her; he did it a lot, especially when she was drinking the bottle of wine he had hoped to share with someone else and determined to resist himself, so that he could remember every detail in order to repeat it verbatim. How strange and oddly unchristian to be eavesdropping by proxy.

‘Rubbish, Andrew Sullivan, you’ll know all about having daughters and sons one day, probably, you’re scarcely forty. I’ve seen how you really like the children. One day you’ll know. I was over forty when
she
arrived.’

Celia Hurly was one of those women who believed that homosexuality was a curable aberration, which amused Andrew, although she was a little more accurate than she knew. He smiled the beatific smile he could always call up to order, reached forward and touched her knee, every inch the
safe, solicitous parson. He disliked her for blaming her daughter for wrecking her life: that simply was not fair. As far as he was concerned, children were an enhancement to life, a piece of glorious good luck and a privilege, however they turned out. It made him disposed to pity the mysterious Jessica Hurly, whereas he certainly had not done so before now, even if he did have reason to thank her.