The Judgement of Strangers (29 page)

Even Vanessa, at work during the day and immersed in the Youlgreave papers during the evening, noticed that something had changed.

‘Did you have a good meeting?’ she asked, as I got into bed on Thursday evening.

‘The usual sort of thing.’

She smiled at me. ‘Except that it went on for even longer than usual. Still, you seem quite cheerful about it.’

‘I’ve known worse.’ I was appalled by my automatic hypocrisy, by my careful choice of words designed to avoid an actual lie.

‘I forgot to tell you: Mary Vintner phoned. James wants to do the barbecue on the paved bit outside our kitchen window. Is that all right?’

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not if I don’t have to do it. She said they’ll bring everything, including food to cook, and she’ll make sure he clears up afterwards.’ She sniffed. ‘You smell nice.’

‘I rather overdid the talcum powder, I’m afraid.’ It had worried me that Vanessa might smell Joanna on me so I had taken precautions.

‘I like it. You’ve been very busy this week. We’ve hardly seen each other.’

‘Sometimes it’s like that. Parish life tends to be unpredictable. You’ve been fairly busy yourself. How’s it going?’

‘With Francis?’ Vanessa sat down at the dressing table and began to brush her hair; once I had loved watching her at this nightly ritual. ‘Rather well, actually. I’ve nearly finished cataloguing what’s there.’

‘Have you read everything?’

‘Not really. Just enough to get an idea of the contents. His handwriting was appalling, and as he grew older it got worse. You remember that poem I found?’

‘“The Office of the Dead”?’

‘Yes – I’ve still not been able to decipher it all. And there’s another complication – the spirit regularly moved him to write when he wasn’t exactly sober. Laudanum, brandy and sodas, opium – you name it, he liked it. Plus, there’s a lot of semi-coded references whose meaning I haven’t worked out.’

‘What about the papers that Doris threw away?’

Vanessa frowned at the mirror. ‘Honestly, I know she’s a nice woman, but sometimes I could strangle her. I think two volumes of the journal went, and quite a lot of letters and things. As far as I can see, Lady Youlgreave wanted to weed out anything that dealt with that Rosington episode. So frustrating.’

I shivered.

‘Are you cold?’ her reflection asked me.

‘It is beginning to get cooler at night, don’t you think? A hint of autumn.’

‘How depressing. It’s been such a rotten summer.’ She put down the brush and got into bed. ‘Are you – are you very disappointed?’

‘About what?’

‘About me?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You are good to me. I don’t think many husbands would be so – so
gracious
about having to share me with Francis.’

‘I can understand the fascination,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s important.’

‘Francis?’

‘Discovering the truth. Separating fact from speculation. You should have been an academic.’

She stroked my arm, then let her hand rest on mine. ‘And you?’

‘I told you – at one time I thought I wanted to be an academic, but then being a priest seemed more important.’

‘So we’re two of a kind. I wanted to do research, but I married Charles instead and turned into a publisher.’ She shifted beside me in the bed, moving a little closer. ‘Why couldn’t you combine being a priest with being an academic?’

‘I tried. But it didn’t work out.’ I turned my head and smiled at her. ‘But it’s all right. Everything’s worked out for the best.’

If I hadn’t become Vicar of Roth, how could I have met Joanna?

‘I want you to be happy,’ Vanessa said. ‘I feel I’m failing you.’

‘You’re not failing me.’ I patted Vanessa’s hand and thought of Joanna. ‘And I’m very happy.’

On Friday, Audrey temporarily delegated control of Ye Olde Tudor Tea Room to Charlene, moved her headquarters into the Vicarage and presided over the preparations for the fete. This year she seemed to take it even more seriously than usual. She camped in the dining room, the room we used least. Rosemary acted as her aide-de-camp.

The dining room filled up with smaller items of jumble, and the garage served as a dump for the larger pieces and for a heterogeneous collection of wallpaper-pasting tables, chairs and home-made signs. Toby phoned me and asked if it would be all right if he and Joanna brought the tent in the afternoon and put it up in the garden.

‘You’ve come to see what we’ve been up to,’ Audrey informed me when I took some coffee to her and Rosemary in the middle of the morning.

‘You’re doing wonders.’ I edged towards the doorway. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘Let us pray for fine weather,’ Audrey said, eyeing me in a way that suggested she had earmarked this responsibility for me. ‘People always enjoy themselves more when the sun’s out, and then they spend more.’

Vanessa was at work, but Michael was recruited to help with the preparations as well as Rosemary. He helped willingly, excited by the break in routine.

During the day a steady trickle of people arrived at the Vicarage. Some came to help, some brought items for selling, some came simply to gossip. There would be more in the morning. I sometimes thought that the real importance of the fete was not the money it made, never very much in comparison with the effort that went into it, but the way it brought people together.

All day I found it hard to concentrate. I did not know when Joanna would come. Or even whether she would come. We had not been able to arrange another meeting for today – I was fully occupied until the evening, and we might not be able to see each other alone later on. My love for her was like an itch: the more I scratched it, the worse it became.

As the day went on, frustration and uncertainty made me increasingly irritable. I snapped at Michael when he dropped a fork while laying the table for lunch. During lunch itself Rosemary said nothing: she sat with her head bowed so that her hair fell to either side of her face, effectively curtaining it. When I tried to make conversation, she answered in monosyllables.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ I burst out at last. ‘Must you be quite so gloomy?’

Rosemary made a sound that might have been a sob, scraped back her chair and left the room. Michael stared at his plate, flushing with embarrassment. I went up to Rosemary’s room afterwards, intending to apologize. I’d hardly begun when she interrupted me.

‘You don’t care about me. You never have.’

‘Of course I do. You’re my daughter.’

She lowered her head once more, retiring behind her golden curtain. ‘I wish I lived anywhere but here. Anywhere in the world.’

‘My dear –’

‘It’s all changed since you married Vanessa. You never have any time for me. You talk to
Michael
more than me.’

I sat down on the bed beside her and tried to take her hand, but she stood up at once and moved to the window. ‘That’s simply not true. I love you very much and I always will.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ She looked out into the garden, towards the trees of Roth Park. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. There’s no point.’

‘Rosie, you really –’

‘
Don’t
call me that.’

The doorbell rang. My first thought was that it might be Joanna and Toby.

‘Go on, answer it,’ Rosemary told me. ‘It might be someone important.’

‘We’ll talk later,’ I said, trying to retrieve something from my failure.

She shrugged. I went downstairs and opened the door.

‘It’s only little me,’ said Audrey. Something in my face must have alerted her, for she added almost at once, ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘Nothing at all, thank you.’ I stood back to let her into the house. She surged past me, trailing clouds of perfume and perspiration.

‘I’ve a feeling,’ she said gaily, ‘this is going to be our best fete yet.’

‘I hope you’re right. Now, if you’ll excuse me –’

She was between me and the study door, cutting off my obvious line of escape. ‘All the stalls are very well stocked, and we’ve got a really good band of helpers this year. And I think that Toby Clifford’s fortune-telling tent is going to make all the difference. Even the Vintners’ barbecue.’

‘Good.’

‘I wanted to ask you – what time do you think we should announce the result of the Guess-the-Weight Competition? Last time we left it until the end, and I’m not sure that was a good idea – a lot of people had already left, including the winner, in fact. Do you remember? It was Mrs Smiley, that woman with the poodle who lives in Rowan Road.’

‘You must do whatever you think best.’ I edged towards the study door, but Audrey held her ground.

‘I thought perhaps we should announce the winner just before tea – at about ten to four. I mean, let’s face it, if anyone’s going to guess the weight, they’re going to do it in the first two hours, aren’t they? Doris told me that they took most of the guesses in the first hour.’

‘I’m sure that’ll be fine, then.’

‘There was one other thing – the cups and saucers. Last year several of them got broken. The Church Hall Committee were rather upset. If you’re happy with it, I’ll say at the outset that we’ll replace any breakages from our profits so there’s no doubt about the matter.’

‘Audrey,’ I said desperately, ‘I’m sure you’ll make all the arrangements marvellously. You’ve already made the decisions. You do not need me to rubber-stamp them for you.’

It wasn’t so much what I said as the way that I said it. I watched the colour flooding into her face. I saw her mouth trembling and her eyes screwing up. It was as if her features were disintegrating. And it was my fault.

‘I’m so sorry.’ In my agitation, I laid a hand on her arm. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. You’re doing a wonderful –’

To my horror she came even closer to me until her body was nudging against mine.

‘Oh, David,’ she said between sobs. ‘I hate it when you’re like that.’

I tried to back away from her but succeeded only in backing into the wall. ‘Now there’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t I make us some tea?’

‘Everything’s changed,’ she wailed. ‘You never used to be like this.’

‘There, there.’ I patted the doughy flesh of her bare forearm. ‘Everything’s all right. Now, there’s a great deal to do before tomorrow.’

By now I was sandwiched between Audrey and the wall. It was a ridiculous situation. I could have stamped my feet with rage, irritation and embarrassment. Each of us has a child inside him, and mine was very near the surface and on the verge of having a tantrum.

‘It’s Vanessa,’ Audrey whimpered, her voice rising higher and louder. ‘It’s all her fault.’

At that moment the doorbell rang once again. Relieved at the interruption, I turned towards the door. As I did so, I realized that Audrey and I were not alone and might not have been for some time.

Rosemary was standing at the head of the stairs, with the light from the window behind her outlining her body and streaming through her blonde hair. In that instant, she looked as beautiful, and as implacable, as an angel.

The tent was contained in a great canvas bundle, the foot of which rested on the floor in front of the front passenger seat of the Jaguar. The top of the bundle poked through the sun roof. When I followed Toby into the drive, leaving Audrey to compose herself in the dining room, Joanna was disentangling her body from the tiny back seats. The despair and frustration I had felt a moment earlier dropped away from me. In her absence, I imagined Joanna so intensely that the reality was almost more than I could cope with: she was, literally, a dream come true.

She clambered out of the car by the driver’s door, said hello to me in an offhand manner, and walked round the long bonnet to the passenger door.

‘Joanna was once in the Girl Guides,’ Toby told me. ‘So she’ll be able to tell us how to put up the tent.’

‘You’re a liar,’ she said over the roof of the car. ‘I was never in the Guides any more than you were.’