The Judgement of Strangers (6 page)

Simultaneously we picked up our glasses. I think we were both a little embarrassed. The small talk of lovers is difficult when you’re out of practice.

Vanessa cradled the glass in her hand. ‘You’ve made me realize how lonely I’ve been,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve had more fun with you in the last two months than I’ve had in the last three years put together.’

‘Fun?’

Her fingers tightened on mine. ‘When you’re living on your own, there doesn’t seem much point in having fun. Or a sense of humour. Or going out for a meal. Didn’t you find that?’

Didn’t
, not
don’t
. ‘Yes. But surely Ronald –’

‘Ronnie’s kind. He’s a good man. I like him. I trust him. I’m grateful to him. I almost married him. But he isn’t much fun.’

‘I don’t know if I am, either,’ I felt obliged to say. ‘Not on a day-to-day basis.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ She turned her head to look at me. ‘You know what I really love about you? You make me feel it’s possible to
change
.’

My inclination was to announce our engagement at once. It gave me great joy, and I wanted to share it. Vanessa, however, thought we should keep it to ourselves until we had told Ronald and Rosemary.

Her delay in telling Ronald almost drove me frantic. I could not feel that she was truly engaged to me until she had made it clear to Ronald that she would never be engaged to him. She did not tell him until ten days after she had agreed to marry me. They went out to lunch, in the Italian restaurant where we had talked about the warts of Francis Youlgreave.

Vanessa did not tell me what they said to each other and I did not ask. But the next time I saw Ronald, which was at a diocesan meeting, he was cool to the point of frostiness. He did not mention Vanessa and nor did I. I had told Peter that I would talk to Ronald, but when it came to the point I could not think of anything to say. He was businesslike and polite, but I sensed that any friendship he had felt for me had evaporated.

His sister Cynthia was less restrained. I had been up to London one afternoon, and I met her by chance at Waterloo Station on my way back home. We saw each other at the same time. We were walking across the station concourse and our paths were due to converge in a few seconds. Her chin went up and her mouth snapped shut. She veered away. After a few paces, she changed her mind and swung back towards me.

‘Good afternoon, Cynthia. How are you?’

She put her face close to mine. Her cheeks had flushed a dark red. ‘I think what you did was despicable. Taking advantage.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I hope you pay for it.’

She turned away and, head down, ploughed into a crowd of commuters and vanished from my sight. I told myself that she was being unreasonable: that the fact of the matter was that Vanessa had chosen to marry me of her own free will; and there was no element of deception about it.

The round of parish work continued. Normally I would have welcomed much of this. Week by week, the rhythm of the church services made a familiar context for my life, a public counterpart to my private prayers. Weddings, baptisms and funerals punctuated the pattern.

There was satisfaction in the sense that one was carrying on a tradition that had developed over nearly two thousand years; that, through the rituals of the church, one was building a bridge between now and eternity. Less satisfying was the pastoral side of parish work – the schools and old people’s homes, visiting the sick, sitting on the innumerable committees that a parish priest cannot avoid.

At that time Roth Park, once the big house of the village, was still an old people’s home. The Bramleys, who owned it, were running it down, which meant that their guests were growing older, fewer and more decrepit. Their policy had an indirect effect on me. There was a run of deaths at Roth Park in those winter months of 1969–70, which became cumulatively depressing. Sometimes, when I walked or drove up to the house, I felt as though I were being sucked towards a dark vacuum, a sort of spiritual black hole.

Rosemary came back from school for the Christmas holidays. She had changed once again. Boarding school had that effect: each time she came home she was a stranger. I was biased, of course, but to me it seemed that she was becoming increasingly good-looking, developing into one of those classic English beauties, with fair hair, blue eyes, a high brow and regular features.

On her first evening home, I told her about Vanessa while we were washing up after supper. While I was speaking I could not see her face because her head was bent over the cutlery drawer. Afterwards she said nothing. She stacked the spoons neatly in the drawer, one inside the other.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘I hope …’ She paused. ‘I hope you’ll be happy.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’

Her words were formal, even stilted, but they were better than I had feared.

‘When will you get married?’

‘After Easter. Before you go back to school. Talking of which, Vanessa and I were wondering if you would like to transfer to somewhere nearer for your last year in the sixth form. So you could be a day girl.’

‘
No
.’

‘It’s entirely up to you. You may well feel it would be less upheaval to stay where you are. Where you are used to your teachers, among your own friends, and so on.’

Rosemary gathered a pile of plates and crouched beside a cupboard. One by one, with metronomic regularity, she put them away. I still could not see her face.

‘Rosie,’ I said. ‘I know this isn’t easy for you. It’s been just the two of us for a very long time, hasn’t it?’

She said nothing.

‘But Vanessa’s not going to be some sort of wicked stepmother. Nothing’s going to change between you and me. Really, darling.’

Still she did not speak. I crouched beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘So?’ I prompted. ‘What do you think?’

At last she looked at me. To my horror, I saw that her eyes had filled with tears. Her face was red. For a moment she was ugly. The tea towel slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘We’ll end up doing what you want. We always do.’

Christmas came and went. Vanessa and I announced our engagement, causing a flurry of smiles and whispers among my congregation. We also agreed a date for our wedding – the first Saturday after Easter, shortly before Rosemary would be due to return to school for the summer term.

‘Couldn’t we make it sooner?’ I said to Vanessa when we were discussing the timing.

‘I think we’re rushing things as it is.’

I ran my eyes over her. Desire can produce a sensation like hunger, an emptiness that cries out to be filled. ‘I wish we didn’t have to wait. I’d like to feast on you. Does that sound absurd?’

She smiled at me and touched my hand. ‘By the way, I had a chat with Rosemary. It was fine – she seemed very pleased for us.’

‘I’m so glad.’

‘“I do hope you and Father will be very happy.” That’s what she said.’ Vanessa frowned. ‘Does she always call you “Father”? It sounds so formal.’

‘Her choice, as far as I remember. She always did, right from the start.’

‘Is it because you’re a priest? She’s very interested in the trappings of religion, isn’t she?’

‘It must be because of growing up in the odour of sanctity.’

Vanessa laughed. ‘I thought clergymen weren’t meant to make jokes about religion.’

‘Why not? God gave us a sense of humour.’

‘To go back to Rosemary: she’s agreed to be maid of honour.’

The wedding was going to be in Richmond, and Peter Hudson had agreed to officiate. The only other people we invited were two of Vanessa’s Oxford friends and a couple called the Appleyards, whom I had known since my days at Rosington. Early in the New Year, Vanessa and I spent a day with the Appleyards.

‘They seemed quite normal,’ she said to me as I drove her back to Richmond. ‘Not a dog collar in sight. Have you known them long?’

‘For years. Henry rented a room from us when we were living in Rosington.’

‘So they knew Janet?’

‘Yes.’

We drove in silence for a moment. I had told Vanessa about Janet, my first wife. Not everything, of course, but everything that mattered to Vanessa and me.

‘Michael’s nice,’ she went on. ‘How old is he?’

‘Coming up to eleven, I think.’

‘You’re fond of him, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ After a pause I added, ‘He’s my godson,’ though that did not explain why I liked him. Michael and I rarely had much to say to each other, but we had been comfortable in each other’s company ever since he was a toddler.

‘Do they ever come to Roth?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘We must ask them to stay.’

I glanced at her and smiled. ‘I’d like that.’

She smiled back. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? It’s not just us getting married. It’s our friends and relations as well.’

In January, Rosemary went back to school. Vanessa spent the following Saturday with me. Now we had the house to ourselves, we wanted to plan what changes would have to be made when Vanessa moved in; we had thought it would be tactless to do this while Rosemary was there. After lunch, the doorbell rang. I was not surprised to find Audrey Oliphant on the doorstep.

She wore a heavy tweed suit, rather too small for her, and a semi-transparent plastic mac, which gave her an ill-defined, almost ghostly appearance.

‘So sorry to disturb you,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you’d seen Lord Peter recently.’

Vanessa came out of the kitchen and said hello.

‘Lord Peter – my cat,’ Audrey explained to her. ‘Such a worry. He treats the Vicarage as his second home.’

I leant nonchalantly against the door, preventing her from stepping into the hall. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t seen him.’

‘The kettle’s on,’ Vanessa said. ‘Would you like a cup?’

Audrey slipped past me and followed her into the kitchen. ‘Lord Peter has to cross the main road to get here. The traffic’s getting worse and worse, especially since they started work on the motorway.’

‘Cats are very good at looking after themselves,’ Vanessa said.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ No doubt accidentally, Audrey tried to insinuate a hint of indecency, the faintest wiggle of the eyebrows, into this possibility. ‘I’m sure you were in the middle of something.’

‘Nothing that wasn’t going to wait until after tea,’ Vanessa said. ‘How’s the book selling?’

‘Splendidly, thank you. We sold sixty-three copies over Christmas. I knew people would like it.’

‘Why don’t you take Audrey’s coat?’ Vanessa suggested to me.

‘People like to know about their own village,’ Audrey continued, allowing me to peel her plastic mac away from her. ‘I know there have been changes, but Roth really is a village still.’

Changes? A village? I thought of the huge reservoir to the north, of the projected motorway through the southern part of the parish, and of the sea of suburban houses that lapped around the green. I carried the tea tray into the sitting room.

‘There’s not much of it left,’ Vanessa said. ‘The village, I mean.’

Audrey stared at Vanessa. ‘Oh, you’re quite wrong. Let me show you.’ She beckoned Vanessa towards the window, which looked out over the drive, the road and the green. ‘
That’s
the village.’ She nodded to her left, towards the houses of Vicarage Drive. ‘Here and on the left: the Vicarage and its garden. And then on our right is St Mary Magdalene, and beyond that the gates to Roth Park and the river. If you cross the stone bridge and carry on down the road, we’ll come to the Old Manor House, where Lady Youlgreave lives.’

‘I must take you to meet Lady Youlgreave,’ I said to Vanessa, attempting to divert the flow. ‘In a sense she’s my employer.’

It was no use. Audrey had now turned towards the green and was pointing at Malik’s Minimarket, which stood just beside the main road at the western end of the north side of the green.

‘That was the village forge when I was a girl.’ She laughed, a high and irritating sound. Her voice acquired a faint sing-song cadence. ‘Of course, it’s changed a bit since then, but haven’t we all? And beside it is my little home, Tudor Cottage. (I was born there, you know, on the second floor. The window on the left.) Then there’s the Queen’s Head. I think part of their cellars are even older than Tudor Cottage.’

We all stared at the Queen’s Head, a building that had been modernized so many times in the last hundred years that it had lost all trace of its original character. The pub now had a restaurant which served steaks, chips and cheap wine. At the weekend, the disco in the basement attracted young people from miles around, and there were regular complaints – usually from Audrey – about the noise.

‘The bus shelter wasn’t there when I was a girl,’ Audrey went on. ‘We had a much nicer one, with a thatched roof.’

The bus shelter stood on the green itself, opposite the pub. It was a malodorous cavern, whose main use was as the wet-weather headquarters of the teenagers who lived on the Manor Farm council estate.

‘And of course Manor Farm Lane has seen one or two changes as well.’ Audrey pointed at the road to the council estate which went off at the north-east corner of the green and winced theatrically. ‘We used to have picnics by the stream beyond the barn,’ she murmured in a confidential voice. ‘Just over there. Wonderful wild flowers in the spring.’

The barn was long gone, and the stream had been culverted over. Yet she gave the impression that for her they were still vivid, in a way that the council estate was not. For her the past inhabited the present and gave it meaning.

The finger moved on to the east side of the green, to a nondescript row of villas from the 1930s, defiantly suburban, to the library and the ramshackle church hall. ‘There was a lovely line of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cottages over there.’

Vanessa’s eyes met mine. I opened my mouth, but I was too late. Audrey’s head had swivelled round to the south side, to the four detached Edwardian houses whose gardens ran down to the Rowan behind them. Two of them had been cut up into flats; one was leased as offices; and the fourth was where Dr Vintner lived with his family and had his surgery.

‘A retired colonel in the Bengal Lancers used to live in the one at the far end. There was a nice solicitor in Number Two. And the lady in Number Three was some sort of cousin of the Youlgreaves.’

Black fur streaked along the windowsill. A paw tapped the glass. Lord Peter had come to join us.

‘Oh look!’ Audrey said. ‘Isn’t he clever?’ She bent down, bringing her head level with Lord Peter’s. ‘You knew Mummy was coming to look for you, didn’t you? So you came to find Mummy instead.’