I was still huddling over a fan heater when I heard more activity in the garden. Burble had returned, and was wielding the long-handled loppers with something approaching enthusiasm. For a few moments. Soon he was puffing on a roll-up, hunching his thin shoulders, and bunching scuffed knuckles around the illegal cigarette. I could see why Ted Vesey was nervous of him; it didn’t take the black eye he’d acquired from somewhere to make him vaguely menacing. His posture, knife and fork haircut, apparent reluctance to wash his person or his clothes, and a few random piercings did that.
Donning a duvet-thick jacket, I headed out with a couple of mugs of drinking chocolate, apparently his favourite non-alcoholic tipple, since for so far unexplained reasons he didn’t touch caffeine in the form of tea, coffee or even Coke. We both pulled a face when I registered that the roll-up was in fact a spliff.
‘Where do you get the stuff?’ I asked, as if I might fancy some weed myself.
‘This guy. Grows his own.’
‘Even so, Burble – still illegal, still harmful. Theo could be arrested simply for letting you smoke it if one of our neighbours dobbed us in.’
He looked helplessly for somewhere to dispose of it.
My eyebrows shot up when his hand drifted towards the garden refuse bin. ‘The local media would just love a Rector in Drugs Row story, wouldn’t they?’ I said, with a grin severe enough to brook no argument.
The spliff went back into his baccy tin.
‘Got more than that to worry about, ask me,’ he snarled, punctuating the utterance liberally with expletives, as he did everything he said. Many of the words began with F, since I had absolutely forbidden the C word here or anywhere else I might overhear it. Pausing, he drew on the hot chocolate as if it was nectar. It pretty well was. It might now live in an innocuous supermarket tin, but it certainly hadn’t started out in it. If he’d known its price, Theo would have worried so much about the extravagance that he might even have given up drinking it. Since it was such a harmless indulgence, I thought the tiny deceit was justified.
‘Such as what?’ I prompted him.
‘Fucking shop going and all. Shit, innit?’
‘The shop?’
‘Post office got to close,’ he explained, less tersely than that. ‘The Big Bosses say so. There’s no way old Violet’ll be able to keep the shop going without it.’ He sucked on his teeth, and might have spat, but clearly even a punkish eighteen year old had reservations about doing it on rectory land, albeit somewhere as downmarket as this. He’d have quite understood George Cox’s restraint, though George might have been surprised to see it in him.
‘That’s dreadful,’ I said. And dreadful was a massive understatement. If the shop went, I couldn’t see the pub surviving – it was very much down on its uppers already. If the pub went there’d be nowhere for the village’s old-stagers to nurse a pint, or the odd family to risk a cholesterol-filled but at least home-cooked meal at the weekend. There might be an impact on the playgroup, the primary school (at the age of eleven they left for schools in nearby towns) and – yes, the church. The place would in all likelihood degenerate into a mere dormitory village for Maidstone or even London.
Predictably he swore profusely but very unimaginatively. The gist of his utterance was that the village wasn’t much cop now, and would be even worse with nowhere to buy stuff. By stuff he no doubt meant the tobacco and cheap booze that were the average village youngster’s only means of entertainment, since the funding for a once-weekly youth club had been withdrawn.
‘Will Violet retire, do you think?’ I asked.
He looked taken aback to be asked for his opinion, but at last shook his head doubtfully. ‘Won’t want to, that’s for sure. She’ll keep going till she has to quit, knowing her. But no one’s supposed to know, like. She’s my gran’s cousin.’ Which was, I supposed, an explanation of how he knew. ‘Total shit.’ He sniffed.
I had a suspicion that promising to ask Theo to pray for Violet might not fill Burble with joyous optimism. ‘We should do something,’ I said, probably sounding vague but actually determined.
‘Do you reckon you can?’ I’d never heard him sound remotely eager before. Actually, on a scale of one to ten, this would just about creep up to one, but there was something else in his voice – something that sounded suspiciously like trust. ‘Thanks,’ he added, passing me the empty mug. ‘Is it true, Jodie, you used to drive a Porsche? How did you manage that?’
I didn’t want to sound as if I was preaching, but I told him straight: ‘A lot of hard work to get my qualifications, and a lot of hard work once I got a job.’
‘And a silver spoon to start with,’ he jeered.
‘Stamping books at a library? I don’t think so.’
‘Come on …’
‘Do you really want to know what kick-started me, Burble? Because I’ll tell you. In those days, if you were young your employers had to send you to get your qualifications by way of something called day-release at college. A bit like an apprenticeship. I was messing around in someone’s class – poor cow, we were probably making her life a misery – and one of my fellow students said the teacher – only they called themselves lecturers – was wasting her time; we’d never get anywhere because we’d all had such unhappy childhoods, rotten parents, and so on. And for some reason the teacher broke this stick of chalk in two. She said she could either moan about not having a decent stick of chalk and throw the pieces away, or she could simply use what she’d got to write with. And while she wrote words like analogy and metaphor and simile on the board, I came to a big decision.’
‘To use your half piece of chalk?’
‘Exactly.’ I could have hugged him. ‘And I hope you’ll use yours. Now, I don’t reckon you got as much out of school as you could have done. So we need to start from there.’
‘We?’ He blinked.
‘It’s one thing filling refuse bins with brambles,’ I said, ‘but real gardening’s another.’
But my mental quest for something to fire him with enthusiasm and a belief that he could not just actually earn enough money to come off the dole, but also have a realistic chance of getting a horticulture qualification, wasn’t matched by any glimmer of a response. I could see that helping Burble was going to be like trimming those brambles – a long and not necessarily rewarding battle.
Since Theo hadn’t heard even a whisper of Burble’s news, we agreed over an early supper that neither of us should mention it to anyone else until it had become a decent-sized rumour. As I’d told Ted Vesey, Theo was going to see a couple of non-churchgoers about the baptism of their baby, to suggest there might be some significance to the ceremony apart from unseasonal strappy dresses, heels more vertiginous than mine and silly hats. And then of course was the late visit from the churchwardens. In the absence of anything more tempting, swathed in my quilted jacket, thermal gloves and a couple of scarves, I popped my running hat on and headed for the village hall, armed with enough pound coins for the electric slot meter to keep us at least tepid all evening.
Seven or eight WI members were abuzz with something that snapped their mouths tight shut when I pushed the door open. When a collective turn of heads established it was only me, however, I was loosely admitted to their circle, like a new satellite orbiting the accommodating earth. After all, I was now officially a member, and here for the business which the committee had unanimously decided should be dealt with before the talk; if it was left till later, to a woman everyone bolted. But whatever they’d been talking about must wait till they’d inspected and transferred from their plastic box to a china plate covered by a paper doily the cupcakes I’d brought along as my contribution to the refreshments. Imagine Jodie Harcourt – Jodie Welsh – with time to make cupcakes. Not very well decorated ones either, truth to tell, despite the Dr Oetker toppings. At least the bag of toiletries I’d brought for the evening’s raffle was decidedly if discreetly upmarket.
The meeting, which simply involved reading minutes and correspondence, was swiftly over. Mrs Mountford, it was noted, had sent apologies.
These days, to boost numbers and add to their coffers, the branch welcomed visitors of both sexes. These now started to trickle in to hear tonight’s talk, which was to be on the merits of wormeries. This was actually a subject in which I was interested, as much to my surprise as Theo’s. It’d be nice to do something useful with all our weeds. Meanwhile, as we waited for the speaker, conversation sparked up again. About the post office, of course.
Their teeth might not have been biblically gnashed, but they were certainly sucked. How could old people survive in a village with no provision for pensions, food, or even – perhaps, in fact, most important – a public space for casual but life-enhancing conversation? And why should people with young families want to move in?
I could have pointed out that young people would be far less dependent on a single shop. They could do a supermarket run, or, more likely still, shop online. Instead I asked what I should have asked Burble: ‘What will happen to the premises when the post office closes? Can Violet keep on the shop lease?’
Elaine Grant, a bright Scot hitherto by some twenty years the youngest of the group and thus pretty much my contemporary, shook her head, setting Pre-Raphaelite coppery tresses aswirl. ‘That’s the problem, actually. Not the post office people. They’d more or less tolerate it there, since it runs at a slight profit, but it’s the shop itself that can’t survive. Not the way that the rental’s shot up. They say there’s already been a change-of-use application. Another bijou commuter residence, I suppose. So I’m afraid it’s—’ She drew her hand across her throat.
How had Burble got it so wrong? All that pot in his brain, perhaps.
At this point our speaker arrived, needing help, he said, with his equipment. At least the worms he’d brought weren’t about to be let out of a can.
The PowerPoint presentation over, it fell to me to make the vote of thanks. Reminding him I was the rector’s wife, I told him how much I liked the idea of worms being at supper on something other than the occupants of the graveyard. There was a shocked silence; presumably no one picked up the allusion to Hamlet. Raffle time: the speaker won the toiletries and looked genuinely pleased. I won a bottle of wine I wouldn’t even cook with, but mustn’t think of declining. Everyone laid into the wonderful cakes, but it seemed to me that there were just as many at the end as there had been to start with. Talk about loaves and little fishes. There was a general allocation, everyone, including the speaker, leaving with a portion of leftovers.
‘Heart attack on a plate,’ Theo observed sadly, the biology teacher he’d once been surfacing briefly. ‘Refined flour, refined sugar, cholesterol by the bucket.’ With a grin, he added, ‘Just one slice!’
‘Only if you join me for at least half a mile jog tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Even if it means getting up half an hour earlier.’
He pulled a face, and poured another half glass of red wine. ‘I’m protecting my heart with this,’ he said. ‘OK, I know you’re right. But I feel such a wimp, knackered after only a few minutes. Even after that ligament problem you must be covering five or six miles a day.’
‘It’s just a matter of practice,’ I said briefly, dismissing all the hard work, pain and boredom. ‘How did it go tonight?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘The wardens have called an emergency parish church council meeting tomorrow at seven. And – because it’s choir practice night – it’ll be here, I’m afraid, not in the vestry. So you might need to commit yourself to another run, because if you’re in the house you’ll find yourself acting as usherette and tea lady and everything else you loathe rolled into one. And if Mrs Baker’s arthritic hand is still too bad for her to hold a pen, we might even ask you to minute the meeting.’ He eyed me narrowly. ‘Why don’t I hear squeals of protest?’
‘Because I might – I just might have the glimmer of an idea.’ Little wheels were turning briskly in my head.
He held up an authoritative hand in the sort of gesture he never made in London. I knew his schoolmaster voice would come next. ‘It’s a PCC meeting dealing with church business, Jodie.’
‘Oh, so is my idea – if it ever grows into a fully-fledged one, that is. What I thought was—’
The phone rang. He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’d better take it.’
The phone conversation went on and on. I poured him another glass of wine, only to find myself absent-mindedly drinking it myself while I waited. When he returned, he was almost staggering with weariness, so I didn’t mention my idea. In fact, I’d much rather say nothing even to him – perhaps especially to him – until I’d thought it through properly. Nothing was worse than a good plan spoilt by lack of preparation.
At last, as he was halfway up the stairs to bed, he said, ‘You were talking about something earlier? A plan?’
‘We’ll talk before the meeting. Promise. Please don’t look so worried – you know I’d not do anything deliberately to annoy the PCC.’ Even Ted Vesey, I added under my breath.
The following morning, showered and perky after my favourite morning exercise with Theo, I was in church, armed with a tape-measure and a notepad. Since the church was always kept locked, I’d borrowed Theo’s key: he was busy taking assembly at a local primary school in a nearby village. It might be that my theory wouldn’t work in practice, and I wanted to be the first – and in that case, the only – person to know.
On my hands and knees, I was interrupted by the sound of voices outside. But your knees are not a bad place to be in a church, so I stayed put and waited to see who it was. The door opened slowly and with the sort of clichéd creak you’d expect in a bad movie. It turned out to be a party of walkers, all loudly apologizing for disturbing the quiet of the place when they saw me, but desperate to see the famous brasses. They were so keen they all slipped their boots off, leaving them neatly in the porch, as if entering a mosque.
I didn’t quite gawp, but I did wonder what on earth they were talking about – and where the brasses might be. I’d never heard of them, even though I’d helped the team of cleaners a couple of times. Looking around, which didn’t take all that long since apart from the cross-shaped body of the building, there were only two side chapels, a vestry and a square annexe leading to the bell tower at the rear, I realized the obvious place must be in the chancel floor. This was mostly covered by a piece of rather viciously-patterned Seventies carpet which was, come to think of it, quite out of keeping with the rest of the interior. While I thought about the wisdom of pulling it back in the manner of a hopeful magician – ta, da! – I directed them to the remains of medieval wall-paintings in the tiny Lady Chapel and the very handsome alabaster tombs in the choir. While their backs were turned I lifted the carpet. It was a good job I’d been circumspect: one end concealed a floor safe; the other revealed two beautiful delicate brasses, the sort that had been stolen from many churches like this. Perhaps – but only perhaps – that was why outsiders were locked out. But it seemed such a waste. Things so lovely should be seen by as many eyes as possible; it must be the brass-rubbing equivalent of having a couple of Fra Angelicos and keeping them under the carpet in your private office.
The walkers were thrilled by the sight. They respected my suggestion that since the brasses were so important (were they? I was only quoting what they’d said, after all), they should look but not touch, and take memories but not photographs. They offered generous donations but I couldn’t locate a single Gift Aid envelope to put them in, cursing the loss of valuable potential income from the tax man. So several fivers and one tenner went naked into the collecting box, which I needed to remind someone to empty. The walkers, by now my new best friends, then wanted guidance to a good eatery: was there a pub in the village? Or at least somewhere they could buy snacks? I directed them to the post office, in the hope that Violet had something suitable in her chiller.
Slowly I picked up my measure and pad, said goodbye to God, and left, carefully – but very reluctantly – locking the door behind me. After all, thanks to the walkers, who should by rights have found themselves inhospitably locked out, there was now enough money in the rusty old wall collecting box for someone to risk taking a jemmy to it. And if anyone did, I knew who the blame would fall on: Burble and his mates.
And me, of course, for letting them do it.
Theo was spending the afternoon visiting the sick, so after a run I still had time on my hands. I spent it at the computer: it seemed my plans might have support in high places – and maybe even High Places.