After Ivy had gone off to the Almshouses, Adela sat for a little under the ancient yew and enjoyed her misery. Everything nice was always snatched away from her. Not just a parcel addressed to her – one could understand that, though one didn’t like it – a father surely had a right to protect his daughter from malign influences – but all that she had loved about St Aidan’s, its very familiarity, the way the sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows at certain hours, at certain times of year, the old pews; the wooden floor, worn down by the feet of worshippers, would soon be gone to be replaced by soulless, practical tiles, easy to wash. All the consoling patterns she knew were to be disturbed. She had loved the elegant flow of St Cecilia’s wooden gown: now it lay in wormy shreds on the ground. Even the pulpit was in pieces, and with it her father’s dignity. The Rector, at his Bishop’s bidding, must now pray at the same level as his congregation, no longer elevated above it as the saints had been above the people. It was too bad, her own superiority as the Rector’s daughter was being brought down as his was. No one envied her being her father’s daughter, but at least they had respected her.
She had trusted her father to stand up against the Bishop’s ecumenical zeal, his strictures that everything must change, everyone be made equal before God – and her father had failed. Why should she pay him the respect she did, since others gave him so little? He was not the man she thought he was. Worse, closer even to home, he had told Ivy to hide the parcel and Ivy had ignored him. He had told her mother to burn it, and her mother had not. And still no one had been struck by lightning, though it was true the day felt heavy, dull, and thundery.
She had somehow imagined that God would be swifter in retribution. ‘Swift in retribution’ – she liked the phrase. Even God had let her down. She cried a little from self-pity and then pulled herself together and prayed for forgiveness. She must honour her father and mother: these random disloyal thoughts could only be from the devil.
Presently Edwin came out of the Rectory with two young men from Jones and Willis the Church Furnishers, presumably so that all could see how the work of destruction was progressing. Adela thought they were inappropriately dressed, in coats with fur collars and soft felt Homburgs, but it was a new century and no doubt they thought they were arbiters of new thinking. She moved behind a tall gravestone so as not to catch their attention. The taller of the two men was smoking a pipe and tapped it out on the low wall of the lych-gate, next to where the builders were piling the old wood. Adela thought that was sacrilegious; the lych-gate was where coffins could wait under cover for burial, where the preacher could stand to deliver the service during bad weather. But her father made no objection to the liberty the pipe smoker took, and the three of them went back into what they had left of her church, laughing.
The sky was already darkening, though it was nowhere near dusk. Black cumulus clouds were piling up behind the steeple, their paler edges lined with a purpled red. The gilt weathercock swung first this way, then that, unable to make up its mind where the worst danger came from, but flashing a general warning. There’d be a storm in the night. Adela rather hoped so. She loved storms. It crossed her mind that she should check that the embers of the tobacco were properly out as she walked back to the Rectory, but she didn’t bother, why should she? It was going to rain, in any case.