Cecilia Mortmain had cats: two narrow-skulled Siamese that slinked like aristocrats from room to room. A source of constant fluidity on her periphery, they tiptoed along an imaginary path that ran up and over the spine of a settee, the coffee table heaped with library books, and the Turkish rug from a long-ago holiday. Graceful as ballerinas, they were nothing to do with her husband. As with her, he barely noticed their existence, except to complain of hairs.
Beyond her window the sky was a freaky cartoon-blue. She drained the last of her tea and watched a lone cloud drift aimlessly across it. Positioned, as usual, at her high look-out post, Cecilia contemplated the listing tombstones that like St Oswald’s perpendicular frontage and soaring spire were smothered in ivy. Saw – along with the smattering of sheep that shouldn’t be there, and Frank from the shop thigh-deep in nettles wielding his strimmer – the plot her husband had reserved for her beneath the Judas tree. Refusing to dwell on her own mortality, she dragged her gaze back to her cats. The seal-point and chocolate-point, which, like her, rarely breathed fresh air, circled her legs as sharks do their prey. Until three dark shapes snagged her eye-line and made her look outside again.
Ellie Fry and the Jameson sisters. Cecilia saw them happily skipping inside St Oswald’s less than twenty minutes ago. The transformation, when they scurried back outside, alarmed her. Clearly upset by something, she watched their pale faces emerge from the shade of St Oswald’s porch. Had her husband done something to them? Timothy said he was heading to church after they’d lunched together. Perhaps it was the elegantly heeled Lillian Hooper? Cecilia hadn’t seen her, but from the muffled breath of the organ earlier, she was definitely inside. Tilting forward in her wheelchair, rucking the Burberry rug she needed over her knees despite the soaring temperatures, she saw that Ellie Fry looked close to tears, and her dimpled smile was totally extinguished.
The children separated off: Ellie back to the pub, the sisters to Dora Muller’s crumbling holiday home. Then it was her daughter, Amy, Cecilia was looking at. Showing off her fabulous curves in the leather cat-suit Cecilia’s sister, Pippa, gave her from her wardrobe. Arm in arm with Dean Fry, they emerged from the dark mouth of the woods just as the Jameson sisters vanished. Dean, louche as ever beneath his mop of girly curls, spun her daughter by her waist, and Cecilia watched them kiss. Seeing her daughter happy made Cecilia happy. She’d had a wretched year that began with her best friend being killed in a hit and run. Then Philip Norris, her boyfriend of two years, dumping her. Although, Cecilia suspected, their split had more to do with Timothy warning him off. Amy had been inconsolable, but look at her now, throwing her head back and laughing. This was Dean’s doing, she smiled, hoping her husband – who took against the boy immediately – didn’t go spoiling things for Amy again.
Timothy used to kiss me like that, she thought, gazing down on them. But be careful, Amy, your father isn’t the man he once was. Her warning steamed the glass. Best not let him catch you. But why not enjoy yourselves – she argued in her head in a way she could no longer do with her husband – when your lives could be snatched away at any moment. She should know: look at what life had handed her. Cecilia nodded to herself, liking the sensation of her petal-pale hair: sinuous and flowing down her back. At least her debilitating condition hadn’t robbed her of that. Small pleasures. Timothy had no idea, pestering her to cut it, saying it wasn’t proper for a woman in her late-thirties; but she flatly refused, it was all she had left of her original self.
Amy and Dean sprung apart when the wooden doors of the church creaked open. ‘In the nick of time,’ Cecilia sighed through the dust motes, scattering them like seeds. Dean, hands in pockets, and whistling as if to beckon the world to his feet, withdrew from the frame. Cecilia prayed the fliers in St Oswald’s porch would waylay her husband long enough for Amy to slip away unseen also. Interestingly, Timothy’s attention had been grabbed by something, but not the parish noticeboard. What absorbed him looked like a square of black-backed card, possibly a Polaroid, but tucked swiftly away into the folds of his vestments, Cecilia couldn’t be sure.
Timothy stepped into the sunlight and tugged at his dog collar as he slid a furtive gaze to her window. Hating him to think she was spying on him, Cecilia retreated sharply on her wheels. Not that there was any real need, the gesture was probably automatic; Timothy Mortmain had stopped looking at her years ago. She understood his disillusionment, the debilitating symptoms of her condition impacted on his life too, and although it wasn’t her fault, neither was it his. Within seconds, Lillian Hooper appeared, clutching a wad of music manuscript. Beautifully turned-out as always. Cecilia thought she was as classy as that Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart , with her easy attractiveness. A demon of an organist, Timothy couldn’t praise her enough, and so kind; Tilly Petley said the woman never had a bad word to say about anyone.
Downstairs the front door slammed. Amy ? Cecilia twisted from the window. The front door slammed again. This time it was accompanied by raised voices, followed by the thudding of someone charging up three flights of stairs.
Amy burst in. ‘You okay, Mum?’ Flushed and panting, she adjusted Cecilia’s blanket. ‘Bit stuffy, shall I open the window?’
‘What were you two arguing about?’ Cecilia asked.
‘Dean.’ Amy shrugged. ‘Dad knows.’
‘I’m not surprised, sweetheart – you’re hardly discreet, the pair of you.’ Cecilia smiled.
Amy returned it, her prettiness lifting Cecilia’s afternoon. ‘I don’t care. Dad can shout all he likes – I love Dean. I really do.’
Cecilia spread wide her arms and Amy, kneeling, her thighs pressed against the footrests of the wheelchair, lay her head in her lap.
‘Best not rub his nose in it, though, eh?’ Cecilia stroked her daughter’s glossy hair that, fanned over her knees, smelled like the joints she’d smoked at college. ‘You know it riles him,’ she said, wondering if Dean had given Amy any more of the cannabis she needed to help ease her pain.
‘But why can’t he just be happy for me?’
‘He worries you won’t achieve everything you should … that you’ll throw your future away on him.’
‘What d’you think?’ Amy lifted her dark irises then dropped her head again.
‘I’m thrilled you’re having a good time … trying new things.’ A wry smile as she inhaled the smell that threw her back to a relatively carefree time in her own history.
‘Trying new things . I’m not trying , Mum – this is for real.’ Amy fidgeted on Cecilia’s thin thighs.
‘I know you think that now, sweetheart, but you’ll be off to university before you know it, and—’
Their conversation was severed by the arrival of Timothy Mortmain: slightly out of puff, although this had more to do with his temper than the arduous ascent to his wife’s bedroom. Imperious in his crow-black vicar’s garb, he made the cats scatter; they didn’t like the reverend, these intuitive creatures who lived on the tips of their nerves.
‘How dare you run off when I’m speaking to you!’ he shouted at his daughter from the threshold. Amy sprang upright. ‘You’re not too old to be put over my knee, my girl.’ The vicar wagged a pious finger.
Striding into Cecilia’s room to administer a disinterested squeeze of her shoulder through the cable-knit shawl she needed to keep warm, Timothy dipped his head to bump a tacky cheek against his wife’s. This was what passed as a greeting between them nowadays, the kisses – along with any intimacy – sadly fizzled out after her diagnosis. Perhaps, or so she wanted to believe, from an irrational fear he had of worsening her pain.
‘Oh, Timothy, you’re sweating. Why don’t you use the stair lift we paid all that money to have put in? You’re always complaining it doesn’t get enough use.’ She teased him, trying to lift his mood; but he refused to give the merest glimmer of amusement. ‘And you’ve been in the woods again, look at the state of your shoes.’
‘Don’t fuss, Cecilia,’ he said, the huge silver cross around his neck winking insolently in the sharp sunlight. ‘Nothing a good polish won’t fix.’
‘What did you say to those little girls?’ Cecilia stared into the recess of her husband’s philtrum, to a thatch of bristles that always eluded the razor.
‘Little girls ? What girls?’ The words thick with menace.
‘Ellie Fry and Dora’s nieces?’
‘Nothing.’ He stepped back too briskly for her to see his expression.
‘You must’ve said something , they looked terrified, poor things – came running out of the church.’
‘You’ve been reading too many thrillers,’ he accused. ‘You think everyone’s up to no good. Not enough to do, that’s your trouble.’
‘Take me somewhere, then. I only get wheeled out for funerals.’ Cecilia knew this wasn’t true, it was her illness, not Timothy, that dictated whether she left the house. It was why they had the top floor of the rectory converted – because even if she wasn’t up to socialising, at least she could look out on the village and still feel part of things. But it made Amy giggle, and lightened the atmosphere.
Although only momentarily. His daughter’s laugh reminded the vicar she was there. ‘And as for you ,’ he started up again, ‘we don’t pay for you to go to one of the finest schools in England to throw your life away on that waster .’ The deep rumble he usually saved for Sunday sermons crackled against the Eau de Nil-painted walls. ‘Smoking dope … riding around on the back of his motorbike … it’s disgusting. What must people think?’
‘Timothy, please ,’ Cecilia intervened. ‘She is eighteen. And Dean’s not a waster.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Don’t you remember what we were like when we first got together? The things we used to get up to.’
A grunt from her husband. ‘Why don’t you come downstairs this evening? Share a meal with me for a change. We could open a bottle of something.’
‘Not tonight, Timothy. I’m sorry, but I’m really not up to it.’
‘Okay,’ he said, sounding defeated. Cecilia read the disappointment in his tone and wished they could have their old life back; that she could be the wife she once was. The man was lonely. Not that he admitted this to her face – he saved it for his poetry, which he then gave her to read. ‘Give me a shout if you change your mind.’ And with long strides, he left them to it.
The room, churned by his presence, spun and settled into the languid heat of the afternoon.
‘Don’t cry, love.’ Cecilia cupped Amy’s face between her hands, drew her close and breathed her in like a rose. ‘You two used to be such friends.’ Her own eyes glistening with emotion. ‘He used to teach you the names of flowers and trees – do you remember? He was besotted with you, wanting to give you a head start so you shone at school; which of course you did.’ She wiped a tear from her daughter’s cheek with the pad of her thumb. ‘D’you remember going with him to the old farm labourers’ cottages?’
‘Yeah.’ A tentative nod. ‘The squalor, Mum – you wouldn’t believe it.’
‘As a young vicar, your dad tried so hard to empathise with his parishioners. Did everything in his power to help them,’ Cecilia explained. ‘You won’t know it, but he wore himself out campaigning for better living conditions for those rural workers.’
‘But they never really liked him much, did they?’ Amy said.
‘Things were better when he had a thriving congregation. Nowadays, those who’ve remained loyal only do so out of habit, or a belief the sky would cave in. You can see what he’s up against – how hard it’s been for him to stick it out here? Especially since I got ill.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘Say it to him, Amy. Because it’s not really his fault he’s so grumpy these days, is it?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Her daughter shook her head, then changed her mind. ‘But he doesn’t have to take it out on me.’
‘I know, love, but he gets frustrated. You’ve heard him, the things he says to me sometimes, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He’s got a lot on his plate.’ Cecilia, counting herself as yet another of her husband’s burdens, smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. ‘I suppose his inability to identify with his parishioners is why he writes poems. He’s trying to make sense of it all … of what’s happened to me.’
‘Is that why he takes himself off for those long rambles, smoking his pipe?’
‘Yes, he said that because God had failed to show Himself inside the church, he owed it to Him to search elsewhere.’
Cecilia gave her daughter the reasons Timothy had given her for disappearing for hours on end. And what choice did she have, other than to believe him? Confined to a wheelchair, she could hardly follow him about to see what he was really up to; because she was certain he was up to something, and whatever it was, there was nothing godly about it.