Chapter Twenty-three

THE DAY AFTER Louisa’s outburst and my row with Matt, I ring the vicar-cage doorbell. In one hand I hold a carrier bag containing a perfumed candle. I’ve seen them in the lifestyle pages of magazines, and have always wanted one. This morning seemed the perfect time to treat myself.

After a few minutes measuring out the doorstep in pigeon-steps, I walk round the block and push open the garden gate. There I find Dylan in discussions with his gardener – last-minute adjustments for the Harvest Festival fête. I loiter next to the wisteria, inhaling the smell of late-cut grass. When Dylan, who relishes using the Latin names for plants, becomes aware that I’m not a parishioner requiring edification, but a friend prone to mocking his pretensions, he ends the conversation with the hired help and holds out his arms.

‘Hey, what a lovely surprise. Are you playing hookie?’

‘Not quite,’ I say, adding that I’ve been made redundant. And now, as Dylan holds me, the tears well up which had remained loyally invisible during the morning meeting while the bailiffs took furniture, and while the policeman explained why Interpol is searching for Rex, who has gone AWOL in Spain with all the firm’s money.

‘Christ!’ Dylan kisses my wet cheek. ‘What about the famous guy you interviewed on Monday?’

‘The bailiffs have taken all the laptops, all the computers. Apparently Rex has been downloading files remotely. There’s nothing left. And we all thought he was a benign old buffer obsessed with reducing his golf handicap.’

‘Christ!’ says Dylan, again.

Help me, I long to say to him, like you did once before, by finding me Matt.

‘What does Matt say?’ asks Dylan as we enter his kitchen.

‘We had a row.’

‘About this?’

I shake my head. About a dress, I want to say. As if somehow this would make it completely true. I sit down, as Dylan sets about trying to remember how to make tea.

‘Hey, you could try being me for a while, and meet the Bishop.’

‘Metamorphosis – well, there’s a thought.’

‘Call it transubstantiation,’ Dylan says, making a mess of pulling apart a milk carton.

‘So the church really does have an answer for everything?’

‘We hate to boast.’

‘Well, then, I’ll have to try one of those Alpha courses at Holy Trinity—’

‘For God’s sake, don’t do that,’ shouts Dylan, flinging cups and saucers noisily on to the table. ‘That’s not the way at all,’ he adds, ripping open a packet of biscuits.

‘I was only joking.’

‘All right. But really, that’s not religion. That’s for people wanting easy answers.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ I want to know, tugging at my parting.

Dylan spoons fragrant compost into a teapot. ‘Nothing, if you’re prepared to tolerate the unknown, and endure the fact that not everything has an answer.’

I pull out a hair. ‘But there must be meaning. There must be an answer.’ I’m almost crying.

‘Darling, don’t start again. Here, have my – oh no, I haven’t got one – here, have a tea towel instead.’

‘I thought “God is love” was the answer,’ I sniff.

‘It is. But not always. There’s earthquakes, terrorism, cancer. You can’t just airbrush out the bits you don’t like. It’s all or nothing. Faith is about commitment. It demands full participation. At least, that’s what I’ve been reminding myself lately.’

‘A bit like parenting.’

‘Yes,’ snaps Dylan, as he pours.

‘Which makes parenting such a terrifying prospect.’ I reach for a custard cream, and nibble its manufactured border. Once the edge is in line with the filling, I dunk it in my tea and suck on its sugary insides.

‘I thought the same when I saw Louisa. You know the little fella’s not well?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I say. ‘But I’m not surprised. Two months premature.’

Dylan slides to the edge of his chair, stretching out his legs until his body is in a straight line. ‘Prue’s asked me to perform a naming ceremony tomorrow. Just in case.’

‘Ah. She left a message on my mobile this morning, but I haven’t got round to returning it. Poor things.’ We sit in silence, our hands cupped round our drinks. ‘Do you know the worst thing? Everyone’ll think I’ve given up work to get pregnant.’ Dylan sniggers. I tell him it’s not funny, and he pretends to have been admonished. ‘Because, after a time, it’ll be obvious I’m not, and then people will start to pity me. They’ll think Matt and I are blowing our savings on IVF. Or that one of us is defective. I don’t think I can bear it.’

‘Bear what?’

‘Their misplaced sympathy.’

‘They won’t think that. Just tell them about Rex.’

I know Dylan’s right, and yet I also know it’s really my mother, choirmistress to the reproachful, who loiters in the cloisters of my soul, poised to anoint her child with ash crosses of disappointment. And now those massed ranks in the choir-stalls have been joined by Nicole, with whom I had the briefest of conversations this morning in the office, while snaffling things from the bailiffs. She said, only partly in jest I think, that what I needed now, yaar, was a new project – like pregnancy! Just remembering this makes me reach for the increasingly sprouty hairs at my crown.

I interrupt pulling my hair to grab another biscuit. It’s time we all stopped being selfish, na, Nicole had said, as I held open the door for her. Her words stung me with the force of whiplash. And as I turned to her to say goodbye, it was my mother I saw leaning against the jamb.

Without the structure of my career, I fear I might fall apart. How I long to be brave enough for change.

*

After leaving Dylan to the one o’clock Mothers’ Union (which borrows his kitchen of a Wednesday to make copious amounts of Cup-a-Soup, and which he tolerates because it means he gets a free hot meal), I hesitate on the pavement, unsure which way to go. The trees in the street are beginning to shed their plum and golden leaves; they make loud, satisfying cracks when I step on them. From an open window further down the street, I can hear Britney Spears belting out a tune – even she, it seems, is asking to be given a sign.

I walk slowly without any clear purpose, and find myself eventually outside Dylan’s church. It isn’t all that welcoming from the outside. But it is at least familiar, and I stand for a moment in the porch to consider my options.

Inside, the cool air is dense with a sneeze-inducing cocktail of floor polish, old incense and musty prayer books. I breathe deeply, and make my way to the pew at the front. Ahead of me is the golden reredos drenched in fruity sunlight pouring down from the stained- glass windows. I am meant to find this sight uplifting; to be inspired by the eloquence of God’s grace, filtered through human craftsmanship; to appreciate spiritual integration as represented by the Trinity. Instead, I feel I’m fragmenting inside. It’s as though my soul is covered with the hairline cracks of the glazes on my father’s many pots.

At the opposite end of the chancel step stands the oatmeal and cobalt alabaster statue of Mary. One palm is raised in peaceful greeting. My heart craves absolution, but in that moment life seems too complicated. I feel unworthy. I exist in a moral twilight. By choosing not to have children, I have rendered myself permanently reprehensible. I think of Dad dying, and the man on the plane, my row with Matt, the loss of my job, the renunciation of fertility, my relationship with my mother. Negligible traumas, possibly, in the greater scheme of things, but they leave me with the overwhelming sense that I’ve let someone down. That I have failed to live up to expectations.

And I remember standing this morning in Fenwick’s before a display of candles in glass tumblers. Two shoppers were whispering about them in terms of reverence as the kind of essentials fashion designers took on holiday. Matthew Williamson swears by them. Picking one up at random, I ran a finger round its smooth rim. Its purity seemed to burn my sullied skin. I imagined dropping it, surrounding myself with jagged pieces of broken glass, and I couldn’t get out of my head the idea of pressing that sharpness into the raised veins at my wrist. Harper’s Bazaar ran a feature on them last month. Or were they arteries? Artery, vein? Vein, artery? Audio visual, Victoria and Albert. And that Stella McCartney, she’s planning a range. I could almost feel my skin give a little under the pressure, could almost see the point at which the shard pierced the flesh.

I remove the box from the carrier bag, and undo the packaging. Juniper and lemongrass mingle with the fustiness of embroidered kneelers. I cup the frosted glass and roll it in my palms, anger throbbing through my bloodstream, anger that has been fermenting for what seems a lifetime. I see the elephant pebble arch in the sky and sag towards the sea – can almost smell the rank salty water – and feel deflated. My focus narrows until all I can see is blue. Blue, virginal blue; Mother of God blue. A pulse thumps in my head. My fingers grip the tumbler and then suddenly, after a moment of connectedness, the pressure dissolves and the glass slips from my hand.