Esme, watching October come and go, with its church council meetings and Harvest Festival services and suppers, felt uncomfortably detached from her congregations.
I shall be leaving, she thought, I shall be leaving, and you don’t know. Not until the following spring did the leadership team plan to inform the circuit meeting and the chapels of their decision to reorganize the circuit. In the smaller chapels, keeping going felt no worse than the struggle it had been for so long. In Esme’s congregations, even Wiles Green having enough members to remain viable until death took its toll of the elderly congregation, it had crossed nobody’s mind that in the event of a cut in staff their minister would be the one to go.
She had spent time reading up in her bulky (hitherto pristine and unopened) current edition of the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church, so as to appear appropriately informed when she asked her chairman of district about stationing her for her new appointment. He had reassured her that nothing would happen until next May at the very earliest; nothing would be known until the following September—a year before she would make her move. “So don’t panic yet!” he boomed, in his jovial way.
Esme could see nothing to panic about. She could see that her churches would be well served by her colleagues when the time came for her section to be parceled out into their neighboring sections. She could see that time was being given for careful decisions to be properly made. She could even see that, in the long run, she might come to look back with gratitude; as the other members of the leadership team reassured her when they met a second time to discuss the redistribution of the circuit, the forthcoming move could broaden her experience and enrich her life. It was just that, listening to the others discuss possibilities, and to her church councils talk about futures that only she knew she would not be sharing, something of the old ache of weariness began to return. In the last year, confidence and enthusiasm had grown along with a sense of belonging, in part because the people in membership of her chapels were now familiar to her and she to them. She knew their histories, and their family connections now, the places where they worked, and what their homes were like. Preaching on a Sunday had a deeper pastoral significance. She knew her sheep, and they had come to know her voice, and trust was growing. And then, Jabez … Ember, too, but, especially, Jabez … As she contemplated moving, she began to be more and more unsettled, until the parsonage that had never felt really like home began to seem positively distasteful. Esme stood in its sitting room, looking at the wallpaper and curtains chosen by other people with the criteria of sticking to a tight budget and giving offense to nobody. She looked out through the replacement windows with their hideous aluminum frames onto the square lawn and modest herbaceous beds designed for easy maintenance at the back of the parsonage. There was nothing to complain of and nothing to delight in. I don’t belong here, she whispered, and that was true now whichever way you looked at it.
When Esme had first offered for the ministry, she had been a married woman, and it had been late but not too late to think of having children someday. At that time, her sense of belonging had derived from her marriage. That had gone. The demands of her work ensured minimal contact with her parents, her sisters, and brother, all tied themselves by work and family obligations. She had grown away from them anyway now, in her own soul journey; lonely, her heart longed for someone to be her kindred. Who will I be? she asked herself now. Whose sister am I, and whose child? Who will love me, and where will I belong? What will my home be—just myself, maybe?
She wondered about looking for some sort of pet. She thought that a dog would require more attention and companionship than her work would permit her to give: But she toyed with the idea of buying a cat—Siamese cats, she had heard, were like dogs in some respects, affectionate, but with the advantage of in-built feline independence. She wondered if having a cat might help to create a sense of home.
Then numbly, standing still, gazing without seeing through the window, Esme thought, I should pray about this. That’s the thing I really ought to do. When you pray for things, they come out right. Well, maybe better than they might have done otherwise. At least, if it’s awful, I’d have the comfort of knowing it was God’s will. She frowned, puzzled. Then … does that mean then … if prayer—well, is God looking after me or am I looking after God? Is there a pattern? At all? And if so, does it really rest on my initiative so much, if there is a God? Does prayer really make a difference if all of it is God’s will anyway? And if it’s not, does that mean God isn’t infinite—or all-powerful—after all? With a sudden, peevish, restless sense of irritation, and an inexplicable but deep-rooted mutiny against the duty of prayer, instead Esme went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. She looked in the tin. No flapjacks left. She thought back to last week when she had stowed a bar of fruit and nut chocolate in the top drawer of her desk, and thought she’d settle for that.
As she poured boiling water onto the instant coffee granules, she reflected wryly that however big her next congregation might be, any move away from Jabez would involve a reduction in her intake of tea. And she surprised herself by starting to cry.
Hastily wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, refusing to look too closely at what leaving him meant to her, Esme took her coffee into the study, and more from force of habit than for any specific intent, sat at her desk and turned her computer on. The past weeks had been so busy, an evening opening up suddenly free left her at a loose end. She had no need to prepare a sermon for Sunday; they were back in Ordinary Time, she was preaching in a different chapel from the previous Sunday—last week’s sermon would do. The church councils were done, as were the circuit meetings and the Synod, and the Harvest Festival produce was all satisfactorily distributed to various worthy causes.
She supposed that now would be the time to pray or to read or to sit quietly and invite God’s holy presence into the restlessness inside her. But somehow she found it impossible to settle to anything requiring focus and a clear spirit.
Esme played seven games of solitaire and finished her coffee.
Without really thinking about it, she found herself telephoning Marcus. By virtue of being himself more than through office held in the circuit, Marcus served on the circuit leadership team. Esme thought maybe he would be a helpful person with whom to discuss her proposed move. Perhaps he would have some suggestions, help her to frame a more positive outlook on the prospect.
Her call was answered by a lady from a house-sitting firm, hired for a month to look after their home and their dog. As soon as the lady began to explain her residence in the Griffiths’ house, Esme remembered that the date of the most recent leadership team meeting had been conditioned by Marcus and Hilda’s forthcoming late holiday in Italy. They were traveling, she recalled, through Switzerland, and staying for a few days in a hotel by the Italian lakes, before stopping off for a week in Venice, continuing to Tuscany and on to a favorite spot in Florence, flying home from there. They would be away a month.
Esme thanked the house sitter and ended the conversation.
She wondered about going out to see Jabez, but decided it would be too late for that household by the time she arrived. The following day she had promised the afternoon for pastoral visiting, but the morning was still free. She thought if the weather remained fine she would cycle over to Wiles Green in the morning, just to say hello.
Esme played five more games of solitaire, looked at various Internet sites she had listed for a free moment, and then decided on an early night.
After breakfast in the morning, she cycled over to Wiles Green and found Ember returning down from the orchard with the hen-food bucket as she came round the corner of the house into the yard.
“Mornin’.” Ember watched her dismount and prop the bike against the wall. “You welcome as always to a cup of tea if you fancy my company, but Jabez gone to Shropshire to see his son. Went Monday. He’ll be back for the weekend.”
Esme looked at her in surprise. “I had no idea Jabez had any children!”
“Two sons he got. Hardly ever sees ’em. He got no money to travel. They got no money to travel. He writes sometimes.”
“Oh. Are they married? Has he got grandchildren?”
“One was married but his wife left him, took the kids with her—you know how ’tis nowadays. The other one sits the other side of the church; he won’t be marrying.” She swung the bucket, making the handle rattle. “You having a cup of tea? I got the kettle just on the boil.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll just stow this pail back in the shed. Don’t you let on to Jabez you caught me feeding his hens this late—he’ll be ticking me off. Don’t see why. Hens likes a lie-in same as I do.”
Esme doubted this, but didn’t say so. She followed Ember across the yard into the kitchen and sat at the table, watching her make the tea.
“Jabez’s sons,” volunteered Ember conversationally, as she peered into the brown depths of the pot and stirred the tea, “is, as you might expect, not unlike Jabez. Achievements and qualifications all about as spectacular as his. Samuel, the oldest one, he got a BA—failed—from York University. Enjoyed prowling around the North York Moors, investigating ancient archaeological sites, and studying up on The Dream of the Rood and Old English as I gather, but not so enthusiastic when it came to George Eliot or Milton. Young Samuel says Milton is good for sterilizing nappies and that’s about all. According to Jabez, unless you got a good nodding acquaintance with the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Catholic Mass, you got no understanding of any English literature up until the 1970s anyway. That’s what he says. If ’tis so then it’s hardly surprising Samuel missed his mark—never been near a church in his life, not even baptized. Adam now, his younger son, he never failed anything on account of he never went to any college in the first place. Adam says he’s like his father—got a hereditary DNA in Getting By. Seems to be the case, he can turn his hand to most things. If life has a manual or a rule book, nobody ever told those three.
“’Tis Samuel was married. Well, if this ain’t brewed now, it never will be.”
Jabez usually poured the tea through a strainer into the mugs. Ember didn’t bother. She said an occasional tea leaf to chew made it more interesting.
“I suppose I should find a few days to visit my family sometime soon too,” said Esme, with less enthusiasm than she had intended. Ember watched her, attentive and shrewd.
“I’m sorry—that sounded as though I didn’t look forward to seeing them. I do—I mean, they’re my family. It’s just, I don’t know what exactly, somehow they make me feel a bit of a failure. They’re not Methodist. I was brought up Church of England. They think chapel is quaint and unsophisticated and a bit vulgar. My parents came to hear me preach once. I remember it. I gave my best shot at quite a complicated expository sermon on the teaching structure of Saint Mark’s gospel. Afterward, my mother said—I can only imagine the remark was one she’d dreamed up earlier to have ready, and she’d slept through the actual service—‘Ah, you Methodists; a simple belief: Just have faith. How comforting. I wish I could be like that, but the Anglican Church is a thinking church, intellectual.’ They never came to hear me again. One of my sisters is the headmistress of a girls’ private school. She went on a conference last March, where they were told how important it is to give themselves little treats to reward all the hard work they do—she says she works a hundred-hour week. So she did treat herself. She bought herself a state-of-the-art wall-mounted CD player. Goodness only knows how much it cost. My other sister is a doctor. My brother is a research chemist. I’m not quite sure what he’s doing at the moment. It’s all covered by the Official Secrets Act. They’re very sweet to me, fond of me. But with the same affection they might show to a much-loved poodle, one that’s been in the family a long time. I’ve dreamed sometimes of becoming a superintendent and then a district chair and then the president of the conference—just to show them. Even if I managed it, I’m not sure they know what the president of the conference is, or does. Actually, I’m not sure I do myself. I think they vary wildly between the ones that deliver impassioned speeches expounding radical political views and the ones with nice smiles that have trouble finding a place to put their handbag down while they bless the winner of the sandcastle competition.”
Ember chuckled. “Something been upsetting you? You sound a bit curdled today.”
Esme didn’t reply. She felt unsettled and restless and sad. Eventually, “Ember,” she said, “do you pray?”
Ember considered this question without surprise.
“I light fires,” she offered, after awhile.
“Pardon? Fires? Where?” Esme looked at her, slightly startled, waiting for enlightenment.
“Anywhere. In the orchard. In the little hearth in my bedroom. At my old place I lit ’em in the garden near the hedge. Under the stars is best. Fires is fragrant, and calls to the Being at the heart of it all. Twig by twig I makes ’em. I takes my time—just little fires we’re talking about, not roaring great bonfires. On the burning I lay dried pinecones from the woods and the roadside. Slips of rosemary, dried sage. In the smoke is all my yearnings. Dreams that never came to be. My sense of home. In the smoke is the brown bears, kept in cages, their gallbladders tapped for bile for Chinese medicine. And foxes, running for home, not knowing their earth is blocked by the hunter. And the forests, cut down for loggers and cattle ranchers. And the streams, fouled with factory effluents and sewage and corpses. In the smoke is the bluebell woods and the daffodil woods, the brilliance of the moon, and a bird singing after dusk on a warm summer night. The sound of the surf on the shingle, and the wind in the tops of the pines. I sits by the fire, and I says nothing, although sometimes I weep. I’m not sure what deity is, my love; but life is sacred, life is wise. One day, if my smoke finds the way home, and wakes the great Spirit, then the face of life that is death will come speeding silent like a hunting owl, and take the cancer of humanity off this poor, stripped, raped mother Earth, take it silent and quick, no more than a squeak of alarm; and the mountains will have their peace again, and the oceans give back the heavenly blue. The guns and the cars will rust, and the televisions will be quiet at last, and the factories and schools and government buildings will be for the bramble, the rat, and the crow. Is that what you call praying? Or is it just fires?”
“I think it’s what I call praying,” said Esme. “Ember, I just can’t pray anymore.”
There are very, very few people to whom a minister, whose house and income are linked inextricably to the willingness to pray, may make that deadly confession. Ember seemed like one of the few. Esme heard her own voice sadly and hopelessly speak the words; and it came as a relief.
“Another cup of tea? I think we’d squeeze one more each out of this pot? Yes?”
Ember poured out the tarry, cooling dregs.
“What do you call praying, then, my love; that you can’t do?”
Esme sighed. “Well, just the usual things. I should have a quiet time in the morning; read the Bible. Maybe use the prayer handbook or the district prayer calendar to intercede for the world and the church. I should confess my sins and pray for the sick; I should pray through the pastoral list. I might use the Order for Morning or Evening Prayer in the Methodist Worship Book. There’s lots of modern resource stuff I could get to help me, if only I could get by this terrible inertia. I could do Ignatian visualizations or meditate on a short text or use the words of a hymn.”
“I’m not surprised you got trouble praying!” Ember sounded impressed. “You got the same trouble I get buying food in a supermarket. Better with an apple from the orchard or the egg new-laid from under the hen.”
“But what am I going to do?” Esme cried out. “I’m a minister, I can’t carry on just not praying; I’m a fraud!”
“My mother was born in Wiles Green,” said Ember, with apparent irrelevance, “but my father didn’t come from this part of the world. My hat! This tea tastes foul, don’t it! Let me throw that out, and we’ll start again with a fresh pot.”
The slops went in the compost bucket, and Ember drew fresh water, which she set to boil.
“My father came from some mountain part on the border of India, I think. He grew up in one of they villages you see on calendars, houses with the roof made out of grey stone shingles. He had a pilgrim soul, my father, didn’t stay with us all that long; but after he moved on he used to write to me now and then. He sometimes used to speak to me about Siddhartha, the Buddha. My father told me this word Buddha just means someone who is awake. He said that Siddhartha taught people only to wake up. To pay attention, be present—‘as I am to you,’ my father used to say—to live mindfully. My father spoke about life lived on purpose. When he walked, he walked slow, because his feet kind of loved the ground. Every step he took, he gave attention to. He said whatever I was doing, I was to do it with all my attention, even just sitting quietly, watching, or listening. He said you got to have presence of mind. When I was podding peas, he taught me to gaze on my hands and love them working. He said that in the peas were sunshine and rain from clouds and dew and earth. Our mother spoke about the garden having good soil for growing peas, and he used to say, ‘Not soil; soil is a word that means dirt. Say earth, not soil; for the earth puts out living plants from the living body of her sacred being. Reverence the gift. Reverence the earth.’ He would take up a handful of earth in his hands, rub it, and sniff it, and he’d nod in satisfaction. ‘Earth is clean and good,’ he told me. And he said to our mother we children were to have earth and air, fire and water to play with, which fortunately wasn’t hard in the part of the country we lived in at that time. He often told us to practice the yoga of reverence, until when I was a teenager I asked him what he meant by it. He laughed at me—almost everything made him laugh; not unkindly, he just didn’t mind about things. He said it meant seeing into the heart of whatever you had before you until the fire of its divine life revealed itself to you. Anything—from a cut finger to a plate of steamed cabbage to a sinkful of washing up. A vase of perfumed lilies or dog mess in the yard. The eyes of your bridegroom when he gives himself to you in marriage and the eyes of the same man when he tells you he’s leaving you. He said we were to be present to every being we encounter with absolute respect, and treat ourselves with the same respect. I can remember him now, he spoke softly always, saying, ‘Every living being is present to this moment, therefore you are a part of everything because you are also in this moment. Therefore you are holy because this moment pulsates with the divine. Your only responsibility is to bring your attention to this moment; when you do so, you will perceive the radiance of divine light illuminating everything that is.’ He said all kinds of stuff along those lines. I never saw him praying as such—but I saw him peeling potatoes sometimes, and I believe it was much the same thing.”
Esme sat quietly and thought about what she had just heard. She drank her tea Ember had made and poured out and set before her as she was talking.
“I think my congregation would expect me to have a daily quiet time,” she said at last.
“Then take quiet time every day,” Ember replied. “Invite your God. Say, ‘God, have you noticed the quietness of this time? Have you got your full attention on this moment? Good. So have I.’ I tell you what isn’t prayer, my love. Worrying isn’t.”
Esme smiled. “No—you’re absolutely right. I can see that.”
The conversation remained with her through the week—she realized that it had been the first time she had talked with Ember at any length. She felt that in Ember she had encountered something very solid and uncompromising and strong, very wise, too. Esme had mentioned how helpful she had found it to spend time with Jabez, to have the fresh view of his perspective on life, and to hear what he had to say as they sat and chatted in his workshop or by the fireside in the living room of his cottage. Ember had looked at her, a look that Esme couldn’t read.
“Jabez?” she had replied. “He got plenty to say to anyone with the same interests. And sometimes, my love, you do well to listen to what he doesn’t say—especially to you.”
That puzzled Esme. Had she been insensitive in some way? As she looked back on the many times they had talked, becoming easy with each other as the months went by, Esme felt the sudden upwelling of sadness again; she did not want this move, without really knowing why.
In early November, once Marcus had come back from Italy, the leadership team met again. It was decided that after Christmas, Esme could talk to the stewards in her section churches about the changes to come. Then alternative plans for the future would be presented to the church councils and to the circuit meeting in the spring, the implications of the decisions there being returned for consideration at the annual church meetings. As they disbanded after an evening of animated discussion, Marcus said to Esme, “You rang us while we were in Italy, my dear. Was it something in particular? Is all well?”
Esme shook her head. “No problems, nothing to worry about. I just had a thought that maybe I could come and see you, to talk through where I might go, what I might do next.”
“Why don’t you join us for supper, Esme? Tonight is good if you have no other engagement and feel you can face any more on the topic today.”
Esme accepted, gratefully. That evening, driving through the dark lanes to Wiles Green, she reflected on how quickly the summer seemed to have come and gone; the seasons like a wheeled thing rolling downhill, picking up speed as it goes. I suppose it’s because the summer was so chilly and wet this year, she thought. I haven’t had enough of the sun, I feel so tired and dispirited; I’m not ready yet for the winter.
Hilda, on the lookout, saw her approach, and stood framed in the warm light of her open doorway as Esme climbed out of her car.
“Welcome! Come in, my dear, come in! Such a dreary night, come in by the fire, come in!”
As Hilda took her coat, Esme asked how the trip to Italy had gone.
“Oh, marvelous, my dear, but just marvelous! It was so lovely to have Jeremy with us—our youngest son, did you know he came? It’s never easy for him to get time away from that business of his, it seems to gobble up his living daylights, but just for once he could snatch a few weeks—he had to fly home from Venice of course, and I would so much have liked him to be able to enjoy Florence, but well—I’m sorry, Marcus? Did you call? No, of course we’re coming, just a moment of girlish chatter—wine I should think if you’re pouring. Come along in, my dear, I’m just dying to show you our photographs—unless of course you absolutely detest other people’s holiday snaps—well, it can be tedious, don’t you think? Of course it can. There now, in you go, make yourself comfy, that’s right, here’s Marcus with your wine. Oh, and nuts—I shouldn’t know Marcus at a party without his nuts, a very pressing host sometimes—take a handful, there you are!”
Esme admired the photographs of lakeside hills and wayside shrines, the Venetian squares and bridges and waterways, and the glories of Florence. She learned that Jeremy, who appeared in some of the snaps, a youthful clone of his father, ran a small chain of juice bars catering to health-conscious executives in the West End of London. Hilda again expressed concern about how hard he worked and how time-consuming his business commitments were. Required to corroborate this, Marcus expressed the opinion that possibly Jeremy’s attitude to his work was a little less languid than it had been to his studies at school; but Esme could see how proud of the young man his father felt.
“And of course now Sophie has her little gallery in Piccadilly, it’s much more handy—she and Jeremy can both be based in the London flat now, and it does save so much running about. Back and forth to Paris was no joke in the long term.”
Esme said she could see that this would be so. Gathering the photographs into neat piles again, she replaced them in the envelopes on her lap. “Those are beautiful. What a wonderful trip,” she said.
“Oh, it was! Last year in Russia,” Hilda threw up her hands in horror at the memory; “well, Marcus would go. Leningrad it had to be. Oh, I admit we saw some splendid things but, dear me, icons ad infinitum and the acrylic alphabet that nobody could make head or tail of. I was honestly just glad to come home! Now then you must be famished—I’ve a nice little casserole, just the thing for a cold night. You and Marcus can talk over your church nonsense while I flap about in the kitchen. It’s so nice of you to look at my photographs, my dear—you know how it is, people just fall asleep looking!”
Marcus, ensconced in the comfortable depths of his armchair on the other side of the fire, sipped his wine reflectively.
“Are you happy about your move?” he asked Esme, when Hilda had gone out of the room.
She responded cautiously, “Well, if this hadn’t come up, I think I should have hoped for a reinvitation to stay, but it all seems practical; I am looking upon it as an opportunity.”
Marcus nodded. “But you—” he bent and placed his glass on the corner of the modern York stone hearth, which looked remarkably at home in this old house with its antique furnishings, “—you had no particular reason why you might have preferred to stay on with us at Wiles Green?” he asked.
Wiles Green? Esme thought of Miss Trigg. How strange that he might think I had a special attachment to the chapel at Wiles Green. He can’t face worshipping there himself!
“No? Just a question of finding the right way forward? I had thought—” he hesitated, “—I had thought the suggestion I might offer for restructuring would be to combine Southarbour with the little chapels that remain to the west of it, leaving Brockhyrst Priory and Wiles Green to the north as a tiny section suitable for a half-timer; which could be a supernumerary just retired looking for a few more active years or a minister in local appointment who might welcome half a stipend.”
“I suppose it’s possible one of our retired ministers would take them on, but those two chapels are no doddle to run,” said Esme. “And we haven’t got a minister in local appointment.”
“No,” Marcus admitted. “Not at the moment, but you never know.”
“Well, but we’ve got to plan for what we have now,” said Esme, perplexed. “Unless you know something I don’t know.”
Marcus shook his head. “It was only a thought,” he said. “And I’m quite sure you know more about it all than I do. You feel there are no ties for you here then, beyond the natural preference for spending a while longer with the congregations you have come to know?”
“Yes, but somehow … well, if I’m honest, I’m sad to be going; but it’s clear I’m the obvious choice if one of us has to leave. And after all, I’d have had to move on eventually, wouldn’t I? I’m getting less and less convinced that it’s part of the vocation, but the reality is that it’s part of the job.”
“Yes.” The curious, speculative way Marcus was looking at her suddenly reminded her of the way Seer Ember had sat considering her in Jabez’s kitchen.
“What?” she asked, feeling slightly unnerved.
Marcus smiled. “I feel not entirely happy about these decisions for change. It seems to me the discussions might have waited until a moment of natural parting. I’m going to go ahead and make my suggestion to the team, Esme; that we make a small section suitable for, say, a minister in local appointment. We may attract somebody. It isn’t only older people who go for local appointment. Sometimes folk feel called to ministry who, for reasons of family commitments or other ties to a local area, are looking for something more stable, more rooted maybe.”
Why is he telling me this? Esme wondered, bewildered. For heaven’s sake, I know what local appointment entails. Why is he insisting on pursuing this cul-de-sac when there’s no one here it applies to?
“Ah! Ready, my dear?” Marcus got to his feet and stood politely waiting for Esme to accompany him to the dining room.
After they had eaten, as Hilda disappeared to brew some coffee, Esme asked Marcus for some advice in choosing her way forward.
“It’s funny,” she said, “there seems to be no particular area or type of ministry that calls to me—all I know is, I’m quite happy here. I think I’ll try for somewhere not too far away.”
Marcus had no advice to offer, however, and as she mulled over their conversation on the way home, Esme concluded he was probably sensible; people have to accept responsibility themselves for the choices they make.
November, overcast and cold, damp with recurrent drizzle, persisted dismally in the direction of Advent. Esme gazed out of her study window at the cheerless sight of her front garden clogged with a sodden mat of fallen leaves, the earth of its borders between the skeletal rose bushes interrupted by the broken, awkward shapes of dead plants blackened by night frosts.
She sat planning the format for Portland Street’s service of Advent Light scheduled for the first Sunday of December in ten days time. Piled on her desk were files of previous Advent services, carols-by-candlelight liturgies, Christingles, and school end-of-term winter services, intended to offer her inspiration. So far none had.
She pulled a lined pad toward her. “People, Look East,” she jotted down, and “O come, O come, Emmanuel” and “When the Lord in Glory Comes.” Changing tack for a moment, she reached for her card file, flicked through to find the telephone numbers of the choir mistress at Brockhyrst Priory and Southarbour’s worship bandleader; these she wrote down in readiness at the bottom of the sheet of paper. Suddenly, her attention was caught by something green pulling up alongside the pavement beyond her garden wall. “Good Lord! It’s Jabez!” she said aloud, wondering as she left her desk and went to open the front door, if it was right to feel so pleased at the interruption.
“Hello!” she called out to him, happy at his unexpected arrival. He had been about to take something out of the back of his truck, but hearing her call, left it, and came toward the house. Esme delighted afresh in the curious, shy, “I’m not here” mode of his approach. How does he do it? she asked herself, smiling at the sight of him in his huge waxed jacket and rivers of silver hair.
He lifted his eyes in one bright glance as he came to where she stood on the doorstep. “I thought you might be glad of your leaves raked,” he said, nodding toward the damp mass obscuring her small front lawn. “And round the back,” he added. “I popped in yesterday while you were out, but no rake in the shed, so I came back today. All right?”
“Oh, Jabez! You are a darling! That would be absolutely wonderful! Would you like a cup of tea first?”
He smiled. “Well, you put the kettle on while I make a start on these. Cup of tea be most welcome, but I haven’t come to hold up whatever you’re busy with.”
Esme shook her head, laughing. “Oh, no! Please do! I shall be glad of an excuse to stop! Have you got a rake then? Is there anything else you need?”
“No, I got all I’ll be wanting in the back of the truck. Esme, you got no proper compost bins here, have you? If I find a spare morning and I can pick up some forklift pallets or something somewhere, shall I pop in and knock up a place for leaf mold and for your kitchen compost down the end of the garden? Rots down better if it’s properly contained.”
“Does it? Well, yes, that would be lovely.” Esme didn’t dare tell him she recycled nothing and threw all her kitchen waste out with everything else for the dustman to take to the landfill site—or that there wasn’t much kitchen waste anyway because most of what she bought was ready-meals in the first place. “I’ll put the kettle on then,” she said, changing the subject.
When, having made a cup of tea and put some flapjacks out on a plate, she returned awhile later to the front doorstep to invite him in, she found him with the leaves raked into neat piles, which he was collecting onto a tarpaulin he had spread on the tarmac drive. She observed that he had brought a yard broom with him, and presumably, intended to sweep up the fallen leaves thickly edging the driveway, too.
“With you in a minute,” he said, glancing up.
In the once or twice she had seen him since his visit to Samuel in Shropshire, Esme had at some point mentioned in conversation the despair she felt at her inability to tend her garden adequately. “It’s such a tangle,” she had said. “I quite like gardening, but it’s a bit big for me, and there are so many other things to be done. The minister before me never did anything in the garden, but the one before him was a real enthusiast, so there are all these dead things and weeds that have colonized the bare earth of the veggie patch. Really horrid weeds too. Ground elder and bindweed and things with deep roots. And now the leaves are falling, I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to catch up with it.”
“I am just so grateful,” she said, as he perched on the high stool at her built-in Formica breakfast bar. “Have a flapjack. Have two. It’s so nice of you. It feels like the cavalry coming over the hill. Whoever else in all the world would turn up out of the blue to rake up all these blessed leaves for me? Thank you so, so much.”
Jabez blinked, pleased and slightly embarrassed.
“Steady on,” he said. “I got a free afternoon, that’s all. I’m glad to be of some use, I rarely enough am.”
Esme smiled at him. “You’ve a large crumb of flapjack lodged in your beard,” she observed.
“Have I? That’s nothing new.” He felt for it and fished it out. “There are some things that don’t go with beards, like professional advancement and spaghetti bolognaise,” he remarked, “but it’s handy for catching the crumbs, it saves on shaving stuff, and I get up quicker in the morning.”
Esme laughed. For a moment there was silence between them.
“D’you know,” she said then, “nobody else comes to help me with the difficult things like you do. I’ve thought about it often, because it’s a curious thing about women in ordained ministry. Sometimes the question is raised as to whether it’s more difficult for women to be ministers, whether there are practices of discrimination or prejudice that we should attend to. In my own experience, I have never met any sense of individuals intentionally making life difficult—I mean, there are plenty of people like Miss Trigg, but then as you said, she’s entitled to her point of view as much as I am to mine. And yet … oh, it’s hard to put my finger on what the difference is, it’s just little things all the time; ordinary, mundane things that nobody notices—even I don’t notice most of the time. You know, I’ve sat in the Synod at lunchtime, and all the ministers are undoing their sandwiches, opening their plastic boxes and their cling-film packets—and I’ve heard the men saying things like ‘What’s this then? I’ve never had one of these before’; which makes it clear they didn’t pack their own lunch, nor yet did the shopping that enabled the packed lunch to be made. Once I made a remark to a male colleague comparing one grocery store to another; he smiled with a sort of polite interest and then said he didn’t really know because he hadn’t been in any of them—his wife does all the shopping. That man’s wife doesn’t sit at home polishing her nails the rest of the time either; she’s a community psychiatric nurse. And our superintendent, at a staff meeting, will look at his watch and say, ‘I’ll have to be back by one, because Jean will have the dinner ready.’ I’ve sat in a committee at Westminster, a roomful of men and me the only woman except one—and she was the secretary of one of the men, there to take notes, you know? And we sat round the table before the meeting began, polite chat. The talk was all about recently visited London art exhibitions and the latest computer software. A couple of the men were having hard times. One of them said his secretary was off sick, and the other one said his computer had crashed—or was it the other way round? Then the door swung open, and into this elegant chatter—I mean, the committee was to discuss poverty in Britain today, and the Methodist church is supposedly a scrupulously egalitarian institution—in walked two black ladies bearing platters of sandwiches. And I asked myself, is this the church of Jesus Christ? Is this how it’s meant to be? But, Jabez, what really gave me the creeps is that nobody else thought anything of it!
“And in my own life, if I were a man alone—I know this is true from the experience of male colleagues—they’d bring me chocolate cake and ask me round to dinner and offer to help me clean my house. But because I’m a woman, they expect me to help run the bazaar and take an active interest in making the coffee after worship and bake buns for church teas. It’s so unfair! If I were a male married minister, my wife would probably do half my pastoral visiting and help me with all the socializing and remember Christmas cards and relatives’ birthdays, as well as get the shopping and vacuum the floors and cook the tea. But if I as a woman were married, my husband would go out to work and that would probably be his contribution to the household. Full stop!
“Sometimes as I’ve been driving seven miles out to Wiles Green along rutted lanes with a fruit salad or a huge vat of soup on the passenger seat, on my way to an event where I have responsibility for all the proceedings as well, I ask myself, Why am I doing this? If I whine about it to any other women minister, she just looks at me over her pack of sandwiches (not the one her husband made, the one she stopped to buy at the garage shop when she was filling up with petrol on the way to Synod) and says, ‘Well, why are you?’ And I’ll tell you why, Jabez, it’s because although I can preach and chair a meeting and do all that the job requires, underneath it all I’m not a modern woman; I’m not sure of my role, and something in me mourns the passing of tradition.”
He looked at Esme. One eyebrow twitched expressively, and there was a smile in his eyes. He said nothing until he was sure she’d stopped, and then, “Um, men do vary,” he ventured.
Esme gazed at him hopelessly. “Jabez, I’m so, so tired,” she said.
Jabez nodded. He sipped his tea and sat quietly. Esme looked at him, his body relaxed but aware, his eyes thoughtful; she saw a poise in him that she had seen in wild things, not often in human beings.
In the course of her life, Esme had usually had a special friend. When something interesting or important happened to her that she was bursting to share, she would find that whoever she told, she hadn’t really told it, not felt she had really been heard, until she told her special friend. Over the last few months she had begun to find, without consciously realizing it, that so it was now with Jabez. Whatever her news or her trouble might be, if only she could tell Jabez, nothing more needed to be said.
“Four years ago, my husband left me.” Esme’s fingers picked up a till receipt that lay among other discarded papers on the breakfast bar. Absentmindedly, she began to fold and refold it. “I trusted him, you know. He told me he loved me, spun such dreams for me, till I was caught in the silken threads of romance like a fly in a spider’s web. He promised me he’d love me always, take care of me. He called me his princess and he said the moon was a silver ball and he’d climb up to heaven and bring it down.” She broke off, feeling foolish. Truly she had fallen for the loveliness of it all, the wedding and the happiness of being chosen, of achieving something her family might admire; of being, for a man who had seemed so clever and accomplished and sophisticated, the Only One. Except she hadn’t been. “It was all right for a while,” she said. “I mean, we managed fourteen years together, just about. We were happy, more or less, right up until the time I was accepted as a candidate for ordained ministry. I don’t know what happened, it was as though he saw me as a competitor. He’d always insisted he supported the idea of me following that path, but …”
Her voice trailed away, and she sat for a while remembering. Then she stirred, and looked at Jabez. It intrigued her, the way under a veil of quietness in his face, lights and shadows of his soul dappled and flickered. He sat without moving, impassive, but so alive. He waited for her to speak, but she felt understood; she had no need to say any more.
“Esme, I better get those leaves done,” he said after awhile, finishing his tea. He got down from the high stool, took his mug to the sink, rinsed it, and looked round for the dishtowel to dry it.
“My experience is limited,” he said, glancing at her with a shy smile as he dried the mug, “but I guess you have to be wary of eloquence. In general, if a man is in love—I mean really, deeply in love—you won’t get much more out of him than the bleat of a strangled sheep when he tries to tell you how much he cares for you. Never trust the staying power of a love that can be expressed as ‘I adore you, darling!’”
Esme laughed. “I see!” she mocked him. “So you could go weak at the knees at the sight of me, and you’d never be able to tell me so!”
He put the mug back on its hook with the others, and hung the dishtowel back on the rail it had come from.
“That’s right,” he said quietly. “Now I better get on with those leaves.”