Esme woke early, with Advent on her mind. Tuesday today, first Sunday in Advent coming up. Through her childhood, and as a young woman, Advent had been a season of excitement and happy anticipation, a magical time of year. All that seemed to have been crushed out of it now, by the weight of too many events. She had organized her Christingle service for Portland Street, with a modest prize for the child with the best decorated orange. She had contacted the Scout leaders from Brockhyrst Priory to arrange a small band of instrumentalists for the Advent service of light. She had appealed for carol singers from all three churches for carol singing round the village at Brockhyrst Priory. Her Christmas service details were in to the local paper, and she had written three pastoral letters for the church magazines of each of her three chapels, remembering to include a plug for the Covenant service in early January, there being no January magazine. The watch-night service on New Year’s Eve was sorted and the Christmas midnight communion, too. The carols services at each of her three chapels had been scheduled so that she could officiate at all three—it meant Wiles Green taking the 4:30 slot again this year, but they didn’t seem to mind. In her diary she had noted a number of social occasions; the circuit staff and stewards’ New Year’s party (all ladies to bring a dessert, the superintendent’s wife to provide the main course; Esme was on fruit salad again) and the Portland Street choir dinner at a two-star hotel in a side road a few hundred yards in from the seafront. The choir went there every year, securing at a knockdown price a cheerful evening with a mediocre meal. The youth leader had invited her to the Brownies’ and Rainbows’ Christmas party, and she had been approached with a request to take a small service for the playgroup that met at Portland Street. She had been invited to the Christmas celebrations of five house groups; in each case Esme was to give a Christmas message, after which there would be a party with finger foods. She had been asked to give the Christmas address for the Multiple Sclerosis Society carol service, taking place in Brockhyrst Priory chapel for the first time this year, and she was to say a prayer at the conclusion of the annual junior school Christmas concert in Portland Street chapel. There remained outstanding some arrangements to be made about the donkey belonging to the livery stables, in preparation for the Living Crib that the vicar of St. Raphaels at Wiles Green masterminded each year. It had occurred to him that ecumenism would spread the burden of forward planning, and he had invited Esme to be part of the proceedings, which involved her sourcing a recently delivered mother, a lantern on a hook, and a reliable donkey. The stable was a regular venue, so nobody had to fix that. On the first Saturday in December, which was AIDS week, Esme had promised to take part in a special service at the Anglican church in the center of Southarbour. She also noted that she had two planning meetings scheduled in early and late December for a bereavement group preparing special intercessions for the hospice anniversary service, which wasn’t till February but had to be planned ahead to enable fliers for distribution in the New Year.
Suddenly remembering the preparatory planning necessary for the week of prayer for Christian unity in mid-January and the ecumenical service on Bible Sunday, Esme found herself very wide awake at six o’clock in the morning, which was early for her. Lying in bed mentally reviewing her various commitments and responsibilities for a while hardly seemed to improve them. Fervently hoping that no one would die and require a funeral before the end of the first week of January, Esme got up to make a cup of tea.
Seizing the opportunity offered by an early start to the day, in a moment of resolve she took her copy of the Methodist Worship Book off the shelf and used the set form of Morning Prayer as devotions to start the day. Feeling virtuous, as light came, she decided to go for a ride on her bike as well. She ate a bowl of cereal and left the washing up in the sink for later, locked up the house, and got her bike out of the shed. As she cycled out in the direction of Brockhyrst Priory, encouraged by the emergence of a promise of sunshine after two weeks of drizzling rain, it occurred to her to push on in the direction of Wiles Green and drop in for a cup of tea with Jabez and Ember, who she thought would most likely be up by now. The morning sunlight strengthened as she rode through the lanes. She encountered a number of people out walking their dogs and some schoolchildren walking along to the main road to wait for the bus. She went cautiously, because the postal delivery vans were busy in the lanes at this time, and other vehicles were hurrying to workplaces. Fallen leaves packed on the road surface made the way slippery, and in the places of shadow it was still icy. Esme felt glad to arrive in one piece at the Old Police House. She dismounted from her bike and wheeled it up the path to the cottage, leaving it propped against the wall of the kitchen.
Knocking on the door, and then immediately opening it to let herself in, she found her friends in the warmth of the kitchen, chatting, the early sunlight streaming through the window above the sink that looked up the garden into the orchard. On the table, the remains of breakfast things still stood around the big brown teapot in its multicolored knitted tea cozy (Ember’s work). Ember sat in her corner by the stove, and Jabez sat by the table on one stool, his back resting against the wall, his feet up on the other stool. They each held a mug of tea, steaming. It was a companionable sight, and as Jabez put down his tea without question and reached up a hand to the shelf for a third mug, Esme felt a sudden impulse of happiness in the warmth of the welcome always there for her, confidence in friendship given.
“You’re abroad early,” said Ember. “You had your breakfast, or will I make some more fried bread?”
“Oh, dear, don’t give me fried bread!” It may have sounded ungracious but the words were spoken before she thought twice. “I mean, it’s ever so kind of you, but I just have to lose some weight. I cycled everywhere during the summer but I don’t seem to have lost a pound—it just made me hungry and I ate more.”
“I expect it’s just muscle then,” said Ember consolingly. “Muscles be heavier than fat.”
Jabez held out the mug of tea he had poured her and took his feet off the stool, pushing it toward her for a seat.
“It’s okay,” she said, leaning her back against the edge of the sink, “I’m fine over here. I don’t think it is muscle, Ember, I think it’s middle-aged spread.” She sighed. “It makes me feel so frumpy.”
“You don’t look frumpy,” Jabez said quietly. “Just—” and then he mumbled something in the direction of his tea that Esme didn’t catch. She looked at him, intrigued, but he wouldn’t look back at her.
Ember, alert, her eyes snapping with mischief, caught Esme’s eye. “I believe,” she said with a grin, “those words, if that’s what you can call ’em, were ‘nice to hold.’”
Esme took a moment to register her own delight in the compliment—that it was more precious to her than she might have expected. Jabez took refuge in his mug of tea. Ember regarded them both with intense interest.
“Well,” she said, “you bring him something nice to hold, he got the bike shed, what are you waiting for?”
Jabez froze in rigid embarrassment, his hand halfway returning his mug to the table. For a moment he said nothing, just stared fixedly at the space in front him. Then he placed the mug very quietly, deliberately, on the table.
“Ember, for heaven’s sake, she’s a minister,” he said. “That’s disrespectful to say such a thing.”
Not in the least put out by this rebuke, Ember regarded him with skepticism, leaning forward to say, “Jabez Ferrall, you tell me you look at Esme and see a minister, and I’ll call you a liar to your face.”
Desperate, turning his head away as an animal turns its head from the bars of a cage, not looking at either of them, Jabez said firmly to Esme, “I wouldn’t lean against that sink if I were you; you’ll get a line of water on your back. Excuse me now, I haven’t fed the hens.”
Avoiding their gaze, he got to his feet and crossed the kitchen, escaping into the yard and closing the door firmly behind him.
“He has,” said Ember, with a grin.
They heard the postman call to him, and Jabez reply; but he didn’t bring the letters into the cottage.
“Oh, dear.” Esme felt worried. “I think he was really offended, Ember. Don’t you think you should maybe go and apologize?”
Ember’s face wrinkled into laughter, which shook her small frame.
“Leave him be, he’ll come round,” she chuckled. “Bring that tea and sit you down here at the table. Jabez takes hisself too serious most of the time. ’Tis a male disease.”
Esme smiled, and came to sit with Ember.
After awhile Esme asked, “Will either of his sons come home for Christmas?”
Ember shook her head.
“If you ain’t religious that way, then all Christmas brings is expense,” she replied. “He sends them a card and what money he can for a present. If he’s lucky, they remember to send him a card, at least before January’s too far started. We have Christmas very quiet here. Jabez likes to listen to carols on the radio, and when the shops reduce the prices of everything after Boxing Day, we have some stuffing and a bird, a Christmas puddin’ and a jar of brandy butter. Last year he gave me some chocolates—that was nice; and I’d knitted him a scarf which he was glad of. I got a book put away for him this year; saw it at a jumble sale in the summer.”
“What’s the book?” Esme asked.
“Annie Dillard—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She done a good thing in there about stalking muskrats, and I reckon Jabez’ll like reading that.”
“I don’t think I know it,” said Esme. She sat for a while, contemplating the month ahead and shook her head. “I think I’ll be lucky to get through Christmas alive! It’s just so hectic. The last thing in the marathon will be just a morning service on Boxing Day (being Sunday, but we’ve cancelled the evening worship); and then I drive up to stay with my family for a few days. Back in good time for the New Year’s services. It feels a bit like a treadmill sometimes.”
Ember looked at her curiously. “Do you enjoy your work?” she asked.
Esme blinked, surprised. “Do you know,” she replied after a moment’s thought, “that is not a question I’ve ever asked myself. I believe in it—I think. It’s worthwhile, I suppose. The church at its worst is soul-destroying, but it’s the only institution founded on a command to offer unconditional love and that’s a wonderful raison d’être.”
“A what?”
“Reason for being there. When my husband left me, I lost quite a lot of myself. Hope, you know, and confidence. I have found comfort in the work; if nothing else it keeps me busy.”
“You ain’t very happy then?”
Esme considered this. “Well—yes and no. I feel a bit restless sometimes, for reasons I can’t fully analyze. Something to do with my own fulfillment—I don’t know. I seem to achieve remarkably little. But the people are kind, and the work is something I feel able to offer. When I preach, I feel alive.”
Under Ember’s perspicacious gaze, Esme felt it all sounded very empty and inadequate. “More tea?” Ember asked her, but she shook her head.
“Surely, though,” Esme protested then, “that’s how it is for all of us, isn’t it? Life in the real world is a very humdrum thing; we have only moments of exhilaration. Isn’t it the same for you? Like the prayer book calls it—‘ordinary time’?”
“I’ve had good times and bad,” Ember said. “I was not much more than a girl when I married; my husband left and good riddance and I never looked for another. Bad news is men, most of ’em. I never had any money nor wanted none. I done bits to get by, that’s all. But I had a day when I asked myself, What is it all? What’s it for? I remember it, I was standing in the lane that leads off the top of Stoddards Hill, high summer, and I just stood there and listened to the heartbeat of it, and I saw that life held out its hands to me, and that in the very core of it all there is joy. Make no difference that you got to grieve sometimes and these things happen that tear the very gut out of you. Makes no difference. Its heartbeat is joy, and it holds out its hands to you, and the only doorway into it is this living moment. Worry and fear and longing and desire is about living in tomorrow, and grief and bitterness and regret and pain is living in yesterday. Life is joy, and joy is never tomorrow. There is only now. If you ain’t living now, why, then, you’re dead. And trying to please other people slams the door to joy shut in your face. Walk your own track. Listen to life’s voice with your own ears. Don’t trust truth in packets, especially the ones got warnings and contracts with ’em. Don’t parade your soul around; live quiet and small and simple. Don’t blame anybody for what happens, don’t ask favors and, Esme, don’t look for approval. There’s joy at the middle, but you got to trust things enough to turn your back on the party and choose it.”
“Ember,” said Esme, “you’re amazing.”
On a sudden impulse, she got up from her stool, went round the table to Ember’s corner, and hugged the old woman’s small, plump body against her, bending down to kiss the top of her head. Ember close smelled of wood smoke and herbs and garlic—wood smoke principally; but a very pleasant, wholesome smell.
After a moment, slightly embarrassed at her own display of emotion, she released her and stepped back, and returned to sit on her stool again. Ember looked across at her, dark eyes kind and laughing and wise.
“Jabez’ll be up the orchard, Esme,” she said. “Always goes up the orchard when he’s upset. And I’ve upset him good and proper this morning. Overstepped his boundaries by about fifteen mile.” She spoke with perfect tranquillity, making no comment on Esme’s gesture of affection and contemplating with peaceful detachment the distress she had caused Jabez.
“He’ll come round,” she added. “Needs a bit of a shove sometimes, does Jabez.”
She got up from her chair and opened the stove door, fed it with more firewood, and began to collect the breakfast crockery for washing up.
“You’ll find him in the orchard,” she repeated.
Esme hesitated. “Maybe he’d rather not be disturbed—maybe I should just go home,” she ventured.
Ember paused with the pile of crocks in her hands and regarded her in a way that made Esme feel that she was pitied, better understood than she was quite comfortable with, and an unwilling source of amusement.
“What you get out of this life depends on what you put in, my lady,” was all Ember offered, saying again, “You’ll find him in the orchard,” before busying herself with her tasks at the sink—this required turning her back on Esme: The conversation seemed to have terminated.
Esme drew breath to say one more thing, but, “In the orchard,” said Ember firmly, and did not look round.
So Esme wandered up into the orchard, where she did indeed find Jabez in the furthest corner, sitting on a pile of firewood, smoking a cigarette, and looking upset.
“I’m on my way home, Jabez.” Esme approached him, speaking in a cheerful, ordinary tone, choosing to ignore the look on his face. She had to wait a little while for his reply, and wondered if it would be better just to go, but eventually, “What must you think of us?” he said, bitterly.
“Think of you? You and Ember? I think I’m so, so lucky to have you as my friends. You feel like real friends, true friends, both of you. You always make me feel welcome and loved. And I love your honesty—I wish the world had more people in it as honest as you and Ember.”
He shot her a glance of incredulity. “Ember! I dare swear the world could stand another one or two as honest as me, but if I thought there were any more like Ember I’d take to the woods or top myself!”
“Jabez, why are you so upset?” Esme was beginning to laugh; it all seemed a bit out of proportion. “She was only joking! She didn’t mean it!”
“Joking? Ember doesn’t make jokes. She sees what’s inside you, and she got no mercy. And I hate it. It wasn’t proper what she said—it wasn’t decent. Bike shed! I’m not that kind of man!”
He looked at the end of his cigarette, saw it had gone out, and threw it with some force into the hedge. From under the silver eyebrows another fierce glance shot her way. “And, yes, you are welcome. And you are loved. But I’m not—I wouldn’t—” He stopped, finding himself in difficult territory. “I’m not that kind of man,” he said again. He bent his head, and Esme looked at him sitting with his shoulders hunched to his ears, his elbows resting on his knees, and his hands clasped tight together. She noted her own sense of hope that resulted from his being unable to go through with his insistence that he was not and that he wouldn’t. And what on earth am I doing? she asked her heart. What am I offering him anyway? Where does Jabez fit into my world? How can I be anything but a day-tripper in his?
She watched him, not sure what to do. They seemed to have reached an impasse, it was time to go; and yet she felt certain that she would leave him unhappy all day if she couldn’t bring something better out of this before she left. So, what to put in? For what after all did she want to get out of this life, this encounter? There is only now, Ember had said: “If you aren’t living now, why then you’re dead.” What did she want now, then? Her head and her heart seemed to have met head-on in a Wiles Green lane too narrow for passing places. She just knew she didn’t want him to look so upset.
“I know you aren’t that kind of man,” she said at last. “Bike sheds, I mean. For didn’t you tell me once, making love should be done in a bed; because it’s a thing of tenderness, and it should be warm and comfortable?”
Startled, he looked up at her. So that, she thought, is what it takes to make this man look at me for more than two seconds at a time. She raised her eyebrows, enquiring, smiling at him, deliberately keeping things light. Trying to, at least. He swallowed, blinked, continued to look at her. She had rather hoped he might laugh, but he looked absolutely transfixed.
“What must you think of me?” She echoed his words to him, but gently, offering him his own dignity back. “Jabez, I think I should go.”
Now whatever have I got myself into? she asked herself, as she turned and left him, sitting motionless on the pile of logs.
Is this normal behavior? she wondered, exasperated, as she got on her bike and set off through the lanes. Doesn’t he know how to make light of a thing? Whatever next? She pedaled furiously along the lanes back to Southarbour. I’m neglecting my work. I should be in my study! Why am I wasting time on visiting people who will never come to chapel and on pottering round the countryside on a bicycle?
Suddenly thrust closer to Jabez than she had quite expected to be, she felt flustered and defensive. She directed the energy of her confusion into cycling fast, quite impressed at the ease with which she could master the hills these days. Without allowing it to break into her conscious mind, she turned vigorously from the sense that there was something unfair about keeping from Jabez the plans for her future. She lumped them together in her mind, Jabez and Ember, and reflected that delightful as they both were, they were also undeniably eccentric, odd, and difficult. Tiresome of Jabez to make so much of Ember’s mischievous joke; tasteless and provocative of Ember to say it in the first place. She avoided the memory of her own quick pleasure at what he had said—“nice to hold”—and of something more unsaid between them in the orchard: “For didn’t you tell me, making love should be done in a bed?” Jabez looking at her, startled, hearing what she didn’t say—shouldn’t say, couldn’t say, because she was leaving. And because—with an effort she suppressed the whole memory—there was nothing to be said.
When she reached the safety of the parsonage, Esme felt surprised and impressed with herself to see that she had made it out to Wiles Green and back, and had half an hour’s conversation, and it still wasn’t quite ten o’clock. She made a cup of coffee and retreated to her study with two biscuits. She switched on the computer and going online to check her inbox she found an e-mail from her superintendent minister. He had something to discuss with her, he said, and would she ring him, to make an appointment.
E-mail didn’t come naturally or easily to Esme’s superintendent, though he had recognized the necessity of electronic communications and mastered the basics required. He was of the old school and utterly predictable; in the study every morning, visiting in the afternoons, meetings in the evening. His wife, Sheila, had dedicated her life to being his mainstay and support, her unself-conscious sweetness of manner and warmhearted concern for others providing the backbone of the pastoral care he offered. On the occasions she had been in his parsonage, it amazed and intrigued Esme to see that, after thirty-seven years of ministry, when he heard the telephone ring, which he probably did about twenty times a day, her superintendent would still run from wherever he stood in the house to answer it.
She wondered why he had asked to see her. An inarticulate man with few social skills, he would never contact his colleagues unless he found it unavoidable to do so. A miner’s son, brought up in a family of seven children, frugality was nearer than second nature to him; his phone calls were short, his letters came by second-class post, and he would calculate in advance whether he had to mail them at all, carefully consulting his diary to ascertain if he might rather take advantage of crossing paths with the recipient at a forthcoming church business meeting. He had worked out the shortest mileage from his parsonage to every destination his work regularly encompassed. He wasted no money of his own and none of the circuit’s, though he was generous with both when called upon by others in need. His preaching was sound, safe, uninspiring, and conscientiously recycled over the thirty-seven years, each sermon annotated with the occasions and venues of all its outings.
Esme respected him; in his dealings with his colleagues, he erred from strict fairness only when he felt it necessary to be kind; he understood his administrative responsibilities clearly and undertook them with meticulous detail, remembered everything, and she trusted him to play his part in the circuit reconstruction with honesty, competence, kindness, discretion, and total lack of imagination.
She picked up the telephone and dialed his number. Nine thirty on a Tuesday morning in late November. He answered the telephone instantly, being seated, as she had visualized, in the padded office swivel chair provided by the circuit, at his desk in the study.
“Brian Robinson,” he said, in his loud, unemotional way.
“Hello, it’s Esme. You wanted to see me.”
“Ah, yes, my dear. Some news from the chairman I’d like to discuss with you when you can spare a moment.”
“I can come over today if you like,” she replied.
“Today? Now let me see. I’ve got a funeral call later this morning, about eleven, and a Wesley guild in the afternoon. Tomorrow is my midweek communion, and then in the afternoon I’m running Sheila to the osteopath for her regular visit, taking in some pastoral calls on the way home. How about Thursday?”
“Can’t do,” said Esme. “I’ve got a school assembly early, a sick communion, then I’m the speaker for the ladies’ fellowship at Brockhyrst Priory after lunch, and a wedding rehearsal in the evening. Friday’s busy all day too—I mean, I can pop over right now, I can be with you in ten minutes; or even we could talk on the phone?”
“Oh no, I’d rather not discuss this on the telephone. Let me see.…” He paused. She could hear him breathing. He already had a funeral call to take him away from his sermon preparation in the study. This would further eat into his time. It was Tuesday and he liked to type up and print his order of service and notices sheet on Thursday morning; the sermon would have to be finished before then. Esme could feel him weighing it up in his mind.
“Well, all right. My funeral call is no more than half a mile from you. I’ll finish off this correspondence later, and come over to you now. See you shortly. Righto.”
Puzzled and curious, a quarter of an hour later Esme opened the door to his ring on the loud electric bell and offered him coffee. He accepted the offer, but asked for a small cup. Since he passed his sixtieth birthday, large cups of coffee taken early had started to be a problem to him later in the morning.
He seated himself on her sofa, she gave him a coffee and sat in the armchair, and looked at him, his almost-bald head covered by a few thin strands combed carefully from above his left ear over the pink shining expanse of his scalp to meet the balancing growth of hair at his right ear. The elbows and cuffs of his battered tweed jacket had been reinforced with leather, probably by Sheila. His hand-knitted dark blue waistcoat concealed the fact that his clerical shirt was really only a stock, easily removed when it was time to do his half hour of gardening while Sheila washed up the dishes after their lunch.
“Well?” said Esme.
“It’s about your appointment, my dear.”
It transpired that a minister from a circuit in a wealthy suburb of London had rather precipitately abandoned his congregation in the company of his senior steward, who was the wife of his organist. The organist, heartbroken and embittered, had refused to have anything further to do with the Methodist church and offered his services to the Baptists (they had gratefully accepted, having been managing for years with a second-rate pianist who could neither sight-read nor play the pedals). The church community had been left shocked and distressed, without a minister, a senior steward, or an organist.
In the immediate emergency, the chairman himself had plugged such gaps as he could, and the other staff of the circuit had arranged medium-term pastoral and preaching cover. But the chairman had promised to do what he could to secure a new minister without waiting for the usual slow wheels of stationing to begin to grind. Knowing that when Esme left she would not be replaced, it had occurred to him that though she should give her congregations ample time to make their parting, and the circuit ample time to adjust, nonetheless her move might be brought forward and considered before the usual time in May, if she were interested in investigating the possibility.
“It’s a plum job,” her superintendent stated frankly. “If you want to do well, this would set you on your way. They wouldn’t tolerate just anybody in that part of Surrey. It’s a compliment to your preaching and admin gifts. There’s a rough patch in that circuit, but the section they’re offering you is very smart indeed. Good parsonage—I’ve been in it. Compliment to your pastoral gifts too—it will take something to pull the congregation through this in one piece. Chairman thinks highly of you, my dear; he knows you won’t let him down. What do you think? Take a look?”
Something in Esme’s stomach gave a lurch as the reality of her move came alarmingly nearer. She hesitated. Then, reasoning that as she had committed herself to going, this could save protracted uncertainty, and prove a shrewd step on her inevitably nomadic chosen path, she agreed to pursue the matter. Her superintendent congratulated her; evidently he approved. It made little difference in this circuit except for accelerating the time-table of restructuring. It would help the chairman out of a hole, which would be regarded favorably. And he felt it would be a sound and positive step for Esme, which made him feel a lot better about her having been edged out of the team. Without real thought or discussion, she felt herself crossing another threshold.
When he left, promising to contact the chairman for her, who would initiate the necessary liaison, Esme closed the door behind him and leaned her back on it, feeling shaky and terribly weary.
This had been a sound decision for a minister. If she discussed it with her mother, or any of her family, they would be enthusiastic, Esme felt sure. Her colleagues would be impressed and think she had done well. The circuit stewards would feel relieved. Her own church stewards and members would feel as positive about this as about any move. It was only …
With a sigh, feeling slow and tired and inexplicably miserable, Esme made her way like a sleepwalker to the kitchen. She made herself another coffee and, being temporarily out of flapjacks, took half a packet of biscuits into her study with her. She sat down at her desk and opened the document folder on the computer to check her notes for the last school assembly she had done.
Until she had talked this through with Jabez, she wouldn’t really know what she thought about it herself. What were the implications of that anyway, she asked herself? And why anyway did the deepest part of her say, Not yet! Not yet! whenever she thought about telling Jabez and Ember? Would it cause them so much of a problem? They had certainly been good friends, but she told herself it would be vanity to presume she figured that much in their lives, whatever had passed between them this morning.
She opened the file named Priory Street Infant School. She put Ember and Jabez and everything about the move out of her mind. Nothing had been decided. It would take ages anyway. Next week saw the beginning of Advent. She was unlikely to hear anything before the New Year.
Esme worked determinedly through what remained of the morning. She cycled out to see a blind and frail housebound church member on the outskirts of Brockhyrst Priory in the afternoon. On the way home she called in to the DVD library to choose a film, then stopped at the supermarket and did her shopping, wobbling rather precariously home with her bicycle basket full and three carrier bags dangling from the handlebars unevenly weighting the bike.
She spent three hours as afternoon crossed over into evening ransacking poetry anthologies and the Internet to put together a presentation for the Ladies Fellowship on The Spirituality of Winter. While her supper heated in the microwave, she printed out the poems she had downloaded. Then she took her meal on a tray with a cup of coffee into the sitting room to watch her film. She ate her supper from the plastic container it had come in, telling herself that this was simplicity interpreted by the twenty-first century. In another mood she might have found the film funny and touching: Tonight it seemed irritating and trite. She paused it four times to answer the telephone, without really minding the interruption.
At eleven o’clock that night, the film finished, and she took the tray through the dark passage into the kitchen, where she caught sight of her bicycle handlebars resting against the windowsill. She had forgotten to put it away in the shed.
She deposited her fork and mug in the sink. She looked at the encrusted remains of overmicrowaved lasagna on the walls of the empty plastic container, and guiltily threw it in the bin, trying not to think about Jabez’s disapproval of excess packaging. Then she opened the kitchen door and went out into the back garden to put her bike away. The streets were quiet at this time of night, apart from the sound of a vehicle with a diesel engine climbing the hill toward the parsonage and then ceasing somewhere nearby. She took hold of the cold bike, and, as she wheeled it to the shed, stopped to look up at the night sky. Here in Southarbour the darkness was never profound enough for many stars to be seen. But tonight a sickle moon shone clear and bright in a sky mostly clear of cloud now, and the tingle of frost nipped the end of her nose.
In the shed she startled herself by treading on an empty plastic flowerpot, which broke with a loud crack. It was difficult to stow the bike in the dark, especially as the shed was not large and already accommodated the lawnmower. Extricating herself, she shot home the bolt to fasten the door and snapped the padlock shut. As she did so, she half thought she heard someone speak her name; with a sudden fright as she turned, she realized she was not alone in the garden.
Her clutch of terror turned to simple astonishment as she recognized the figure standing on the frosty grass between the gate at the bottom of the garden and the shed where she stood herself.
“Jabez?”
Esme’s breath as she spoke lingered in a cloud on the frigid air. She stared at him in amazement—for Jabez indeed it was.
She had not been mistaken in thinking she heard his voice quietly speak her name, half wanting her to hear, half afraid to reveal his presence.
The moonlight discerned him, but though he carried something, held something in his hand, she did not take in what he had there. Now seen, he stood there quite still, and across that distance of yards, and even in the dimness of night, there formed between Esme’s eyes and his an electric corridor, such that she felt she might say for certain—and maybe for the first time ever—that looking into the eyes of Jabez Ferrall, her eyes had beheld an immortal soul.
He did not move. Just looked at her, with eyes as full of life, as vital, as a fox or deer or any wild thing that, first surprised, will hold your gaze in message and appraisal; total encounter, a momentary precursor to inevitable flight.
It occurred to Esme that he had expected to find her out in the garden as little as she had expected to find him. Her immediate surmise, that something was wrong, gave way to a sense that having not expected to be discovered, he was urgently contemplating retreat.
So it came about that Esme abandoned her first intention of speech—“Are you all right?”—the question framed in practical, conventional format in the bright, sociable mind that filled all the front stage of her habitual thinking. Instead, from somewhere else, perhaps from the twilight mind of her solar plexus reaching out to worlds beyond, came unbidden the words she actually said. “Don’t run away. Please. Don’t run away.”
And she said it to the wildness and shyness in him, to his privacy and to the depths of half-healed pain in him that, for some reason she couldn’t understand, suddenly stood before her. His face changed then. The uncertainty of the wild thing poised on the brink of involuntary flight crystallized into something more frightened, as will came in to control instinct and he knew he would stay. He came across the garden to her.
She understood when he spoke. The fear that had stolen across him like a shadow more somber than the darkness bewildered her until she heard him say, “I’ve brought you some flowers.”
Flowers. In November. In the middle of the night.
And then she felt as scared as he did, because obviously he was offering her his heart. And where did that leave them?
Esme thought fast. She could see no way not to hurt him. To accept the implicit gift of his love would be a gross unfairness in view of her intention of moving away. To refuse it would wound and humiliate him. He saw her hesitation, and something changed. He did his own quick thinking.
“I been uneasy all day—about what was said this morning.” His eyes met hers, and she saw the flicker of prevarication in them. “I hadn’t thought to find you out and about at this hour. I thought you’d be in bed. It had been my intention to leave these here for you. For the morning. To apologize. Ember and me, we may overstep the mark sometimes. We’re simple country folk. You mustn’t expect we’ll always get it right.”
Esme had to admire the skill with which he turned his self-offering into the building of an unbridgeable chasm between them. It hurt, though.
“Ember and you?” she said, picking up the very deliberate discontinuity he had placed between them and her. “Simple country folk. Are you?” Her eyes met his gaze, level and direct.
“Yes,” he replied quietly.
Oh, God, her soul sent its silent distress flare, now don’t let us turn this into a fight. Troubled, anxious not to damage the friendship between them that had become such a source of strength to her, instinctively, without conscious formulation, the core of her spirit reached out for help and strength.
He looked down at the flowers in his hand, and held them out to her. In the garden at the front of his cottage, one yellow rose that climbed against the house bloomed gamely on into December. Mingled with ivy from the hedge, rosemary, and a feathery spray of blue juniper (filched from the garden of the Old Police House; she recognized it), the last of these roses were what he had brought her.
“Jabez, come inside,” she said, as she put out her hand to take his flowers.
He rewarded her with a tense, shy smile.
“I think I’d best not stay.”
She felt the splinting of his pride in the stillness of the way he spoke.
“Jabez—” but he shook his head.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said, gently. “Leave it now.”
He left the roses in her hand, and in an understated gesture of finality, he turned and made his way across the moonlit garden, out through the gate, as quietly as he had come.
I’ll see you soon. She examined this small token of hope. It was something, but she felt bereft.
It felt impossible, too difficult. Jabez’s life had been built on a different foundation entirely from hers. His sense of self and his sense of belonging grew out of rootedness in the earth and the family, out of how he had loved, and out of the making of his hands. What Esme aspired to had been based on professional achievement and on membership of a body of people scattered across the world—some whom she had never met, some all too familiar. But they were bonded together by the traditions and doctrines they believed in—or in some cases accepted without analysis, for the comfort of a sense of belonging. She felt a sudden sharp misgiving about the wisdom of tying home and income to so structured an ideology. What happens when a person changes? she asked herself in sudden panic. To walk with God is an unfolding rhythm of life, a wild music of many moods and tempos, embracing the shadows of doubt and disillusionment and the black dark of despair as well as the sweet blue heavens of joy and affirmation, the glorious sunset colors of the soul moved by beauty, amazed by peace. To serve the church as an ordained minister is an altogether narrower, more prosaic thing.
As she stood there alone, holding her flowers and still looking along the empty garden at the gate Jabez had closed behind him, Esme became aware of herself shivering. She went indoors, finding a vase for her flowers, locking up for the night, making a hot-water bottle for her bed, the core of her congealed into a hard lump of wretchedness.
“I’m sorry, Jabez,” she whispered in the darkness as she curled round her hot-water bottle in her cold bed. “I’ll come out and see you in the morning.”
And after awhile, she slept, but she woke early.
Is it too soon to go and see them again? Am I sending the wrong signals and making things worse by going to see them so often? As Esme bathed and dressed and cleaned her teeth, she felt completely at sea, alone in the complications of a situation that was pulling her relentlessly in conflicting directions. Then, seeing that the day promised fair again, and recalling that the next few days were filled with commitments already, bringing it to Sunday night before another opportunity presented itself, Esme decided to cycle out to Wiles Green again whether it was wise or not. The separation Jabez had made between them the night before had been sensible and redeemed an awkward situation, but the ache it left felt unbearable. She couldn’t contemplate waiting a week to put it right.
She went, a little later than the morning before.
As she pushed her bike around into his yard, she could hear their voices in the kitchen. Through the window at the back of the house she saw Jabez standing, washing up at the sink. He glanced up and caught her eye as she passed. She heard him speak quietly and then the conversation ceased.
“Morning!” she called cheerfully as she propped her bike against the wall and came in through the door, which, despite the cold, stood open for the sunshine. Esme stepped over Jabez’s boots, abandoned in the doorway.
Above the kitchen table, in the corner that held the warmth of the stove, the drying rack had been let down on its pulley system, and Ember was folding dry washing from it onto the kitchen table. “Talk of the Devil,” she said amiably as Esme came in. She drew breath for further speech, but Jabez suddenly stopped what he was doing, gripped the edge of the sink, and, imploring, almost wailed, “Please! Ember—please!”
What on earth was she about to say? Esme wondered, but for once Ember forbore, continuing serenely with her task. Jabez left the sink, wiping his hands on the drying-up cloth, and said more calmly, with only a trace of desperation, and without looking at her, “I’ll make a cup of tea, shall I?”
“That would be very nice,” said Ember, with an elaborate civility designed to betray other matters below the surface.
“What?” asked Esme. “What is it?” She wondered if Jabez had told Ember of their meeting the night before.
“Have you fetched the milk in, Ember?” asked Jabez, ignoring Esme’s question.
“Still on the front step, I imagine,” Ember replied, turning her gaze on him in bland innocence. “You better go and fetch it.”
“Ember, please,” he entreated again, and hesitated a moment before going through the house to open the front door.
Ember moved like lightning, quicker than any woman of eighty-six should be able to move, to push the kitchen door closed with her foot.
Lower than Esme had imagined it was possible for a person to speak and still make herself audible, Ember said as she passed Esme in returning to the table, “He been telling me how much he loves you. I never would have guessed he had that much passion about him. You better watch out.”
And she was back folding clothes in silence when Jabez pushed through the door with a pint of milk in his hand, looking from one to the other of them in helpless suspicion.
These words dispelled all Esme’s anxiety; she had not turned him away irretrievably then. She felt a wave of joy that it was as she had hoped, and not admitted that she hoped. An irrepressible desire to giggle began to bubble up inside her.
“You seem a bit low on firewood,” she said, her words slightly unsteady as she tried to still the quaver of laughter that wanted to escape. “Shall I get some more in from outside?”
“That’d be kind,” said Jabez doggedly, setting the milk down on the table. Where he stood obscured the way past the stove, and Esme had to come by him for the wood basket.
“Excuse me, then,” she said sweetly, gently putting her hands on his waist as she brushed by. It was the first time she had ever touched him, except the moment long ago that her fingers had touched his on the bicycle handlebars and the brief inevitable meeting of their hands as he gave her the flowers last night. He turned and looked at her, searching, as she came back past him with the basket. She said nothing, but Ember’s words had started something effervescing in her soul like sparkles of sunlight, and she couldn’t help the grin that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
As she was two steps into the yard, she heard him say in quiet but vehement reproach, appalled, “Ember, how could you?”
When Esme returned to the kitchen, Jabez would not look at her. He made her a mug of tea, and set it before her without speaking as she sat down at his table. Ember had taken the pile of clean linen to put away, and Esme searched for a way into his self-conscious silence.
“Thank you for the flowers,” she said gently, after awhile. “You shouldn’t have picked the last of your roses for me.”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “You’re welcome. I—well, you’re welcome.” She sat, watching him. “Jabez, for goodness sake, look at me!” So he did, but only for a moment. “Leave it,” he said, shaking his head. “Leave it, let it sort itself out. Let’s just see how we go.”
She sighed. “Okay. But—are we all right? Are you all right? I mean—is it all right between us?”
He stretched across the table and with his fingertips lightly stroked her hand.
“It’s all right,” he said, “but leave it for now. Esme, I got work to do. I’m expected in Brockhyrst Priory at half-past nine.”
She drank her tea, and as she left the cottage, he came outside with her to collect the necessary tools for his morning’s work from the shed.
He smiled at her, so hopelessly shy he made her feel shy too.
This is crazy, she told herself. We’re like teenagers! And whenever am I going to tell him about my job?
The days that followed plunged Esme into an unremitting round of pre-Christmas social gatherings and liturgies. She drove out to Wiles Green and called at the cottage after the Portland Street carol service on the second Sunday of Advent, but apart from that there seemed no time; even the Sunday evenings after worship had turned into special occasions celebrated with obligatory mince pies. Esme hated mince pies, but it would have been impolitic to confess it.
The busyness of the season drove from her mind all concerns about the impending move, apart from the occasional pang of wistfulness as she reflected that if things developed smoothly, this would be her last Christmas with her congregations here.
Neither could she give much time to worrying about her friendship with Jabez. With characteristic self-possession he had contained his mortification at having his confidences of love betrayed, and when she called after church in mid-Advent, he made her welcome, cooking her supper and hearing with quiet amusement her exasperation at all the excesses smothering the simple beauty of Christmas. Esme asked him if, in time to decorate Portland Street chapel for the junior school end-of-term carol service on Tuesday, she might have some of the ivy and the bright-berried holly that grew in his hedge at the top of the orchard. Jabez readily agreed, offering to cut her some and bring it over on Monday afternoon.
“If I don’t find you home, I’ll leave it somewhere in the yard,” he said. “Unless—” he hesitated. “Would you rather I take it straight to the chapel?”
Esme’s heart went out to him. She sensed that Jabez would rather do almost anything than involve himself with a party of church members arranging flowers. “My place will do fine,” she said. “It’s really kind of you to bring it over for me.”
Ember had chuckled at the relief on his face.
About ten days before Christmas, Esme became conscious of how tired she felt. She looked at her packed diary, which had long overrun any hope of a day off before Boxing Day, turning the pages desperately in search of something she could cancel without causing offense. She found nothing.
Christmas day fell on a Saturday that year, and the preceding weekend held a Christmas Fayre at Portland Street on the Saturday morning (Esme had been written down to open it with a prayer and then help run the white elephant stall); a church concert at Brockhyrst Priory on the Saturday evening (Esme had been asked to say a blessing at the end); and on the Sunday the junior church nativity presentation at Portland Street in the morning, followed by two carol services one after another in the evening at Wiles Green and Brockhyrst Priory.
As she stood in the doorway of Brockhyrst Priory Methodist Chapel in the bitter cold, shaking the hands of visitors leaving the Saturday-evening concert, Esme’s head ached and her throat felt sore.
“Nice for you to have an evening off!” beamed the husband of one of the choir members, and Esme looked at him in amazed disbelief, unable for a moment to frame a reply.
“Yes,” she said lamely then, seeing some response was required. She had no need to summon a smile. Her Christmas smile had become a permanent fixture. Her face ached when she let the smiling mask drop as she got into her car to go home.
On the Monday morning, when the ladies from Portland Street came for the annual “Parsonage Pies” event, erecting folding tables laden with bric-a-brac for sale in her front room, Esme was beginning to feel shivery and distant. Grateful that welcoming them into her kitchen with all the chapel crockery, coffee, and boxes of biscuits seemed to be all that was required of her, she subsided onto one of the chairs that she had ranged round the walls of her dining room, the table being pushed against the wall below the hatch to serve coffee.
Normally she felt encouraged and cheered by the jollity and good fellowship of these gatherings. The evident goodwill and friendliness of her church members was heartening to see, but through that morning, as people came and went in faithful support of the event, her head swam and her eyeballs hurt her. She felt faint and dizzy and slightly nauseous, but most of all, despite the air desiccated by the central heating, she felt so cold.
The ladies washed up, counted the takings from the bric-a-brac stall, asked Esme if she would mind if they left all the unsold bits and pieces with her at the parsonage, and made their cheerful departure at about one o’clock.
I must go to bed, Esme thought as she said thank you and smiled and waved in farewell to the last one. I’ve got to go to bed. I can’t be ill now, there’s the junior school end-of-term concert tomorrow and all the Christmas services coming up. I can’t be ill. I expect I’ll be better if I just have a lie-down.
Shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering, she began to climb the stairs. She wanted her hot-water bottle, but it seemed such a long way to go to fetch it. She thought she ought to lock the back door, which meant returning to the kitchen anyway, so she persevered in her journey to collect the hot-water bottle. She felt as though she would never reach her bedroom, and when she reached the top of the stairs, she crawled along the landing on her hands and knees. When she got to her bed, she collapsed onto it and lay there for a while, summoning the strength to make her way back down. Eventually, with an effort, she sat up on the bed, pulled off her clothes, and dropped them on the floor. Even the touch of her nightdress seemed to hurt her skin as she put it on, but she felt pathetically grateful for the snuggly softness of her dressing gown over it, a warm pink chosen to be comforting. She sat for a while, and then made herself begin the trip back to the kitchen; but halfway down the flight of stairs she crumpled and sank down, shaking, hunched into a heap of feverish misery. Oh, God, I feel so ill, she muttered. Oh, help!
She sat there for a few minutes, shivering violently. She felt as though she were spinning in the cold loneliness of black space, weak and drained and empty. Oh, God, I need somebody. I feel so ill. She gave up all hope of moving, and just sat in a state of collapse.
She vaguely heard a knock at the back door without taking in what it was. The knock was repeated, and the door opened. She heard Jabez’s voice calling, “Esme?” and it felt like the most welcome sound in the world.
“Hello!” she called back, embarrassed at the feeble croak of her voice. For heaven’s sake! she thought. Half an hour ago I was on my feet saying good-bye to people, I can’t be that bad. She lifted her head and leaned it against the banisters, listening to the sound of him kicking his boots off just inside the kitchen door before he came through from the kitchen into the hall toward the sound of her voice.
He looked up and saw her. “Esme!”—and the next moment she was enfolded in his arms.
“I don’t feel very well,” she murmured, turning toward him, shivering, clinging to him pathetically for warmth and restoration.
“Come on, sweetheart, you shouldn’t be here. Let me put you to bed.”
Esme clutched at his sweater, longing for the friendly, woolly feeling of it, and nuzzled her face against him, smelling him; tobacco and machine oil and the warm, human smell of him.
He held her for a moment, and she felt him kiss her hair, felt herself enfolded in absolute tenderness.
“You’re not well, my love, look at the state of you,” he said. “Let me put you to bed. What are you doing sitting here?”
“I was going to fill my hot-water bottle,” Esme said, reaching to pull it out from where it had wedged between her and the banisters. He took it from her and laid it down on the stairs.
“I’ll do that,” he said, “and get you a hot drink if you’d like one. Come on now.”
He came upstairs with her, and she showed him which was her bedroom. He straightened the bedclothes and turned back the quilt, and Esme curled up on the bed, her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her, shivering convulsively, her teeth chattering.
He tucked the quilt round her, and she stayed there curled in a tight ball while he went down to the kitchen and boiled the kettle. He was back quickly with the hot-water bottle and a steaming cup of medicated lemon drink for colds and flu that he had found at the back of the cupboard where Esme kept her tea and coffee.
She took the hot-water bottle into the bed gratefully, and gradually its warmth enabled her to relax. After a few minutes she sat up, and propped against the pillows she drank the hot mixture he had made her. She began to feel warmer and a little less desperate.
“Is there anything more I can do for you, my love?” Jabez asked her as he took the empty cup from her hands and put it on her dressing table ready to take downstairs.
“Yes,” said Esme. Even as she spoke, a rational part of her mind was telling her, Don’t do this, Esme; don’t drag him into this any deeper—be fair, but she said, “I want you to lie on the bed with me and hold me. Oh, Jabez, I feel so ill.”
For a moment he hesitated, looking down at her. Her eyes ached unbearably, and now she was beginning to feel hot. She lifted back the covers and immediately a wave of shivery cold returned. She closed her eyes. “I feel so ill,” she said again. “Please, Jabez.”
Diffidently, because she asked it, he lay down on the bed beside her, and took her into his arms. “Just for a little while,” he said. “I think you need to go to sleep, my love.” Esme snuggled against him, hungry for the comfort of his kindness and warmth. As he held her, breathing quietly, saying nothing, the softness of his beard against her forehead; as the tension smoothed out of her, she began to feel his heartbeat, and an unfamiliar sense of trust and peace welled up and suffused her whole being. She felt like a child again. She felt as though she’d come home.
“Esme,” she heard him say gently as drowsiness enveloped her, “will it be all right if I let someone like Mr. Griffiths know you aren’t well? I guess this is a busy week, and it might be as well to sort out someone to step in for you.”
“Oh … yes, please … whatever … thank you, Jabez.…” And she fell asleep in his arms.
For the next twenty-four hours Esme drifted in and out of feverish sleep. For two days after that she felt too weak to get out of bed. Each day Jabez called in twice to make sure she was all right, and he brought her simple, nourishing things to eat and left her with a hot drink in a Thermos flask by her bed. A message came from Marcus to say he had contacted the people in her diary, as passed on to him by Jabez, and she need have no concerns, just get well. He added that five other people from Brockhyrst Priory had flu, including the organist; but not to worry, he would deputize on the organ for the Christmas services if necessary.
On Christmas Eve, when Esme was on her feet and feeling like herself again, shaky but normal, she discovered with delight that in three days of illness she had lost five pounds, which made it all worthwhile. Jabez called in to see her in the morning and expressed doubt about her being sufficiently recovered for the Christmas services, but she reassured him she would be fine and thanked him, promising to call in to the cottage before she went away to visit her family.
She felt well enough to take the children’s crib service at Portland Street, and their midnight communion, and despite feeling strangely insubstantial by Christmas morning, she managed the early service at Brockhyrst Priory, where Marcus played for her.
“Well done!” she said to him afterward. “I had no idea you could play!”
“Oh, well …” He shrugged his shoulders in deprecation. “I can fill in, my dear, but I’m not a patch on good old Clifford. When he plays, the spirit soars, but with me it’s more a case of Toccata and Fudge in D minor, and that’s if you’re lucky on a good day. Glad to help out—but are you sure you’re better? Should you be here?”
Esme smiled at him. “I feel a bit floaty, but I’m fine really. Thanks for all your help.”
Marcus looked at her thoughtfully. “Just as well Jabez Ferrall was about; he explained he’d been calling in with the church greenery and found you unwell. Kind of him to help out with decorating the church for Christmas. Jabez is a good man.”
“Ah! There you are, my dear!” Hilda’s arm was suddenly around Esme’s shoulders in a loving squeeze. “I was looking for you at the door and someone said, ‘There she is, look, Hilda, over by the organ!’—and here you are indeed. A teeny little Christmas gift, dear—just a small packet of fossilized ginger, very warming, good for the circulation. Merry Christmas!”
“Crystallized,” murmured Marcus, as he turned to assemble his sheets of music and lock up the organ console. “Merry Christmas,” he added, looking at Esme over the top of his glasses. “And make sure you get some rest.”
Esme went straight from Brockhyrst Priory to the morning service at Wiles Green, where one by one as they left the chapel, her congregation expressed their love and concern—“Are you all right?” “Take it easy, now!” “Have a nice rest with your family after tomorrow.”
She thought of the Christmas cards mingled with “Get well” cards crammed on every ledge and surface at the parsonage, the greetings and affection of her church members.
As she walked away from the chapel toward her car, Esme felt warmed and encouraged by their friendship and support, and privileged that she should be its focus.
“Esme.”
When she reached her car, Esme looked around to see who had spoken her name. In the shadow of the yew tree, well out of the sight of worshippers leaving the chapel, stood Jabez.
“Would you like to come to us for lunch, or have you got other plans?” he asked.
Esme smiled, grateful.
“Happy Christmas,” she said. “I’d love to be with you.”