Past Praying For Read online

  ...abide with us,

  Our Lord Immanuel.

  As the reedy echoes of the organ faded on the air, the Reverend Margaret Moon turned towards the altar.

  ***

  The Ferrars had not gone to church. Laura had made the excuses about having too much to do at home, and the girls being tired, though Sara had immediately insisted that she was going to church with the McEvoys, which had made her mother look foolish. But she was past caring by now. Just as long as she didn’t have to sit in church, trying to be pious and grateful for all her blessings, of which she had many – she knew that, because James kept telling her so – when all she could feel was rage and humiliation.

  It was like a sickness, a physical sickness, which made even Lizzie McEvoy’s delicious cooking (stuffed quail with almond wild rice and an orange Sauternes sauce) taste of sawdust and sit in lumps in her throat. She hadn’t wanted to go at all tonight, but James had forced her to do it.

  ‘The girls have been looking forward to it, and I’m not taking them and leaving you behind, on your own. Anyway, you can’t go into hiding for the rest of your life.’

  The trouble with James was that he was a lawyer. If you were a lawyer, everything you had to deal with was so cut and dried that in the end you became, as he would put it in his prissy lawyerish way, more than a trifle cut and dried yourself.

  It was hard, sometimes, to hold the thought that he’d played a mean and moody saxophone in his Oxford college jazz band, and had been sleek and dark and excitingly moody himself, or that she had been a Maenad who could dance for hours at a stretch and make her hair spin out in a dandelion clock as she grooved to their beat. He was going to be the most brilliant defence lawyer in criminal history, and she was going to write scintillating, incisive television drama. Funny what life did to you, really. Funny, if you thought that someone grinding a steel-edged heel in your face was funny. That was what life was like.

  And she would never know how she came to be a failure, and he came to be a stuffed shirt, and she didn’t know now, when he was being so amazingly reasonable, whether what he said was prompted by loving consideration of his wife’s well-being, or cool calculation of what would suit him best.

  He was certainly determined that she should rejoin the human race, and it didn’t seem to matter that forcing her to do it at a dinner party at the McEvoys was the equivalent of hoisting someone on to an unbroken stallion to get back their confidence after a fall from a horse.

  Her pride had come to her aid, and she had carried it off. But it made her feel schizophrenic; the slim, elegant, social Laura there at the dinner table laughing and chatting and making all the right noises, while the black voices of her fury raged on in her head. The effort of keeping the two parts separate had given her a genuine headache, and all she craved now was a couple of extra-strength paracetamols and peace to think her poisonous festering thoughts and swear and cry if she wanted to, without James’s calm voice saying maddeningly, ‘It won’t do any good, going on like that. It’s not the end of the world, after all.’

  What she really didn’t need was James to point out in that unbelievably annoying way that they were all healthy and solvent in a world where lots of people weren’t. Having it pointed out that she was unbalanced about it and behaving badly didn’t help one bit.

  ‘You can’t reason yourself out of feeling something!’ she had hurled at James. ‘We’re not all cold-blooded lawyers, you know.’

  And when James had sighed and smoothed down his already immaculate hair and agreed and refused to be drawn into an argument, it all made everything worse, because an argument would have given her somewhere to direct her anger. His sympathy might be genuine enough, but the trouble was that there was no right thing anyone could say or do, except to decree that the facts weren’t the facts and it had all been a stupid mistake.

  The worst of it was that she had, for once in her life, allowed herself to feel truly confident. She had lived with a heady cocktail of excitement, elation and pride ever since last summer when, over a glass of sparkling wine to celebrate the conclusion of another successful year at Cranbourne Girls, Joan Lambton, the headmistress, had told Laura, her deputy and friend, that she was going to retire next year.

  ‘I’m fifty-eight and I’m single. I’ve got my years in for my pension now, and it gets harder every year for me to leave my little house in Perigord for the “A” level results and those ridiculous league tables. So next year, I shan’t. I shall stay on when the tourists leave, and I shall sketch and read and enjoy the September weather, and get particular satisfaction out of thinking of you all, slaving away on the chalk face.’

  ‘Oh Joan!’ Laura’s first reaction was dismay. ‘That’s all very well for you, but – ’

  ‘My dear girl, this is your big chance! You’ve been an outstanding deputy, and I’ve told my governors they need look no further. They’ll advertise, of course, but I have no doubt that I’m looking at my successor. To the next Principal of Cranbourne Girls!’

  She raised her glass, and Laura, laughing and pink and protesting, had returned a toast to the present one.

  Laura hadn’t exactly told anyone herself, but she had hinted to Lizzie and Suzanne, because they were her closest friends, and Hayley Cutler had somehow found out, because she always did.

  She was proud of the way she had acquitted herself at the interview. It was only the third she had ever had, and previous ones had been a damp-palmed, twitching nightmare. But this time, she believed in herself; she was confident that she could do the job, and in any case, she knew most of the governors – Piers McEvoy was one of them, for goodness’ sake – and they were well aware that on occasions when she had had to deputize for Joan, she had done it well. She had made modest noises after the interview, of course – after all, there were three external candidates, and one might prove to be outstanding – but she had already begun making her plans, looking forward to the long chats with Joan about the future, and the congratulations, and the status she had never dared to hope would be hers.

  She would never have dreamed of applying for promotion elsewhere. They could have turned her down out of hand, and rejection mattered to her. Rejection really mattered. James might say it was simply a question of pride, but then James had never in his life had a visible problem about his sense of self-worth.

  She had known the day the decision was to be made, and when Joan Lambton’s voice greeted her on the phone first thing that morning, her heart had leapt.

  It had taken a moment or two to understand what she was hearing, not least because Joan herself was so upset. She had not been authorized to phone; Laura would learn by letter that the new Principal was to be, not Laura, not even one of the unknown and possibly exotic outsiders, but Elaine Siddons, the Head of History, a young woman of advanced ideas who had been a thorn in Joan’s flesh since her appointment two years ago. It was a slap in the face to Joan herself, and she was also riven with guilt at the damage her explicit raising of expectations in Laura might have done.

  Automatically, Laura said the right things, replaced the kitchen phone gently on its stand, and sat down at the round pine table in the corner of the room, looking at the Hokusai exhibition poster on the wall as if she had never seen it before.

  She would have to return to a staff-room where even those who liked her would be unable to resist schadenfreude and where everyone, without exception, would fawn nervously on the member of their own ranks who had been so suddenly elevated to power over them. Where she herself would have to mouth warm congratulations to her junior colleague.

  She had written six versions of her resignation letter, varying in tone from coldly dignified to vituperative, by the time James came home from the office.

  He had turned pale at the notion of anything so extreme. ‘Extreme’ was James’s ultimate word of condemnation, and he had persuaded her not to send any of them, for the moment at least. She would want to apply for another job, and it wouldn’t look good to be unemployed
when she did it.

  It was practical advice. It went without saying that James’s advice would be practical, but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to apply for another job. She wasn’t sure that she was ever going to be able to put herself back together again in a convincing enough pattern to get one.

  And besides, she didn’t want to be sensible any more. She wanted to be irrational, and violent, and to punish the world for what the governors of Cranbourne Girls, may they rot in hell, had done to her.

  And Piers McEvoy was the worst. She wasn’t sure why Piers was the hub of their social group, because nobody really liked him. He was physically unappealing – short and squat – as well as being boorish and overbearing and far too often drunk.

  He was a man with something to prove, of course. It was his father, a plain-spoken Northerner, who had built the haulage business up from two second-hand lorries bought when he was demobbed; all that Piers had ever done was sell out after his father’s death to an international company for who knew how many millions and a seat on the board. A credible rumour suggested that otherwise it would have been two lorries to two lorries in two generations. Not very bright, Piers.

  But somehow, it was hard to refuse the constant invitations to the Lodge. It was such an exquisite house; it seduced you, really, against your better judgement, with decor by one of the London interior decorators and furniture you might read about in collectors’ magazines which you pick up but feel are too expensive to buy. It was flattering to be part of the inner circle, and Lizzie’s superb cuisine and the quality of the champagne didn’t do any harm either.

  Money talked, there was no doubt about that. You could buy friendship, influence, anything you liked with that sort of money. Including a place on the board of Cranbourne Girls – a place meantime, until he could get himself made chairman.

  His Paula went there, along with the Ferrars girls and Martha Cutler, and he had homed in on the governing body as an interesting toy. His opinion might count for nothing in the London boardroom of Trucking Worldwide, but it was clear he was carving up the Cranbourne Girls’ governing body like the conjuror with a lady and an electric saw.

  You could, she thought bitterly, carve them up with a butter-knife.

  She should have been able to count on his support for her application – they were nominally close friends, after all – or at the very least he could have warned her about the way things were going and cushioned the blow.

  But she knew now, as if she had been privy to the governors’ discussions, that he had gone against her. She knew by the way he had looked at her tonight, knew he was getting some sick, sadistic pleasure out of watching her, noticing the dark circles from lack of sleep and the bitten nails with the knowledge that he had got in to inflict this injury on her mind. It was a sort of mental rape.

  If he had said anything about it, anything at all, she was not sure that the social Laura could have remained in control.

  But nothing had been said. In this village, nothing ever was said to rock the social boat, except with doors closed and shutters bolted, or under the seal of confessional coffee at the kitchen table to another woman.

  They walked home through the village, hearing the sound of the organ from the church as they passed. James took her elbow solicitously as they reached the front door, and having unlocked it, put his arm round her to usher her in ahead.

  He’s treating me as if I were ill or deranged, she thought. Perhaps I am.

  She knew she must pull herself together somehow. She was becoming unbalanced, obsessional; she wasn’t eating properly, and she felt light-headed and strange. And now she was afraid – she was very much afraid – that she was beginning to do things, weird things, without realizing she had done them. Like placing a bunch of dead flowers bound suggestively in black thread on the middle of her desk.

  She had stared at it when she came down yesterday morning, and the rest of the family had looked at her oddly and denied all knowledge, and she found that she could not quite dismiss the notion that she might have done it herself. Which was a nasty thought, but not as alarming as the thought that if she hadn’t, someone else had got into the house and left this cruel suggestion of a wreath for the funeral of her hopes.

  ***

  Outside, the midnight, far from being clear, was damp and unpromising. The electric light in the church had been switched on, streaming through the open doorway in a golden rectangle.

  Margaret, her wide embroidered vestment making her look squarer than ever, took up her usual stance by the ancient yew to the left of the south door. There was a little worn hollow in the stone just there, and she liked to feel that here she stood in the footsteps of her predecessors in office – however shocked some of them might have been by such blatant disregard for the views so trenchantly expressed by St Paul.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Margaret – lovely service!’

  ‘Thank you so much, Miss Moon. Good-night. Oh Caroline! Happy Christmas!’ Mwah, mwah. ‘Drinks tomorrow, remember, twelve o’clock.’

  ‘Not much chance of a white Christmas this year.’ Someone made the inevitable comment, and a woman somewhere behind shuddered.

  ‘Don’t even mention it! I hate snow.’

  ‘Nice for the children, though.’

  Like a stream in spate, irrepressibly, the flow of polite banalities poured out, lapping the congregation in a flood of well-intentioned insincerity as its constituent parts filed through the doorway and fanned out on to the flagstone path.

  Margaret scanned them all shrewdly as she processed them: smile, murmur a greeting, shake hands with just the slightest sideways impetus to move them along, smile, murmur, shake hands again.

  She had, she reflected, heard only one genuine, heartfelt remark (‘Has anyone got an onion they can spare me? Please? I used my last one in the stuffing and forgot all about the bread sauce.’) and that was not excluding the embrace and, ‘Dear Margaret! May Our Lord’s birthday shower you with the fullest blessings!’ from the oppressively evangelical Mrs Cartwright. Perhaps, Margaret allowed guiltily, the woman really meant it, but she would be surprised to see her at early communion tomorrow morning.

  She could put a name to a good number of them by now; others she recognized, a few she did not know at all. Visitors, perhaps, or what they called Occasional Christians, though whether because they appeared on occasions like this, or because these appearances were so infrequent, she was never quite sure.

  And here was Piers McEvoy now, in camel coat and rollneck cashmere sweater. He was a short, flabby man with fair colouring and glassy, protuberant eyes, like a fat pale frog in a blond wig, Margaret thought. He had freckled hands, too, one of them now clutching at the shoulder of the scarlet military-style coat worn by a willowy brunette rather taller than he was. She wasn’t Mrs McEvoy – was she the young doctor’s wife, perhaps? – and if Froggy had wooing on his mind it was clear from the expression of his victim that he was out of luck.

  She had taken some time to sort out the women in the group that revolved around the McEvoys – they seemed to be of similar age, and tended to cluster at church or social functions – but she had it more or less straight now.

  That was Elizabeth McEvoy coming out, her face pale and tired-looking under a Black Watch tartan silk Alice band. She liked what she had seen of her, and perhaps presumptuously felt rather sorry for her, since however lavishly interlined her Colefax and Fowler curtains might be it could hardly make up for having to live with Piers. She was always beautifully dressed; tonight she was wearing a coat which looked as if it cost more than most women’s clothes’ allowance for a year, but she wore it as if, like a doll, she had been dressed in it by someone else.

  Suzanne Bolton, just behind, was the nurse, and looked it, with her crisp light brown hair always immaculately styled. She was the one who would give a hand with anything practical in the church, if you didn’t mind your other volunteers dropping out one by one because she couldn’t help trying to organize everyone
else as if they were in an operating theatre. She was married to a businessman – what was his name again? Patrick, that was it. Had a business in the town nearby supplying some sort of engineering parts, which was going well now after a bad patch. He was coming out with his arm round the shoulders of Ben, their son. They were very alike, those two, with their dark red hair and brown eyes. The likeness was accentuated by the air they both had of expecting that someone would bark, ‘Get that sterilized’ at any moment.

  Then there was Hayley Cutler. She was the easy one to remember, leggy with wavy blonde hair worn long and that thick-as-clotted-cream American accent, which always seemed just a little exaggerated. She was chatting now to a man Margaret didn’t recognize, but as usual was making great play with her long thick eyelashes, and laughing her warm, throaty laugh. Mr Cutler had apparently fled the scene some time before, but Hayley certainly wasn’t the type to let that dent her social life. Au contraire, if Minnie Groak – an amateur at cleaning Margaret’s house but a rigorously professional gossip – was to be believed.

  The fourth of the group – which was undoubtedly the group to be in with in Stretton Noble – was Laura Ferrars, wife of James, a lawyer who was one of the churchwardens. She was a deputy headmistress, with a manner which seemed cool but which might stem from being shy. Margaret hadn’t noticed them tonight; perhaps they were away.

  ‘Ah, vicar,’ said McEvoy, with the sort of heavy facetiousness that made Margaret’s hackles rise. ‘Well done! That will have set me up nicely for another year’s sinning.’

  I feel sure you don’t need any encouragement. The tart rejoinder sprang to her tongue, but she was practised now in the control of that unruly member, and smiled noncommittally as he laughed in appreciation of his own joke. The gust of his breath was stale and whisky-laden.

  A group of teenagers, giggling and jostling, passed on the far side without meeting her eye, though she was regarding them benevolently. There had been stifled whispers and muffled snorts of laughter from that quarter of the church, but their intoxication was mainly with the wine of youth, and if they had been to a party, at least they had broken off to come to church.