Past Praying For (3 page)

She
shoved her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. It was better to be silent, motionless, in the weird glow of the television screen than to get up to turn on the light. Light might chase away the shadows –
but what
might
remain
when
the
shadows
fled?
Cramped and rigid, barely daring to breathe, she sat huddled in her chair, glassily unseeing in an interminable torture of terror.

It
seemed a long, long time later that at last she heard a taxi coming up the drive. With frantic energy she leaped from her chair, ran out of the room and downstairs to see, miraculously, her father, not Mrs Beally, climbing out.

‘
Daddy, Daddy!’ she shrieked, throwing herself at him as he opened the front door, desperate for his protection and assurance that now everything would be all right.

But
Daddy hardly seemed to see her. Looking over her head he detached the clinging arms and put her inexorably aside.

‘F
or God’s sake, not now,’ he groaned, and reaching his study like a wounded animal crawling to its lair, he shut the door on the stricken child.

***

It was from Mrs Beally the next morning that she learned of her brother’s death in an avalanche.

‘
Your pa went off to Austria first thing. You’ll need to be good now, because there’ll be a lot to do, people coming for the funeral, I don’t doubt.’

She
did not mention the day before. The child could not.

The
night before Gervase’s funeral, Giles sat at his desk with his papers before him, but gazing over them unseeing to the framed snapshots of his son, his hair tousled from running, and his wife, her mouth in its sweet curve, her blonde curly hair springing back strongly from the smooth brow. The picture of his daughter as a baby he did not even see.

As
he looked bleakly at Melody’s smiling face, his hand dropped from the side of his chair and rested, for an incredulous moment, on her soft curls. He came to himself with a cry, and looked down on a smaller head, then into the pleading upturned face of his daughter.

It
was too much; he could not bear it.

‘
Get out!’ he said with barely suppressed violence. ‘Get out, and for God’s sake never do that again.’

And
the child fled.

She
was only nine years old, but she had learned already the futility of tears. She had learned that nothing was too bad to happen, and that she could trust no one. She had learned, too early, the frightful truth that we are all of us, in the end, alone.

She
had not learned yet that life went on, and they could patch you up so effectively that no one would realize that inside, somewhere, you had been warped and twisted to destruction.

She
seemed entirely calm by the time she reached her room. She went over to the desk and picked up, once more, the blue suede diary. Sitting in her chair she read, quite slowly, what she had written, and took up the pen again to add another half page. Then she picked up a crayon, and solemnly, meticulously, coloured every remaining page black until she reached the end of the book.

***

Time passed and agony faded, as it does. She worked hard at creating the shell to cover her scars, pretty and smooth and fragile as a robin’s egg. She grew up, she found friends, and she had a step-mother – another doctor – who was kindly, if detached. She married young.

She
left Missy behind, long-forgotten in the mists of a childhood she never chose to recall. But Missy did not go away. Missy waited, silent in the shadowy corners of her mind, for the crack made by some blow of fate through which she could emerge, full-fledged, in a form older, stronger, and more evil still.

1

Margaret Moon had always liked dressing up. When she was a plain, square, freckle-faced little girl with long brown plaits, she had loved to put on her mother’s old white nightie and play weddings; long, detailed, luxuriously-imagined ceremonies, with herself the unlikely cynosure of all eyes, the groom an accessory much less interesting than the traditional blue garter.

And
now, when the freckles and the plaits had vanished, but the squareness and a certain child-like gusto remained, here she was, standing on the altar steps, wearing a white gown. Only she was facing the other way.

She
looked down the length of her little church, past the Crusader’s tomb into the thicker shadows of the cross-aisle beyond. Under the Norman arches, the stained glass of the windows was opaque, and only the polished memorial brasses on walls and floor took light from the flickering candles in the jam jars on pews and ledges, a hundred luminous points. The cool, damp breath of old stone was overlaid by their warm, waxy smell. Perhaps that was what was meant by the odour of sanctity, which had always seemed to her a curious phrase.

Penny
Jackson, at the organ which was one of Margaret’s more immediate problems, struggled womanfully into the first asthmatic chords of the tune ‘Forest Green’. Along with everyone else – about fifty of them, Margaret reckoned, with her ex-banker’s automatic eye for figures – she drew an obedient congregational breath for the opening words of the beloved Victorian carol.

O little town of Bethlehem

How still we see thee lie...

Lit
from below, her new parishioners’ faces had a strange, disembodied innocence; the mouths round dark ‘O’s of sound, sharp features blurred, wrinkles smudged smooth by shadow. Only the eyes told a story: the young eyes, glowing in the candlelight, wide with wonder and over-excitement; older eyes, veiled or hooded depending on whether caution or age had made the greater mark.

Here
and there, she caught the glimpse of tears, but she did not yet know her flock well enough to guess where these were prompted by grief, where regret, and where the easy, generalized nostalgia for an idealized Christmas as it wasn’t now, probably wasn’t a hundred years ago and most certainly wasn’t almost two thousand years before that, in the draughty squalor of childbirth in a cattleshed somewhere in Bethlehem. If you believed that.

She
did, in fact. It couldn’t be described as a fashionable position, and she wasn’t certain it had the Bishop’s full support, but it was one of the persistent convictions which had driven her to where she stood at this moment, which came as a fresh surprise to her every time she thought of it.

Sometimes
it seemed like one of her dressing-up games, even now, with her feet in their sensible black shoes planted on the flagstone floor of St Mary’s, and the weight of the cassock across her broad shoulders, ready when the hymn stopped to turn and say the words which would introduce the sacrament, here for her own people in her own cure of souls.

How silently, how silently

The wondrous gift is given…

But
it hadn’t felt like a gift, more like some sort of monstrous burden laid upon her, so that however unpromising the prospect, she never had the alternative of turning back. There was an illustration in the family copy of
The
Pilgrim’s
Progress
which had terrified her as a child, and even now occasionally haunted her dreams, of Christian with his burden of sins growing fleshy tentacles into his back; at times it seemed that her calling was quite as hideously inescapable.

‘
Do you hear – voices?’ a friend had asked with hushed, fascinated horror, and even as Margaret laughed a dismissal, she found herself half wishing the answer was ‘yes’. Then it would have been simple; a visit to a psychiatrist – the modern white witch – and a diagnosis of stress, a prescription. Religious delusions dissipated, inconvenient vocations removed.

It
was more a sort of relentless discomfort, a niggling itch she couldn’t scratch. At every stage, her approach had been grudging and tentative, every query prefaced, as it were, by ‘Num..’, the word her Latin mistress at school had dinned into her as introducing any question expecting the answer ‘no’. Yet, uncannily, the path had been made smooth and doors that appeared tight shut had opened, sometimes so unexpectedly that she fell on her metaphorical nose.

She
had joined, dutifully, in the prayers that the Synod might be guided to approve women’s ordination, but with a sense of praying after the event. The decision, however little the wise and great and good might realize it, had already been made – probably before the dawn of time, though it didn’t do to get caught up in that sort of speculation, or you could spend your life contemplating the tiny trivial circles which were all your mind could achieve on that subject, like stirring the ocean with a very small twig.

And praises sing to God the King

And peace to men on earth.

What
she had certainly never expected was to find herself in a peaceful village in the prosperous Thames Valley, which dozed amid well-kept gardens and quiet leafy lanes, deserted during office hours when, it seemed, almost the entire population abandoned it for somewhere in the City.

It
had been in an inner city charge that she had worked as deacon, then curate; a frenetic, dynamic place throbbing with the urgency of the human need which lay, visible as an open sore, on every side. There were soup kitchens and encounter groups and missions to people as ignorant of the Good News as the savages her missionary great-aunt had so forcefully enlightened seventy years before.

The
babies with Aids, the homeless, the drug addicts and the battered wives she had counselled had been a joyful confirmation that the hand she had felt laid upon her shoulder was indeed summoning her to an important battle.

So
when the Bishop told her about Stretton Noble, the charge he had chosen for her, her first, incredulous reaction was that this could only be some sort of episcopal joke. She did not know him well; perhaps he had an odd sense of humour?

Fortunately,
she had restrained herself from bursting into laughter and slapping her thigh. He meant it, all right. As he talked about her duties and the Parish Council and the Mother’s Union, she fought to stifle the unchristian thought that perhaps the lip-service he had paid to the idea of women priests was no more than that. If she was an inconvenient body, where better to bury her than beneath the mouldering turf of a rural English parish?

Only
as she left the Palace, unspoken protests fermenting in her soul, did it cross her mind that whether or not the Bishop had a sense of humour, there was little doubt that the Almighty did.

O Holy Child of Bethlehem

Descend to us we pray...

They
had been pleasant enough in their civilized, rather patronizing way, these sleek, well-fed city folk aping what they imagined were country ways with their waxed jackets and Barbour wellies and Range Rovers to tackle, morning and evening, the threatening terrain between the village and the nearest Thames Valley railway station, all of four miles away. They had treated her with such impervious civility that she had no means of knowing what they thought either about women priests, or about Margaret Moon herself, as a person, if this last concept ever came into their heads. She had found herself warming to old Sam Briggs, who was one of the rare indigenous breed; he occupied sheltered housing in the Old Almshouses and with patent sincerity spat on the ground whenever she passed. He was not, she noted, here tonight.

It
was a good congregation, though. There were people here whom she had certainly never seen in the church before, and probably wouldn’t again until Easter, if then.

The
hymn was nearing its end. Behind the gold rims of her spectacles, she closed her short-sighted eyes briefly in inchoate prayer, waiting humbly for the transforming moment of peace and power.

...
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.