‘Oh?’ said Catherine. ‘Do you know how long you’ll be? Because Michael and I will both be out until quite late.’ The woman smiled, and started to close the door.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘it’s okay. I can let myself in, thank you.’
Catherine found Michael downstairs, sleeping in the armchair, and asked him if he’d given the woman a key. He stirred slightly, and sections of the weekend paper slipped from his lap to the floor. Catherine repeated the question, and he opened one eye to look at her. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said.
Which had reminded her, later, of the morning after the first night they’d spent together, and of him lying in bed with one eye open just like that, watching her dress. Because he’d thought he was dreaming and didn’t want to wake up, he’d said. It hadn’t looked like that, she’d told him, buttoning her blouse and looking around the room for her stockings; it had looked more like he was spying on her. She’d loved him watching her like that, then. And you a man of the cloth as well. This said when the idea of him as a vicar was some kind of joke still, before he was ordained; before they were married even, although there’d been some prevarication around that before, around whether they hadn’t better wait, which they’d settled by deciding that engagement was a commitment in itself and they were as good as married in God’s eyes. She remembered their haste over dinner that night, once the decision had been made; barely tasting the food, barely even speaking, catching a bus back to his friend’s flat while most people were only just heading out for the night. And then the heat and hurry of first sex, collapsing all too soon under the weight of expectation. The realisation that this, after all, was something else which would have to be learnt, considered, practised.
And what were they then, twenty-one, twenty-two? More than half a life ago now. Graduates, just, and already moving on to the next thing. Michael at theological college, preparing for ministry, talking about curacies and parishes and the discernment of vocation; Catherine less certain, knowing only that she wanted to carry on studying English, that she didn’t want to fall into teaching the way so many of her friends had done. No more than two years since they’d met, volunteering at the chaplaincy’s soup run – Michael overflowing with the thrill of new belief, Catherine looking for some way to rekindle a childhood faith which had been more inheritance than choice – and already the thought of them not being together had seemed puzzling and unreal. As if they had been brought inevitably to one another. Which she’d believed, then. Their life together had been so filled with purpose that it had felt like something more than chance: the soup-run project, and the Christmas night shelter they’d helped set up; the prayer vigils they’d organised, the 24-hour fasts; and that summer in Europe, sleeping in train stations and parks, going to free concerts in bombed-out churches, sharing open-air communion with Germans and Italians and Norwegians and thinking that this was how life would be for them now, that this endless sense of possibility was what her faith could finally come to mean.
And then there was marriage, ordination, a first curacy, a flat. A master’s degree, a PhD proposal, a funding problem, and falling into teaching term by term. All these things decided, settled, while they were still too young to know any better. You can go back to the research later though, Michael had told her, when the PhD fell through and she found herself accepting teaching work after all; there wasn’t any rush. Trying to reassure her. Keeping one eye on what she was doing.
On Monday morning they found the yoghurt spoon outside the American woman’s room, with a note. THANK YOU FOR THE SPOON, it said. Catherine knocked at the door, and waited a moment before peering inside. The bed was made, and the holdall the woman had brought with her was gone. But there were still clothes in the wardrobe, and a scarf hanging on the back of the door.
‘She hasn’t left then,’ Catherine said.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Michael said, already turning away.
‘She might have just forgotten to pack everything.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, in a tone which suggested it was unlikely, and went downstairs. She closed the door and followed him, picking up the post and dropping it on the kitchen table while Michael put the kettle on to boil. She cut two slices of bread and put them in the toaster, and Michael fetched plates and knives and butter and honey from the cupboard. Unthinking, this routine. Unbreakable, almost.
‘I don’t like her,’ Catherine announced. Michael looked at her strangely.
‘Like her?’ he said. ‘You don’t even know her. Why would you like her or not like her?’ The toaster popped up before the toast was ready, as it always did. Something was wrong with the timer, apparently. Nothing which couldn’t be fixed. Catherine reached over and put it down again.
‘There’s something about her,’ she said. ‘She makes me uncomfortable. The way she looks at me. The way she seems to be taking us for granted.’ Michael filled the teapot, put it on the table, and sat down.
‘The way she looks at you?’ he repeated. He seemed amused. The toaster popped up, and she put it down again.
‘And the way she won’t answer my questions,’ she added. Michael made a noise in the back of his throat, something like a snort or a stopped chuckle. A harrumph, people would once have called it. She’d married a man who harrumphed at her across the breakfast table. The toaster popped up a third time. She brought the toast to the table and passed it over to him. ‘What’s she doing here, Michael?’ she asked, sharply. ‘What’s she doing in our house? She could be anyone. We don’t even know her name.’ He finished buttering his toast before replying, and she saw, in his expression, that same infuriating self-assurance which the American woman had shown her.
‘First,’ he said, ‘it’s not our house. It’s a vicarage. It belongs to the church, and we’re guests here just as much as she is.’ Catherine tried to cut in, but he held up a finger to stop her. Actually held up a finger. When had he started doing this? Why had she never said anything?
‘Second,’ he continued, ‘this woman came to me asking for help, and regardless of whether she’s odd or evasive or whether she’s even telling the truth I don’t see that any harm can come of offering her a room for a few nights. It’s not as if we need it.’ He poured the tea, sliding hers across the table and reaching for the pile of post. ‘But if you think I’ve made a mistake,’ he said, ‘you’re welcome to ask her to leave.’
There was a word for this, for the way he was being about this whole thing – superior? Supercilious? And there was a word for women like her who put up with this kind of behaviour for as long as she had – a word like, what, weak? Not weak exactly, it was more complicated than that, but not decisive, not assertive. Not when it mattered. She stood up, leaving the tea on the table and her toast uneaten. She’d given up slamming doors a long time ago, so instead she just left it gaping open and went upstairs to get ready for work.
Work was a lecturing post in the English department at the new university. She hadn’t ever got back to the research. There weren’t all that many research positions available in the English departments of new universities. She wrote the odd paper here and there, did her bit to keep the research assessment scores at a respectable level, but mostly she concentrated on shepherding her students through the set texts and critical literature; giving lectures and seminars, setting essays and marking essays and trying to keep up with all the paperwork which had lately crept into the job.
It was a good job though. She liked it. She couldn’t remember, now, why she had once been so determined to avoid teaching. She enjoyed standing in front of a group of students and helping them work their way towards an understanding of what literature could do, what it did do. Developing the analytical tools, it was called these days, although she preferred her first departmental head’s description of it as turning the lights on in there.
She liked being in an environment where people enjoyed what they were doing, valued it, even if they tried to pretend they didn’t. She liked having col
leagues at all – she’d seen how Michael’s solitary, self-directed work had isolated him at times, turned him in on himself – and she enjoyed just sitting in the staffroom with them, drinking coffee, talking, listening to gossip. Of which there seemed only to be more the older they got; some of her colleagues were divorced already, one more than once, and over the years there’d been regular talk of goings on behind marital backs. She’d even, once, found herself in a situation where it had been made clear that something like that had been an option for her. But the idea had seemed absurd, a caricature of any discontent she might have been feeling, and she’d declined. She wondered if that had ever been gossiped about around the coffee table there, with the curled-corner posters of fat new novels stuck to the walls and the ring-binders stacked in the corner behind the door. It seemed unlikely.
When she got home that afternoon, Michael showed her a note he’d found on the desk in his study. WOULD APPRECIATE FEWER QUESTIONS, it said; MY CONDITION DOES NOT RESPOND WELL TO STRESS.
‘You have to ask her to leave,’ Catherine said. Michael made a non-committal sound, an mm or an umm, and Catherine waited for something more.
‘It’s quite a statement though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What did you say to the woman?’
‘Michael, please. I’m just not comfortable with her being in the house,’ Catherine said.
‘Do you think she’s on some kind of fast?’ Michael asked. Catherine took the note from his hand and looked at it again.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Do you think she’s fasting?’ he repeated.
‘I don’t know, Michael,’ she said, ‘I really don’t know.’ She was suddenly very tired.
‘Because as far as I can see she’s only eating yoghurt,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed her eating anything else? She hasn’t asked to use the kitchen. She’s never joined us for dinner, she keeps insisting on not being hungry. Haven’t you noticed?’ He seemed fascinated by the idea.
‘Michael,’ Catherine said. He looked up. ‘She can’t stay.’
The woman came back late. They heard her letting herself in while they were clearing away the dinner things, and by the time Catherine had got out to the hallway she was halfway up the stairs.
‘Hello again,’ Catherine said. The woman turned round, the holdall in one hand and a carrier bag filled with pots of yoghurt in the other.
‘Hey,’ she said. Her hair was hanging limply around her face, and her skin was even paler than it had been before. She looked exhausted, ill.
‘No luck at the hospital?’ Catherine asked. The woman stared at her.
‘Does it look like it?’ she said, turning away. She was almost at the top of the stairs before Catherine could take a breath and respond.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, raising her voice a little. ‘Sorry?’ The woman stopped, but didn’t turn round. ‘Sorry,’ Catherine said again, trying to soften her voice with a laugh; ‘but I was just wondering. I mean, we don’t actually know each other’s names, do we?’ Waiting for the woman to turn round, feeling her fists almost clenching when she didn’t. ‘My name’s Catherine,’ she called up.
‘Hello, Catherine,’ the woman said, flatly, and continued on up the stairs to her room.
Catherine stood in the hallway, waiting for something, unwilling to go straight back to the kitchen and have Michael ask about her day and what they might watch on the television as if nothing untoward was going on. As if the woman wasn’t staying longer than he’d said she would. As if the woman had been open and straightforward with them and given them no cause for concern.
She prayed about it later that evening, sitting in the front room with a lit candle and a Bible on the coffee table, a confused prayer in which she asked that they all be kept safe, that her fears about the woman prove unfounded, that the woman find what she was looking for at the hospital, that Michael or herself might find some way of resolving the situation, that she could be less suspicious and more trusting of the world and the people who came her way, that God might grant her more love and faith and empathy in situations like this, that Michael might listen to her a little more, take her fears more seriously, that God might watch over them all in this situation.
She opened her eyes, and saw the woman standing in the doorway, still wearing the long beige raincoat and holding another spoon. Smiling.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I just thought I heard something.’
‘Well,’ Catherine said. ‘Only me.’ She felt as if she’d been caught out, exposed somehow. The woman smiled, and that self-assurance, self-contentment, self-whatever-it-was, was there again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only you.’ She noticed Catherine looking at the spoon. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind. I helped myself to a spoon, for the yoghurt.’ Pronouncing yoghurt with a long oh, which in Catherine’s irritable state felt like yet another trespass.
‘Oh no,’ Catherine replied, lifting her hands in an attempt at nonchalance, letting them clap down on her thighs; ‘that’s fine. It’s only a spoon.’ A weak smile, met with a shrug. The woman glanced down at the Bible, the candle.
‘Were you praying?’ she asked. Catherine nodded, and the woman looked puzzled, tilting her head as if she was about to ask something. ‘Well,’ she said, finally, ‘I won’t keep you. It sounds like your husband’s gone to bed already.’
‘Goodnight,’ Catherine said. The woman left, closing the door behind her, and Catherine watched as the candle flame flapped and fluttered and eventually stilled.
She shouldn’t be angry though. It wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have been angry at the time, and she should have learnt not to be still angry about these things now. He was dedicated to his job. He cared about the church, about the redevelopment, about the new community services he wanted to offer, about enthusing the congregation with a sense of mission. These were all good things to care about, to spend every waking moment worrying about. But she was tired of it now. She was tired of being towed along while he did these things.
At least people didn’t come calling to the house, generally. That was one thing. It happened to other vicars – it had happened in previous parishes – but it hadn’t happened here. The vicarage was too far from the church, too anonymous-looking, and so they hadn’t had people banging on the door at all hours asking for money as they had elsewhere. People went to the church, and Michael dealt with them there. Which was good. It gave them some separation, mostly. It meant Michael could relax a little once he was home, and it meant Catherine had to worry a little less about always being The Vicar’s Wife. There were still the phone calls of course, and the members of the congregation who knew where they lived and would insist on calling round with messages, paperwork, problems, and would talk to her when Michael was out as if she was his secretary. She’d minded it more in the early days, before she’d felt established in her career. She’d resented the idea that her role in the world might amount to no more than being The Vicar’s Wife. I married you, she’d snapped at him once; I didn’t marry your job. I didn’t marry the Church.
That had been their first crisis. There had been others: his muted, slow-burning reaction to his mother’s death, when he’d shut her out so completely that she’d almost walked away; the string of burglaries in the last parish; the incident which never was with her colleague in the English department. And there was the business of children, of course, but they’d stopped talking about that eventually, once it had become more or less academic.
And then there was the American woman he’d offered the spare room to that time, six years ago now and she couldn’t help thinking it was too long ago for her to be still thinking about it like this. It wasn’t as if they’d ever seen her again.
That Saturday, when the woman had been in their house for more than a week and was showing no sign of being about to leave, Catherine had been woken by the sound of Michael making his breakfast. She usually tried to have a lie-in on Saturdays, and was usually w
oken like this, by the clatter of knives and plates and mugs, reflecting each time that for such a big house sounds did seem to carry awfully well, that the two of them seemed to rattle around in there. She heard the toaster popping up, and Michael putting it down again, and she turned over to go back to sleep.
In the kitchen, Michael was taking the butter and the honey down from the cupboard and waiting for the kettle to boil. The American woman appeared in the doorway – this was Michael’s account of it, later – and said she hoped she wasn’t interrupting but could she ask him something? Michael said yes, certainly, and she came into the room and sat down. Her situation was more complicated than she’d expected, she told him. It seemed she would have to go back to New York to get copies of her medical records, a referral from her doctor, her insurance documents. Which was a problem because she didn’t have the money to go home and come back again. Michael asked if there wasn’t someone she could get to send the documents. The woman looked at him, and ignored his interruption, telling him again that she didn’t have that kind of money, not to go home and come back again. She didn’t even have the money to get down to Heathrow, ha ha – this said as if it was all a big joke, according to Michael, or rather as if she wanted him to think that she was bravely trying to make it all into a big joke – and so she knew it was a lot to ask after all the kindness they’d already shown her but did Michael think there was any chance he could help out at all? Financially?
Michael told her he was sorry but he didn’t think he could do that. Which seemed to surprise her, he said. Seemed to nudge her off-balance. Something in her expression changed, was the way he described it. But all she said was that she was sorry to have troubled him. And then, as they were both moving into the hallway, asking if she could ask him something else. A nod or a shrug from Michael, and she said that she’d noticed something was wrong, that she wondered if there were maybe some problems between him and his wife. And the answer heard by Catherine, as she stood in their bedroom doorway at the top of the stairs, was that he didn’t think that was an appropriate question actually, ha ha; whereas the answer in the account he gave her later was a far less equivocal no.