Barbara Erskine: Time’s Legacy

It all came to a head on a hot July evening. She was writing notes for her sermon in her upstairs eyrie. The evening sun was shining on the spires and grey stone roofs in the distance, the roofs of the other Cambridge, the idyllic Cambridge of the tourist brochures and the luckiest students on earth, did they but know it, and she was staring thoughtfully out, thinking how the sight never failed to enchant her. Lost in those thoughts, she almost missed the sound of footsteps running up the stairs to her front door. Standing up, she went to open it. ‘You seem to be in a hurry, Kier – She broke off abruptly. It was Sue.

‘Sorry to disappoint you! Were you expecting him?’ Sue pushed past her and turned to face Abi in the middle of the room. She was a small, intense woman in her mid-thirties, attractive, neat and self-contained. Her hair was usually pinned back into a tidy pleat at the back of her head. This time it was down, swinging shoulder length and newly blonde. It made her look younger and somehow more vulnerable. ‘Have you no shame? You’re supposed to be a vicar! I hope you rot in hell!’ Sue dissolved into angry sobs.

‘Sue?’ Abi was appalled. ‘What’s happened? What are you talking about?’

‘As if you didn’t know!’ Her tears dashed away, Sue’s large blue eyes were cold. ‘I trusted you. It never crossed my mind you were having an affair.’

‘I’m not! I’m not having an affair with anyone! Who?’ She paused. ‘Not Kier? You don’t think Kier and I…?’ She was suddenly furious.

‘Of course Kier and you. Do you think I am naïve? But of course I am. I never suspected. I liked you. I trusted you!’ For a moment she stood staring at Abi, her face twisted with misery and hatred, then she turned back to the door. ‘Well, you can have him. I don’t want the two-timing, loony bastard. But don’t think you will get away with this. The whole parish is talking and I’m going to report you. I’m going to make sure you are sacked. You are not fit to enter a church!’

Abi stood completely still in shock as Sue ran back down the stairs. Moments later the sound of the slamming front door echoed up to her.

Kier had been standing below in the front hall. He walked slowly up towards her as she appeared in the doorway and looked down. ‘I’m so sorry, Abi.’ He looked exhausted. ‘I suppose it was inevitable.’

‘Why? Why was it inevitable?’ She stared at him furiously. ‘What on earth gave that poor woman the idea that you and I are having an affair?’

He shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her much lately. You and I’ve been so busy with the parish. I talk about you a lot, I suppose.’ He looked away uncomfortably and lapsed into silence. ‘She just got the wrong end of the stick.’

Abi pre-empted the situation at once, phoning the bishop’s office the same evening in spite of Kieran’s protests that it would all blow over, explaining that it was not possible for a female curate to share a house with an unmarried priest and two days later she moved out of the Rectory to a small furnished flat in a terrace of pretty two-storeyed houses several blocks away. Her sitting room there had no view. It opened out into a small courtyard garden, thick with nettles and brambles. In its centre there was an abandoned rusty bicycle, but strangely the atmosphere was fine. It was a cheerful little place; it seemed to welcome her and as soon as the door had closed behind her she felt cherished and safe. The upstairs flat was empty. She liked it that way.

She knew the bishop had spoken to Kieran. She wasn’t sure of the outcome. Kieran never mentioned what was said. He took back more of her workload, encouraged her to take more services on her own at St Hugh’s and their regular meetings took place more often than not in St John’s. It seemed convenient. They would sit in a pew at the back, talking quietly, keeping to business. There were no more glasses of wine. She didn’t ask him if he and Sue had made up their quarrel.

While Abi was standing in the patch of nettles at the back of her new flat, surveying the scene and wondering if she had time to cut back some of the weeds and plant a few token flowers to give the place a bit of colour, almost exactly 203 miles away by road, in Woodley in Somerset, Cal Cavendish was standing in the gardens behind her somewhat larger, detached house, staring into space, a pair of secateurs in her hand. A basket of cut flowers lay at her feet and she hadn’t moved for several minutes, lost in thought. They were in trouble, deep trouble financially, far worse than they had thought. The only income that came in now that her husband, Mat, had retired was from his suddenly rather meagre-seeming pension and her B & B business and it had not been a good summer. She sighed. She and Mat had just come back from one of those interminable meetings with the bank and the trustees in Taunton, which always left them feeling so depressed. Her instinct had been to go into the garden to hide amongst the flowers, Mat’s to take the dogs and go out for a long walk.

As the sun set the house threw oblique shadows across the lawn. It was a beautiful place, the kind of house anyone would kill for. She had thought it a dream come true when she realised that she and Mat were going to live here. It was an ancient manor house, built of mellow local stone. Parts of it still reflected its medieval foundations, parts had been remodelled in the eighteenth century to give it, outwardly at least, a Georgian symmetry which was to her mind utterly beautiful. A building had stood on this site for nearly two thousand years – they had Roman remains in the garden to prove it – and it wore its history like an ancient velvet cloak, confident, stately, elegant and distinctly shabby. Her thoughts went back to the bank. You weren’t called in to see local managers these days. There were no more lunches with a man who you thought of as your friend or at least as a civilised person to whom you could talk. The loan department was based in Taunton and the young man who had spoken to them had employed an edgy, slightly threatening tone which she could see had grated on Mat as much as it had on her. The house’s history, the fact that it had been in Mat’s family for hundreds of years, the efforts they were making to repay the various loans Mat’s father had cheerfully taken out over the years without bothering to inform his three sons, none of this seemed to engage him in the slightest. All he was interested in was the computer screen in front of him. The screen which he kept swinging to face them, but which never quite seemed to be legible or comprehensible to either of them. She glanced at the house. In this light you couldn’t see the crumbling cornices, the rotting wood, the splits in the mullions, the missing slates. In this light it looked like something out of a fairy tale.

A movement in the flowerbed caught her eye. It was the woman in the blue dress. Cal sighed. She watched her with only half her attention, seeing the figure drift seemingly aimlessly amongst the autumn roses. ‘I wish you could bloody well help,’ she said out loud after a moment. ‘What about bringing us some luck for a change.’ Wearily she bent to pick up her basket. When she looked again the woman had vanished.

‘Can you drive over to see me, darling? I would so love it if you could. Your father is at a conference in New York, so it would be safe to come home!’ Laura Rutherford sounded as cheerful and humorous as usual. Abi stared down at the phone thoughtfully as she replaced the receiver. But something was different. Had there been a waver in her mother’s voice? If there had it would have been unheard of. Laura was a strong and determined woman. Serenity was her middle name.

The fact that Abi’s sudden re-posting had been to a Cambridge parish had in a way been a disappointment, for she had known the city for a large part of her life. Her father had been a professor at the university until his retirement and her parents still lived in the house on the far side of the city where she had been brought up. As it turned out her new job was in an area of a Cambridge she had never known before and one that every day shocked and surprised her more and more, but in many ways she would have preferred to be based somewhere far away because much as she loved her mother, her relationship with her father was uncomfortable to say the least.