Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

‘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 woken 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 .

He’d left for a meeting at the church then, and the American woman had gone back to her room, and she must have already started packing because by the time Catherine had been to the bathroom and washed her hair the woman had disappeared: the room empty, the sheets stripped, the front door key left on the bare mattress with a note.

She stood in the empty room for a few moments, feeling the blessed silence settle around her, and then she went downstairs to set the table for lunch. She scrubbed and pierced two jacket potatoes and put them in the oven. She washed and drained and mixed a salad, and made a dressing. She looked in the kitchen drawer where they kept their bank cards and passports and housekeeping money, and made sure everything was there. She checked that Michael’s new laptop computer was still in the study. She ran the vacuum cleaner around the spare room, emptied the wastepaper basket of yoghurt pots, straightened the rug. She took the crumpled sheets downstairs and put them in the washing machine, and when she went back upstairs she checked through her jewellery box.

It wasn’t that she’d thought the woman would turn out to be a thief. Not really. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she’d felt about her, the suspicion and unease which she couldn’t bring herself to admit might have been unfounded.

It felt like a long time before Michael got home. He started telling her about the meeting almost before he’d opened the door, tugging off his shoes in the hallway and rattling on about misplaced funding priorities and a dean who cared more about church buildings than putting the gospel into practice. She waited for him to finish talking before telling him that the woman was gone, by which time they were sitting at the table with a dressed salad and two steaming baked potatoes between them. She showed him the note the woman had left, unfolding it from her cardigan pocket and smoothing it out on the table. THANK YOU, it said, SEE YOU AGAIN SOON. He smiled, and nodded, and draped a napkin across his lap.