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.
The household into which Abi had been born had been aggressively godless. Her father, the world-renowned chemist Professor Harry Rutherford, had drummed a compulsory atheism into his only child from the first. When she had gone up to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford and chosen to read history he had nearly had apoplexy, but her lack of talent in maths and the sciences at school could neither be overlooked nor sidestepped and he was forced to give in with good grace to the inevitable fact that chemistry would never be her thing. He even understood his daughter’s love of sacred music. Music was his own passion, sacred music an illogical but profound side shoot of something that had a comfortable root in mathematical progressions. The areas of her life which involved healing and intuition and irrational spiritual longings she kept very carefully to herself. Had he known that sometimes she lingered in churches and cathedrals to sit, lost in thought which sometimes turned to prayer, he would have disowned her on the spot. As it was, her decision to study theology and later to seek ordination led to a quarrel which had kept them apart for five years in spite of her best efforts to effect some kind of reconciliation. Since her move back to Cambridge she and her mother had met alone, secretly, for furtive lunches in small restaurants in the narrow winding streets of the old city far from the modern science laboratories which were still her father’s usual habitat even now he was retired.
Laura Rutherford was a deeply spiritual woman but she had no time at all for the strictures and structures of the church. ‘I am afraid you will regret this, sweetheart,’ she had said with a sigh, when Abi had told her of her emerging vocation, ‘but you have to follow your own star. You will always have my blessing, whatever you do. You know that.’ Her own worship was centred on her love of plants, her world famous garden, the time she spent alone in the company of flowers. With her husband she was able to maintain a sufficient level of scientific involvement with horticulture and plant chemistry to keep their marriage stable and happy over its thirty-five years of existence. Her private beliefs, whatever they were, she kept to herself. Neither her husband nor her daughter were a party to them.
Her mother greeted Abi at the front door and they hugged each other with guilty glee. ‘It’s so lovely to see you!’ Laura led the way indoors. ‘Darling, Harry! I’m quite glad to be shot of him for a few days. He is such a bigot!’ There was a bleak emphasis on the last word which brought Abi up short. She caught her mother’s hand and swung her round to face her. ‘Mummy? Is everything OK?’
Laura nodded. ‘Of course, darling. Now, you tell me what has been happening to you. I was very surprised to hear you had moved. Why the sudden flight from the Rectory? Has that oleaginous man been pawing you?’
Abi let out a snort of laughter. ‘He’s not oleaginous. He’s basically a nice person, but yes, we were getting a bit too close and his fiancee objected. All over now. The bishop had a word. It’s strictly business from now on.’
Laura led the way into a garden full of roses. ‘You still shouldn’t be working with a man like that. How can you concentrate on your job!’ her mother retorted.
‘It is my job to learn to get on with people. To manage situations. To cope with men like Kier. If I fall at the first fence I might as well give up.’ Abi flung herself down on a mossy stone bench. A small fountain trickled gently in the circular pond at their feet.
Her mother sat down next to her. She smiled fondly at the water spout. ‘Solar powered. Isn’t that clever.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘You are not talking about your clients here. Your parishioners. Whatever you call them. You are talking about sexual harassment at work.’
Abi shook her head. ‘I have to deal with it, Mummy. God must have sent me to St Hugh’s for a reason.’
Her mother glanced across at her. ‘Perhaps God is trying to show you that you are in the wrong place. In the wrong job.’
Abi looked away. ‘I’m not in the wrong job!’
‘So, you’re enjoying it?’ Laura turned back to the fountain, studying the moving rainbows in the water with exaggerated care.
There was a short pause. ‘I’m finding it a bit tough, actually,’ Abi said at last. ‘It’s not just Kier. It’s the whole pastoral thing. It was so different before, in my last parish. I saw myself as a healer, not a social worker. Now I’m expected to give advice, recite an austere prayer, but keep my distance from people and I hate it.’ She bit her lip. It sounded shameful, said out loud like that. ‘It must be what God wants for me, and I have dedicated myself to serving him, but -’ She paused.
There was so much missing from the reality of being a priest now, compared with her expectations, she didn’t know where to start. She had tried again and again to face what was wrong, to pray about it, to ask God what she should do differently, to try and find why so much was missing in her life now that had been there before, even when she was a student. The sense of the numinous. The wonder. The absolute knowing that there was so much there which cannot be seen but which is known absolutely deep inside. It was a certainty which made the whole world shine and that shine had gone. ‘I’m not very good at poverty and obedience, I suppose. I didn’t sign up to be a nun! Everything I do here presents some kind of conflict. I’m a mystic by nature, but I have to be a realist as well. I have such a sense of duty towards this job, and yet, I long to be free. I know I have a calling but now I want to rebel at every turn. I want to help and heal, but apparently I’m not allowed to. I want beauty and passion and a sense of the sacred in my worship! It’s not there. I sense the other world around me, but I don’t dare mention it. It is as though Kier is terrified of anything spiritual. There is no Mystery in what I do. With a capital M. At least not when -’
‘Not when?’ Laura did not look up. Her hands in her lap were clenched.
‘Not when Kier is there. It’s his way, I suppose. He is a sincere, dedicated man, and he believes in what he is doing, he’s passionate, but he bullies the congregation. He talks about sin all the time, never the hope and beauty of God’s love. He works to rigid rules as though he’s afraid to allow any mysticism to escape. In fact as though he’s afraid of everything.’
Laura grimaced. ‘It sounds to me as though it’s Kier who is your problem, not God! Don’t you take services on your own? Can’t you do your own thing?’
‘Not very often. I take them at the little church in the parish, but even there I am always conscious of being watched. Spied on. Someone is always there to sneak back and tell him I’m doing something wrong.’
‘He sounds awful.’
Abi laughed. ‘No. It’s just a different approach to mine. I have to learn his way of doing things. He’s also warm and funny and very charismatic in his own way.’
‘He doesn’t sound any of those things from what you are saying.’
Abi opened her mouth to deny it, but somehow the words didn’t come.
