The Reaper

the church fete did to him, what was he like after a couple of beers?

She didn't find out that evening, though she stayed long enough for a glass of the elderflower wine he had bought from the bottle stall. With a couple of other people she helped stack up plates beside the deep, old- fashioned sink that had been there since the forties. The rector was insisting that he would do his own washing up later.

'He could do with a dishwasher,' one of the women commented.

Nobody spoke, but there were smiles all round.

Gary wasn't in when she got back, and it was too late to do anything useful in the garden, so she made herself a sandwich and settled down to watch Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick. Men with devilry appealed to her, at least on screen. There wasn't much of the devil in Gary these days. On Saturday evenings he was with his jazz circle, a pathetic crowd of middle-aged blokes in black T-shirts and sandals who drank real ale and listened to records of players of fifty years ago they referred to familiarly as Dizzie, Bird and Bix. The sight of them stretching their necks to bob their bald heads like wading birds was not pretty. Upstairs Gary had a tenor saxophone he had been trying to master ever since his schooldays. She found out about it only after they married.

And why did they marry? There had been a spark of something when Gary had come to paint the outside of her parents' house and posted a note through her bedroom window suggesting a date. She'd always had a wild streak in her own character, so she didn't hesitate. He was in better shape in those days, with dark, sleeked-back hair. He knew which clothes to wear, took her to discos, to parties, to London. Helped her learn her lines for the plays she was in. Talked about what they would do with their lives, the foreign countries they would visit on their world tour. Made love to her under the stars on the beach at Weymouth, inside the tower on top of Glastonbury Tor, on a punt (carefully) on the river at Oxford, in a first-class compartment on the last train home from Paddington and in a hot-air balloon over Bristol, drunk on champagne, while the other passengers pretended to admire the view from the opposite side. He took risks then. He would have done it between the aisles in Sainsbury's if she had asked. Never mentioned the heart murmur he was supposed to have had since childhood. She heard about that much later. That murmur was his excuse to avoid all strenuous work. 'Can't take risks,' he'd say. So the garden was Rachel's responsibility. Fortunately she didn't mind. Plants in their infinite variety fascinated her. Without knowing their botanical names she had a passion for flowers and a sound knowledge of the best way to care for them. And, it has to be said, they gave her the excuse to get out of the house when Gary was home.

'Can't take risks.' These days the biggest risk Gary took was stepping out of doors without his baseball cap. Didn't want the wind blowing that streak of hair off his scalp.

She told him once that the Walkman he used to listen to jazz was rubbing on his scalp, making him bald. Mean. He was sensitive about hair loss, but she was sick to the back teeth of hearing the tinny sound. He believed her for a while and took to wearing the headband under his chin, which made no difference to her frustration and just made him look more ridiculous than ever, with his silly spit of hair linking up to form an oval around his head, like a slipped halo.

There had been other boyfriends before Gary. She attracted them, knew how to perform the balancing act between sex and her reputation. She liked men, needed someone to share with. Yet by nature she was not a liberated woman. Oh, she was willing to have a career, make a contribution, but basically what she craved above everything was marriage and children. Chances had gone by. Men more attractive than Gary-men she had slept with-had found other partners and taken jobs in places she would have adored to live in, one in San Francisco and another Paris. Even Aberdeen, where her second lover ended up working for an oil company, would have been an improvement on Foxford, Wiltshire-or Wilts, as she thought of it.

No use moaning, she often told herself these days. Get on with life. The marriage was childless and barren of romance, so she put her energy into her part-time job, three days at the health centre as a receptionist; the garden, which she'd cultivated as a traditional cottage garden, with shrub roses, laburnum, foxgloves and herbs; and amateur dramatics, always a passion, plus her charity work and her support of the church. It was her Christian sense of duty that made divorce too awful to contemplate. True, she had erred and strayed in her youth, but she took the solemn vows of Holy Matrimony seriously. She had not been with another man since her wedding day.

Gary came in around eleven-thirty, after she had rewound Jack Nicholson and was watching some inane Saturday night programme aimed at the teenage audience. He wasn't a smoker, but some of his friends were and she could smell the cigarette fumes clinging to his clothes. He peeled a banana and flopped into a chair, the baseball cap still on. 'How'd it go?'

'The fete, you mean?' she jogged his memory. He wouldn't recall how she was spending her day. 'Top result. With weather like that, it couldn't miss. We were really busy on the cake stall.'

'Did you bring one home?'

She shook her head. 'It isn't the thing.'

'What isn't?'

'For the people in charge to put cakes aside for their own use.'

'Very high-minded. What happened to the ones you didn't sell?'

'Everything went. If you really want cake, I can cook one tomorrow.'

'Don't bother. You'll be at church tomorrow.'

'Not all day. There's time.'

Gary shook his head. 'So how did he shape up?'

'Who?'

'The new sky pilot.'

'Have some respect, Gary. He's the rector. And he isn't all that new. He's been here since last year.'

'A bit flash isn't he? Wears red socks.'

'I hadn't noticed the socks,' she said casually and untruthfully. 'Who cares what colour his socks are if he does his job well? He stayed all afternoon.'

Gary laughed. 'He couldn't very well bog off, could he? What time did it end?'

'Five, or thereabouts.' She chose not to speak of her invitation to the rectory afterwards. Instead she said, 'He made a good speech to open the fete. He said the word 'fete' came from 'feast.' He'd found a parish magazine from the nineteen-thirties with a correction notice about a day of prayer and feasting in support of the Congo mission. It should have read prayer and fasting. He's always got a funny story.'

Gary said without smiling, 'Must be the way he tells them. What are they saying about the bishop, then?'

'The bishop?'

'Yours, isn't he? Glastonbury? It was on the local news tonight. Took a jump, didn't he?'

'The bishop?'

'They found him at the bottom of some quarry and his BMW at the top.'

'Oh, that's awful! You're serious? Dead?'

'He made sure of that. The drop looked like Beachy Head. What made him do that, for Christ's sake?'

'I can't believe it. He confirmed me.'

'P'raps he was on something. Thought he could fly with the angels.'

Gary's tasteless humour left her cold. 'Poor man.'

They stared at the screen for a while, locked in their own thoughts. Rachel eventually suggested coffee.

'Don't bother.' He reached for the remote control and turned down the sound, the unfailing sign that he wanted to say something momentous, however casual he tried to make it sound. 'I was talking to the lads. I don't know who mentioned it. Gordon, maybe. There's a travel agent in Frome offering three weeks in New Orleans for nine hundred quid. That's everything. Flight, hotel.'

'In America?'

'That's where New Orleans is.'

'You're thinking of going?'

'It's the jazz capital of the world. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver.'

'And you'd like to go?' she pressed him. She would have preferred New York or San Francisco, but she would cheerfully settle for New Orleans, strolling the sunny streets in shorts, eating Cajun food in the French Quarter or on one of those Mississippi paddle boats. It would be the nearest thing to the world tour they had promised each other