You Owe Me Five Farthings Page 2

Her reaction, therefore, caused him considerable surprise.

  “You’re doing what?” she demanded furiously, when he broke the news.

  “Trying to rescue my marriage,” he repeated, slightly taken aback. “I promised Rose that I would end my relationship with you straight away. But of course I want you to stay on as my PA,” he added quickly.

  “Oh, you do, do you? I suppose it doesn’t matter in the least what I want?”

  This sarcasm touched him on the raw, for he had never previously been on the receiving end of her contempt. What was more, before the events of this autumn, he would not have taken anyone’s scorn seriously enough for it to hurt him, and few people would have dared to vent it on him, anyway. But in the recent changed circumstances of his life, he felt suddenly vulnerable, unsure of his own standing in his family, and even with the company that employed him, after the amount of time he’d had to take off last month. Struggling with his own difficulties, he completely failed to understand the reasons for her anger.

  “Olivia, I’m sorry,” he began, shaken into uncharacteristic apology.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said, recovering her normal cool demeanour, but retaining the scorn that had stung him. “It was fun while it lasted, but if you want out, that’s okay with me. I’m not staying here, though. You can find someone else to watch your back. From tomorrow.”

  He was silent, trying to think of a way to persuade her. He didn’t love her and never had, but she was an important part of his business life. Who else would manage to keep all the competing balls of their working lives in the air the way she had? On the other hand, if she wanted to leave, it was probably better to stand back and let her do just that. He’d have to make do with a temp for a bit while he found someone new. What the company would say, or do, if she simply walked out, he didn’t know, but that wasn’t his problem. Without another word, he picked up his briefcase and laptop and set off for the afternoon’s meeting without her.

  Olivia watched him go, outwardly at least unmoved. Let him sink or swim on his own. Their arrangement in and out of working hours had suited him as well as it had her until his recent family crisis had brought him up short. But he had never encouraged her to get involved in his personal life, indeed had positively repulsed her a few weeks ago when she had tried to take their relationship to a different level. Clearly he had forgotten that overture of hers and was assuming that nothing had changed. Well, it was too late to expect her to help him now. To work with Clive decorously in the office and keep her hands off him at office parties and in hotel rooms on nights away on business would be a travesty of the successful partnership they had had.

  Damn Rose! She could have sworn the woman had neither the allure nor the guts to hold on to Clive if he once made up his mind to leave her. But the truth was that Clive wanted to stay with his family. The recent dramas involving his young son, not to mention Clive being questioned by the police in a murder investigation––everyone at work had heard about both events because he had been off “sick” for weeks as a result––seemed to have knocked the stuffing out of him. But she couldn’t see him sticking to it. He might think right now that being a model husband and father would make him feel less guilty about his failings in the past, but it wouldn’t last. However, she wasn’t about to hang around and try to pick up where they had left off.

  Her respect for Clive had been gradually eroded by the events of the past few weeks and had disappeared entirely this morning. But to surprise had been added a barely acknowledged anxiety. If life circumstances had caused Clive to fall apart like this, no one was immune. Of all the hard-headed, successful people she had met, she would have thought him the most likely to have stood up to such pressure, and she couldn’t understand why he had not, all of which made her uncomfortable. A diminished, vulnerable Clive held no interest for her. She simply wanted to get away from him, from the whole creaking set-up, as fast as she could. She had enough annual leave left to make her departure now, this morning, and then she could look for a new job in the new year. There were plenty more fish of Clive’s kind in the sea. One of them might be willing to be hooked permanently, if she played her cards right…and if that was what she wanted.

  She found a plastic crate, put it on her desk and started to pack her belongings. There wasn’t much to take with her. She had never decorated her office with knick-knacks, plants and other clutter. And anything that would remind her of her working life at this company was better left behind. Outside in reception she could hear the girls giggling; no doubt they had been eavesdropping. She stuffed a box of tissues into a corner of the crate viciously and shut her ears.

  Two

  Jeremy attended the village school’s annual Christmas presentation in the church the following afternoon––more in the character of parent than as rector of the parish, though he was always asked to give a short talk at some point in the proceedings before handing out to the infant classes the small presents provided by the Parochial Church Council. The churchwardens had left the heating on all day especially for the occasion, so the building felt unusually warm and welcoming. The teachers and their pupils had decorated inside with holly wreaths and candles, while an enormous tree dominated the side aisle, adorned with tinsel, baubles, and coloured lights in traditional fashion, making the church look very festive. The presence, unusually, of real snow outside had made the children rather excitable, but apart from that, everything went off very well.

  The school presentation included various musical and poetic renditions on Christmas themes, with a few tangential offerings to fill up the hour’s performance. In one of those, the younger children sang the old nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons” that mimicked the melody of the City Church bells of Restoration London. As Jeremy listened, he found himself musing on the second line, “You owe me five farthings, said the bells of St Martin’s,” and from there his thoughts moved on to the nature of personal debt and particularly our debt to God. As created beings, he thought, we owe God everything. And as sinners, even more so. But we will never be rich enough to pay Him. But if grace is a free gift, then should we even try? A tangled skein of philosophy, this, he had to admit, as quite often happened when he started asking theological questions of himself.

  The annual school presentation normally aroused in him feelings both warm and optimistic, as befitted the beginning of the Christmas season. But today there moved a worm of doubt about the warm optimism of Christmas, and with it the germ of an idea as to the theme of his preaching over the Christmas period. An uncomfortable theme, it would be—and one that would almost certainly cause offence to some––but perhaps that was precisely the point.

  Liz, unaware of the turmoil of his thoughts and enjoying his unaccustomed presence beside her in the pew, saw with maternal resignation that Bethan’s hair was escaping from its pigtails and Chris’s jumper was inside out––he must have taken it off at some point and then put it on again, but why?

  On the other side of the church sat Rose and Robert, tucked away almost behind a pillar in the side aisle. Outwardly composed but inwardly weeping as she sat listening to the melody of the City Church bells in the nursery rhyme, Rose found the words evoking rather different thoughts from those that had come to Jeremy. She had not considered, when she told Simon that they could no longer even be friends, that this separation might mean her leaving the bellringing band. She realised she owed them a great deal more than the five farthings of the song, and that when the bells called her again to ring them, she would go. It was partly that she felt an obligation to the ancient art of campanology and her fellow ringers in the tower. Ringers were always in short supply in rural areas, and they had spent such time and effort teaching her to ring, even though she knew she would never be all that proficient. She appreciated, too, Jeremy’s point about the bells’ powerful witness to the world that the Church still called parishioners to worship, however little they wished to hear the summons, and however deaf they were to its demands. Yet she wondered uneas
ily how easy it would be to face Sunday service ringing––and Simon––again.

  Robert held her hand tightly as they sat together in the pew. Just then she was his lifeline, and he was finding it hard to let go of her and swim even in the safe and shallow pond represented by his class at the village school. He had discovered in the last few weeks that life wasn’t the quiet, secure, uneventful bubble he had grown used to, but a dangerous and unpredictable vortex of emotion, isolation and fear, where unexpected horrors might be awaiting you along familiar country roads, or vengeful human monsters might attack you in your sleep; where the night was filled with terrors and nightmares, and only a very few people could be trusted. In all of those horrors, his mother had been there for him, and he knew she would always be. But he was afraid he had somehow made her unhappy, for she had not smiled much in the last few days, and he had heard her crying once or twice when she thought he was out of earshot. That troubled him, and he couldn’t work out what was wrong, although he didn’t really see how it could be his fault. Worse still, he didn’t know what he could do to help her––except to give her his own childish love in return for her steadfast adult presence. So he clung tightly to her hand, and hoped that both of them would come safely together through their present troubled waters and find peace and security again.

  ~ * ~

  On Saturday, Rose suggested they visit the local garden centre to see Santa Claus––whose grotto filled up, from a retail point of view, that slack time of winter between autumn pruning and spring planting. A visit to Santa’s grotto had always been his favourite treat during the pre-Christmas period in the past. Surely, Rose thought, it would help rouse him from the lethargy into which he still too often lapsed when tired or stressed, and give her a much-needed fillip too?

  But Robert, to her surprise, flatly refused the offer, asserting in rather a querulous voice that he would rather stay at home. She persuaded him to accompany her to buy a Christmas tree before they sold out, but he was fretful and pettish on the journey and refused to make any attempt to enjoy the lights and decorations with which the garden centre had decked itself in its attempt to attract seasonal custom, although in previous years he had always revelled in them.

  When she told Clive about this, on their return, he was far from sympathetic. “You’re babying him,” he observed, with only a degree less than his old level of scorn. “He’s eight years old, for God’s sake. He probably doesn’t believe in Father Christmas any longer––I’m sure none of his classmates do. He may have enjoyed it all in the past, but that’s no reason to think he will now. Take him ice skating or something instead.”

  “Maybe,” said Rose, refusing to be browbeaten. “I just thought it might cheer him up.”

  Clive snorted. “I’ll take him to a Bisons hockey game at Basingstoke in the new year. That’s more of the kind of thing a boy of his age enjoys, and it’ll give him a bit of kudos at school.”

  Rose looked at him in surprise. Clive didn’t usually show much interest in sports of any kind––and nor, for that matter, did Robert. “He’s not all that keen on ice hockey,” she pointed out.

  For a moment, there hung between them some remnant of the argument about Robert’s personal and social development that had caused such a rift earlier in the year––a rift that had closed over during the traumatic events of the past few weeks without ever being properly healed. For a moment, Rose expected a reopening of the half-submerged dispute about whether and when Robert should go away to boarding school. But to her surprise, Clive just shrugged and turned away, leaving the argument in abeyance.

  What has got into Clive? thought Rose. Could he have given up the boarding school idea altogether? Might Robert be allowed to stay safely at the village school, and then go on for secondary education to Northchurch College, in the local town? Perhaps she should take him to the College Christmas Fayre instead of Santa’s Grotto. That would be a more grown-up activity, in Clive’s terms, and she might find the last-minute presents that she had hoped to get at the garden centre. But on the other hand, Simon, who taught at the College, might be there, and she couldn’t face that––not yet.

  ~ * ~

  Northchurch College Christmas Fayre, held traditionally on the Saturday following the end of the Christmas term, had a local reputation and was well supported by people from the surrounding area, many of them looking for last-minute presents at bargain prices. The college was popular in the area, providing a venue for film shows, live amateur theatrical productions and concerts in a rural area not greatly blessed with such amenities. The icy conditions of the previous week had begun to relent which, along with the efforts of the county’s gritter lorries, made the roads less daunting to drive over, and the stallholders were expecting a good turnout.

  Mike Swanson, who was a pupil at the college, persuaded his mother to drop him at the Fayre on her way to do the grocery supermarket shopping in the town.

  “Doesn’t Dad usually take you?” Liz asked, as she picked up the shopping bags and tore the week’s list off the pad in the kitchen. “What’s happened to him this morning?”

  “Parish stuff,” Mike told her. “A funeral visit, I think.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed his mother vaguely. “Old Mrs Swinton at Two Marks died on Wednesday. I expect her son and daughter have come down to arrange the funeral.”

  “So, can I hitch a lift with you, Mum, please?” Mike asked again.

  “I’ll only be an hour or so at the supermarket,” Liz warned him. “Will you be ready to come back with me then?”

  Mike hesitated. “I’m not sure. I might help on one of the stalls if they need me.”

  She frowned, working out the logistics. “Dad might be able to pick you up later, perhaps.”

  “I’ll text him and ask,” said Mike. His father’s phone would be switched to silent while he dealt with the funeral visit, of course, but he would check it later.

  “I suppose if Dad can’t do it, I can fit in coming back for you later somehow.” His mother sounded slightly reluctant, and Mike hoped his father would be able to help. His mother was busy enough as it was.

  “Thanks, Mum. An hour isn’t really enough to do the Fayre properly. Dad and I usually stay all afternoon.”

  “Mmm,” commented Liz.

  It was the bookstall, she knew, that drew them both. Every year local booksellers offloaded new books that hadn’t sold during the autumn to make room for the bestsellers that their customers were buying for Christmas, and householders in the area went through their shelves for unwanted volumes to donate. Jeremy himself had done that earlier in the week and sent the books to school with Mike.

  When they arrived, Mike made a beeline for the stall, where he planned to spend almost all the pocket money he had saved up for the occasion. The Swanson household was not a wealthy one, as Jeremy’s stipend was augmented only a little by his wife’s weekly evening-class teaching. Mike was only fifteen and his parents didn’t want him to jeopardise his school work in this exam year by taking a job in the evenings to earn money. But his mother faithfully gave her four children a little money of their own every week out of her earnings for the sake of their independence as well as to teach them how to manage their finances––and Mike had been saving his for months.

  The bookstall at the Fayre was usually run by Mike’s English teacher, Simon Hellyer, who shared his love of books, particularly those containing poetry, and who was also Mike’s mentor and idol. But on this occasion, Mr Hellyer was mysteriously absent and had delegated the task to one of his younger colleagues, a girl in her early twenties who had joined the staff to teach history the previous term straight from training college and whose dark-haired vivacity Mike secretly admired. Miss Barnard, Mike saw, had already attracted a small following of Sixth Form boys and was having trouble deflecting them.

  “Can I help you on the stall, Miss?” he asked. He had helped Mr Hellyer with the bookstall last year and felt confident about being involved again. Though younger than most of M
iss Barnard’s swains and dwarfed by some of them, too, he could not bear her to suffer embarrassment or difficulty.

  “Mike!” She greeted his arrival with enthusiasm. “Thanks, I could do with a hand. I’ve had a lot of late contributions. One of the monks from Whitehill came in half an hour ago with a whole boxful of books, and I haven’t had a chance to price them. Can you have a look and see what you think? I haven’t even finished setting up properly yet, and it’s only ten minutes till we’re officially open!” She turned to the boys, who were jostling with each other a little to get closer to the book table behind which she stood. “Time to go, lads,” she said firmly. “Unless you’re in the market to buy books. I’m busy here, and even with Mike’s help I’m not going to have time to get everything ready before we open the stall.”

  The boys cast jealous looks at Mike across the table as they turned away, but none of them was willing to pretend an interest in books that they didn’t feel.

  “Phew!” Miss Barnard said. “Thanks for rescuing me, Mike. What a nuisance they are.”

  Mike didn’t know what to say. Miss Barnard never seemed to feel any need to retain a protective professional distance from her pupils, and he was slightly embarrassed as well as attracted by her friendliness. Mr Hellyer, by contrast, though approachable, was always in control of any situation he found himself in, which Mike found much easier to deal with.

  He smiled vaguely at Miss Barnard and delved into the box of books from Whitehill Abbey. As usual, they were cast-outs from the Abbey library, and a mixture of heavy theology (not very likely to be bought by Fayre customers, except possibly his father) and lighter lifestyle books in paperback. The former often ended up being taken to the local Oxfam shop to join other academic tomes in Oxford itself or be sold online, but the latter were usually worth putting out in a prominent position for the customers.

  He had reached the bottom of the box before he came upon something that he always thought of later as simply The Book. As soon as his hand touched it he knew it was different—special in some way. He lifted it out carefully and set it on the table.