The Rector's Wife Read online

  About the Book

  For twenty years Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife has served God and the parish in a variety of ways. She has baked for the Brownies, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices and clothed herself and her children in jumble-sale items.

  When her husband fails to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreats into isolated bitterness, and the bullying of her daughter at the local comprehensive reaches an intolerable level, Anna rebels. She takes a job in the local supermarket where she earns her own money, her sense of her self-worth, the shocked disapproval of the parish and the icy fury of her husband.

  She also attracts the passionate interest of three very different men, each of whom is to play a significant part in the blossoming of her life…

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  The Rector’s Wife

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly-acclaimed bestselling contemporary novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, as well as a number of historical novels.

  Born in Gloucestershire, she now lives in London. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

  For more information on Joanna Trollope and her books,

  visit her website at www.joannatrollope.com

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  THE CHOIR

  A VILLAGE AFFAIR

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

  A SPANISH LOVER

  THE BEST OF FRIENDS

  NEXT OF KIN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  MARRYING THE MISTRESS

  GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

  BROTHER & SISTER

  SECOND HONEYMOON

  FRIDAY NIGHTS

  THE OTHER FAMILY

  and published by Black Swan

  By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

  LEGACY OF LOVE

  A SECOND LEGACY

  PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER

  THE STEPS OF THE SUN

  LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

  THE BRASS DOLPHIN

  CITY OF GEMS

  THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE

  and published by Corgi Books

  Joanna Trollope

  THE RECTOR’S

  WIFE

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409011552

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  THE RECTOR’S WIFE

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552994705

  Originally published in Great Britain

  by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Bloomsbury edition published 1991

  Black Swan edition published 1992

  27 29 30 28 26

  Copyright © Joanna Trollope 1991

  The right of Joanna Trollope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers,

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK

  can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  For Antonia

  Chapter One

  As usual, there were five of them on the village green, waiting for the school bus. Also as usual, they began to talk differently as Mrs Bouverie approached, louder, more self-consciously, and the younger two, in their all-weather uniform of jeans, and bare feet thrust into stiletto-heeled shoes, put their cigarettes behind their backs. It was, Mrs Bouverie thought, as if she were a headmistress. But she was worse than a headmistress; she was the Rector’s wife.

  Every weekday afternoon in termtime, the school bus from Woodborough stopped at Loxford village green and decanted nine children. The reception committee of mothers was always waiting, partly out of maternal duty, but mostly because those ten minutes on the village green filled the same gossiping function as ten minutes at the village pump had for earlier generations. When the children clattered, yelling, down the bus steps, their mothers regarded them with a mixture of disgust and pride, as if amazed anew each afternoon that they had managed to produce children of such spectacular offensiveness.

  The last child – and the oldest – was always Flora Bouverie, who came trailing down the bus steps burdened with splitting carrier bags and fragile, half-made artefacts, peering about her blindly for her mother. She took her glasses off, every journey, because, if she did not, they were taken off for her and thrown out of the bus window into a hedge. Mrs Bouverie knew this, and she also knew that the Loxford mothers despised her for meeting a child of ten. If she had said, But I meet her as miserable compensation for enduring Woodborough Junior which is quite the wrong school for her, they would have despised her even more.

  ‘Intolerable,’ Flora said, dropping her bags on her mother’s feet.

  She scrabbled about in her duffel-coat pockets until she found her glasses. ‘I hate this coat. I look like a train spotter.’

  Anna Bouverie thought with revulsion of the bags of jumble lurking in the Rectory garage. ‘I know. But the alternatives are even worse.’

  Flora put on her glasses. She looked up at her mother with eyes enlarged and blurred by the lenses.

  ‘What does cretinous mean?’

  ‘Literally, mentally defective.’

  Flora looked round at the village children swirling, screaming, across the green, like gulls round the ships of their mothers. ‘Exactly!’ Flora shouted after them.

  One mother turned back. She worked most nights in the pub, and was the self-appointed keeper-up of the village spirits, relentless in her jollity.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Mrs B! Don’t be late!’

  They all cackled with guilty laughter.

  ‘What does she mean?’ Flora said, staring after her.

  ‘I’m usually late for the bus. I have to run. They watch me running. That’s all.’

  ‘Frankly,’ Flora said, s
tooping for her burdens, ‘I think it’s intolerable.’

  ‘You’re full of huge new words—’

  ‘English,’ Flora said briefly. ‘We had to find six words out of a newspaper. We always do everything out of a newspaper for English.’ She paused. ‘I found flatulence. It means burping – and the other one.’

  ‘Farting,’ Anna said. Woodborough Junior’s familiarity with rich obscenities had overlaid Flora’s natural vocabulary with an anxious and reacting gentility.

  ‘Yes,’ Flora said, looking away.

  Anna bent to disentangle a bag or two from Flora’s fingers.

  ‘Come on. Tea. It’s starting to rain.’

  Ominous little gusts of wind were digging playfully in the nearby litter bin and scattering crisp packets about. They blew damp draughts against Anna and Flora’s faces and veiled Flora’s spectacles with infant specks of rain. The mothers and children were out of sight now, reduced to no more than faint yelps from among the council houses built on rising ground above the green, and there was no-one else about, and would not be, until the men began to come home at dusk.

  ‘Why,’ said Flora, in the dead and hopeless tone of one who has uttered a particular, heartfelt question over and over, to no avail, ‘why does school have to be so horrible?’

  Loxford church was medieval, with a square tower and a Norman tympanum over the south door of the Harrowing of Hell. Loxford Old Rectory was Georgian, built of the same blond stone as the church, and it sat behind grand double gates whose posts were boastfully crowned with new stone eagles. Loxford New Rectory was redbrick and had been built in the early sixties. It had, Anna Bouverie’s mother said, all the quiet charm of a bus shelter.

  Its redeeming feature was its setting. It had been built on a piece of glebe land behind the church, with a narrow drive running up beside the churchyard wall, separating it from the lane, isolating it from other houses. Its front windows looked towards the church, and its back ones over farmland to a series of gentle green hills, the furthest one crowned with a low, dark copse, like a pool of spilled ink. When Peter and Anna had come for interview, Anna had looked at the hills with hunger, and not at the cramped kitchen or the meanly proportioned sitting-room, and had urged Peter to accept. ‘Oh, we must,’ she had pleaded. ‘You must. Please.’

  He had been doubtful. He was doubtful about being sole incumbent in five parishes – he had visualized a team ministry – and even more doubtful about the rural ministry in itself. Did he . . . Was he . . .

  ‘While you are waiting for God to write it down for you in capital letters,’ Anna had shouted finally, exasperated out of all diplomacy, ‘I shall decide for you both. We are going to Loxford.’

  To Loxford. Loxford with Quindale, Church End, New End and Snead. After six years in a Birmingham slum parish, Anna thought, you became desperate not to have a front doorstep strewn with down-and-outs and to have a back garden littered with worms, not discarded syringes and used condoms. Six years! Six years of bringing up Charlotte and Luke with chicken wire tacked across inside their bedroom window, and a security system worthy of Alcatraz so that the parishioners who needed to get to you never could. Flora had been conceived the minute they reached Loxford, out of sheer relief. Anna supposed that she should then have had another baby, to keep Flora company, but had found that she felt as unlike having another baby as she had once felt like it.

  Walking up the drive beside the churchyard wall, Anna said, ‘What happened to Marie? I thought she was your friend.’

  ‘She went to Germany,’ Flora said, stopping to peer at the wall, where moss was beginning to swell into new plump spring cushions. ‘With her father. He’s a corporal.’

  Half Flora’s school were Army children. They lived briefly in the great camps round and about, and then vanished. Flora envied them because all the things she craved in life they could buy cheaply in the NAAFI. They seemed to take money for granted. Flora, accustomed to a life of bare sufficiency, knew differently.

  She put down a bag and dislodged a green dome of moss.

  ‘Look—’

  Flora had always dawdled. Toddler walks with her had been a superhuman test of patience as she squatted by every puddle, slowly stirring the water with sticks, and picked up myriads of stones, tenderly brushing them free of earth and inserting them with infinite laboriousness into pockets already grinding with pebbles. She roared with fury if helped or hurried.

  ‘It really is raining now,’ Anna said.

  Flora must be fed, the sitting-room fire lit, the dining-room tidied for tonight’s Parochial Church Council meeting, supper organized. And then, there was her translation. Paid by the page, Anna translated German and French technical books into English. It was dreary work, but it was private. Peter had discovered that his five villages would not like him to have a working wife.

  ‘You will find,’ Colonel Richardson, of Quindale House had said, not unsympathetically, ‘that it would cause a lot of resentment. A lot. Particularly among those who don’t go to church—’ he eyed Peter – ‘but might?’

  Peter did not repeat this to Anna. There would have been no point; she would simply have laughed. Her natural vivacity, her particular charm, had led her too often into thinking that people would be drawn into seeing things her way, with disastrous results. At least, Peter had found them disastrous, and he would find them so again if Anna chose to try and charm Colonel Richardson out of his opinion of working clergy wives. So, to avoid this, Peter merely said that, for the moment, he’d appreciate it a lot if she’d keep working a bit quiet. She had taught in a language school in Birmingham three mornings a week, a language school with a crèche, run by an enlightened Belgian woman, where Charlotte and Luke had gone until they were old enough for school. She said to Peter, ‘Teaching is very quiet. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not invisible enough.’

  They had been in Loxford six months then. She was happily pregnant and still sustained by the hills. She saw the advertisement for a technical translator in the newspaper. It was easy to learn the vocabulary, as easy as it was dull. So strange, she sometimes thought, to have all this engineering knowledge in three languages and still be so unable to apply a single word of it that she could scarcely change a plug without helpful diagrams. In order to make a weekly sum of money even dimly visible to the naked eye, she had to translate fifty pages a week, a drudgery she tried to regard as ineluctable as brushing her teeth or washing the kitchen floor. A decade of it now, ten years at two and a half thousand pages a year. Best not to think of it, in case her temper slipped out of gear and, as once she had done, she threw a bowl of apples at Peter. She had missed; the bowl had broken. It was a blue-and-white pottery bowl Peter’s mother, Kitty, had brought back from a timeshare holiday with a friend in southern Spain. The apples had rolled everywhere, gathering bruises and fluff. She had found one months later under the vegetable rack, shrunk to the size of a nut, dark wizened brown, and smelling of cider.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Flora said, setting her moss down carefully on the kitchen table.

  ‘Gone to see the Bishop.’

  ‘Wowee,’ said Flora. She pressed the moss and watched a trickle of earthy water ooze out of it. ‘Why?’

  Slicing bread, Anna said untruthfully, ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  The Bishop had been to Woodborough Junior once, to take prayers. Flora, unwisely, told her class he would wear a purple robe and a great cross round his neck and a huge ring like a winegum. He arrived in a dark suit and a black shirt buttoned down over his dog collar and kept his hands folded so that nobody could see if he had on a ring at all, let alone one like a winegum. It had been a humiliating day for Flora and she bore the Bishop a grudge in consequence.

  ‘Would you like cheese in your sandwich?’

  ‘What I would really like,’ said Flora, knowing there wasn’t any, ‘is chocolate hazelnut spread.’

  Recognizing the game, Anna waited.

  ‘Or black cherry jam. Swiss jam.
’

  Silence.

  ‘Or smoked salmon,’ Flora said inventively, never having had any.

  ‘Or cheese.’

  ‘OK,’ Flora said, ‘cheese.’

  ‘Cheese, please. I can’t think why I’m making this sandwich for you. Why aren’t you making it yourself?’

  Flora stuck out her hands and her lower lip.

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘Flora,’ Anna said, ‘have you got prep?’

  Flora put her hands over her ears and began to jump about all over the kitchen.

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up—’

  Again, Anna waited. She watched Flora with exasperation and pity. Charlotte and Luke had managed school perfectly well, had made friends, had slipped effortlessly in and out of all the required fads and fashions. Charlotte had gone on to university; Luke was now at sixth-form college. Flora was different. She was cleverer than either of them, more elusive, more fragile. She said sometimes, of school, ‘But I can’t make the right conversation,’ and it was true. Something uncompromising in Flora prevented her from understanding where she went wrong. Her frustrated jumping, which sent her thick, straight, dark hair – Anna’s hair – flying up and down like dog’s ears, was no more than a maddened expression of how she felt when reminded of school, of a world where she was doomed to remain odd.

  Anna put the sandwich on a plate, and then put the plate on the table, beside the moss.

  Flora stopped abruptly, and said, ‘I forgot my flute.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes!’ Flora said on a rising note. ‘It’s my lesson tomorrow, I must practise—’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Anna said into the receiver, ‘Mr Bouverie is out just now. He should be back by six; could you — oh. Oh, I see. Are you sure he said he would call? All right, I’ll tell him. Mrs Simms, 7 New End. Goodbye.’

  She put the receiver down.

  ‘Daddy apparently forgot to go and see Mr Simms in Woodborough General.’