The Judgement of Strangers Read online

  At that moment, Joanna slipped from behind the trunk of an oak tree fifty yards away from me. She wore a long, pale-coloured dress which swayed as she walked and glowed against the greens of the leaves and the grass and the brown of the trees. She saw me and began to walk towards me. Faster and faster she came. I held out my hands to her and, at long last, I felt the touch of her fingers on mine.

  31

  Love is a form of haunting, and Joanna was my ghost.

  I knew the terrible danger I was in – both socially and, far more importantly, spiritually. I ran the risk of hurting all those I loved. I was wantonly endangering the happiness of Vanessa and Rosemary. The feelings that Joanna and I shared had no future. We had very little in common.

  I also knew that, even if I had the power to rewrite the immediate past and to prevent what was happening now, I would not choose to exercise it.

  Joanna and I packed a great deal into that week, into a handful of meetings.

  ‘You’re early,’ she said on Tuesday evening, still holding my hands in hers.

  I was so happy I could not stop smiling. ‘So are you.’

  ‘Toby’s out.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  She glanced to her right, towards the drive. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ Her fingers tightened on mine. ‘I think someone’s coming.’

  We snatched our hands apart. For a moment we listened. I heard traffic on the road and a distant burst of laughter, perhaps from one of the televisions in Vicarage Drive.

  ‘It’s no one,’ I said.

  ‘Come into the garden.’

  ‘But if Toby –’

  ‘We’ll hear the car on the drive.’ She smiled at me. ‘Trust me.’

  She led me through the oaks and up the drive towards the house. We cut through the shrubbery on to the lawn. As we came on to the grass, she took my hand.

  ‘We can go into the house if you like.’

  I felt a shiver running through me. Fear and desire, inextricably mingled. ‘We’d better not.’

  ‘Then let’s go down to the pool.’

  Hand in hand, we walked quickly across the lawn. The pool was a good choice. It was masked by trees and set lower than the surrounding garden. We could hear and not be seen. If need be, if someone came from the house, I could slip away through the fence into Carter’s Meadow. Conspirators plan ahead.

  We sat on one of the benches recessed into the stone wall around the pool. The stone was warm to the touch. The evening sun slanted across the swaying waters of the pool, creating shifting black stains of shadow against the clear blue of the water. A passenger jet flew overhead and Joanna covered her ears with her hands and pushed her face against my shoulder. Slowly the sound diminished and silence flooded back. She reached up, cupped the back of my head with her hand, and pulled my face towards hers. With my free hand I stroked her arm. Without moving her mouth, she took my hand and placed it over her breast.

  I pulled away from her. I was trembling like a man with a fever. ‘I can’t do this.’

  Her face was flushed and smiling. Suddenly she kissed me again. This time her tongue darted into my mouth and flicked to and fro like the tail of a landed fish. Despite myself I responded.

  Afterwards she said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that since I met you in church.’

  ‘You were in there when I came to lock up. You said you couldn’t get used to the quiet here.’

  At that moment another aeroplane went over our heads. We looked at each other and started to laugh.

  ‘Do you remember when we found that cat?’ she asked. ‘You put your arms around me.’

  ‘I remember.’

  Joanna’s hands were under my jacket now, exploring and stroking my body like two small animals. Suddenly the hands stopped moving. She pulled her face away and looked up at me.

  ‘We mustn’t let Toby find out.’

  ‘We mustn’t let anyone find out.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. If Toby finds out, he’ll use the knowledge.’

  ‘How?’ I tried to smile. ‘Blackmail?’

  I had intended the suggestion as a joke. But Joanna nodded.

  ‘He’ll be out of luck,’ I said. ‘I haven’t any money.’

  ‘He’d find something else you could give him. Or do for him.’

  ‘You make him sound like a monster.’

  Joanna said nothing. She looked away from me and stared into the dappled surface of the pool.

  ‘Joanna,’ I whispered; even saying her name was a pleasure, intensified because the pleasure was touched with pain.

  ‘He’s my brother.’ She spoke to my chest; she would not look at me. ‘I’ve known him all my life. But I don’t know why he’s like he is. All I know is what he is.’ She swallowed. ‘How do you think he got that car? His precious bloody Jaguar?’

  A rich boy’s toy. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He was dealing. Not dope, or acid, or even speed. I could have handled that. He was dealing heroin. He was going out with a girl called Annabel. Poor little rich girl. Her dad gave her everything, including the E-type. Toby got her into heroin, I’m sure of that. Then he started using her as his front for the dealing. She had a flat at the back of Harrods. He was very clever. When the police began prowling around, everything led to her not him. They busted her. They could have done her for dealing, but the father could afford a good barrister. Toby’s name just didn’t come into it. In the end they did her for possession, instead, and now she’s in a nursing home in Switzerland. She worshipped Toby, you know. Still does, I expect. She told him he could use the car while she was gone.’

  ‘And you?’

  She stirred in my arms and looked up at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Do you use drugs?’

  ‘Nothing you need worry about.’

  ‘What about you and Toby? Why are you together? Why did you buy this house with him?’ I hesitated and added a further question, one that bubbled up unexpectedly, surprising me perhaps more than her. ‘And why are you so scared of him?’

  Joanna did not reply. My lips brushed her hair. She was breathing rapidly and shallowly. A small black ant scurried along the stone bench and climbed rapidly up to the top of my left thigh. It ran down to my left knee. It stared over the swimming pool like stout Cortez over the Pacific. Suddenly it turned through 360 degrees as if searching for his fellows. Finally it plunged over my kneecap and ran down the shin to the unknown territory of my foot and the paving slabs beyond. Like myself, the ant had gone too far to turn back.

  ‘Joanna? Why?’

  I wanted to say that I loved her so much that I had a right to know, but I felt that that would be putting unfair pressure on her. She raised her head and stared at me with those green-brown eyes, wide and innocent. Her lips parted but, instead of speaking, she pulled my mouth down on hers.

  While we were kissing, we heard the dark throb of the Jaguar’s engine on the drive.

  For the rest of the week, time behaved capriciously, sprinting and crawling by turns. Joanna and I managed to meet every day, usually in the evening. On Wednesday, we went to the cinema in Richmond. I cannot remember what the film was. We bought tickets separately and met in the darkness. We sat side by side, unable to speak, our fingers exploring each other. Afterwards we left separately, just before the lights came on. I had parked in a side road near the green and Joanna joined me in the car. While we were kissing, I thought how easy it would be for a policeman to pass by and shine a torch into the car; how easy for a colleague or parishioner to recognize the car and come over to talk to me.

  Joanna pulled slightly away from me. ‘I want all of you. I want you inside me.’

  ‘No. That’s impossible.’

  ‘I’m not a virgin, you know. Not since I was sixteen.’

  I wanted to ask about those nameless lovers she had known before.

  ‘I wish you were my first,’ she went on. ‘I’ve never felt like that before.’

  I kissed her again.

  A few m
inutes later she returned to the subject: ‘So why don’t we make love properly?’

  Why not indeed? ‘Not yet,’ I managed to say.

  ‘But why? You want me.’ Her hand was working between my legs and I could hardly deny what my body made so clear. ‘I don’t care where. We can do it here if you like. Now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because …’ For me, I knew, penetration would be the final step, the point of no return. I had surrendered so much else but I was not – illogically but powerfully – prepared to surrender that. ‘I’m not ready. Just give me a little time.’

  ‘That’s the one thing we don’t have.’

  ‘One of several things we don’t have, actually.’

  Joanna giggled. ‘I love you.’ Her hand began more vigorous operations. ‘Still –’

  ‘Yes,’ I said faintly. ‘There are other possibilities.’

  She lowered her head over me. I stroked her hair.

  All this should have been squalid, even ridiculous. Many people would have used worse words, and perhaps they would have been right. There are few defences left for a married, middle-aged clergyman who furtively exchanges sexual favours with a vulnerable young woman in a variety of undignified and uncomfortable situations.

  I thirsted for Joanna as, at other times, I had thirsted for God. Discomfort, guilt, fear of discovery, lack of time – everything fed whatever emotion bound us together. It was not merely lust, because lust is straightforward and this was not; and lust can be satisfied, at least briefly, and this never was. Obsession? No, because that is entirely selfish and neither of us wished solely to take from the other – we also wished to give. What else was left? Only love, that vague and much-maligned word: a love that embraced lust and obsession.

  During that month, I skimped and neglected the religious framework of my life, the framework that had sustained me for so long. I was afraid of God. I felt as though I were in the Garden of Eden but had no right to be there, and at any moment the order for my expulsion would come. Nor did I have time for Him. There was no longer enough room in my life.

  There was little room for anything except Joanna. My in-tray filled up with unanswered letters and unpaid bills. The pad by the telephone filled with messages asking me to phone people I did not want to phone.

  On Thursday I invented an attack of flu to avoid a diocesan meeting, a lie which gave us five whole hours in the afternoon and early evening. Joanna and I drove down to Hampshire, parked the car in a lay-by and followed a footpath into a wood. We left the footpath and followed tracks made by small animals until we came to a little clearing in a hollow. I laid out the rug from the car. Then, for the first time, I saw Joanna naked.

  Despite everything that happened later, that afternoon glows in my mind. Sunlight trickled down through the leaves, casting shifting patterns on our bodies. I had never known such pleasure, such excitement, such happiness. Morally, I knew, avoiding penetration was a mere quibble – my guilt was already absolute. But I clung to the quibble as if it meant something, like a man holding a life belt in the face of a tidal wave.

  What happened did not feel squalid: it felt inevitable, sad, guilt-ridden and wonderful. We knew that there would be a price to pay; and there was. But neither of us could have known how high that price would be.

  32

  Even Vanessa, at work during the day and immersed in the Youlgreave papers during the evening, noticed that something had changed.

  ‘Did you have a good meeting?’ she asked, as I got into bed on Thursday evening.

  ‘The usual sort of thing.’

  She smiled at me. ‘Except that it went on for even longer than usual. Still, you seem quite cheerful about it.’

  ‘I’ve known worse.’ I was appalled by my automatic hypocrisy, by my careful choice of words designed to avoid an actual lie.

  ‘I forgot to tell you: Mary Vintner phoned. James wants to do the barbecue on the paved bit outside our kitchen window. Is that all right?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not if I don’t have to do it. She said they’ll bring everything, including food to cook, and she’ll make sure he clears up afterwards.’ She sniffed. ‘You smell nice.’

  ‘I rather overdid the talcum powder, I’m afraid.’ It had worried me that Vanessa might smell Joanna on me so I had taken precautions.

  ‘I like it. You’ve been very busy this week. We’ve hardly seen each other.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s like that. Parish life tends to be unpredictable. You’ve been fairly busy yourself. How’s it going?’

  ‘With Francis?’ Vanessa sat down at the dressing table and began to brush her hair; once I had loved watching her at this nightly ritual. ‘Rather well, actually. I’ve nearly finished cataloguing what’s there.’

  ‘Have you read everything?’

  ‘Not really. Just enough to get an idea of the contents. His handwriting was appalling, and as he grew older it got worse. You remember that poem I found?’

  ‘“The Office of the Dead”?’

  ‘Yes – I’ve still not been able to decipher it all. And there’s another complication – the spirit regularly moved him to write when he wasn’t exactly sober. Laudanum, brandy and sodas, opium – you name it, he liked it. Plus, there’s a lot of semi-coded references whose meaning I haven’t worked out.’

  ‘What about the papers that Doris threw away?’

  Vanessa frowned at the mirror. ‘Honestly, I know she’s a nice woman, but sometimes I could strangle her. I think two volumes of the journal went, and quite a lot of letters and things. As far as I can see, Lady Youlgreave wanted to weed out anything that dealt with that Rosington episode. So frustrating.’

  I shivered.

  ‘Are you cold?’ her reflection asked me.

  ‘It is beginning to get cooler at night, don’t you think? A hint of autumn.’

  ‘How depressing. It’s been such a rotten summer.’ She put down the brush and got into bed. ‘Are you – are you very disappointed?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You are good to me. I don’t think many husbands would be so – so gracious about having to share me with Francis.’

  ‘I can understand the fascination,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s important.’

  ‘Francis?’

  ‘Discovering the truth. Separating fact from speculation. You should have been an academic.’

  She stroked my arm, then let her hand rest on mine. ‘And you?’

  ‘I told you – at one time I thought I wanted to be an academic, but then being a priest seemed more important.’

  ‘So we’re two of a kind. I wanted to do research, but I married Charles instead and turned into a publisher.’ She shifted beside me in the bed, moving a little closer. ‘Why couldn’t you combine being a priest with being an academic?’

  ‘I tried. But it didn’t work out.’ I turned my head and smiled at her. ‘But it’s all right. Everything’s worked out for the best.’

  If I hadn’t become Vicar of Roth, how could I have met Joanna?

  ‘I want you to be happy,’ Vanessa said. ‘I feel I’m failing you.’

  ‘You’re not failing me.’ I patted Vanessa’s hand and thought of Joanna. ‘And I’m very happy.’

  On Friday, Audrey temporarily delegated control of Ye Olde Tudor Tea Room to Charlene, moved her headquarters into the Vicarage and presided over the preparations for the fete. This year she seemed to take it even more seriously than usual. She camped in the dining room, the room we used least. Rosemary acted as her aide-de-camp.

  The dining room filled up with smaller items of jumble, and the garage served as a dump for the larger pieces and for a heterogeneous collection of wallpaper-pasting tables, chairs and home-made signs. Toby phoned me and asked if it would be all right if he and Joanna brought the tent in the afternoon and put it up in the garden.

  ‘You’ve come to see what we�
�ve been up to,’ Audrey informed me when I took some coffee to her and Rosemary in the middle of the morning.

  ‘You’re doing wonders.’ I edged towards the doorway. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘Let us pray for fine weather,’ Audrey said, eyeing me in a way that suggested she had earmarked this responsibility for me. ‘People always enjoy themselves more when the sun’s out, and then they spend more.’

  Vanessa was at work, but Michael was recruited to help with the preparations as well as Rosemary. He helped willingly, excited by the break in routine.

  During the day a steady trickle of people arrived at the Vicarage. Some came to help, some brought items for selling, some came simply to gossip. There would be more in the morning. I sometimes thought that the real importance of the fete was not the money it made, never very much in comparison with the effort that went into it, but the way it brought people together.

  All day I found it hard to concentrate. I did not know when Joanna would come. Or even whether she would come. We had not been able to arrange another meeting for today – I was fully occupied until the evening, and we might not be able to see each other alone later on. My love for her was like an itch: the more I scratched it, the worse it became.

  As the day went on, frustration and uncertainty made me increasingly irritable. I snapped at Michael when he dropped a fork while laying the table for lunch. During lunch itself Rosemary said nothing: she sat with her head bowed so that her hair fell to either side of her face, effectively curtaining it. When I tried to make conversation, she answered in monosyllables.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I burst out at last. ‘Must you be quite so gloomy?’

  Rosemary made a sound that might have been a sob, scraped back her chair and left the room. Michael stared at his plate, flushing with embarrassment. I went up to Rosemary’s room afterwards, intending to apologize. I’d hardly begun when she interrupted me.

  ‘You don’t care about me. You never have.’