Cold to the Touch Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  Over breakfast in the morning, Sarah found the leaflet she had picked up in the church and stuffed into her handbag. Maybe best to have a little more knowledge before a morning with the vicar.

  This church is named for Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, of whom little is known except that he was also known as Nathaniel, an Israelite in whom there was no guile. He preached the gospel successfully in Armenia, although finally suffering martyrdom, according to legend, by being flayed alive and beheaded. (Vicar’s notes: what he did to deserve this isn’t known, poor sod.) He was finally interred in Rome, on the site of an old pagan medical centre, which gave rise to other hospitals being established in his name. His emblem is a butcher’s knife.

  It is believed this church was once also an infirmary for men of the sea, and that is why it bears his name.

  The day was dreary grey and bitterly cold, a great day for housework. Sarah was thinking what a forgotten word that was and was still astounded to find how she reacted to the weather. Here it dictated the course of every single day, instead of being the irritating irrelevance that it was in a city. Here and now it changed every minute, dictated moods and was the arbiter of events.

  She checked the limited sea view, obscured by mist today, rain forecast. She checked Jessica’s phone: number not available. All in all, a good day for distracting herself, because Jessica had swung back into her mind like a black cloud of mosquitoes that she wanted to swat away. She had forgotten her other agenda and now she had to remember it.

  The vicarage was in the high street, at the downhill end, separated from the church by the graveyard. It was gloomily separate, with a small front garden boxed in by a privet hedge on three sides. There was no latch gate from the street, only an untidy gap in the hedge and a path, flanked by two patches of plain grass, leading to the front door. The frontage was Georgian in style if not vintage, with big ground-floor windows and pillars standing guard over the front-door porch. Someone had messed around with this house. The path was green with moss, the pillars were made of pockmarked concrete and the front door was painted in cheerless, blistered black. The walls on either side bore traces of recently removed ivy, leaving faint trails that crept away from the windows. Handsome but forbidding, the house seemed as if it was trying to repel visitors instead of offering them succour. The new electric bell played a hymn tune, possibly the same as the vicar’s mobile-phone tone – a bit camp, maybe. He did slightly overdo the gay persona. Before the door opened she found herself thinking of Jessica’s phone, which played ‘Greensleeves’. Jessica’s silent phone, nagging away, refusing to be forgotten.

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ the vicar said. ‘I really can’t believe you’re doing this. Are you a mirage? Does God Almighty send you loaded with gifts? Come in, come in.’

  Sarah was armed with a bucket of scrubbing brushes, cleaning cloths and dust sheets, a regular Mrs Mop. The first thing she noticed – for the second time – as she squeezed her way inside was the brown wallpaper in the dark hallway. The hall led on to stairs: two doors opened off it into reception rooms facing the front. Andrew led her into the first.

  ‘I exaggerated,’ he said. ‘It’s not really so bad. I’m not thinking of doing the whole house, it’s really just this room. Oddly enough, Father Gavin and his wife, killjoys that they were, did all right with the upstairs and the kitchen, where they spent most of their time, but with this room, the receiving room, as it were, and the hall, well, it’s as if they were trying to keep people out. You know, make it as dreary as possible so no one would be tempted to come back. No, that’s being unkind, maybe they just couldn’t afford it. The only person who can stand this room is Mrs Hurly, when she comes to tea, and even she doesn’t take her coat off. It’s a room for shouting in, and I sort of wish it was and wish it wasn’t. It’s got to have a better purpose than that, hasn’t it?’

  It was a beautiful room, begging for the light to be let in. High ceilings with plain cornices, two huge windows almost to floor level giving onto the front garden. On the wall opposite the windows there was a blocked-off fireplace with two armchairs either side, looking as if they were paying homage to non-existent flames. A meagre amount of heat circulated from the single radiator. A sofa stood between the windows, miles away from the fireplace. The ceiling was mercifully off-white, the walls a dull maroon, the carpet a drab olive green to match the darker green of the upholstery and the only other light apart from daylight came from an unpleasant triangle of bulbous spotlights in the centre of the ceiling. There was an additional optional standard lamp in stainless steel and with a bent stem, so crooked and discordant that it looked as if someone had hit it sideways. The ambience of the whole room reminded her of a spectacularly dull waiting room, deliberately designed to exaggerate the anxieties of anyone waiting in it. The central light in particular had a we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk feel, and the thought of Mrs Hurly taking tea in it cheered Sarah mightily. The most positive objects on view were six cans of white paint lined up against the wall, alongside a serviceable-looking ladder.

  ‘If you can enliven this space I shan’t know how to thank you, I really shan’t. It needs more than magic, and if you really provide that I don’t know how I’d ever repay you.’

  She considered the view.

  ‘It needs a bit of work, rather than magic. But as for thanks, you could leave that to God or you can take on my mortal soul for redemption – it could do with it. A cup of coffee would be nice to be going on with, and what the hell is this room for?’

  The vicar paused for effect before announcing something ready-rehearsed. He found it difficult to articulate why it was that the room was slightly cursed.

  ‘It’s the padded cell of Pennyvale,’ he said. ‘My predecessor said it was the designated room for arguments. You know, like the bleak interview cell you see in TV thrillers, the anonymous room where you can lie on your back and squeal like a stuck pig, get your emotions out. It was where people came to take counsel and bad instant coffee. Married couples, people with children problems, people at screaming pitch one way or another, could come here and slug it out without anyone hearing a thing, because you can’t, you know, you really can’t. The last vicar fancied himself as a counsellor, which may have something to do with the diminishing congregation. I’ve got another view on that; I think he was lazy enough not to want it to look nice in case anyone would want to use it. I think a priest should encourage celebration, but this one needs help. Shall I make the coffee, I do good coffee, leave you to think about it?’

  Surely a room for counselling should be small and cosy, or dark like the traditional confessional, which, when she came to think of it, also defied intimacy. This was a room for clearing the throat, saying Hmm and not knowing where to start. Did village people bring their errant children here for a rebuke from the vicar in lieu of a village policeman? It was a punitive room: it had sadness in its very walls, and yet she could see it full of people having a great party. No one had ever been allowed to relax in here, let alone smoke. Sarah was sorry for them all on that account, but pleased that the lack of any festive action had left the ceiling pristinely untouched by champagne corks or nicotine. She touched the dark walls – not bad, not too many cracks – but how many coats of paint would it take to make it pale but interesting? That central light would have to go. There were scuff marks round the skirting boards from enthusiastic hoovering of the sick, threadbare carpet, which should have crawled away before it met the moths.

  Andrew came back with coffee on a tarnished silver tray, proper coffee in a cafetière, china mugs. The mobile phone in his pocket rang, loud in the space. He muttered ‘Excuse me,’ and left the room for a minute. She helped herself, sat in the uncomfortable armchair by the blocked-up fireplace, thought strategy, mobile phones and how to hire a steam cleaner. Sam the butcher would know. Either that or get Jeremy to scrub the carpet in the same way he scrubbed the block, just to see if there was anything to discover beneath t
he patina of genteel grime, otherwise haul it up and hope to discover wood. She strode to the far corner of the room where the carpet was fraying round the edges, grabbed it and pulled. Badly laid, cheap carpet, scarcely nailed down, it came away easily, revealing disintegrated yellow underlay and, beneath that, planks. The excitement was almost unbearable. By the time Andrew came back she had rolled away a whole noxious strip of the stuff and the air was full of dust.

  ‘What on earth are you doing? You can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, panting.

  ‘It isn’t my house, it isn’t my carpet . . . Oh bugger it, why not, indeed? I’ve wanted to vandalise this place so much it pains me. Oh look. A floor.’

  Such a shared, wonderful joy, the finding of that floor. They stood and grinned at one another. Andrew wondered later if those who had discovered Australia felt the same unholy joy as he did on the discovery of a not-so-bad wooden floor. Not glorious, but OK. There’s no money to sand it, he warned, it costs a bomb. OK, Sarah said, we scrub it and bleach it, that’s what we do, just like you’d do with an imperfect soul you cannot make perfect, you do what you can. We could try sawdust and soap and water. First get rid of the crap.

  It was one of the most refreshing and exhausting mornings he had had for ages, and the sun came out to cheer, briefly. He felt happy. Lord, he said, physical labour is good for the mind. By noon the carpet, which conveniently fell to pieces as they attacked it, was all sitting on the damp grass outside and the room felt relieved by its absence.

  ‘The only problem,’ Andrew said, as they sat and surveyed it through the window and ate the sandwiches he had made, ‘will be when Mrs Hurly wants to come to tea. She won’t like this at all, doesn’t like change. It might have been her carpet in the first place, come to think of it, she was always donating things to the last incumbent; they were bosom buddies. I hope she doesn’t notice as she goes up the street. I’ve made a point of going to tea with her today, rather than the other way round, so maybe it’ll be all right.’

  ‘So you have to be bosom buddies with my landlady too, do you? Why’s that?’

  He shrugged. ‘Donations, donations, donations. We can’t keep the organ going without Mrs Hurly and a couple of others, her most of all. And she claims huge affiliations with this house because her husband grew up here. He paid for a new roof here before he died and I’ve got every reason to be grateful for that. And the last vicar and his wife were so good to her daughter, blah, blah, blah. I’m being churlish. There’s a good woman in there: she’s just lost. She wants to open up, but she can’t so she criticises.’

  ‘You know what that sounds like?’ Sarah said. ‘It sounds like this bloody Mrs Hurly had the last vicar and his wife in her pocket and on her charity bankroll, and expects you to dance to order in the same way. Without the moolah, if you see what I mean. Just guessing.’

  He sighed, looking at a callus growing on his hand with evident satisfaction. How fast things went when they were shared.

  ‘It’s not far off, for a guess. I don’t seem to have much choice. What else do you know?’

  Sarah took a deep breath. It was high time this man knew there was a quid pro quo for painting his front room and getting rid of his carpet. Nothing was for nothing, even if it was a pleasure. He clearly knew more than he thought he did, if only obliquely. She liked the man and did not want to deceive him. The thought of silent Jessica still nagged away, whatever the distraction. She was present in this room: Sarah could feel her presence.

  ‘Look, vicar, sorry, Andrew, I may as well come clean. I’m a dual-purpose person, well, usually three at any given time. I’m here in Pennyvale, which I think is a wonderful place, apart from having such a twee name, because I wanted to be somewhere like this, not right here, necessarily, but somewhere with most of these ingredients: village, not town, roses round the door, all that stuff. I’m here in particular because Jessica Hurly, my young friend, introduced me to it and it turned out to be what I was looking for and her mother has places to rent . . . and, and, oh never mind the ands. And because Jessica told me things, alluded to things, and I know she’s at odds with her mother and feels she can’t come home, I just thought, while I was here, well, you know, I thought I might try and fix it, even though I don’t know what’s to fix. I’m worried about her, she’s a bit messed up and everyone needs a mother, I should know and . . .’

  Andrew was frowning at her from a distance, puzzled by all the ‘ands’ but listening intently. He would not judge her harshly. The mobile phone in his pocket went off.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said again.

  Sarah got up as he left the room and she opened the first can of paint. Ugh, dead white. She didn’t like dead white; it always had to be white with an undertone of something else, cream or butter, or pink or blue. Dead white was the colour of dead skin and lard, but it would do for the first undercoat. She picked a brush from the equipment she had bought, dipped it in the paint and applied it to the purple wall in a tentative smear. Lovely, anything was better than that. She looked at her watch; at least a few hours of daylight for the task, they could do one whole coat if he helped. As long as he continued talking. She stripped off her sweater, revealing a sleeveless T-shirt, manhandled the ladder and stuck it up by the windows, start here by taking down the curtains. The room cried out for blinds, or no curtains at all. She was framed in the window stretching up, when Andrew came back. She might as well have been advertising herself to the street, a small, shapely body fully extended and with a straining bosom.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ he said, ‘and the devil arrives.’ And then, as a spontaneous afterthought, ‘What a jolly good figure you’ve got. You look perfectly lovely up there.’

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself, Andrew.’

  He sat down heavily as if shocked at the sight of her, framed in the light with her red hair blazing, a revelation.

  ‘Bugger. That was Mrs Hurly. She wants to come to tea after all. She has something very pertinent to discuss. Wants my advice.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He stood up and shook himself. Sarah got down off the ladder, entirely aware of the effect she had had, and came and stood beside him.

  ‘You’re using me, aren’t you?’ he said sadly.

  ‘That’s what friends do, even new friends,’ she replied. ‘I’ll happily paint the walls for nothing, I’ll even pay for the privilege, but I need to find out Jessica Hurly’s history if I’m going to effect some sort of reconciliation. She didn’t ask, I volunteered. It isn’t much to ask, is it?’

  ‘Are we friends?’ he asked, his face breaking into the smile that transformed it.

  ‘Yes, we are – at least, I am. You can speak for yourself.’

  The smile widened into a laugh. He should do more of that, too.

  ‘That’s all right, then. That means I’m perfectly free to break the secrets of the confessional and all for a Christian purpose. Look, I really don’t know the particulars of Jessica’s disgrace, it was before my time, she left as I arrived, but it can’t have been anything too terrible, youthful exuberance, oh, hell, yes, it was. Better come clean. She was the reason for the last vicar leaving, you see; she was how I got this job.’

  He coughed: dust, embarrassment. She thought he was probably a compulsive divulger of secrets, given a chance. A perfect keeper of them too, just as she was. One day she might be able to tell him about her fear of fire, but not now; better to stick to the point.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He couldn’t go on, you see. Not after she accused him of raping her. She did it in church, just as he was starting evensong.’

  Sarah dropped the paintbrush back into the can and watched it sink. Well, well. Anxiety for Jessica started all over again – as if it had ever gone away.

  ‘Was it true?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. In light of the fact that she also accused the doctor, the butcher and a couple of others of something similar, and withdrew the allegations, probably not.’

&n
bsp; ‘I wish,’ Sarah said after a long pause, ‘that she’d told me that. Someone told you.’

  ‘Not her mother, for sure. A helpful member of the congregation took notes and passed them on, and the dreadful do-call-me-Gavin left me a letter saying I should be very careful in my dealings with one Jessica Hurly. I also gathered that my chief qualification for getting this job was being gay, so I’ve been camping it up ever since. How times change. I should also be kind to her mother, who had once been a generous Christian.’

  Village life, the pursuit of perfection, attention to detail. Sarah felt utterly dismayed. She looked at the smear of virginal white paint on the walls for inspiration, remembering how she should never believe anything without checking, felt sick with pity. True or false, it was equally pitiable. Andrew was looking distinctly shifty. No, not shifty as in deceptive; shifty as in confused.

  ‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘So where did all this sexual mayhem take place? Here? In church, in this very room?’

  Andrew walked towards the window, checking the street.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know as much as I do know and it hasn’t seemed a good idea to find out the details. There weren’t any charges or investigations, just an . . . outburst, so that was that, not discussed, everyone leaves and murmurs a bit, the Pennyvale way of doing things.’

  He was looking at his watch, something he did involuntarily, as if it provided a solution.

  ‘Anything else?’

  He shook his head, trying to downgrade the information as soon as he gave it, possibly the approach he adopted towards sermons. Sarah could not see him describing the real temperature of hellfire. He would try to mitigate the burden of that for the children at least. She had watched him with the children, warmed to his indecision, even as there was more clearing of the throat.

  ‘Not really. Only the specific thing Madam Hurly wishes to discuss and elicit advice on, which is . . .’