The Reaper Read online

  "It isn't just the effort on the day. It's chivvying people to do the baking. I do no end of work on the phone in the week before. And knocking on doors."

  "I know."

  "Shocking about the bishop, isn't it?"

  "Dreadful."

  "There's more to it than they said in the Sunday Times this morning, you can be sure of that."

  "Is there?"

  "The gutter press will be full of it."

  "I haven't heard anything."

  "Bishops don't jump into quarries without a reason."

  "I suppose not."

  The triumph of the cake-stall team over all opposition had strengthened the bond between them, Cynthia was certain. "Are you waiting for someone, poppet, or shall we walk together?"

  Rachel said the rector had asked her to wait.

  Cynthia gave the hat such a tug that it slipped askew and had to be put back with two hands. "Oh."

  "Can't think what it's about," Rachel said disarmingly. "Is Christian Aid week coming up soon?"

  "He doesn't organise the collectors. I do."

  Rachel cursed herself for forgetting that Cynthia was the one woman who couldn't be fooled by that piece of sophistry.

  "Maybe I left something behind yesterday. I'm hopeless like that. Always have been."

  "I didn't see anything of yours when we left."

  "Neither did I. It's a mystery."

  "In that case I'll leave you to find out," said Cynthia, all her chumminess used up.

  "Right, then," Rachel said inadequately.

  People were still emerging from the church in numbers, so she moved aside to encourage Cynthia to move on quickly. If she had not been so keen to get rid of her crotchety friend, she might have taken more care. She took a bold step back, forgetting this was a churchyard. Her heel nudged awkwardly against the raised edge of an ancient gravestone. She lost her balance and tipped backwards.

  Her bottom took the main impact, a hard landing on a stone slab that would leave bruises for a week, but the real pain was mental, acute embarrassment at exposing legs, tights and knickers- oh, yes, the full show-to the faithful of Foxford as they emerged from church enriched with pious thoughts. Struggling to restore decency, she hauled herself to a sitting position and tugged at her skirt. Already she was surrounded by Good Samaritans.

  Cynthia had swung around and said, "My God-what happened to you?"

  "I'm fine, fine," she insisted before she knew if she was, or not. "I tripped, that's all. So silly."

  And now the advice came from all sides.

  "Take a few deep breaths."

  "Try putting your head between your knees."

  "Don't get up yet. You'll feel faint." She couldn't. She was fully hemmed in. Seated on a grimy old gravestone, wishing she was anywhere but here.

  "Would a drink of water help?"

  "Do you want smelling-salts, dear?" (from one of the two old ladies who sat behind her). "I always have them with me in church. It gets so close sometimes."

  "Was it a faint?"

  "No, I'm perfectly all right. Really."

  Then: "May I? Excuse me. What's happened here?"

  The voice of the rector himself, trying to find a way through the crush.

  Someone made room for him and he crouched beside her with a hand on her shoulder. "Rachel! What's up …? Are you hurt?"

  "I don't think so. I'd like to get up."

  Cynthia said, "She'll be all right, Otis. She says she's fine."

  He asked them to make room. She was shivering as if it was winter.

  She tried to get up. Rested her right hand on the slab and cried out with pain the moment she put pressure on it.

  "You are hurt," said the rector. "Here, let me help."

  She managed to get to her feet with his support. In any other situation, Otis Joy's arm firmly around her back would have been bliss, but she was in no state to appreciate it. All those anxious faces did not help.

  "You OK, Rachel?" he asked, still with; his hands on her shoulders as if she might lose her balance.

  She hadn't noticed until that moment of pain. She just felt numb at several points of her anatomy, including the arm. She said she was sure she'd be all right. Without thinking, she tried to brush the back of her skirt, now covered in the yellow stuff that grew on the stone. A stab of pain travelled up her arm.

  "It could be broken," said the rector. "Let me see."

  He held the arm lightly and asked her to move her fingers. There must have been people qualified in first aid or nursing among the bystanders, but this was church territory and he was taking charge and no one had better interfere, not even Cynthia.

  Rachel didn't want a fuss, yet couldn't hide the discomfort. The rector said she ought to get the arm X-rayed and meanwhile they had better immobilize it. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he pulled his surplice over his head and improvised a sling for her.

  The one good thing to come out of this mishap was that Otis Joy insisted he and no one else would take her to hospital. In no time at all she was seated beside him in his rattling old Cortina being driven to Bath.

  "I should have offered you some aspirin," he said. "Idiot. I've got some in the vestry for emergencies."

  She said the pain had virtually gone now that the arm was supported.

  "Are you right-handed?"

  She said she was.

  "Isn't it always the way?"

  "It's my garden that bothers me. It'll be a wilderness in no time."

  "Won't your husband take a turn out there?"

  She smiled. "You don't know him. He's flying to America, anyway."

  In Accident and Emergency she was seen almost at once and then sent to another section for the X-ray. Otis Joy got up to go with her.

  "There's no need for you to wait," she said. "I'll be all right now."

  He refused to leave her.

  "I could be here for hours," she said when they were seated in the radiography department.

  "All the more reason for me to stay. After all, it was my fault."

  "Why?"

  "If I hadn't asked you to wait, this wouldn't have happened."

  "No, it was my own stupidity," she repeated. "I stepped off the path without looking."

  "It's in a dangerous place, that grave, so close to the church door. You're not the first to trip over it. I've a good mind to have the slab levelled flush with the turf."

  "You couldn't do that. What would the relatives say?"

  "They've long since gone. It belonged to one of the previous rectors, the Reverend Waldo Wallace."

  "Now that you mention it, I've seen the name before."

  "The incumbent for over fifty years, until about eighteen-eighty," he said. "And much loved by the parish. He brewed his own beer and supplied the pub. Believe it or not, tithes were still being paid in those days. Each year at harvest time, good old Waldo gave a tithe dinner at the rectory, a jolly for the whole village."

  "With beer?"

  "His home brew. It was a real bender. And a midnight firework display. Said he waited all year to hear the ladies crying 'Ooh!' and 'Ah!' as the rockets went up."

  She giggled. "You made that up."

  "No, Waldo said it. Pre-Freud and quite innocent, I'm sure. He never married."

  She didn't know what to say.

  "Anyway," Otis Joy added smoothly, "he wouldn't have wished this on you."

  She said Waldo Wallace sounded a sweetie.

  "Oh, sure. But on the other hand," he said, "we all get our kicks some way. If Waldo liked to hear the ladies going 'Ooh!' and 'Ah!' maybe he had something to do with you tripping over his grave."

  "All he heard from me was 'Ouch!' I hope I said nothing worse."

  "He must have heard some ripe Anglo-Saxon in his time. We clergymen do, you know."

  "Not from a woman, surely? Waldo was never married, you said."

  "He would have had a housekeeper, and I bet she dropped a plate occasionally and said something stronger than 'Oh
, my word.'"

  Rachel was called for the X-ray. There would be a further wait while they processed it and showed it to a doctor. She was feeling guilty about taking so much of the rector's time on a Sunday.

  "Don't you have Evening Service soon?" she asked when she returned to the waiting area.

  He looked at his watch. "Oceans of time."

  "It must be hard, trying to find space for your own life."

  "This is my own life," he said. "I don't think of it as a job. True, there are fixed points in the week, services, PCC meetings, choir practice, and so on, but I make time for other things when I feel the need. Wouldn't be much use to anyone if I never relaxed."

  "So what do you do?"

  "In my spare time? Fresh air and exercise. I like to get out. Music."

  "What sort? Classical?"

  "Catatonia."

  "You're kidding?"

  "There's some very good bands about these days."

  "I'm surprised."

  "I grew up with pop. Didn't you?"

  "I thought you were going to say Mozart."

  "Can't fault him, but I hear a lot of solemn music in church. Give me something with a heavy beat and grunge guitars."

  "My husband thinks it's cool to listen to jazz, Benny Goodman and stuff. To me it's more dated than Beethoven." She felt a small stab of conscience for knocking Gary (not to say Beethoven), but it didn't trouble her much because she also felt the hurt of the proposed New Orleans trip. "His jazz crowd like warm beer and late nights."

  He grinned. "Thick, floppy sweaters."

  "Old jeans and sandals. And cigarettes. Not many women go for jazz, unless they sing with a band."

  "How does a jazz musician wind up with a million pounds?" he asked suddenly.

  "I don't know."

  "By starting off with two million."

  She was called to see an orthopaedic specialist. The X-ray showed she had a fracture above the wrist, a common injury known as a Colles' fracture, the doctor explained. The lower end of the radius had broken off and displaced backwards. There was damage to a ligament, but this was normal. It would require some manipulation.

  Forty minutes later, she came back with her forearm encased in gleaming white plaster. "What do you think?"

  "I think you should get straight on the phone to your lawyers," he said. "Sue the Church of England. Take them to the cleaners. They're not short of a few bob."

  "You'll get the sack, talking like that," she told him, speaking with a freedom she wouldn't have dared to employ an hour ago.

  "I'm a disgrace."

  On the drive back to Foxford, she said, "You've been so kind. I don't deserve such treatment."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, I'm surprised you talk to me at all after that time I knocked at your door and you were only half-dressed."

  "Less than half," he said, and she thought, Oh my God, why did I bring this up?

  But he was amazingly untroubled. "It reminds me of the vicar who called on one of his parishioners and got no answer, so he took out his visiting card and wrote on the back, Revelation, 3, 20. When the lady checked the verse she found: 'Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come into him, and will sup with him, and he with me.' On the following Sunday the lady in question dropped a card of her own into the collection plate. It read: Genesis, 3, 10. And when the vicar checked, he found: 'I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.' "

  Relaxed again, Rachel said, "Well, after that, I'd better make it clear I can't offer you supper, but I hope you'll come in for coffee when we reach my house."

  He wouldn't this time, he said, and she understood why, considering it was his busiest day.

  "One day in the week?" she said, and boldly added, "After all, we do have some unfinished business."

  "What's that?"

  "Whatever it was you asked me to wait and see you about after church."

  "Oh," he said. "Slipped my mind. Just an idea. In view of the accident, it may have to wait."

  Next morning she received a spray of pink, yellow and white carnations. The message inside read, "Sorry about the break. Get well soon. Love Waldo."

  "Who the hell is Waldo?" demanded Gary.

  She was tempted to say he was someone she'd fallen for, but Gary wouldn't see the humour in it. Already he was suffering hardships because she couldn't use the arm properly to make breakfast. Any sympathy had been short-lived. So she explained whose grave she had fallen over and said the flowers were obviously a joke.

  "Bloody expensive joke," said Gary. "Some people have more money than sense."

  Four

  The treasurer of the Parish Church Council was Stanley Burrows, a retired headmaster. He had taken early retirement at fifty-six, when Warminster reorganised its education system and created a Sixth Form College (a disaster, in Stanley's eyes). He was now approaching his seventy-fifth birthday. Overweight and inclined to wheeze after getting off his knees in church, Stanley was a sober, honest and God-fearing man, treasurer to the last three rectors. Each year he reminded the PCC of his age and suggested a younger person might be willing to take over, but no one else did anything about it. The feeling in the parish was that while Stanley Was up to the job he should continue. Why not, when the accounts were always up to date and never questioned by the auditor? The diocesan quota was paid by standing order. The verger, the cleaner and the organist received their cheques. The rector was given his expenses. Stanley had an excellent relationship with Joy, who urged him not even to dream of giving up.

  "But it doesn't give me the satisfaction it used to," Stanley confided this year. "It's more and more difficult to achieve a balance, I find."

  "That will be the quota," said Joy. "Between ourselves, Stanley, I think the diocese will undermine everything if they go on pushing up the figure as they do. They don't understand the problems of running a parish year in, year out."

  "Precisely what I found in education," said Stanley, helped onto his favourite hobby-horse. "The people at County Hall had no conception what it was like to be head of a school with out-of-date textbooks and temporary buildings. All the money went to that damned great folly up the road, if you'll forgive my language."

  "The Sixth Form College?"

  "The Ivory Tower, I call it."

  "Still, if that's the way our masters want to spend the money …"

  "The men in suits," Stanley said with contempt, regardless that he was never seen in anything else.

  "We can only carry on as usual. It's the same with the church. We must trust that the Lord will provide. And the coffee mornings."

  "There's a limit to those, Rector. You can't put on more than one a month. People won't come."

  "We have the income from the fete," the rector reminded him. "Beat all records this year."

  "We couldn't get by without that. I was going to mention that some extra came in late as usual. The unsold secondhand books were offered to a dealer and raised twenty-five pounds, and thirty-eight more came in from door-to-door sales for the raffle. It's cash in hand that we can put into your contingency fund."

  "You think so?"

  Stanley nodded emphatically. "It's the best thing that happened to this parish for years, that little account with the Halifax. I mean, if all these extras showed as income in the accounts, our quota would be sky high."

  "You're happy to continue with this unofficial arrangement?"

  "More than happy. It's our salvation, Rector."

  The word "salvation" was a little strong for a man of the cloth. "A safety net, anyway. But 1 think we should keep it confidential."

  "Absolutely. We don't want the new bishop to hear of it when he's appointed. He'll only raise the quota."

  "There's no need for anyone to hear of it."

  "Specially the bishop."

  "We don't need to personalise it, Stanley. You and I know that the board of finance does the sums and recommends the figure t
o the Synod."

  "Sorry. I shouldn't let it get to me."

  "But you're right in principle. They don't need to know every detail. We pay our share to the diocese, Stanley."

  "And on time. Do you know, I've heard of churches-no names, no pack-drill-who wait until the end of the year before stomping up. It's unfair on the rest of us, because that money could have been accruing interest for the diocese and bringing down our quota."

  "In theory, anyway."

  "Well, it wouldn't have to rise so steeply."

  "And are you still adding all the columns yourself, without using a calculator?"

  Stanley was proud of hi|s mental arithmetic. "It keeps the brain ticking over, Rector. (The day they allowed the damned things into the classroom was a disaster. But if ever you find a discrepancy in my figures, I'll be happy to hand over. Some day it's going to happen. The brain cells don't replace themselves."

  "I don't see any sign of yours failing," Otis Joy was quick to assure him.

  "That's a relief."

  "Truth to tell, Stanley, most of the clergy are duffers with money, and I'm no exception. Finance doesn't excite me in the least. I know it's part of a priest's job and can't be shirked these days. In fact, it seems increasingly to dominate parish business. So it's specially helpful that you manage our accounts so well."

  Those words acted like a blessing. Stanley left the rectory in a glow of self-esteem, firmly resolved to continue as treasurer for at least another year. The more he saw of this young rector, the more he liked him.

  Otis Joy, too, was quietly satisfied. He had been fortunate with treasurers at the two churches he had served as priest. Retired men, both of them, committed Christians, anxious to co-operate fully in the mundane business of financing church activities. How can a rector effectively carry out God's work if he is worried over money?

  Take the matter of expenses. No priest wants to be a charge on the parish. Treasurers always feel embarrassment at being asked by the rector for petty cash. He is their minister, their spiritual father, so it can be uncomfortable dealing with his claims for car and public transport expenses, telephone, postage, stationery, secretarial assistance, office equipment, maintenance of robes, fees for visiting clergy and-a major item for an active priest-hospitality at the rectory. Fortunately his main income, his stipend, is not the business of the parish treasurer.