The Vicar's Wife by Katharine Swartz

Author:Katharine Swartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2013-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Alice

Goswell, 1939

Alice sat at the kitchen table and stared down at the blank piece of paper in front of her. Firmly, in her neatest script, she wrote Beef roast for Weltons. She was determined to invite Flora Welton and her family to Sunday lunch next week. She hadn’t mentioned it to David yet, who she thought she could win round, or Mrs Sutherland, who would be undoubtedly disapproving. Yet in the eight years since she’d first come to Goswell, Flora Welton had been, in many ways, her closest friend.

Sighing, Alice rose from the table and gazed out at the church, visible from the kitchen window, its sandstone exterior now glinting almost gold under a summer sun. It was a beautiful, warm day, and David had promised they’d walk to the beach and have a proper cream tea at the little café that had opened there recently. It was Mrs Sutherland’s day off, so the kitchen, for once, felt peaceful and quiet, her own domain. She found she liked Mrs Sutherland’s days off, for she could make David’s dinner herself, including dessert. She had, after much trying, mastered the art of baking on the contrary range and could turn out a very nice cake. Mrs Dunston had remarked upon her Victoria sponge at the summer fete last month.

The last eight years, Alice had to acknowledge, had not been easy, although to be fair, neither had they been as hard as those first few months. The darkest moment had been and always would be, the loss of her baby.

Her little girl had been, quite simply, born too early. She’d been lovely, with a mouth like a rosebud and her hands curled up into tiny, perfect fists, but so thin and white and still, as if her little body were carved of marble. Alice had held her, only briefly before the nurse had whisked her away, while David stood by her bed, his face stony in grief.

That, in some ways, had been the hardest part of the ordeal. Instead of turning towards him, Alice had felt herself withdraw from David and felt helpless to stop herself. He’d done the same, so they’d been cloaked in their separate grief and silence, and Alice had, for a few weeks, simply drifted through the days, a ghost in her own life. She barely remembered the hours passing, and ate nearly nothing at all. Part of her, even if she could not form the thought in her own mind, wished to die. To simply fade away into numb nothingness.

Then Mrs Sutherland had given her a talking to, telling her she needed to dress properly and get out for some air, and what about the poor vicar needing a proper wife again? Alice had stared at her beady eyes and thin mouth and thought, briefly, that she hated her. Mrs Sutherland had not lost a child. Mrs Sutherland had not been told by a doctor (who looked at his pocket watch in the middle of speaking to

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