The Rector's Wife by Joanna Trollope

Author:Joanna Trollope
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 1992-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Eleanor Ramsay, alerted by Peter, telephoned Anna and asked her to come and stay in Oxford. Anna demurred, thinking of the administrative complications. Isobel, however, was ahead of her in this, and said that she would have Flora to stay for a week, and that Luke could spend the week with his friend Barnaby whose mother liked Luke because she believed he was a sobering influence.

‘Don’t you want to go?’ Peter said.

She was stirring a cup of tea, round and round, pointlessly, since she never had sugar. ‘Yes, I want to go. But I don’t want to have to go.’

‘Things have got too much for you before, you know,’ he said, unwisely, thinking of her frantic outbursts at St Andrew’s, all those years before.

She glared at him. ‘You too,’ she said, quick as a flash.

He got up and poured more hot water into the teapot.

‘I suppose I might get some translation done in Oxford. I’ve neglected it. I couldn’t somehow face it recently, it seemed both inexorable and insultingly second-rate.’

‘Even compared with loading shelves in a super-market?’

‘Even,’ said Anna in a dead level voice, ‘with that.’

‘Perhaps now’s the moment to give that up—’

‘And perhaps it isn’t. I’m only away a week. You forget I’m a star employee. Nice Mr S. Mulgrove is a man of sympathy and flexibility. I’ll work longer hours the week after.’

‘And collapse again.’

‘I expect so,’ she said. She was beginning to seethe with rage. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘No,’ he said maddeningly, ‘it is a great inconvenience to me.’

She closed her eyes. She heard him refill her cup. She did not want her cup refilled. She said, hardly caring, ‘Will you be all right on your own?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. His voice was faintly complacent.

‘The groupies. Of course.’

‘Don’t be cheap, Anna.’

She picked up her teacup and flung the contents at him. They hit his chest, just below his dog collar, across the triangle of grey-polyester clerical shirt-front that showed above the V-neck of his grey clerical jersey. Then she got up and walked out of the kitchen into the garden, closing the back door behind her with tremendous care.

Eleanor’s husband, Robert, met her at Oxford station. It was, he said, perfect timing for an arrival, just after the afternoon batch of tutorials, and before a senior common-room meeting. He was a tall, thin, awkward man with the face of a kindly rabbit. He seized Anna’s case and took her arm solicitously.

‘Eleanor and I were saying we don’t think we’ve seen you, actually seen you, for over ten years. Certainly not since Ptolemy was born. These parenthood years are simply extraordinary, aren’t they? One spends all this time and emotional energy developing a great supporting muscle, and then at sixteen they turn round and say they are living their own lives now, thank you, and simply hack it through. I’m afraid Eleanor has spoiled Ptolemy, being the youngest and unquestionably our most able child. That’s why she couldn’t meet you. Your train didn’t tie in with his violin lesson.

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