On one level Sally continued to function normally. She parked the car and went into the hospital. In the reception area she exchanged a few words with a physiotherapist who sometimes came to St George’s. She took the lift up to the seventh floor. A staff nurse was slumped over a desk in the ward office with a pile of files before her. Sally tapped on the glass partition. The nurse looked at the dog collar and rubbed her eyes. Sally asked for Audrey Oliphant.
‘You’re too late. Died about forty minutes ago.’
‘What happened?’
The nurse shrugged – not callous so much as weary. ‘The odds are that her heart just gave way under the strain. Do you want to see her?’
They had given Audrey Oliphant a room to herself at the end of the corridor. The sheet had been pulled up to the top of the bed. The staff nurse folded it back.
‘Did you know her?’
Sally stared at the dead face: skin and bone, stripped of personality; no longer capable of expressing anger or unhappiness. ‘I saw her once in church. I didn’t know her name.’
On the bed lay the woman who had cursed her.
Sally found it difficult not to feel that she was in one respect responsible for Audrey Oliphant’s death. It made it worse that the old woman now had a name. Perhaps if Sally had tried to trace her, Audrey Oliphant might still be alive. The pressure must have been enormous for a woman of that age and background to kill herself.
She phoned Mrs Gunter from the hospital concourse and gave her the news.
‘Best thing for all concerned, really.’
Sally said nothing.
‘No point in pretending otherwise, is there?’ Mrs Gunter sniffed. ‘And now I suppose I’ll have to sort out her things. You’d think she’d be more considerate, wouldn’t you, being a churchgoer.’
Sally said she would return Audrey Oliphant’s bag.
‘Hardly seems worth bothering. Audrey said she hadn’t got no relations. Not that they’d want her stuff. Nothing worth having, is there? Simplest just to put it out with the rubbish. Except Social Services would go crazy. Crazy? We’re all crazy.’
During the afternoon the despair retreated a little. It was biding its time. Sally visited the nursing home. She let herself into St George’s and tried to pray for Audrey Oliphant. The church felt cold and alien. The thoughts and words would not come. She found herself reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the outmoded version which she had not used since she was a child. The dead woman had probably prayed in this way: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ The words lay in her mind, heavy and indigestible as badly cooked suet.
Halfway through, she glanced at her watch and realized that if she wasn’t careful she would be late picking up Lucy. She gabbled the rest and left the church. The Vicarage was empty but she left a note for Derek, who was still enjoying himself with the archdeacon.
It was raining, sending slivers of gold through the halos of the streetlamps. As Sally drove, she wondered whether Lucy had forgotten the conjuring set. It was unlikely. For one so young she could be inconveniently tenacious.
Sally left the car double-parked outside Carla’s house and ran through the rain to the front door. The door opened before she reached it.
Carla was on the threshold, her hands outstretched, her face crumpled, her eyes squeezed into slits and the tears slithering down her dark cheeks. The big living room behind her was in turmoil: it seethed with adults and children; and the television shimmered in the fireplace. A uniformed policewoman put her hand on Carla’s arm. She said something but Sally didn’t listen.
Michael was there too, talking angrily into the phone, slashing his free hand against his leg to emphasize what he was saying. He stared in Sally’s direction but seemed not to register her presence: he was looking past her at something unimaginable.
‘I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel, been able to effront or enharden me …’
Religio Medici, I, 40
Eddie called her Angel and so had the children. He knew the name pleased her but not why. Lucy Appleyard refused to call Angel anything at all. In that, as in so much else, Lucy was different.
Lucy Philippa Appleyard was unlike the others even in the way Angel chose her. It was only afterwards, of course, that Eddie began to suspect that Angel had a particular reason for wanting Lucy. Yet again he had been manipulated. The questions were: how much, how far back did it go – and why?
At the time everything seemed to happen by chance. Eddie often bought the Evening Standard, though he did not always read it. (Angel rarely read newspapers, partly because she had little interest in news for its own sake, and partly because they made her hands dirty.) Frank Howell’s feature on St George’s, Kensal Vale, appeared on a Friday. Angel chanced – if that was the appropriate word – to see it the following Tuesday. They had eaten their supper and Eddie was clearing up. Angel wanted to clean her shoes, a job which like anything to do with her appearance was too important to be delegated to Eddie.
She spread the newspaper over the kitchen table and fetched the shoes and the cleaning materials. There were two pairs of court shoes, one navy and the other black, and a pair of tan leather sandals. She smeared the first shoe with polish. Then she stopped. Eddie, always aware of her movements, watched as she pushed the shoes off the newspaper and sat down at the table. He put the cutlery away, a manoeuvre which allowed him to glance at the paper. He glimpsed a photograph of a fair-haired man in dog collar and denim jacket, holding a black baby in the crook of his left arm.
‘Wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night,’ Eddie said. ‘Looks like a ferret.’ Imagine having him running up your trousers, he thought; but he did not say this aloud for fear of offending Angel.
She looked up. ‘A curate and a policeman.’
‘He’s a policeman, too?’
‘Not him. There’s a woman deacon in the parish. And she’s married to a policeman.’
Angel bent her shining head over the newspaper. Eddie pottered about the kitchen, wiping the cooker and the work surfaces. Angel’s stillness made him uneasy.
To break the silence, he said, ‘They’re not really like vicars any more, are they? I mean – that jacket. It’s pathetic.’
Angel stared at him. ‘It says they have a little girl.’
His attention sharpened. ‘The ferret?’
‘Not him. The curate and the policeman. Look, there’s a picture of the woman.’
Her name was Sally Appleyard, and she had short dark hair and a thin face with large eyes.
‘These women priests. If you ask me, it’s not natural.’ Eddie hesitated. ‘If Jesus had wanted women to be priests, he’d have chosen women apostles. Well, wouldn’t he? It makes sense.’
‘Do you think she’s pretty?’
‘No.’ He frowned, wanting to find words which Angel might want to hear. ‘She looks drab, doesn’t she? Mousy.’
‘You’re right. She’s let herself go, too. One of those people who just won’t make the effort.’
‘The little girl. How old is she? Does it say?’
‘Four. Her name’s Lucy.’
Angel went back to her shoes. Later that evening, Eddie heard her moving