The Benefits of Passion (4 page)

‘What?' He was exasperated at last.

‘I love you, Barney.'

‘Well, you've got a funny way of showing it, Isabella.' Her mouth dropped open.

‘
Funny?
What do you mean
funny?
I want to go to
bed
with you, for God's sake! What better way of showing it is there?' A small child was gazing up at her in wonderment from the lawn. Piss off, she thought. Barney simply shook his head and began walking again. Her cheeks burned.

‘What am I supposed to do? Buy a bloody vibrator?' she muttered at his retreating back.

But he heard her and turned round. ‘Why not buy a six-pack while you're at it? I'll give you a donation.'

With that he walked off, leaving her spluttering in the middle of the path. He really
did
mean no. Here was a healthy red-blooded male who was genuinely not interested in a quick no-strings-attached legover. She tried to shrug it off. Perhaps she wasn't his type. But what if he thought she was a slut? And suddenly she could think of no good reason why he shouldn't think that. It's only a game, for God's sake. Why was he taking it all so seriously? She stood, amazed at how much it hurt. I'm getting out of here, she thought. But, unfortunately, the only way out seemed to be along the path after Barney. She was going to have to walk past him and the other cricketers gathering in the archway. The small child was still staring at her. She stuck out her tongue at him, summoned her dignity and walked off.

She was a few yards from the group of chatting men when her skirt, which had been docile all day, chose to leap up like a playful hound. She squeaked and clutched at it. There was a tactful silence and she scurried past the men and their averted smirks. Bloody vicars. It wouldn't be half so embarrassing if they bayed and whistled like normal men.

She heard them setting off and walking past her while she was bending to unlock her bike. She clamped her skirt firmly between her thighs and wrestled with the lock until she remembered something else about that dress. She straightened up hurriedly, but not before she had given the Latimer Hall First XI a generous glimpse of cleavage. If she had been able to meet Barney's eye as he passed her, she would have seen that he had a distinctly unsaintly expression on his face.

They had just –

There was a knock at Annie's door. She shut her notebook and hid it swiftly under her Bible.

‘“Reject battered fishcakes”,' said Ted coming up behind her.

She laughed. ‘“We offer a full range of sundries.”'

‘I'm just off to chapel. Do you want to walk down with me?'

She sensed an undercurrent of concern. Damn damn damn it all. What if her friends had got together and said, ‘We're a bit worried about Annie,' and chosen Ted as the best person to tackle her?

‘Yes. Yes, of course.' She rubbed her forehead.

‘Headache?' asked Ted.

‘No. I'm fine.' There was a pause.

‘Good.'

She hated fobbing him off like this. ‘I expect it's just my hormones running amok.'

Ted gave her shoulder a friendly pat. ‘Poor old Annie.'

She got to her feet. He was probably used to fielding this kind of thing – teenage daughters, menopausal wife. She pictured him in rubber waders venturing out into a dangerous tide of oestrogen. They set off along the corridor.

‘It's my age,' she apologized. ‘Big Ben. Ticking away. I expect it'll fade.'

‘Into a small folding travel clock, maybe,' he suggested, taking up her image as she'd expected him to.

‘Good. I can stifle it under my pillow.'

‘Or throw it against the wall.' They went down the stairs.

Edward came crashing down three at a time and caught them up. ‘Morning!' He might have been addressing a parade ground.

‘I sometimes forget to wind my clock up, these days,' said Ted.

Don't, pleaded Annie's look. She could feel herself starting to giggle.

‘Why don't you get one with batteries, then?' asked Edward.

Annie yelped.

‘It's got a snooze button,' went on Ted. ‘In case I want to nod off again.'

‘What's the matter with her?' Edward demanded.

‘I've given up asking,' replied Ted.

They went out on to the street and crossed over to the college chapel. It was a cold grey morning. The cathedral bells chimed. Ding dong ding
dong
! Ted glanced at Annie and made her laugh again, but she was aware how easily her laughter could slide over the edge into tears. If she were to plunge off down the street sobbing they would understand. The time of the month. Her age. Poor old Annie. They stood aside and let her enter chapel first. It was just politeness, of course, but it felt as though they were police officers escorting her into the dock.

CHAPTER 4

They were just –

They were just what? wondered Annie as she stared at the page. She couldn't remember how that sentence had been going to finish before Ted had interrupted her the previous day. There was no time at present to reconstruct the scene in her mind. She was supposed to be at a doctrine lecture.

Dr Mowbray was already passing round handouts when Annie entered Coverdale lecture room. She slid into an empty seat beside Edward. He gave her his wide flashing smile, and her sex-drive came bounding up like a friendly dog with its tail wagging.
In your basket, Libby!
ordered Annie. Libby was short for Libby-doo, which was how one of Annie's former pupils had thought libido was pronounced. Libby sat panting quietly as Dr Mowbray cleared his throat and put on his glasses.

‘Right. Models of atonement today.' He flapped a piece of orange paper. ‘Does everyone have one of these salmon-coloured handouts?' There were some smothered grins. Dr Mowbray was very alert to subtle colour gradations. Ted and Annie had wasted many moments devising fanciful names for white paper (polar-bear-coloured, shaving-foam-tinted). Annie looked at the sheet. Quotations from the Early Fathers and great Reformers. It was complemented shortly by a mature Cheddar-coloured sheet with extracts from more recent theologians. Dr Mowbray began.

At first Annie concentrated, on the grounds that if he could be bothered to say it she should be bothered to listen. Dr Mowbray was a kind man with a thorough but rather monotonous lecturing style. He had been a tutor in Coverdale since about the mid-sixteenth century. Before long, however, her thoughts were deflected along a path of their own.

The Crucifixion was supposed to be the pivot of human history. It was the point at which the eternal intersected with the temporal. Somehow Christ was reconciling the world to God by his death on the Cross. Somehow. But how? Annie's eyes scanned the yellow and orange sheets. So many answers to this one question. They all seemed to glance off the surface of the problem. Annie no longer had any answers of her own. As a child she had always pictured the Crucifixion taking place in the back garden at home under the shadow of the horse-chestnut tree. The scribes and Pharisees walked up and down the dusty lane beside it, wagging their heads. They were dressed in long stripy robes from the Sunday School dressing-up box and they had tea-towels on their heads. The wind stirred in the sticky buds while Christ hung motionless on his Cross.

    There is a green hill far away

    Without a city wall,

    Where the dear Lord was crucified,

    Who died to save us all.

It was a strangely dispassionate Passion. Where was the violence, the man nailed up on a plank of wood and left to die in the Middle-Eastern sun?

Edward's biro was racing busily. Annie knew he was just going through the motions, though. He'd already got the Cross sorted out. He made no secret of the fact that his aim was to get through Coverdale with his faith unscathed. Annie suspected he viewed theological college as a sort of boot camp – lots of pretty tedious square-bashing and assault courses, but you knuckled down and got on with it for the sake of what lay beyond. He attended lectures and went on placements stoically, knowing it would soon be over. He'd be ordained, and then he could get on with the real business of proclaiming the Gospel and making disciples. Edward had no room for words like
contextualization
and
dialogue
in his vocabulary. ‘Load of bull,' he could be heard booming above the throng in a voice that was clearly going to render some church PA system obsolete when he arrived there as curate.

Annie sighed. Edward was a dear friend, but his theology suffocated her. It marshalled and harried everything into order and began sentences with the words
the Bible says
, as though this automatically silenced any counter-arguments. It dealt with Facts and Proofs. There was little room for the ‘what ifs' and ‘yes buts' of this world, and Annie was a terrible yes-butter. There were no buts. The Cross was God's solution to Man's sin, as amply demonstrated by the Bridge Illustration.

Oh, that old Bridge Illustration. Annie doodled an arch on the salmon sheet. She had first encountered it at the age of five in a children's address. The visiting preacher (Mr Winter from Watford) got out his flannelgraph. He stuck a felt square saying
GOD
on the left-hand side of the board and a felt square saying
MAN
on the right. Between the two was a gap. They were separated by
SIN
. Man tried in vain to straddle the gulf of green baize with such jerry-built bridges as Good Works and Church Attendance, but in the end (lo and behold) it was a sturdy cross which fitted the hole perfectly.
Ergo
, you could only be saved by Christ's atoning death. Annie was tempted to point out to Edward that a Qur'an of the right size would also fit. Or a doughnut, even, if you tamped it down properly. But Edward would think that it was just another of her mad, semi-sacrilegious notions.

It wasn't as if Edward had no sense of humour, thought Annie. He was quite capable of laughing at himself, once he'd worked out what the joke was. Annie smiled as she remembered a skit he had done in the Coverdale Christmas revue. Bishop inspects the troops. He had marched on to the stage in a purple shirt with a short crozier tucked under his arm and barked at a line of cassocked recruits: ‘All right. Straighten up, you lot. You're in the Church now, you know.' He had paused in front of Annie, who was hopeless at acting and had spent the entire sketch weeping with laughter, and bellowed, ‘What's that you've got under your uniform, soldier?'

‘Bosoms, sir.'

‘Bosoms? Never heard of them! Not regulation!'

‘She's a woman, sir,' Ted had interjected. ‘We have women in the Church these days, Bishop, sir.'

‘Eh? What? Oh. Very good. Carry on, soldier.'

She felt herself starting to giggle again at the memory.

Edward looked up. ‘Hopeless!' he hissed, not even bothering to find out what was amusing her this time.

Annie tried to read the quotations in front of her, but found her mind returning to that flannelgraph. She had stared at it, rapt, as the preacher was saying, ‘And so, boys and girls, it's no good thinking you can earn your way to God by going to Sunday School.' His voice went kindly on, urging them to invite the Lord Jesus into their heart if they hadn't already done so, while behind him the felt cross was slowly unpeeling itself from the board. It flipped to the floor without a sound, leaving God and Man as estranged as ever.

‘Right. Well. Any questions?' asked Dr Mowbray, rubbing his hands together briskly.

Ingram, of course, had a question. He'd been sitting at the back reading a book to demonstrate that doing two things simultaneously hardly engaged one-fifth of his vast intellect. He shouldn't even have been there. The lecture was designed for Coverdale students doing the Certificate in Theology, but Ingram was bright and therefore doing the university theology degree. He was attending this lecture simply to show off. Everyone knew he would get a first in his finals in June. Unless Annie was right and he wasn't actually that bright, after all. It would all depend on whether the examiners had the patience to sift through his polysyllabic phraseology to see if an idea was lurking there or not. If they took him at his own estimation he would certainly get a first. Annie scribbled ‘Little Pinhead, Rambledon' on a piece of paper and threw it to Ted.

Meanwhile, Ingram's question had drawn to a close. Dr Mowbray looked thoughtful.

‘I'm not really sure what you're asking, Ingram,' he said at length. Annie smirked as Ingram flipped back his floppy hair.

‘I
think
what I'm saying is this,' he said patiently, and off he went again.

‘Get your bloody hair cut,' muttered Edward into his notes. This was overheard by half the room, but Ingram forged on, impervious to their tittering. Dr Mowbray answered him. He's probably as intelligent as Ingram would like to be, thought Annie. Why doesn't he just swat him aside like a bumptious bluebottle? But Dr Mowbray was endlessly long-suffering and unassuming. Perhaps he'd seen it all before. He must have watched hundreds of ordinands come and go over the years. He was stroking his silvery beard and saying, ‘Yes! Ah, yes, indeed! That's a very good point,' to a question from Dave. He tidied it generously into the proper theological categories as though this was what Dave had meant all along. Annie decided that Dr Mowbray should marry Barney and Isabella. She'd have to find a new name for him. Manning? Mayhew? Moore?

‘You may now kiss the bride.' Barney did. Not a perfunctory peck, but a long, deep, passionate kiss. Isabella was on her toes almost squeaking with surprise. The moment went on and on. A bee droned up the aisle towards the mass of flowers and Dr Moore cleared his throat. The congregation, who had started to shift a little in their pews, laughed. Barney released her and gave her his wonderful slow smile. My God, thought Isabella. My
God
. What's tonight going to be like?

Libby thumped her tail eagerly in her basket, and Annie snatched her thoughts back. What am I doing here? she wondered, in a kind of amused despair. She thought again about the hundreds of ordinands, picturing them like an early black-and-white film, shuffling with frantic jerky gestures into the lecture room, tackling tricky doctrinal or ethical issues, then juddering out again. Wave after wave of nice, white, middle-class people. We'll go on to live out our faithful, not-very-glamorous lives in parishes up and down the country. What difference will we make? We stake everything on the belief that it makes all the difference in the world, but when we look around, what do we see? Empty churches. Locked churches. Redundant churches. What's the point? We might as well not bother. Don't think that way, she chided herself. Faith was like the apostle Peter walking on water. If you looked round at the wind and the waves and asked yourself how you were doing it, you were bound to sink.

How many others had slid despairingly under the waves in their time at Coverdale? Perhaps they had managed to thrash their way to the shore and were successful barristers and bankers now, attending church on Sundays, looking at the slightly pathetic figure in the pulpit and thinking, Phew. What would she do under those circumstances? She heard her mother tut angrily. You're hopeless, Anne Brown. You're always giving up. There's that pegbag you never finished. You can't go through life never finishing things, you know. But Annie did. Her whole history was a mess of loose ends. She seldom had the courage to cut things off properly and make a clean break. They just petered out. She was always trying to convince herself that she'd come back to them one day and maybe finish them. She still had that pegbag somewhere.

If she left Coverdale she'd have to skulk back to teaching. God, you're so boring, Anne, Damn used to say; and Annie had to admit Damn was right. It would be nice to go out with a little style, for once. To scorch across Coverdale like a bad comet. But that wasn't
done
, of course. Or at any rate, not often. The college had produced one
enfant terrible
in its time, famed for his boozing, bonking and bad language. It was ten years ago, but people still spoke of Johnny Whitaker with a kind of awe. He'd somehow managed to scramble aboard ship again and get ordained, so maybe there was hope. Annie had only contemplated these things, not done them. Maybe he'd sat listening to this very lecture ten years ago with a hangover, plotting the fate of the next sexy undergraduate. She smiled in fellow-feeling. There were several extremely attractive young men in Jesus College next door.
Woof woof. Get down, Libby!

A bit of folded paper landed on the table in front of her. She opened it. ‘Much Blether'. She glanced across at Ted and grinned. He was looking as deadpan as ever.

That evening Annie looked again at the words
They were just
, and crossed them out.

‘Stop writing now, please, ladies and gentlemen.'

Isabella's pen made a final desperate lunge towards the end of the sentence. Her arm was dropping off. It was her last exam, thank God, and she knew she had done disastrously. All around the students stretched and exchanged grimaces while the exam scripts were collected up. Isabella wiped her sweaty hands on the skirt of her cream slub-silk dress. It was new and outrageously expensive, and she had bought it in the firm belief that if you looked good, you felt good; and if you felt good, you worked well. The system seemed to have broken down somewhere, though. She was heavily overdrawn and felt lousy. Still, she thought, as she got to her feet, being overdrawn made the sums easier. You just added to your total. And in any case, her father would bail her out as usual if she went to him with a trembling lip and admitted she'd got herself into a bit of a pickle again. She shook the full skirt and filed out with the others.

It was hot. The air filled at once with the laughter and wails of post-mortem. Champagne was cracked open and the end-of-term annihilation began. Isabella wandered off across the marketplace to where she had chained her bike. I don't feel part of it, she thought. Camilla's law exams had finished two days earlier, so she had already spent forty-eight hours drunk. She would be waiting for Isabella with a whoop and a wine-glass. Isabella had seldom felt less like partying. And all because of Barney. She had turned the encounter in Latimer into a light-hearted romp for Camilla, and the two of them had giggled and shrieked over the story. But Isabella had been unable to edit out of her mind the memory of Barney standing and shaking his head at her. In
disappointment
. That's what was so awful. He didn't find her outrageous and irresistible. He was disappointed in her.

She searched along the railings for her bike. As the days passed she had gradually realized that she'd give anything to have him think well of her. Even
behave
well, for God's sake. There was no denying it. She was in love with him. There was also no escaping that it wasn't mutual. He'd never made the slightest attempt to contact her. It was all so humiliating. She would rather
die
than let him know what she felt. If she bumped into him she was going to pretend that it was a huge joke, and he was only about number eight or nine on her list of intended scalps.