(7/20) Fairacre Festival (10 page)

'Simply pecking at your food, Gerald,' commented his wife, briskly removing the plates at lunch-time. 'You worry far too much. You'll have another of your dizzy spells, if you're not sensible.'

'I'll have a walk this afternoon,' said the vicar meekly. 'Fresh air always calms me.'

The road to the downs above Fairacre peters out into a grassy track. Birds darted across the vicar's path, with cries of alarm. Rabbits bounded away with a flourish of white scuts, and at least four larks vied with each other high against the blue and white dappled sky. It looked so peaceful, so unchanging, much as it looked, thought the vicar, with a pang, when the silversmith had finished his masterpiece, in the reign of Queen Anne, over two hundred and fifty years ago.

He sat himself heavily on the springy turf and plucked a nearby harebell, twisting its wiry stem this way and that as he gazed at the village spread out below.

What should he do? He had had faith that his prayers would be answered, but God in His wisdom had seemed to withhold the easy way. There, below him, the villagers rested after their wholehearted efforts in Festival Week. The response had been wonderful, the village united as never before. There could be very little more expected from them. Henry Mawne was right. More help must come from another source, and the only possibility was the chalice. He must bring himself to approach the Bishop and to seek his advice. He owed it to his church and to his villagers. He had been selfish and weak in refusing to face the facts.

He sighed heavily, and the view below him grew suddenly blurred. Sad at heart, he struggled to his feet and made his way home.

The vicar slept little in the nights that followed. He had met Mr Mawne and Jock Graham and agreed reluctantly to consult the Bishop. It had taken him a week to compose a letter, and now he awaited a reply in an agony of spirit.

One morning he sat leaden-eyed before his breakfast egg, surveying the pile of letters. There was no word yet from the Bishop, but among the bills, receipts and circulars was a long blue air mail envelope, as gaudy as a peacock among sparrows. The vicar took it up first, savouring this rare foreign treasure.

'George Washington had a fine face,' he observed, studying the stamps closely. 'And what a good idea these little address tickets are! So much more legible than some unknown handwriting at the head of a letter.'

'Who's it from?' asked Mrs Partridge, cutting to the heart of the matter.

'Oh, now let me see. "G. D. Lamb," it says. Lamb,' said the vicar ruminatively. 'Do we know a Mr Lamb in America, my dear?'

'Of course we do,' exclaimed his wife impatiently. 'George Lamb who was here during the Festival. That's probably the recipe for almond cookies he promised me. Do open it, dear, and
please
eat your breakfast. I want to clear the table. I'm having a coffee morning here today to raise more funds.'

The vicar obediently took a bite of toast and then slit the envelope. The letter was written in a firm hand in good copperplate which owed its beginnings to Miss Clare's guidance, many years earlier.

Mrs Partridge watched her husband's eyes widen and his face grow pinker as he perused the paper in his hand. At last, bemused, he put it down, and rummaging in the envelope produced a cheque which he studied with stupefaction.

'Is my recipe there?' asked Mrs Partridge. The vicar shook his head slowly, as if to clear it, rather than in answer to his wife's query. He seemed beyond speech.

'Has he sent something to the Fund?' asked Mrs Partridge, her glance falling on the cheque. 'How very, very kind of him!'

The vicar opened his mouth, and shut it again. He took a sip of coffee, and then found his voice.

'He has sent us a cheque for two thousand dollars.'

'No!'
said his wife, thunderstruck. 'He
can't
have done! Not even Americans are as rich as that, and George only has a catering business which he built up himself!'

Without a word, the vicar handed the cheque across the table.

'It must be two thousand, because it's got it in words as well as figures,' said Mrs Partridge, studying the cheque earnestly, and speaking with great care as though she were explaining matters to herself. 'I simply can't take this in, Gerald.'

'It's not George alone, my dear. It appears that his good friends on the trip were most concerned to hear of our plight, and contributed very generously, and also got other people to do so. George says in his letter that two old ladies, whose parents came from these parts originally, gave a considerable part of the money, and so did some relatives of George's wife. Can you believe it, my dear? We have been wonderfully blest.'

'It is absolutely wonderful!' said his wife huskily. 'In the face of such generosity one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. Oh, Gerald, this will save the chalice, won't it?'

'It was my first thought,' confessed the vicar. 'I must telephone Henry immediately, and Jock, and then we must get in touch with the Rural Dean and the Bishop.'

He pushed back his chair and came round the table to kiss his wife. He looked, she thought, as though twenty years had fallen from him in the last five minutes.

She watched him affectionately as he gazed once again at the cheque.

'How does one translate it into pounds?' he asked.

'Divide by three,' said Mrs Partridge promptly. 'That's somewhere near. Henry will know exactly.'

'But that means this is worth almost seven hundred pounds! It is quite incredible! To think that people who have never seen us or our little church should be so overwhelmingly generous! It does one's heart good.'

'The same sort of thing happened at Dorchester Abbey,' his wife reminded him. 'And there was a simply lovely service of thanksgiving with lots of Americans there. Remember?'

'Yes, indeed,' nodded the vicar. 'And there will be one here in Fairacre before very long, I can promise you.'

He picked up George Lamb's letter and put it carefully, with the cheque, into his wallet.

'I shall do my telephoning, and write this morning to George and all his kind friends,' he said. 'But what I shall say, I really don't know. My heart is too full.'

The joyous news flashed round the Fairacre grapevine within hours, helped considerably by the partakers of coffee at Mrs Partridge's morning meeting. Villagers were incredulous at first, and then genuinely touched by the unexpected benefaction. Even Mrs Pringle seemed moved by the magnificence of the present, though she was grudging in her first pronouncements to me.

'That George Lamb must've done well for himself in New York. Been fleecing the customers, I shouldn't wonder.'

I was roused to wrath and told her that the idea may certainly have been George's, but the bulk of the money was from Americans who had never even seen St Patrick's, which made the gesture even more wonderful. Mrs Pringle had the grace to look a little sheepish as she spread a tea towel over the hot boiler to dry.

'Yes, that's true,' she conceded. 'I've always understood the Americans—for all their funny ways—had a feeling heart. And say what you like, Miss Read, it's a feeling heart that matters when you're in trouble. They tell me the vicar's already planning a thanksgiving service as soon as the repairs is done.'

'We'll all be there,' I promised her.

Epilogue

E
XACTLY
a year after the fateful night which wrecked the roof of St Patrick's, the bells were rehung in the repaired belfry.

Now all was completed. The spire and the roof presented their usual tidy aspect to the village. At last the scaffolding had gone. The workmen's huts had vanished, and the trodden grass of the churchyard was fast returning to its velvety greenness under Mr Willet's tending. The hand on the Appeal Fund board stood triumphantly at well over two thousand pounds thanks to the efforts of the folk of Fairacre and their friends near and far.

In his study, the vicar was composing the sermon he would be giving the next Sunday at the great thanksgiving service. On his desk stood Queen Anne's silver chalice reflecting the autumn sunshine in its mellow curves. The vicar touched its ancient beauty with loving fingers. In a few minutes it would be in the kitchen being cleaned by Mrs Partridge in readiness for its part in the festivities of the great day.

What hopes and fears had centred round this lovely thing during the past year, he thought! What a year it had been for them all in Fairacre!

He pushed aside his papers and went into the garden for a breath of air. It was a quiet, gentle day with no breath of wind, a contrast indeed with the fury of the first of October last year when disaster had struck.

He thought, with gratitude, of all the blessings which had followed—the united efforts of all in the village, the bravery, the generosity of everybody, particularly of those American friends who had forged an unforgettable link with this small unknown village, as a result of last year's storm. What friends Fairacre had made! What fun it had been!

He stooped to pick up a shred of paper which was lodged among the button chrysanthemums in the border. He smoothed it out and surveyed the lettering with a smile of intense happiness.

Crumpled, rain-washed and faded, it was the final triumphant scrap of

M
ISS
R
EAD
is the pen name of Mrs. Dora Saint, who was born on April 17, 1913. A teacher by profession, she began writing for several journals after World War II and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. She is the author of many immensely popular books, but she is especially beloved for her novels of English rural life set in the fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. The first of these,
Village School,
was published in 1955 by Michael Joseph Ltd. in England and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. Miss Read continued to write until her retirement in 1996. In 1998 she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to literature. She lives in Berkshire.