Be Near Me (2 page)

'That's fine,' she said. 'I bought the organic stuff.'

Mrs Poole worked only two and a half days a week. She liked to smile at unpredictable things and gave the impression she showed sides of herself in the rectory that she couldn't show at home. Her husband Jack was a part-time gardener for the council. 'He just cuts the grass,' she said, as if to separate his efforts from the sorts of things we might do ourselves.

Mr and Mrs Poole appeared to live together in a state of settled resentment. She said they seldom went out and that he had given up on trying to make her happy. He wasn't the man she had married, apparently, and a thousand things had happened, she said, that made it clear he couldn't deal with responsibility. Even after the events of that year, I don't think I ever came to understand what Mr Poole really thought of his wife and the world she craved. But she may have been wrong to assume that his drinking was the biggest part of him, that he was, in some barely conscious way, a standard-bearer for the town's worst prejudices. Some might have called him a broken person, yet there was more to him, and more to her, than either of them would find time to recognise.

It was Mrs Poole's habit to see him as a failure. I think perhaps his biggest failure, in her eyes, was to seem to deny something very essential in her as they got older, something that might have made them more elevated and more sophisticated than the people around them, the people—'his people', she would say—of whom Mrs Poole had come to feel perhaps too easily scornful, and whom he, Jack, had an equally natural ability to understand and to rub along with quite nicely.

'Yes,' she said once. 'Being one of them.'

'Don't be too hard on Dalgarnock,' I said. 'The people from here are no different from people elsewhere, except they probably have more to deal with and smaller means to do it.'

'You'll find out if I'm too hard on them,' she said, and I knew from the way she said it that she'd heard things against me or against priests in general or people from England.

Mrs Poole thought that Jack saw her new habits and interests as being pretentious and wanted to deny her an opportunity for personal growth. 'He doesn't know me,' she said. 'You know me better than him.'

'I don't know about that, Mrs Poole. I only know a few old prayers and a dozen facts about Marcel Proust.'

'That's you then,' she said. 'But it's not nothing. It's a damn sight more than most people round here. Most of those people wouldn't give you daylight in a dark corner.'

'Is that one of your native expressions?'

'That's right. They wouldn't give you the shine off their sweat.'

'Nice,' I said. 'Proust would be proud of you.'

'Shush,' she said. 'You know what I mean. You can't expect a priest to know much about life, but at least you've read a couple of books.'

'Whatever you say,' I said.

I could only assume Mrs Poole came to work to live another sort of life. As with all her jealously guarded, self-defining hours—the night classes, the environment, the afternoons down at the Red Cross shop—her time at the rectory was spent, at least in part, in solid opposition to her husband's view of her as a person gaining airs and ignoring the hands of her biological clock.

One day we visited the garden centre. It must have been a month into my time there in the parish. I had been telling Mrs Poole a thing or two about the older kinds of rose. We looked up some books, and it was decided that rose bushes were exactly the thing for the rectory garden, planted with care round the walls, each of us falling by degrees into a strictly imagined world of old fragrances. That day, Jack was in the children's playground next to the garden centre when we came out bearing our new plants. He didn't see us coming along, though I suspect Mrs Poole saw him, for she flinched and the small leaves on the bushes shuddered as we walked across the gravel.

'Amazing,' I said.

'Sorry?'

'That's actually a twelfth-century rose you're holding.'

'The weight of it,' she said.

Jack was sitting on the roundabout with a passive look on his face and a bottle of booze in a paper bag. We put the things in the car and then Mrs Poole went back to use the loo, while I sat behind the wheel and watched her mysterious husband removing table-tennis bats from a large blue bag and throwing them into the trees.

Before we'd started the soup, the postman came to the door and hammered on it with his usual disregard. 'Nothing gets your attention like a knock at the door,' said Mrs Poole, and she went out. I spent a moment playing a phrase on the piano, placing my foot on a dull brass pedal. Then I stopped and cocked an ear before putting Chopin into the CD player; I could hear very clearly what the postman was saying to Mrs Poole.

'How's yer English priest getting on then?'

'He's not English,' she said. 'He was born in Edinburgh.'

'Don't kid yerself,' said the postman. 'Yer man's as English as two weeks in Essex. Get a load ae that rug lying there!'

'What are you talking about?'

'That thing under yer feet,' he said. 'They didnae have that in Father McGee's day. That's a pure English rug, that.'

'Just go about your business and stop coming round here talking nonsense,' said Mrs Poole. 'This is a Persian rug.'

'That's Iran or Iraq,' he said. 'You want to get rid ae that.' As he laughed he sent a menacing splutter into the hall. 'There's blood in they carpets. Our troops are over in that place and they're not buildin' sandcastles. There's young men dying out there. You have to watch out for the Iraqis.'

I'm sure there's an essay in which Liszt writes of Chopin's apartment on the chaussée d'Antin, the room with a portrait of Chopin above the piano, and the belief of the younger musician that the painting must have been a constant auditor of the sound that once flamed and lived in that room, bright and brief as a candle.

'The postman?' I said.

Mrs Poole put a letter into its envelope and folded the whole thing in three. She creased it as people do who never file their letters, holding the stiff paper in her hand like a small baton. 'Aye,' she said. 'Just another of yer local idiots.'

'Isn't Good Friday a bank holiday? Don't they get the day off?'

'Not in Scotland,' she said. 'That's an English thing.'

She seemed more than slightly annoyed with the postman, as if his careless and brash way of talking had added some terrible degree of insult to the letter he had given her, the letter she now stuffed into the front pocket of her apron.

'Are you all right?'

She smoothed one lip against the other. 'In this country,' she said, 'they prefer to have an extra holiday on the second of January. They ignore Good Friday but they don't ignore the second of January.'

'Really?'

'Of course,' she said. 'The second is the day after New Year's Day, and they'd much sooner have an extra day with alcohol than an extra day with God.'

'You're very severe, Mrs Poole.'

'No wonder,' she said. 'The idea of a person like that being responsible for bringing the post.'

'He's just doing his job.'

'Don't be soft,' she said. 'He's an idiot. And you'd do well to recognise an idiot when you see one.'

Mrs Poole picked some lint from her skirt, and a moment of unease registered with her before she appeared to decide in favour of cheerfulness. 'This is more of your film music you're playing,' she said.

'It's the best thing in the world.'

'Oh God,' she said. 'We've got something good to talk about at last.'

'Yes,' I said. The swerve past the unmentioned letter was still there between us. 'I'm afraid I like the Nocturnes more than anything else. More than Bach.'

'Away ye go.'

We moved to the table and she straightened the cloth.

'I'm no expert,' she said, 'but I'm sure that's wrong.' She looked cheerfully combative. 'You might have to rectify it or else find a new cleaner.'

'A new cleaner who likes nocturnes?'

'That's right,' she said, enjoying her joke. 'You're such a dangerous snob, Father David.'

'No danger to you. You're the most gigantic snob I've ever met. I count it as part of my good fortune to have come across you.'

'I intend to become worse,' she said.

'Be my guest.'

'Only two and a half days a week, mind.'

I asked her again if she was all right, and she nodded into the tablecloth before lifting her spoon. She hoped it was fine to receive mail at the rectory.

'By all means,' I said.

She brushed her cheeks with the back of the spoon as if to cool them and then said we should get on and have our soup. 'The stock is just right,' I said. 'The stock is perfection.'

She had no little regard for the small things, for the dominant note in a perfume—almonds, say, or vanilla—and she appeared almost girlish in her enthusiasm for finding the right shoes and dressing to her mood.

'You've got to make an effort,' she said.

'You'll see us all to our graves, Mrs Poole,' I said. 'You have more energy about you than any of us.'

'I've got that,' she said. 'But you've got the other things.'

I asked for a little of last evening's Alsace. 'Very sweet,' I said. 'It will cut through the taste of your soup.'

'That's not very abstinent of you,' she said.

'Even at this sad time, Good Friday,' I said, 'we must have gaiety. We must have gaiety at all costs.'

At first she said she wouldn't drink any, but then suddenly she changed her mind, bringing over a glass which she pinged with a fingernail. I filled it and she drank the glass in one go, lifting her napkin and dabbing the edge of her nose as if the napkin were a sort of accomplice.

'Is that all right?' I asked.

'Parfait
,' she said.

'You have a nice tone to your pronunciation.'

'Thank you,' she said. And after a moment: 'Has France always been your favourite? I mean, of all the places?'

'Well, it's created some personable Englishmen.'

'What do you mean?'

'A little contact with France does an Englishman no end of good,' I said. 'But too much of it can make the French intolerable.'

'Is that a joke?' she said.

'Depends if you're English or French.'

'And what if you're Scottish?'

'Bad luck,' I said.

'God, you're a pain,' she said. 'One minute you're Scottish yourself and the next minute you're more English than Churchill. I'm sure I don't know what to be saying about you.'

'Well,' I said, 'here's some advice. Only say sweet things about me and you'll never go far wrong.'

'A pain!' she said. 'Maybe you're just a turncoat, and the war has turned you against France.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

Mrs Poole looked at me and bit her lip and said nothing, as if the matter was best forgotten and not looked into; then everything seemed to resolve itself as she asked again about the sweetness of certain wines. 'I would like to go some day to France,' she said, 'and see these vineyards.'

'Alsace is in the northeast.'

'Like Aberdeen,' she said.

'Exactement.'

A print of Bernini's
Apollo and Daphne
was hung so as to absorb the light from the window that faced the church. I saw myself buying the print long ago at the Galleria Borghese, a small purchase on a spring day after a walk under the pines of the villa gardens. Waiting for Mrs Poole to speak again, I looked at Daphne's anxious face and noticed her fingertips flowering into branches and leaves. The light was very subdued.

'I wish you'd turn that music off,' Mrs Poole said. 'It gets on my nerves. I hate all that watery music. I borrowed some of it from the library. God. It makes such a fuss of itself.'

'You just like to argue with me, Mrs Poole.'

'I do,' she said.

She smiled and then laughed as she poured herself another inch of Alsace, her eyes flaring, willing me to argue my case.

'Poor washerwoman that you are,' I said. 'The famous Scottish education system barely left a mark on you.'

'Father, don't make me swear. Jesus is up on the cross covered in wounds and you're nearly making me swear.'

'You will never go to heaven.'

'It's mechanical.'

'You'll never be happy.'

'I'll never be sad, more like! Gluttons for sadness, you Chopin fans. Bedwetters.'

'Goodness, Mrs Poole,' I said. 'Strong words. I should say you were brought up in a bath of coal.'

'Born and bred. But I still know Chopin is dodgy stuff.'

'If it wasn't for Chopin his people would still be kicking up their heels in circles and baring their black teeth to the vodka jug.'

'And you a good whatsit—socialist,' she said, lifting the plates and doing a little victory sashay into the kitchen.

'Not in a long time,' I said.

There was a decent pause. I looked at the swirling carpet and felt ashamed of its cheap, nasty appearance, the purple and beige nylon a field of static electricity. 'Three months and we've still got that terrible floor,' I said.

I looked at the Bernini again and my eye travelled to a framed photograph beneath it on the mantel. It was me at school in my black tie and blazer, a bare hawthorn tree standing behind on the hill above Ampleforth, its branches seemingly shaped by the wind. Next to that was a picture of an elephant rising on its back legs surrounded by workers from a Yorkshire factory. I looked up as Mrs Poole came back. I could see she was happy with the progress of our talk.

'Sorry,' she said, looking down at two new bowls, the redness high in her cheeks. 'Here's the pudding. It's a bit so-so, I'm afraid.'

'Never mind,' I said. 'Good things are temporary.'

The light at the window reminded me that I must soon be off to the school. I wanted to tell her I wasn't half as serious as she thought. I wanted to say that neither of us needed especially to believe what we said. But something in her and something in me made actors of us both when we were together, and I couldn't admit how much I looked forward to being with the young people at the school, just so as to lose myself and to fall in with whatever they were doing. I tried to joke with her but she would always bring me back. She believed my teases were just pauses between big pronouncements, and she wanted them more than anything, the pronouncements, as if I owed them to her.