Village Affairs (19 page)

“Your wife helps you write your sermons?”

“Not exactly. But she gives me lots of ideas, inadvertently, as it were. Here, are you doing anything just now? Because, if not, you could come along to the vicarage with me, and we could tell you what we’ve thought of. Leandra’s making lunch, but we can sit in the kitchen and she can talk while she cooks.”

Bethancourt agreed to this proposition, and they turned together down the High Street. The sky was beginning to clear from the gray of the early morning, and they were bathed in shafts of golden light as they made their way toward the vicarage.

“It must be nice,” said Bethancourt, thinking of Marla and the amount of persuasive charm he had had to use in order to secure her agreement to ask around about Eve and Charlie in Paris, “to have a wife who helps you in your work.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tothill, with positive enthusiasm. “Leandra’s made an enormous difference in my life. I never thought, when I first met her, that she would ever take to being a country vicar’s wife, but it suits her very well.”

“I understand,” said Bethancourt a little cautiously, “that she wasn’t immediately accepted here, however?”

The vicar only laughed. “That’s putting it mildly,” he said. “Let’s face it: when I first came here, about the only people who were happy to see me were the mothers with young daughters who thought it would be lovely if Sally could marry the vicar. They weren’t at all pleased when I brought back a London woman with a wicked past. Of course, they didn’t know about Lee’s past, but they assumed it anyway.”

“It must have been awfully rough going for you.”

“Oh, we didn’t mind so much, we were so happy together. Leandra positively delighted in thinking up little things to do that would bring people ’round. No, it was before I married that things were rough. I was seriously thinking of giving up the clergy then. I was so pleased about getting this living, you see, I suppose I looked forward to it too much.”

“Everyone’s guilty of that at some time or another,” said Bethancourt. “I don’t think there’s anyone alive who hasn’t spoiled a perfectly good thing by expecting too much of it. Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.”

“No,” agreed the vicar. “And I—who had always prided myself on being so pragmatic—wasn’t sensible at all about this. I had some idea of just stepping into the role of vicar and having everything fall into place, and naturally it didn’t happen that way at all. I was too young—at least, that’s what everyone in the parish thought—and even if I’d been ninety, I was a different man from the one they’d been used to for the last thirty years.”

“What changed it ’round for you?” asked Bethancourt.

“Leandra,” answered Tothill. “I was really a very lonely man when I met her, although I didn’t realize it. I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone. Frankly, things never seemed to work out for me in that way and I’d more or less made up my mind to being a bachelor for the time being. But God was looking out for me, though I didn’t know it until I met Lee. She made me so happy, I just plunged ahead, despite all my doubts. I kept looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s beautiful, but is she a vicar’s wife?’”

“Presumably,” said Bethancourt, pausing to light a cigarette, “she was more sure than you?”

“Oh, yes.” The vicar grinned. “She said she didn’t see why she wouldn’t make a perfectly wonderful vicar’s wife so long as the vicar in question was me.”

Bethancourt smiled. “And she was right, in the end.”

“Definitely. I’ve never been this happy, never enjoyed life so much. It’s like a whole new life, really. And Leandra’s happy, too. It’s incredible, how fond we are of each other. Well, here we are. We might as well go ’round to the back door, if you don’t mind.”

Leandra Tothill, reflected Bethancourt, certainly looked happy. She greeted her husband with enthusiasm, and urged Bethancourt to make himself comfortable at the kitchen table. He took a chair and let his eyes travel over her, secretly amused. If the vicar’s tweed jacket was incongruous with his cassock, his wife was just as eccentrically dressed. She had put on a gray sweater and wool skirt with a chef’s apron tied over all, and had tied back her hair with a bit of shocking pink fabric that looked as if it might have come out of the ragbag. Her legs were bare, and she had pulled a pair of thick, oversized socks over her feet in lieu of slippers; they drooped about her ankles.

“Would you like a drop of beer?” asked the vicar. “It’s ham sandwiches for lunch. You will have one, won’t you?”

“Today’s great idea,” said Bethancourt happily. “Cerberus,” he added, frowning, “leave Mrs. Tothill alone.”

Leandra was standing at the counter, carving slices from a large ham, and Cerberus was glued to her side, tail wagging eagerly.

“Can’t he have a bit?” asked Leandra, arresting the downward movement of her hand in which she held a sliver of ham.

“He can if you want to give it to him,” said Bethancourt. “But he won’t stop asking afterward.”

“That’s all right,” said Leandra cheerfully, holding out the tidbit for the Borzoi. “He’s really remarkably well-behaved. Did you train him yourself ?”

“He was housebroken when he came to me. I got a book and did the rest myself. It took awhile.” Bethancourt gazed fondly at his pet, who seemed to have taken to Leandra with a devotion not entirely explained by the ham.

“Richard wants a dog,” said Leandra over her shoulder. “But he’s afraid I should end up taking care of it.”

“Well, you probably would,” said the vicar.

“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. “Anyway, Steve Eberhart says those puppies of Mr. Powell’s will be ready to leave home in a week or so. I told him maybe we’d take one.”

“Oh, really, Lee.” Tothill was laughing at her. “You always want me to have anything I fancy.”

“What sort of dog is it?” asked Bethancourt.

“They’re Kerry blue terriers, more or less,” answered the vicar.

“Very appealing dogs,” said Bethancourt.

“Well,” said the vicar doubtfully, “we’ll see.” He set three bottles of Bass on the table and then sat down himself, reaching for a page of notes.

“Your sermon?” asked Bethancourt.

“No, no.” Tothill produced a pair of half-glasses and peered at the paper. “Lee and I wrote down what we remembered Charlie saying about Eve,” he said. “It’s not very much, but you’re welcome to it.”

Bethancourt sampled his beer, lit a cigarette, and leaned back with a sigh of content to listen.

“We began,” said the vicar, “by trying to remember everything we knew about Eve, and then to trace it all back to where we had heard it in the first place. We both remember when Charlie first came here, and meeting him in the Deer and Hounds, but neither of us remember when we first knew he had a daughter.”

“We probably asked about his family,” put in Leandra. “It’s the sort of thing one does.”

“Anyway,” went on Tothill, “it was general knowledge that he was a widower and had a grown-up daughter living abroad. The next bit is that she was single—we’ve put that separately because Lee remembers it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember asking him if she had married a Frenchman and he said no, she had gone to a finishing school there, and that she was still single. And then he said that she travelled quite a bit, that she’d inherited the wanderlust from him. He seemed quite pleased about that, about sharing a trait with her.”

“The other thing we remember,” said Tothill, “is that whenever he spoke of her, it was as if she was on the other side of the world. That must have come from his being so far away for so long.”

Eve Bingham, Bethancourt recalled, had said much the same thing.

“The next thing is much later, after we had got to know him. He mentioned one night being in Paris before he came back to England and I asked him why his daughter never visited, or why he didn’t go to see her. He seemed very surprised at the question, but after a minute or two he said he supposed there wasn’t any reason now that he was living in England, but that it was probably too late. I didn’t press it, though it seemed to me there was a story there. He was a very private man in many ways, and I didn’t like to pry. In my profession, curiosity is often viewed as meddling.”

“As if,” snorted Leandra, “you had to go looking for problems to solve.”

“No,” grinned Tothill, “I certainly don’t. The trouble is usually to convince people that I can’t solve their problems for them and that praying, although certainly admirable and uplifting, is rarely an answer in itself.”

“People take comfort from it, though,” said Bethancourt.

“Yes, but comfort isn’t always what they need.” Tothill looked rather stern. “If your husband is beating you, prayer may help you bear it, but it won’t make him stop. God does not deal in magic.”

“Oh, dear,” said Leandra, coming over with the sandwiches. “I didn’t know she had been to see you again.”

“Yesterday,” said the vicar briefly, with a look at their guest which suggested discussion of the subject would be better left until they were alone.

His wife took the hint smoothly, setting down the plates and taking her chair while she said, “I’ve put mustard on the sandwiches, Mr. Bethancourt. I do hope that’s all right?”

“Brilliant,” Bethancourt assured her. He took a bite and found that indeed it was. “This is very nice,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

“The ham came off the Brook farm,” she answered. “They’re marvelous with pigs. But we’ve got off the subject. What’s next on the list, my love?”

Tothill looked back at his notes. “It’s rather superficial,” he said apologetically to Bethancourt. “But we thought you might as well have everything.”

“Quite right,” said Bethancourt.

“Charlie was talking about his wife one night,” continued the vicar, “and mentioned that Eve looked very much like her. He said it had been a bit of a shock, when he saw her in Paris, to find his daughter looking the way he remembered his wife. I think it was in the same conversation that we gathered that his wife had died young and that he had raised Eve himself. But he didn’t talk much about that part. As I say, it was really a conversation about his wife.”

“It was rather touching,” said Leandra. “He was obviously still so very sorry he had lost her.”

“That’s the worst of losing someone unexpectedly,” said Bethancourt. “It’s such a tragedy that you make a paragon of them and no one else can ever live up to that. I don’t mean to imply that Bingham’s marriage wasn’t ideal; very likely it was.”

“No, I agree with you,” said the vicar. “Whether it was a perfect marriage or fraught with difficulties, losing one’s partner practically guarantees that one’s memory of it will be as perfect.”

“Well, I think you’re both callous,” said Leandra. “I am sure Charlie loved his wife very much and was truly broken up over her death.”

“Nobody’s saying that’s not true,” said Tothill mildly.

She was peering over his shoulder.

“There’s only one more thing,” she said. “Fairly recently, when he got a letter from Eve. We asked how she was and he said she seemed to be doing very well, but that, as far as he could tell, he was no nearer to having a son-in-law.”

“I gather he thought a son-in-law would be a good thing?” asked Bethancourt.

“Oh, yes,” said Tothill. “The comment was certainly in that spirit. I think he was somewhat concerned about her being left alone when he died. I had the impression that the heart attack he’d had had truly frightened him, though he never spoke of it except as a joke.”

“That’s understandable,” said Bethancourt. “Surely something like that would frighten anyone.”

“Coming face to face with one’s mortality usually does,” agreed Tothill wryly.

Bethancourt took another bite of his sandwich, washed it down with beer, and asked, “So what was your overall impression? What would you say his attitude toward Eve was?”

They looked at each other for a moment.

“What any parent’s is,” replied Leandra, shrugging. “He was proud and obviously very fond of her.”

That was all very well, thought Bethancourt to himself, but was she fond of him?

“Bloody hell,” muttered Bethancourt, and carefully extricated himself from the hedge.

Upon leaving the Tothills, he had decided to go on to the Eberharts to see if their reminiscences matched the Tothills’. The day having cleared, he decided on the spur of the moment to walk, a decision both he and Cerberus had enjoyed.

The Eberharts had done their best, but they were less observant than the Tothills, and did not have much to add that was enlightening. Nevertheless, Bethancourt had a very pleasant chat with them, not regretting the time spent at all. At least, he hadn’t until he had bade them good-bye and emerged from the cottage only to find the sun had set, and although there was a trace of light lingering in the western sky, the road, shadowed by the hedge, lay in inky blackness. He could barely make out a white gleam from Cerberus’s coat, and, in making for the dog, he promptly tripped over a twig and fell into the hedge.

“Oh, damn,” he said, examining himself and finding a tear in his trousers. He sighed and glanced up at Bingham’s cottage, where a white Rolls-Royce was parked and a light shone in the window. According to the Eberharts, Eve had arrived earlier in the afternoon and had lately been joined by Derek Towser. Bethancourt, turning his back to the wind to light a cigarette, contemplated the wisdom of peeking in at the windows. Regretfully, he decided it would be impractical, particularly since the Eberharts would be almost sure to notice.

He turned back toward the village, groping his way past the hedge and sighing. It was going to be a long walk back, and the light jacket which had been just right for a walk in the sunshine was now beginning to feel inadequate. He thought wistfully of the torch tucked into the glove box of his car and sighed again.

“Come along, Cerberus,” he said. “We had better get started.”

It was late that evening when Gibbons arrived at Stutely Manor and found Astley-Cooper and Bethancourt sitting over a chess game and drinking cognac.

He was tired, and gratefully accepted a snifter of cognac, but refused to express much sympathy over the tear the fall into the hedge had put in Bethancourt’s trousers.