Chapter 28

A Small Miracle?

 

 

Christmas Eve. If there was ever a day for ghosts to walk it would be today. Jacob Marley with his clanking chains and cash boxes was roaming the television schedule in various guises warning Scrooge to mend his ways. Cass was exhausted already and she hadn’t even begun her work for today; morning service, then two crib services and one Midnight Mass. A mild, grey Christmas Eve, several degrees above freezing and rain in the air. She felt numb with exhaustion as she dragged herself out of bed and down to the kitchen to get some breakfast.

Anna was still asleep, but Hal came downstairs just after her. He looked haggard and dishevelled, still wearing the old pair of tracksuit trousers and baggy jumper, which he had thrown on last night. He didn’t look as if he had slept, his hair was untidy and he needed a shave. He looked exhausted and sad, and she felt a desperate desire to hug him sweep over her … but it wouldn’t be appropriate or sensible.

‘I thought I might cancel morning service given the circumstances. I’ll ring the church warden over in Strensholm and explain.’ Cass said.

‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll look after her this morning – I kind of feel that she’s my responsibility.’

Cass wanted to shout “But she’s not. She shouldn’t be your responsibility!” This had gone on for too long, Anna needed her family, her father, and it was up to Cass to help her. That’s what vicars were supposed to do - what else had that training course on family reconciliation that she had attended in her days at Ormsborough been for if not for this precise situation? She was going to make this work; she was going to put it right. She couldn’t look at Anna’s suffering any more without trying to do something.

 

‘Charles. Good afternoon.’

‘Vicar? To what do I owe the pleasure? I thought Christmas Eve would be too busy for idle parish visits.’

He had opened the door to the Old Vicarage after she had knocked for the third time. He looked old and tired this morning, and the house smelled stale, almost as if he hadn’t been out of it for a while, that no doors or windows had been opened to let in fresh air, or to let in any visitors. He certainly wasn’t going to ask Cass in, leaving her standing on the doorstep below him as he loomed over her. She wasn’t going to let Charles put her off though.

‘I have come to ask you – to beg you, if I must – to come and see your daughter. She’s very ill, Charles. She was sleepwalking last night, she’s feverish and she’s so thin it hurts to look at her. She needs you. Please, Charles, will you try to get through to her, just one last time?’

‘No.’ He made to shut the door, but Cass got her foot in first. He tutted with annoyance. ‘We’ve already been through this, Vicar. I have nothing to say to her and I doubt that she has anything to say to me.’

‘She needs help. She needs you, her family. She might not be able to see it, but I can see it, every day, I see how lonely she is – and you must be lonely too. I know, Charles, I know about the abortion and the accident, and I can see how awful it must have been and how difficult -’

‘She told you about it?’ He sounded incredulous, and he stopped trying to shut the door so Cass removed her foot.

‘She told me that she feels guilty about her mother’s accident, because of the abortion.’

‘She told you that?’ and suddenly there was a hint of something more than anger, a vulnerability there that Cass had never suspected in Charles before.

‘Yes.’

‘Then why can’t she tell me?’ The words were wrenched out of him as if forced. ‘That’s all I ever wanted her to say! Why can’t she talk to her own father?’ His voice was shaking with emotion.

‘If I was there to help, if I was there to be an intermediary … perhaps she might?’ Cass suggested gently.

‘What are you doing here?’ Anna’s shocked tone as Cass opened the door to admit Charles was not the best beginning to the reconciliation that Cass hoped to effect. Anna was sitting on the sofa in front of the fire where she had been for most of the afternoon, since Hal had left. She was still wearing her pyjamas and wrapped in Cass’s red blanket.

‘I heard you were ill,’ he replied from the doorway, taking off his overcoat and handing it to Cass, ‘and that you might be ready to speak to me at last.’

Cass winced at his direct, almost aggressive tone which wasn’t what Anna needed right now – but she could see how difficult he was finding it to be anything other than his usual, rather abrupt, self.

‘I think the important thing is that you both need to talk to each other,’ Cass stressed hurriedly, taking his coat from him politely and hanging it up.

‘The vicar persuaded me that you were in need of my help and that this time you might be prepared to talk to me.’ Charles stood just inside the cottage doorway looking down at his daughter both physically and metaphorically.

‘You have never given me a chance to talk.’ Anna didn’t argue, scream or fuss. It was a statement, not a quarrel; she seemed too tired for quarrelling. ‘You don’t listen.’

In this tiny cottage Charles’ height was even more obvious than usual; he loomed over his daughter.

‘Well then, talk to me.’ It didn’t sound like an invitation, it sounded like a command.

‘Perhaps this would be a chance to tell your father what you really feel? Cass tried to turn his command into a gentler suggestion.

‘I don’t know if there is any point,’ she said sadly, looking away, into the fire. ‘When I know how worthless and stupid he thinks I am.’

‘You made some stupid decisions. Even you have to see that! But I never said you were worthless.’

‘You disagreed with me, but that didn’t make my decisions stupid; just different.’ With a shudder, she pulled the throw from the sofa around her shoulders, as if the cold air that had rushed in with her father was chilling her.

‘Surely, now that you’re older and wiser you can see just how stupid those decisions were?’

‘Perhaps we could think about what both of you need now rather than going over old ground to begin with,’ Cass suggested, trying to steer the conversation to safer topics. ‘Think about what you could have, rather than what you have lost?’

Neither of them seemed able to answer the other. There was a silence punctuated only by the crackling of the fire, the inevitable beat of the sea and the distant sound of the gulls.

‘May I say something?’ Cass asked after a few moments had passed. ‘I know I’m an outsider, but sometimes it’s easier to see things from a new perspective when you look at them from a distance. I’ve seen you both over the last few months, and I’ve watched you both suffering.’

Charles spluttered and tried to say something but Cass continued speaking, calmly and firmly.

‘Anna, you’re having nightmares; you’re obviously stressed and unhappy, you’re not eating and I think now is the time, Charles, that you need to show some compassion and help your daughter. I think you’re suffering on your own and you need your family around you. Can’t you leave the past behind you and move forwards? It’s Christmas. Now, if any, is the time for reconciliation.’

There was a long silence as the two of them looked at each other. It was impossible to read their faces, both were impassive.

‘Well, Anna, I’m only prepared to give you one last chance.’ Charles folded his arms. ‘The vicar has persuaded me that I should be willing to show forgiveness, which I am, but only if you are prepared to accept that forgiveness and admit that you -’

‘No,’ said Anna again, wearily.

‘Admit that you were responsible -’

‘No.’ She appeared to be speaking neither to her father nor to Cass, she appeared to be addressing the clock on the mantelpiece right now.

‘Responsible for your mother’s accident.’

‘No. I wasn’t.’

‘It was a terrible accident. A terrible, awful accident. Perhaps, Anna, you could tell your father how you feel about it now?’ Cass sat down on the sofa next to Anna, hoping to give her some support, to encourage her to speak. Her father remained standing as if he wasn’t planning on staying.

‘If Anna had not decided to have that - operation - against our wishes there would have been no accident.’ He turned to Cass.

‘Abortion. That’s what you can’t say, isn’t it? I had an abortion, not an operation.’

‘Abortion then.’

‘Can we leave this behind and look forwards?’ Cass suggested. Anna ignored her.

‘I had no other choice; I didn’t want to be a mother at sixteen. I was scared and I didn’t know what I was doing and I knew exactly how you felt about Rob -’

‘I don’t want to hear about it. Rob Thorburn was a feckless charmer, like all his family.’ Her father cut her short. ‘But just because we didn’t approve of him it didn’t mean that we wouldn’t have supported you. That’s what we tried to tell you. You had another choice, you had us. We would have helped you with the baby, Anna.’ He took a step closer to Anna and suddenly, when she recognised the pain in his voice, Cass began to understand.

‘It wasn’t a baby,’ Anna said dully, still staring at the fire away from both of them.

‘Yes, it was. A baby, a child. Our grandchild.’ This time the emotion in Charles’ voice was barely hidden. ‘Why did you do it, Anna, why?’

‘No. No, no, no. It wasn’t a baby. It wasn’t anything. It was a mistake; it wasn’t even properly alive. I never had a child. I never had …’ Anna spoke quickly, shaking her head as if she was trying to shake something away, her voice heavy with emotion, tears in her eyes. She looked small and frail and lost. Cass wanted to hug her; tell her that everything was going to be fine, give her the reassurance she so obviously lacked, but more than that, she wanted her father to do it. She looked up at Charles, expecting him to be swayed by Anna’s distress as easily as she was. Charles just stood there.

‘Charles?’ Cass turned to him, hoping that she would see a change in his eyes. ‘Please Charles? It is Christmas and your daughter needs you.’

For a long while, he considered. Was he going to take that final step towards her and console her? Had Cass managed the seemingly impossible and brought the two of them back together? Was it a small Christmas miracle?

No.

‘You have blood on your hands!’ he said.

‘Get out. Get out!’ Anna cried.

‘Look, please -’ Cass tried to remonstrate with them.

‘I’m going. Good day to you Vicar. I’ve done what I could, but it’s clear that nothing has changed.’

He turned on his heel and left, shutting the door behind him not with an angry slam but with a solid, final clunk. For a moment there was silence.

‘Anna, I’m so sorry. I thought I could help.’

‘You can’t help. Nobody can help. He doesn’t want to help. He hates me for what I did.’

‘There are people who can help you,’ Cass said sadly. ‘You can help yourself. I can help you. Perhaps Hal could – ‘

‘Not even you or Hal. Because it was a child, Vicar, and I killed it and I can’t forgive myself.’ Though she spoke to Cass she was still looking at the fire, unable to look at her. ‘Always it comes back to that. He’s right; I do have blood on my hands. Back then I thought that Mum and Dad would be so angry with me for getting pregnant, that they would want me to have the abortion. I didn’t tell them, I didn’t dare, I was so scared that they would hate me because of who the father was. I never thought that they might actually want me to have the child, that they would have helped – I thought they would hate it and that they would hate me, because they hated Rob.’ Now she was crying in earnest, tears streaming down her face. Cass held out her hand, tried to take Anna’s hand in hers, but Anna brushed it away.

‘Why couldn’t you just tell your Dad? If you can tell me, why not him?’

‘Because of what happened to Mum. He’ll never forgive me because of that, and I don’t blame him.’

‘What did happen?’ Cass asked, gently.

‘Mum found a letter about the appointment, but by then it was too late,’ Anna continued. ‘She decided to try and stop me and that’s when she crashed the car - she never got there, and I was responsible for Mum’s accident and for killing the baby. So how can I expect anyone else to forgive me if I can’t forgive myself?’ She turned to Cass with tears streaking her eyeliner down her face.

‘God will forgive you,’ Cass said gently, because she knew it was the right thing to say.

‘No, he won’t. I don’t believe in God and I don’t deserve forgiveness.’

‘You were so young,’ Cass tried to say. ‘You were scared.’

‘Just because I was scared doesn’t make it right. I know it now. I was wrong, so wrong. I made a mistake… and I … and I …’

Cass tried to hug her, but felt Anna stiffen at her touch.

‘And it’s not just the Maiden that I dream about in those nightmares, Cass. Sometimes in the night I hear a baby crying. It’s lost, but I can never find it.’

‘It’s just the wind … or Twiggy, it could be Twiggy?’ Cass tried to suggest.

‘I hear my baby crying,’ she said, ‘and I don’t deserve your sympathy, Vicar,’ she said, pushing Cass away. ‘Everything my father says is true. I am not worth your concern.’ Her face was more pale and pinched than ever and she suddenly looked exhausted.  ‘I am not worth anybody’s concern.’

‘What about Hal? He’s concerned for you.’

‘Hal feels responsible for his brother’s death and so Hal feels responsible for me. But Hal has his own life to live now and I don’t want to hold him back from living it. I can’t keep holding onto him, can I? He isn’t mine to hold.’

‘There’s always hope somewhere, always help somewhere,’ Cass tried to suggest, gently, ‘sometimes in the most unexpected of places.’

‘Really?’

‘My home fell off the cliff. I thought I had lost everything, but there was Twiggy and so many of my possessions that you rescued. And now I have a home, at least for now, here with you. Hope in the most unexpected of places, Anna, help and hope where I never expected to find it.’

Anna gave a little shrug but did not look at Cass.

‘Look, you’re unwell and you’re tired,’ Cass continued. ‘A few days off over Christmas will do you good. Relax and when you’re feeling better we’ll sit down and find a way forwards together.’

Anna nodded, without saying anything.

‘And,’ Cass continued as brightly as she could, ‘tomorrow is Christmas Day. Perhaps things will seem a bit better?’

‘I hate Christmas,’ Anna said, finally turning towards Cass. ‘It’s all so … pointless … sorry, Vicar, no offence …’

Cass had to fight down the urge to agree with her.

 

There was no Christmas miracle – quite the opposite. Anna was still feeling ill and she stayed in bed most of the day; when she did get up it was only to drink honey and lemon and take some tablets then go back to bed.

On Christmas morning Cass stood up in front of a church full of happy families and preached the good news that she no longer felt in her heart. At lunchtime she made scrambled eggs for herself and Anna; Anna didn’t fancy anything else, and in the evening she heated a microwave macaroni cheese from a frozen packet. Cass opened her presents – boxes of chocolates and bottles of wine from dutiful parishioners and a set of coasters from Graham and June. Then she sat with Twiggy to watch a film on her own, listening to Anna toss and turn in bed upstairs, coughing every couple of minutes. Just like every other Christmas when she was young, when her Mum had gone to bed before her with her grief and her guilt, and, Cass suspected, her bottle of gin.

St. Stephen’s Day dawned with a breath of relief for Cass - Christmas was over for another year. There would be the service at St. Stephen’s for the Patronal Festival, but that was it, a light load compared to the multiple services and sermons of the days before. She got back from the ten o’clock service at St. Stephen’s, which had been surprisingly well attended for Boxing Day, to find Anna out of bed and looking much better. The honey and lemon must be working. She was dressed in her customary long velvet dress and corset and full make up, and seemed somehow more serene this morning. Perhaps just getting it all out in the open on Christmas Eve had helped her.

‘Anna! Good to see you out of bed. Feeling any better?’

‘I think I am. Yes, I do feel better. Everything seems much clearer today; I think Christmas gets oppressive, doesn’t it? So many expectations. Once they’re out of the way and it’s possible to move forward it seems easier. My flu’s a lot better too. It’s the mummers play this afternoon, by the way – do you want to come? Hal’ll be playing the music and he’ll be pleased to see you. I haven’t been for years; it used to be a family tradition, going to see the mummers’ play. Me and Mum and Dad and my brother in the days before I …  it would be nice to see it one more time.’