CHAPTER 5

Nothing To Do With Jesus

 

 

In the early evening Cass made her way down the hill to find Anna Dawnay at Maidensbower Cottage. The road down to Old Rawscar was only wide enough for a single car at a time so entry to the village was limited to deliveries and emergencies, and a large car park between New and Old Rawscar was available for residents and visitors alike. Everyone had to walk up and down the old road to get into the fishing village, just as they had done for hundreds of years. When the streets were empty and dark like this Cass found the weight of those years pressing at her back, as if the faces of those long-ago fisher folk were watching her from just beyond her vision, muttering about the incomer. Cass didn’t believe in ghosts, but here, somehow, anything seemed possible. She shivered, glad when she rounded the corner and she could see a delivery man unloading at one of the many gift shops that lined the twisting main street.

She made her way safely to the quayside at the bottom of the hill. The road flattened out into the wide square of the old fish-quay where the boats were pulled out of the water and lobster pots were stored around the edges. Cass found a little winding path no wider than a wheelbarrow, which wriggled away from the harbour amongst the higgledy-piggledy cottages. This was Maiden’s Yard and at the head of it was Maidensbower Cottage, white-painted with a dark green front door, it had a large brass knocker shaped like an anchor, which Cass used now. She waited as she heard the key turn in the lock and Anna opened the door just wide enough to see who was there. Even when she had seen Cass, she did not invite her in nor open the door any wider.

Anna was wearing a tightly corseted black velvet dress which made her already slender figure look painfully thin – presumably a Goth thing – and this evening she had her hair piled up on top of her head, showing off her long, pale neck - something about her timeless beauty made Cass think of Hal and the faces in the sepia-tinted photographs on the pub wall. She looked very young and very vulnerable; although Cass reckoned that she must be in her mid-twenties at least, she looked younger. Everything about her dramatic, fragile elegance encouraged people to notice her but nothing in her demeanour encouraged conversation.

‘Oh. Hello Vicar,’ Anna said, and Cass had a feeling that she had been hoping for somebody else from the way that Anna looked past her down the path. ‘I know what you’ve come to say, but believe me, Jesus wouldn’t want me, so please don’t bother to…’

‘No, no, it’s nothing to do with Jesus, I promise. I came to thank you for everything you did yesterday.’

She handed the beautiful bunch of flowers to Anna, who took them with hardly a glance. She put the flowers down on a table beside the door, but didn’t open the door any wider or ask Cass inside.

‘Oh, right. It’s kind of you, but you needn’t have bothered,’ she muttered.

‘It was very brave of you. Twiggy’s fine, by the way. I’m so grateful,’ Cass continued, smiling her practised vicar-ish smile.

Anna leaned against the doorframe of the cottage, arms folded protectively against the cold. ‘No worries,’ she said, with slightly more warmth than when she had first opened the door.

‘How’s your house up on Widow’s Row?’ Cass enquired politely. ‘Are you going to be allowed back in?’

‘Oh, it’s not my house. I was renting from the Thorburns. Hal says I can stay here instead.’ She wasn’t looking at Cass, she was looking beyond her, away to the horizon of the sea at the end of Maiden’s Yard. Her breath steamed in the cold air of the evening.

‘This looks like a pretty little cottage,’ Cass tried again to make conversation.

‘It’s fine. Cold, though.’

Anna’s answer didn’t encourage any further communication and Cass could recognise a closed book when she saw one. She was suddenly conscious of the open door letting the frosty night air into Anna’s tiny cottage.

‘I’ll let you shut the door, then. Don’t want to make you any colder. Thank you again.’

Anna shrugged and turned away - she couldn’t shut the door fast enough and she didn’t even say a polite goodbye, then Cass heard her lock it and bolt it. What was Anna keeping out, Cass wondered; the cold, or something else?

 

As she made her way out of Old Rawscar, Cass realised that she had left her mobile phone charger in her car, she would have to go and get it … but the car was still up on the cliff top after last night, parked in the gateway where she had left it. She should have thought to move it during daylight, now she was going to have to climb the stone stairs up to the top of the cliff to fetch it in the dark. She swung across the hump-backed stone bridge across the beck that ran through the old village, only to be faced by a brand-new barrier and a notice at the foot of the old stone steps stating, “The clifftop path is closed due to a serious cliff fall”.

‘Oh, shit,’ she cursed under her breath. If she couldn’t use this path, then it meant going all the way round by the road-bridge in New Rawscar – at least another mile to walk, in the dark and the cold. Not for the first time she cursed the lack of taxis in the village – in central Ormsborough she would have had a taxi in minutes, here she would have to ring for one from Saddleton and she was looking at a wait of more than half an hour – if she was lucky and there was one available. It wasn’t worth it. Sighing, she set off up the hill.

As she walked up out of Old Rawscar, she passed the “Rawscar Holiday Cottages” office on her right-hand side, an upstairs office above a fish-and-chip shop. A light glowed out of the window, and inside she could see a figure behind a desk, working at a computer. He ran his hand through his hair, his body language made him look tired and fraught. It didn’t seem right that a man like Hal should be confined to a desk job; he should be out there heroically battling the waves and hauling nets, strong and brave … He couldn’t see her outside in the darkness, of course, and even if he could have, he probably wouldn’t remember who she was, but she remembered him. She had found herself remembering him several times today, in fact.

It took nearly an hour to get out to her car; she had to walk slowly in the darkness along the little country lane that led - that had led – to her vicarage. Everything was dark; the streetlight at the end of Widows’ Row was no longer working, the cottages were in darkness, and the lights of Old Rawscar were below her in the distance. There was no moon and no stars tonight, clouds covered the sky, and Cass stumbled along the road with only the light from her phone to show her the way. She could hear the sea pounding at the cliffs: it must be high tide.

She had pulled out her car keys as soon as she could see her car, and unlocked the door, the redundant key to the vicarage front door still hanging on her keyring. Ridiculous, to have a key to a door that no longer existed and the key wasn’t even hers, by rights; it belonged to the diocese – although it wasn’t any use to them either.

It was odd; from here by the light of her torch she could see the garden wall and the old iron gate that now opened into nothing. It was as if the vicarage was still there, just out of the beam of light - she could see it in her imagination. She crossed the lane, as close as she could get, past the police tape, until she was right next to the wall - beyond it she could just make out where the garden path ended in a sheer drop down to the sea. She didn’t know if it was safe to get that close, but there was nobody to tell her, nobody to try and stop her. Nobody in this village cared what she did. Charles’ words from earlier came back her. She didn’t belong here, she didn’t understand. Her name would not be written in the registers of the village, she was not part of their past or their future. She was not part of Rawscar at all.

‘So why have you sent me here, Lord? What’s the plan?’ she addressed her prayer to the starless sky above her. ‘Why?’

She was reminded of the suffering of her dying parishioner yesterday, the questions that she couldn’t answer – why, why, why? What was it all for, all this misery and confusion?

‘Come on, show me! Why?’ she yelled into the darkness, and she knew that no answer was going to come to her question.

What she should say is “Thy will be done” and then she should get up, dust herself off, go back to the car and get on with living her vocation – it’s what her father would have done; he would have accepted the will of God with patient gratitude, but Cass couldn’t do that. Instead she was shouting at God because he had taken everything from her for no reason; no reason at all. She had lost so much in her life. She had lost her father, then her mother. James had left her. She had lost her home. She had been moved from one parish to another, one disaster to the next, and then when she found one where she was actually doing something useful, where she was actually making a difference, the bishop had seen fit to suggest that she should be transferred here because he didn’t think she could cope – not half the vicar that her father had been. She had failed.

There was no-one coming to help her in the darkness.

She could not believe in a God who would test her like this and destroy everything that she held dear, who could reward her best efforts with failure and despair. A God who would allow decent people to die in pain like the poor old woman she had been visiting in the hospital. A God who would destroy her home. A God who would allow unhappiness like Anna’s, anger like that of Charles.

How could there really be a God who would allow all this to happen?

Sitting on the cold stone wall that had once surrounded her home, the darkness of the night engulfed her as the battery on her phone finally died and the light went out. She was alone, in the darkness because now she had lost the one thing that had kept her going through all these other disasters, the one hope that she had clung to.

There couldn’t really be a God who would allow all this to happen. She no longer believed in God.