Love Divine Chapter 1

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Wednesday 6 January 8.05 a.m.

A blustery day dawns in Lamley Green, with plenty of rain in the forecast. In Holly Grove, a street of Georgian houses just off the green, curtains and shutters are being opened by sleepy residents in their dressing-gowns, some yawning, some frowning. In its basement kitchens, kettle switches are being flicked and capsules slotted into coffee machines. A dog barks. At No. 14, someone starts drilling loudly into a wall.

At No. 12, the curtains remain firmly closed. Throughout the morning, the following letters will be dropped through its letterbox.

From Carol Buswell, 3 Daggett Close, Lamley Green

Dear Lucy

Archdeacon Martin told me the tragic news and we’re all in shock. I did wonder why Nick wasn’t at Eucharist on Sunday. What a horrible way for your year to start, it beggars belief.

You never know what’s coming round the corner in this world of ours, do you? To think that Nick who we all saw at midnight mass has passed away so suddenly. I’m gobsmacked, to be honest.

He’s at peace and at rest, that’s one thing you can be sure of. And all of us in the St Luke’s community are here for you.

I’m starting to prepare my intercessions for Sunday but it won’t be easy as there’s too much tragedy in our broken world.

Stay strong, stay safe, take care,
Carol x

From Elizabeth Bignell, 24 Glebe Road, Lamley Green

Dear Lucy

As soon as I heard the dreadful news about Nick, I had to drop everything and write to you. I’ve parked the grandchildren in the drawing-room, where they’re reading the classics we gave them for Christmas. Peter’s going to pop this note through your letterbox on his way to do the errands.

I’m thinking of you so much in your sudden loss. How can such a thing have happened? Such a terrible shock. What a charming man Nick was! A highly respected lawyer, by all accounts, and a delightful chap to have around us in Lamley.

I know you’re not the most regular of churchgoers, but please do come along to a service at St Luke’s when you’re ready. We’re a friendly bunch, I promise! We don’t bite!

What can one say, except ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.’ And that grief is the price we pay for love.

Courage, my dear! Peter and I are here for you. Shepherd’s pie in our dining-room at the ready, whenever you are, once the grandchildren have left, and once we’re back from staying with Johnny and Lavinia in Norfolk.

With our love,
Elizabeth

From Hugh Gough, Flat 2, Holston House, 33 Perrins Lane, Lamley Green

Dear Lucy (if I may)

It behoves me to put pen to paper to send you my deep condolences for your loss. Nick’s absence will be keenly felt, and your grief will be shared by us all, although I know that by far the heaviest burden of grief will be felt by you, Sarah and Ollie. Cruelly heavy!

I’m so very sorry to think of you suffering this loss. I can scarcely believe that, just a fortnight ago, Nick was singing that lovely solo in the Carol Service, which I think the choir brought off extremely well, though I say so myself. His voice was a gift to the choir, and we treasured him as a member.

Please let me know if there’s anything I can do. As you know I’m at Dagworth from Monday to Friday in term-time (just two more terms to go!), but on Saturdays I’m free, if you need help with any perplexing paperwork.

May Nick rest in peace.
With best wishes, Hugh

From the Venerable Martin Harrison, The Archdeaconry, 25 The Common, Hamsworth

Hi Lucy

You don’t know me that well, but we met briefly after midnight mass. Was a bit of a stampede as everyone piled out through the porch, but I’m super-glad I was taking the service so I had a chance to say hi. Nick seemed a lovely guy. I heard about his sudden passing, and just wanted to add my condolences.

An interregnum is a weird time for a parish. I know there’s a gaping hole just where you’d like an incumbent at this moment. But as I happen to live very near Lamley, as well as it being part of my area of responsibility, I just wanted to say that if you need anyone to take the funeral at St Luke’s, or at the crematorium, wherever you choose to have it, I’ll be more than happy to. Let’s discuss when you have a mo?

Yours,
Martin

From Vicki Cunningham and Eliot Haynes, @vicki’s, 13 Rowan Avenue, Lamley Green

Hi Lucy

Just scribbling this so can pop it through your box on the way to take Sam to football club. Eliot and I are devastated to hear that Nick has passed away. We’re lost for words. Just wanted to reach out. Nick was just amazing the way he helped us with the wording for our B&B description, we wouldn’t’ve been able to get off the ground without his help.

Wish I knew what to say but let me know if you need any help,

we’re here for you.
Vicki xx

From the Reverend Rachel Goodall, 73 Beaulieu Road, Lamley Green

Dear Lucy

You might remember me – I’m the one who came into the bookshop before Christmas to buy two copies of the book by that former nun, which you brilliantly had in stock.

I sometimes take the services at St Luke’s during the interregnum. (I recently moved here, because the church where I used to be team vicar, in the Leicester diocese, was about to be subsumed into a vast mega-parish, so I resigned.) I knew Nick a bit. He had a gift for being really interested in other people and making them feel good about themselves. Did I glimpse you in the congregation at midnight mass? His sudden death is tragic and pointless. Anyone who tells you there was any ‘meaning’ in it is talking rubbish. I’m never sure whether praying works, to be honest, but if I do manage to shoot a prayer anywhere near the target, it will be for you and Nick.

All best wishes,
Rachel Goodall

From the London Borough of Hamsworth and Hinkling, PO Box 253, IP21 2DV

To: Nicholas Fanthorpe

PENALTY CHARGE NOTICE

Infringement of LTN

DO NOT DISREGARD THIS NOTICE

The London Borough of Hamsworth and Hinkling believes you are liable for a penalty charge with respect to the above vehicle, for the following contravention:

Failing to comply with a prohibition on motor vehicles.

The vehicle was seen in St Melor Road (by camera HH4657)

At 00:12 on 1 January

A Penalty Charge of £130 is now payable and must be paid before the end of the 28 days beginning with the date of this notice. If it is paid before the end of the period of 14 days, the amount payable is reduced to £65.

8.45 a.m. Hugh Gough, bachelor schoolmaster aged sixty, is walking home to his ground-floor flat at 33 Perrins Lane after dropping his letter of condolence through Lucy Fanthorpe’s letterbox and stopping off at Budgens to buy a box of PG Tips and a ‘fish pie for one’ for his supper.

He’s wearing a clean shirt but not a clean vest, and no tie, as it’s still the Christmas holidays and not a Sunday. Vests and shirts are worn on a strict two-day basis. One of them must be clean each day. Today, it’s the shirt. During term-time, shirts, vests, ties, tweed jackets, trousers and suits are rotated in a system so complicated that Hugh needs to compile a termly rota, resembling a school timetable, which he sticks to the front of his wardrobe. This is one of his planned tasks for today.

No one will see that timetable, because hardly anyone ever visits him in his small mansion-block flat on the main road between Lamley Green and Hamsworth. Certainly, no other human being has ever been into his bedroom. As he would say, quoting the first line of one of his favourite hymns, ‘Jesu, the very thought!’

Returning home, Hugh gives his Golden Retriever Odo a hug and sticks today’s Budgens receipt on to his current receipt spike. He goes into his bedroom to make his single bed in the way he always has, after airing it for an hour: top sheet turned over and tucked into the mattress with the two blankets and paisley eiderdown spread on top. The eiderdown smells pleasantly of dust and feathers.

‘Come on, Odo!’ he says. ‘Time for your walkies!’

Hugh, on his morning dog walk

‘It behoves me.’ Did I really begin my letter of condolence to Lucy with that stock phrase from The English Gentleman’s Letter Writer of 1897? It does sound antiquated, now I come to think of it. It was one of my favourite books when I was a child: specimen letters for each of life’s most demanding occasions. I still know them by heart. Not that I ever needed to make use of the ‘Letter from a young man proposing to a young lady’.

She’ll think me musty, fusty and dusty. Which I am. Too late to take it back now. It behoves me. Dignum et iustum est. It is meet and right so to do.

Her curtains were closed, both upstairs and downstairs. Could there be a clearer manifestation of the paralysis of grief: a house with its eyes and mouth shut tight? The Christmas wreath still on the door. Perhaps she’s in bed, curled up. I hope her children are with her. She won’t feel like taking her tree down today. I say it’s fine to keep it up till Candlemas, when to the temple Mary went.

Yes, Nick’s absence will indeed be ‘keenly felt’, as I put it – and especially in the choir. His death was so sudden. What on earth can have happened? Ripped from the world just as we’ve pushed open the heavy door at the bottom of the year. Janus, god of beginnings, gates and doorways. It won’t be easy to find a replacement tenor.

Six days till the start of my last ever Winter Term. It’s always been called ‘Winter Term’ at Dagworth Lodge. Here at St Luke’s Primary I think they call it the ‘Spring Term’, but at Dagworth it’s always winter and never spring. The pitches will be waterlogged.

And there I still stand, thirty-five years later, chalk in hand, at the blackboard that has never been replaced by a whiteboard. Floreat Dagworth!

What will I do when I don’t have school to go to any more? It will be strange. Well, we’re going to keep busy, aren’t we, Odo? I’ll timetable my days with study periods, walks and crosswords.

Hugh spots Carol Buswell, volunteer at St Luke’s and receptionist at the local surgery, aged seventy-five, walking towards him in her beige anorak. She is also on her way home from Budgens after delivering her letter to Lucy. She’s carrying a heap of newspapers.

CAROL: Hi, Hugh.

HUGH: You’ve got a lot of papers today, Carol!

CAROL: They weigh a ton. I need to buy the whole range, so I get a full picture. All these wars: I can’t get my head round them. Everything feels so broken.

HUGH: It can seem like that. But we’re lucky to live in Lamley Green, aren’t we?

CAROL: I’m not so sure these days. It’s not what it used to be. Have you seen that homeless man wandering about? The one with the long hair and a beard? There’s something about him that gives me the willies. He sits on the bench in the churchyard and stares.

HUGH: Well, poor chap. He does have the right to sit in a churchyard and stare.

CAROL: I think he comes in from Hamsworth with food from their foodbank. I bet he’s tried knocking on the door of the rectory, but of course it’s rented out at the moment. I think they’re Americans. They’re out at work all day.

HUGH: Well, perhaps you should include him in your next intercessions. There but for the Grace of God go you and I.

Arriving home from his walk with Odo in the meadows on the edge of Lamley, Hugh sets about dismantling his Christmas card festoons, which he hung up in mid-December, using the same length of green string and ten drawing pins he has used for the purpose for over thirty years. Odo watches as he climbs to the top of his stepladder.

Hugh, taking his Christmas cards down

Careful, now. If I fall and break my neck, I won’t be missed till choir practice on Friday. Unless you howl your head off, Odo.

Good. My method for Christmas-card hanging has worked excellently once again. I’m glad I printed off the Christmas emails and hung them up too. They count as cards, even if they don’t have pictures, and the round-robin ones do have photographs.

‘To Mr Gough, I hope you have a nice Christmas. I’ve had an OK first term at Cambridge, reading Classics (of course!) And I still use your notes!! Best wishes from Henry B.’ Good old Henry. ‘To Mr Gough, happy Christmas. I’ve left uni with a music degree, and I’m now doing a post-grad in organ performance at the Royal College.’ Wonderful Andrew Drake. I knew on his first day in 1A that he was a genuine musician. ‘Dear Mr Gough, we still feel grateful to you for all you did for Ben when he was going through that tough patch. All best wishes, and eternal gratitude, David and Susan.’ Dear Ben!

And here’s the annual round-robin from Deborah. Or Debs, as she calls herself now. I’ll keep that to read again later. Deborah of the dark locks and angelic voice. Deborah of B staircase.

10.30 a.m. The Reverend Rachel Goodall, aged forty-three, sits down with her espresso at Le Croissant d’Or, the recently opened café on the green, and opens up her laptop to have a scroll through the clergy job vacancies in the latest online Church Times.

She is not looking for a job herself. Though ordained, she feels physically sick at the thought of taking on another clergy job. As she mentioned in her letter of condolence to Lucy, the reason she has moved to Lamley Green is that the church where she used to be vicar was stripped of its identity in a strategic revamping of the Leicester diocese. Her husband, who was a prison chaplain in Nottingham, has managed to find a new job at Wormwood Scrubs, and Rachel is relishing having no job at all – especially not a clergy job, which requires the wearing of a perpetual vicar’s smile.

Logging in to ‘Church Times jobs’ and narrowing her search down to ‘Clerical (94)’, she shudders at the first vacancy that comes up: a ‘house for duty’ role going in Lincolnshire in a benefice of twelve churches. ‘Thriving, growing villages surrounded by verdant fields and big skies,’ says the ad. They’re clearly desperate. Whoever gets that job will spend most of his or her life in the car and will be ground to exhaustion with church-roof anxiety and overwork. And they won’t even get any stipend – just a house to live in.

Then she spots the vacancy for the job in Lamley Green.

Advertisement for new Rector

Might God be calling you to serve in one of the South East’s most vibrant neighbourhoods, helping our congregation in service and in Christian witness?

We’re seeking a collaborative and caring priest with a genuine passion for mission to join us on our journey, who will maintain and enhance our well-established inclusive catholic tradition, bringing imagination and energy to a context rich in outreach opportunities.

Lamley Green is a vibrant village on the edge of Greater London in the Diocese of Hamsworth, set round a spacious village green, within easy reach of both the cultural riches of the city and the rural beauty of surrounding towpaths, meadows and woodland. The successful candidate will be housed in a three-bedroom vicarage within five minutes of St Luke’s church.

The bishop and patronage board are working together with the PCC to seek a priest who:

Has a passion for growth

Can build and sustain a vibrant and proactive team

Is pastorally gifted, Christ-centred, and has a missional heart

Will cherish and enable community

For an informal conversation please contact the Rt Revd David Hansom. To view the Parish Profile, please click the ‘apply for job’ button below.

Rachel, reading the advertisement

They think they’re making it sound attractive, but every word chills me to the marrow. No prizes for guessing who was in charge of the wording. Archdeacon Martin lives and breathes those woolly, abstract, holy-sounding concepts.

And, sorry, Martin, but would you mind if I reworded the requirements? It should go, ‘The bishop and patronage board are working together with the PCC to seek a priest who has the hide of a rhinoceros; is prepared to live in a state of acute insomnia, worrying about how to find the annual £100,000 for the Parish Share payable to the diocese (which never says thank you); is willing to account for him- or herself when asked whether ‘numbers are up or down on this time last year’; can think of fresh things to say about the joy of Easter, year after year; has a bladder that can take gallons of milky tea in the evenings; and relishes rather than detests the expression ‘finding different ways of being church’.

I bet Martin’s already got in touch with Lucy, trying to worm his way into taking Nick’s funeral. He has a finger in every pie, that man.

11.15 a.m. Carol Buswell, determined to make the most of the last day of her post-Christmas break from the Rose Street surgery, has arrived home at 3 Daggett Close, a small 1970s house at the far end of a circular cul-de-sac a quarter of a mile further down Perrins Lane than Hugh’s flat. She hangs her anorak up in the hall, over a shelf on which sits a photograph of a smiling, freckled six-year-old boy – her son, Matthew, who is now in his mid-thirties.

Carol gave birth to Matthew at the age of forty-one, having met a man she thought would be a nice, reliable person to settle down with. Jim walked out when Matthew was five months old.

She plonks the heap of newspapers down on the kitchen table and puts the kettle on.

Carol, at her kitchen table

Right. Cup of tea and get started.

World News, pages 13 to 17. But I always go to pages 1 and 2 first, because that’s where they put the fresh tragedies.

Don’t tell me. There’s been a mass-shooting in a shopping mall in Florida. A lone gunman shot down a group of children who were spending their Christmas money, except they call it ‘holiday money’ over there, and then he turned the gun on himself so no one will ever know why he did it. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

And oh my sainted aunt! A plane carrying 125 passengers has disappeared over the Pacific. That’s a gigantic ocean, they’ll never locate the black box, it could be anywhere.

That’s before you even get to the World News, about the bad stuff happening in countries I’ve hardly heard of. Famines, wars, atrocities, landslides. It’s mayhem out there.

I’ve got to fit all that in, as well as the prayers for the Royal Family, they’re going through a tricky patch, and prayers for guidance in our ongoing search for a new rector, that’s not going to be plain sailing, and I’ll need to slot in the diocesan cycle of prayer and the Anglican cycle of prayer, and the prayers for that weird homeless man, and for those suffering in mind, body and spirit like poor Lucy, and for those who’ve died, like Nick.

I’ve checked on the Church of England website and you definitely can pray for the dead. Even though in a way they’re past helping, the poor souls.

You never know what’s coming round the corner. I’ve had my fair share of nasty shocks. I thought I’d settled down with Jim for life, but it turned out we were no good at making each other happy, and he couldn’t cope with being a parent.

Intercessions, coffee, chalice, intercessions, coffee, chalice. I like my three-weekly rota, it means I always have a role.

Is Matthew past helping, too? No, please not. God knows, I’ve tried to help him. But the more I’ve tried, the more he doesn’t listen to my suggestions for how to make his way in the world.

It’s not easy for the young ones out there. He was always a tough little one to help.

Well, at least he’s moved out, at the ripe old age of thirty-four. How’s he going to pay his rent on his tiny wage? And is he even hoovering that flat? I’ve tried to set an example, running a comfortable home for him ever since Jim left, but I don’t think any of it has sunk in. So I’ll be praying for Mattie on Sunday but I won’t mention him, of course.

12 noon Hugh, with Odo curled up at his feet, has made a start on his clothes rota for the Winter Term, and has got as far as half-term. Now he sits down on his sagging brown sofa to reread Deborah’s Christmas round-robin. He has a feeling she made some kind of personal request at the end of it.

Deborah’s round-robin

Dear Friends and Family

Well, another year has passed. I can hardly believe it’s time to sit down once again at the laptop and think back to all that’s happened in what has been another eventful twelve months in the hectic life of the Duggan/Waddell clan.

The really big news is that Simon and I have moved back to the UK! To the elegant city of Bath, to be precise. Simon retired at the end of August, and we felt the time had come to be back living nearer the children, especially as Catherine is getting married to George in July. So we had a fantastic farewell party in the apartment, before packing everything up and saying goodbye to the UAE.

I must say, after the heat and high-rises of Abu Dhabi, it’s good to be back, in spite of the serious downturn in our weather prospects! We’re thrilled with our four-bed terraced house in central Bath which happened to come on the market at the opportune moment. Very Jane Austen! It’s big enough for the children to have a room of their own when they come and stay. And handy for Bath’s excellent shops! Simon has joined the golf club. I’ve joined a ladies’ book group which is a really good way to get to know people.

Simon and I had a fantastic holiday touring round the Northern Territory of Oz in February (see photos). We visited Uluru, aka Ayers Rock. That was mind-blowing. Incredibly remote: hundreds of km from Alice Springs. We had a brilliant driver who drove us round and also guided us on one or two fairly gruelling hikes.

The children then joined us in Sydney for a few days of five-star rest and recuperation. It was great to have quality time, all of us together out there. Simon’s two are doing well. Harvey’s working in PR in London, and Holly’s training for the Bar. My two are also thriving. Catherine has taken control of her wedding, as the younger generation like to these days. Ben’s applying for every acting job going. Not easy to get parts, but he did get to be an understudy in Time of My Life.

This comes wishing you and yours all the best for the coming year. I hope to see more of many of you, as I’ll be living so much nearer.

Love, Simon and Deborah

PS Dear Hugh, Hope all’s well with you. Amazing to be back in the UK! I know you’ll be listening along to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Always sends shivers down the spine. Brings back those golden days, evensong followed by sherry in the chaplain’s rooms and then Formal Hall!

I’m actually coming to the Lamley Green Literary Festival on 29 and 30 May. A friend of mine is doing an event on the Saturday afternoon. Is there any chance you might have a spare room I could stay in for the Saturday night? Would be good to see you.

It’s been far too long. Don’t worry if not poss. Debs xx

Extract from Love Divine | Chapter 1