The Reverend

The wedding went on without me, which is what weddings are for.

By nine the ballroom had reached the part of the evening when a room stops being an event and becomes a party. Catriona had given her shoes to Ross to mind, and he was standing by the service door holding them in one enormous hand like a pair of kittens. Fergus’s band had been joined by a second fiddle and was playing faster than anyone could dance, and people were dancing anyway.

I stood in the service doorway for an hour, because the condition was the rehearsal to the last taxi, and because it was the first wedding I had watched from start to finish in ten years without once working out what it had cost.

That is not true. I worked out what it had cost. I did it at seven, in the first five minutes, from the flowers and the head count and the second fiddle. After that I stopped, which was new.

At ten I went across the yard.

· · ·Scene break

The loft was cold and smelled of dust and slate. I put the light on and folded back the tarpaulin and looked at the stack: eleven boxes still, and two of them with their flaps folded down and not taped, where I had been.

I did not take the one that said only LEITH. I took the top one of the three that said LEITH — BOOKS, because books were the thing I would have packed last and he would have packed first, and I wanted to see what he had put on top.

His own, it turned out. Two textbooks from the agricultural college, soil and drainage, with his name inside the covers in the capitals. A road atlas with the coast road to Kerrow gone over in yellow highlighter, as if either of us could have got lost on it. Then mine: a dozen paperbacks, mostly crime, with the spines broken the way I break them. And the Reverend.

I had forgotten the Reverend entirely, and then I had not.

He was a Victorian clergyman who had walked the whole coast of Scotland one summer with a stick and a bad temper and written it all down, and somebody had reprinted him in a paperback with a lighthouse on the front. I had bought him for fifty pence from a barrow on Leith Walk. He hated sheep, landladies, sea air and other clergymen, and he was funnier than any book written by a minister has a right to be. I used to read him out loud from the windowsill in the evenings, in the jumper, while Duncan lay on the bed with his arm over his eyes, pretending to be asleep.

There was a bus ticket in it, two-thirds of the way through. The date on the ticket was the twelfth of June. The Reverend had been about to reach North Berwick, and had views.

I opened the book at the beginning, to see how much of it I remembered, and found the first tick on page nine.

It was very small. A pencil mark in the margin, a short stroke and a long one, beside a paragraph in which the Reverend’s landlady in Eyemouth served him a herring he described as having died of disappointment. I had read that paragraph out loud. I knew because I remembered the bed shaking under Duncan’s arm when he tried not to laugh, and deciding he had been dreaming.

There was another tick on page fourteen. Three on page twenty-two.

I turned the pages. They went on through the book, the small pencil ticks, one beside every passage I had read aloud from that windowsill between March and June, and none beside any passage I had not. I knew them as I came to them. The goat on the road to St Abbs. The minister in Cockburnspath who had preached for two hours on the subject of gravel. Each one had been marked by somebody who had waited until I put the book down and went to brush my teeth, and reached for it, and found the place.

The last tick was on the page before the bus ticket. After that there was nothing. The Reverend reached North Berwick on his own, with nobody listening.

I sat on the boards with the book open on my knees for a long time.

Then I put the textbooks and the atlas and the paperbacks back, and folded the flaps down, and put the tarpaulin over the stack and tucked the corner in. I took the Reverend. He went into the pocket of my coat, which is what he had been printed for.

· · ·Scene break

Isla had said midnight. I went down at five past, so that he would already be inside.

The garden was dark and the gravel was loud. The guests had been allowed down to the chapel after dinner with a glass, to see it lit; by half past eleven the last of them had come back up the path holding their shoes. The grey gate in the north wall was shut. I walked past it the way Catriona had, as a gate.

The chapel door was open the width of a hand. There was light in it.

He had lit all four hundred for the evening. Along the sills and on the ends of the pews and in iron stands on either side of the step, and the whitewash had taken all that light and made it into something you could nearly hold. He was halfway down the left side with a brass snuffer on a long handle, going from candle to candle without hurrying. Behind him the sills were dark and smoking. In front of him they were still gold.

He did not turn round.

“Isla,” he said.

“No.”

He turned round then. His sleeves were pushed up, and in that light he looked the age he had been when I first saw him, and every day of the ten years since.

“She told me you come down on your own,” I said.

“She’s told you a great many things this week.”

I took the Reverend out of my coat and held him up. It took Duncan a moment to see what it was, in that light and at that distance, and I watched him see it.

“You were awake,” I said.

He looked at the book. Then he looked at the candle in front of him, and put the snuffer over it, and lifted it off, and a thread of smoke went up.

“Most nights,” he said.

“You ticked them.”

“I wanted to know which bits you’d pick.” He moved to the next candle. “You never picked the ones I’d have picked. I wanted to see if you’d get round to them.”

“Did I?”

“Twice.” Snuffer, smoke. “The goat.”

“You could have said you were awake.”

“You’d have stopped reading.”

I would have. We both knew it. I stood in the aisle with the book in my hand and had nothing to say to that, because it was true, and it was the kind of true you only find out ten years later in a loft.

There was a second snuffer lying on the front pew. I went and picked it up and started on the right-hand side.

We did not speak for a while. He worked down his side and I worked down mine, and the chapel went dark behind us in two lines. It was the kitchen again, without the heat: two people doing the same job from different ends, who had learnt how the other one moved.

We met at the step. There were two iron stands left, one each side, twelve candles in each, and the east window was black above them with the sea in it somewhere.

I put my snuffer down on the end of the front pew. So did he.

· · ·Scene break

“I came down to say something,” I said. “I’m going to say it badly. If I say it well it will mean I’ve drafted it, and I haven’t, and I’d like you to know that before I start.”

“Go on.”

“I want you.”

He did not move.

“That’s the first part. There isn’t a strategy behind it. I want you, and not the house, and not the deal, and not to be let off. I’m not asking you to forgive me for the gate. Or for after it. The morning was a reason. The ten years weren’t. I could have written to you on any day of them, and instead I sent flowers to your grandfather’s funeral without a card, because a card would have had to say something. I don’t think that’s a thing I get to ask for, and I’m not going to try to earn it by Sunday.” My voice was doing what it does when I am frightened, which is to get shorter. I let it. “I want to be in a room with you for longer than seven days. I want it to be nobody’s business what it costs. That’s all. That’s the whole of it.”

It was not a good speech. There was no turn at the end. It stopped where I stopped, and I stood in front of him with nothing else in my hands.

He looked at me for a long time, in the light of twenty-four candles.

“My turn,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I want you at the table on a Sunday with nothing to sign.” He said it the way he had said twelve in the kitchen, about the burners: a count of something he had looked at. “I want you in the kitchen the next time the power goes. I want to hear what the Reverend thinks of North Berwick.” He stopped. His hands were at his sides, and I watched the right one close and open. “I want you, Wren. I’ve not stopped. I tried for ten years. It didn’t take.”

It was the second time he had said my name that week, and the first time he had said it to my face.

I had spent a decade in rooms where people said what they wanted and meant something else underneath, which was the real number. I listened for it. There was nothing underneath. There never had been, with him. I had run from that once, across a garden.

“I’d like to kiss you,” I said. “I’m asking. The last time I decided something about the two of us, I did it on my own, at four in the morning, in my father’s office, and I’m not doing that again.”

He was quiet. Not the quiet of a man deciding. The other one, which I had nearly forgotten: the quiet he had on the Shore at six in the morning, when the day had turned out better than the forecast.

“You can ask me,” he said. “I’d like you to.”

“I am asking.”

“Then yes.” And then, because he is who he is, and keeps things even, and cannot let a thing be done for him that he has not matched: “And I’m asking you.”

“Yes,” I said.

· · ·Scene break

He put his hand to the side of my face. I felt the scar across the back of it against my ear. His thumb came to rest on my jaw, where it had rested on the worn corner of the ring box, and stayed there, and he waited, even then, for one more second, in case.

I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart was going as hard as mine. I had not expected that. I do not know why not.

Then he kissed me.

It was not like the Shore. On the Shore we had been twenty-two and twenty-five and kissed as if we were late for something. This was slow. He kissed the way he did everything that mattered, as if he meant to do it once and do it properly, and I stood in the chapel he did not charge for with my hand on his shirt and the smell of beeswax and smoke all round us, and kissed him back, and for a while there was nothing in my head at all, not a number, not a clause, not a door. The chapel was cold. He was very warm. His other hand came to the small of my back, flat, the way it had for three bars of a waltz on Thursday, and held there.

I do not know which of us stopped. I think it was both, at the same moment, the way two people reach for the same pan.

He did not step back. He put his forehead against mine, and we stood like that, breathing, with twenty-four candles burning down on either side.

“There’s a contract,” he said.

“Six o’clock tomorrow.” My voice was not steady and I did not try to make it steady. “With my name on it.”

“And Stellan’s at noon on Monday.”

“Then not now.”

“Not while there’s anything on the table.” He said it quietly, into the small space between us. “Not while anybody’s buying anything. I’ll not have this be part of a price. Not yours, and not mine.”

“No,” I said. “Nor will I.”

It was the shortest negotiation I have ever been in, and the only one in which both sides wanted the same thing and it was the thing they could not have yet.

He took his forehead from mine. He took his hand from my face last, slowly, the way he had taken it off the ring box, as if the lid might lift. Then he picked up his snuffer from the end of the pew and held out mine, and I took it.

“We said the deal wasn’t to come in here,” I said.

“It didn’t.” He put out the first candle on the left-hand stand. “We stopped at the door of it.”

We did the last twenty-four together, a candle each, turn about, until there was only one left, on his side. He held the snuffer over it and looked at me across the flame.

“You’ll want to see the last taxi,” he said.

“It’s the condition.”

“It is.”

He put it out.

· · ·Scene break

The last taxi left at ten past two.

I watched it from the top of the steps with the Reverend in my pocket. It had the best man in the back with the window down, singing something that might once have been Duncan’s Waltz. The tail-lights went away under the beech trees, and then there was only the gravel and the sea and the green door open behind me.

He came out and stood on the step beside me. Not the step below. Beside.

“That’s the last taxi,” he said.

“That’s the wedding.”

“From the rehearsal to the last taxi. You watched it go through.” He was looking down the drive, where the lights had gone. “You said you’d stay and you stayed. So you’ve done it. Whatever you think it’s worth.”

“I haven’t told you what I think it’s worth.”

“You have,” he said. “Down there. I heard you.”

We stood on the steps. It was cold, and I did not go in, and neither did he. There was a line of light over Fife that was not dawn yet but would be.

“Office,” he said at last. “Eight o’clock. Bring Ms Oyelaran.”

“What for?”

“I’ve a thing to say.” He turned and looked at me, and his face was very tired and very clear. “And I want it said in the right room, with the right people in it, so nobody can ever tell you afterwards it was said in the dark.”