Five
(This is kind of a cheat, because it's actually the final assignment for my Short Story course. But I like it, and there's a whole novel waiting to come out of this story.)
It wasn’t unusual for the Reverend J. B. Parker to wake up and find that his wife had already risen. What was unusual was that she had not drawn the curtains back. But he didn’t notice this small aberration as he arose and crossed to the window, for his mind was full of the impending visit from the Bishop. For two weeks the vicar had been away, attending the Ecumenical Synod, something he had been planning for the better part of a year. While there he had struck up a sympathetic accord with his new Bishop, who was likewise a passionate gardener. The two had discussed species and arrangements, the difficulty of finding good gardening staff with so few fit young men about, the distress of sacrificing flowerbeds to vegetables during the War and the joy of being able to once more reclaim their patches of earth for Beauty instead of mundane necessity.
He threw open the curtains and inhaled deeply. It looked to be a glorious day, simply perfect for the Bishop to see his precious garden. He had only arrived home late last night, but he had sent his wife a telegram, and he was sure that Mrs Parker had made all the necessary arrangements. Filled with good cheer, he looked out onto his pride and joy...
What in hell’s name?
Mrs Parker sat on a hard chair in the busy shop she understood was referred to as a ‘greasy spoon’. The thick, white ceramic mug was heavy in her hand, nothing at all like the fine translucent porcelain she was used to, but the hot liquid it held was reassuringly tea-like. Sitting opposite her was Young James (and Young James he would remain to her, even when his black hair faded to grey), his expression forever hidden behind hard scars. The two sat, drinking tea and thinking of the past; the vicar’s wife, soft-skinned and grieving for her son, and the gardener’s grandson, his face horrifically scarred and an eye lost to shrapnel, given his old Pop’s position as an act of charity. Strange allies they made, but allies none the less. He remembered her from when he was a child. She had fascinated him, with her hair as soft and white as the fleeces his mother had handled in the mill until the Woolsorter’s Disease took her. Every time those pale hands had touched him, to give him a slice of bread and jam or a glass of milk, he had wondered what made her skin so soft. Now he knew, of course, that it was because those hands had never worked in her life, but now, when it mattered so much, he didn’t really care. Didn’t care because of Tom.
The Vicar stood in shock, staring out of the window. For moments of eternity his brain refused to take in what he was seeing. It just couldn’t be! Not with the Bishop coming today... oh my God, the Bishop! Pyjamas flapping, dressing-gown forgotten, Mr Parker raced from the room and down the stairs in a panic, his mind still unable to accept what his eyes had seen.
Tom Parker and Jim Calver - the two never should have been friends, the vicar’s sensitive and painfully shy son and the brash, determined grandson of the vicarage gardener. When young, they had carefully kept their distance. Jim had ruled the roost with the local children, in the wild hours between leaving the village school and the moment when the mill shift changed and parents came home. Class difference had separated Tom from the world of the mill-workers who lived on the other side of the vicarage wall, more than any number of miles could have done. Even on the days when Jim was called upon to help his grandfather in the vicarage garden, class kept the boys apart. It had all changed when Tom went to boarding school. There was little tolerance in the harsh bluster of an English public school for a gentle, shy, and deeply religious boy. At sixteen he had come home with a burning sense of the need to make right an unjust world. Attending a lecture from a noted socialist gave him his first opportunity: as both boys made the three mile trek home from the meeting hall, Tom screwed his courage to the sticking place and spoke to his fellow man.
Poor Tom, Jim thought, his eyes looking through his mug of tea to eternity. Fairness was all the heart of you. God in his heaven and should be on earth. What they did to you, my friend, my poor friend.
Mr Parker yelped as he stubbed his toe on the cold stone floor, then broke the Seventh as he tugged at the locked door. Where the hell had Emily been? How could she let it happen? How could she - damn - leave the damn door locked!
Mrs Parker had transformed that night. Soft and snowy, shy as her son, protected her whole life from the harshness of reality; she had swept into the Tup and Shrive like an avenging valkyrie. Jim had never seen a face like hers, streaming tears and set in terrible defiance. Her voice had shaken with rage, but never her resolve. There was no denying her, even if Jim had wanted to. She had been implacable, a force of nature, Demeter bearing a sack of poppy seeds. With a voice hoarse and dry from grief, she had spoken to him as the Burning Bush had spoken to Moses, and Jim had become her slave. He had always known Tom got his shyness, like his deep brown eyes, from his mother, but until that night, Jim had not realised it was from Emily Parker her son got his strength and his faith.
She sipped her tea, looking rather out of place. Lady Bountiful had come to the working classes to see how they lived. But Jim knew it was a lie - Mrs Parker had left such distinctions behind. She would go where Tom could not.
“But don’t you see, it’s not enough for the masses to overthrow the wealthy, Jim. It has to be everyone working together. If you simply overthrow those in power, then someone else will walk into the vacuum. Change must come from both ends.”
Jim shut his eyes to better hear the voice echoing through time. Tom’s face, passionate and shining, in another tea-room not unlike this one. Jim remembered the fire the speaker had kindled in him, the fire of revolution. But Tom had found a different blaze, one of faith, one that said we could walk in the steps of the Saviour. Jim had been willing to fight the world for his own passionate embracing of the words of Herr Marx, who seemed to show a way for the workers of Jim’s world to have something beyond a life of labour. But Tom spoke of More and Hobbes, of Rousseau and Babeouf. Jim, shamefaced, had handed back the books Tom pressed on him. Compassion, that was your light, Tom. When you discovered I could barely read, you read with me, gave me reason to fight my own limits. I still teach others, brother, I still do what you did. God help me, it should have been me dead and you here. The Gospel of Tom gave a new Revelation, a gentler, fairer one to embrace all. But Armageddon still came, oh Tom, it came and destroyed us!
Mrs Parker lent across the table and squeezed Jim’s hand.
“He’s with us, James,” she said, and Tom spoke through her eyes. “Of that I am as sure as I am in the good Lord.”
“I don’t believe in God, Mrs Parker,” Jim said. “I can’t, not anymore.”
“That’s alright,” she replied. “As long as you believe in something, as long as you try to make things better, then it’s enough.”
John Parker was almost weeping as he ripped the flowers from the bed. The tools lay unused in the shed; his bare hands grew muddied as he pulled the offending poppies out in a frenzy. It couldn’t be happening, not today, not of all days. He groaned with despair as the scarlet words wouldn’t leave his vision; they were burned into his retina even as he ripped the flowers out of the ground. Why? How? How could Emily allow it?
For a moment he paused in his frenzy as an impossible idea infiltrated his brain.
“You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen!” Tom pulled off his scarf, his eyes dancing with merriment.
“That girl, Lydia,” Jim replied dryly. Tom’s laughter stopped; his face became cautiously neutral, as it always did on the subject of the Honourable Lydia Winwood.
“Why would you say that, Jim? I know you don’t approve of her...”
“Approve be damned! I don’t care if you go pining after some fluff-brained toff.” Looking at Tom’s carefully blank face, Jim relented. “Sorry, Tom. Who did you see?”
The smile flashed back to Tom’s countenance, and for a moment a mischievous boy peeped from the serious young man’s eyes.
“My mother, sneaking out of a suffrage meeting! Mrs Pankhurst, would you believe? All in a pother lest Father find out. We’ve come to an agreement - I shan’t tell on her suffragist ways, and she shan’t let on I’ve been meeting with Socialists and Communist Agitators.” Tom had gulped down his beer -
“Did you know, Mrs Parker, Tom hated beer? Never liked it. But he drank it with me, with men like me. To make us feel better, to put us at ease."
Mrs Parker nodded, her eyes understanding. She didn’t speak as she passed Jim a handkerchief, and found interest in the bottom of her tea mug until his tears stopped.
“It was him,” she had said, on that night of Revelations. “My husband. He put the feather in the envelope.” His companions may have been confused, but Jim had understood, and he had put his pint down, never to finish it.
“I heard him,” she had said, quietly and coldly, her righteous outrage making her soft voice cut like a glass razor through the noise of the pub. “He is sitting there in our dining room, with our dinner guests, telling them of how Tom - Tom! - shamed him...”
“Why don’t you ask her to go to dinner with you?”
“Jim, you don’t understand. I can’t even summon enough courage to ask her to dance.” Tom sighed. “I guess I’m just a coward at heart. She’s beautiful, vivacious, always chattering. Oh, she might not talk about anything sensible, and I know she’d make a terrible pastor’s wife, but... she’s all I can think about sometimes. She’s like a tattoo, like ink under my skin, and I can’t seem to get rid of her.”
“So talk to her! Ask her!” Jim’s exasperation simply brought the shutters down on Tom’s face. Lydia Winwood was the one thing that kept the class difference between them. Jim could never understand and Tom would not explain why the thoughtless, beautiful socialite kept him so besotted when she barely seemed to notice him.
The vicar knelt in his ruined flower garden, his hands filthy, the mud soaking through the knees of his striped pyjamas. He wept - in frustration, in fear. What would the Bishop think? What lie could he give? That vandals had destroyed his work? That was believable, the mill factory so close by. But Emily, Emily must have known... his mind was not yet ready to accept that his quiet, silent wife, devoted and loving, the perfect parish wife, could have done this. Why? What would have driven her to such madness? And if she was indeed mad, what could he tell the Bishop?
She had been soaked by the early autumn rain, Jim remembered. Her hair had been plastered to her face. Her eyes had blazed, and he had been thankful, for the memory of Tom’s eyes, cold and sightless in the mud of Ypres was still so close to his sleeping thoughts. He could not have borne to have seen the ghost of Tom in her that night. She had told him of going to bed early, leaving her husband with his cronies. Of coming down the stairs, and hearing the vicar’s voice. Of him speaking of Tom, of Tom’s death in Flanders, taken by a shell while carrying the wounded from the field. Of how ashamed he had been of his son, the conscientious objector. Of how, while at the Hunt Ball, he had determined to make his son behave like a man, of taking an envelope on a whim from a desk - silly, scented lilac thing these girls have! - and sealing a white feather into it. Of slipping the envelope, unmarked, into his son’s pocket.
She had stood there in the cold hall, listening to her husband boasting of how it had worked, of how it had steeled Tom’s nerves to do his duty. Joined the ambulance brigade of course - perfectly acceptable for a vicar’s son, but still, never let it be said a Parker was craven!
So shy, gentle Tom died for the sake of a girl who it turned out had not, after all, cared enough even to call him a coward.
“What will you do now, Mrs Parker?” Jim asked at last.
“I’m going to go to London,” she said. “A friend of Mrs Pankhurst is running a soup kitchen in the East End, and I’m going to stay with her, to start with at least. I think... I think I will start a school, a night school for working people, if it is needed. Perhaps teach street walkers shorthand and accounts - I could do that, and there is a shortage of clerical staff since the war.” She looked at him with shining eyes. “I’m going to make Tom proud of me,” she said simply. Jim held her gaze, and fell in love.
“How can I help?” he asked.
Mr Parker fretted as he pulled on his clean shirt. Emily was nowhere, simply nowhere to be found, and the Bishop’s train was due to arrive at 11.15. The garden lay in ruins, flowers destroyed, clods of earth flung here and there. The Bishop’s journey would be for nothing, and how could the housekeeper make amends for it when Mrs Parker was not there to dispense tea and soft conversation?
Foolish, foolish man, to destroy the thing you love to save face, and all for nothing. Poppies do not bloom all at once and overnight. For the last week, while you were away, each day they came out in triumph, to proclaim in scarlet letters three feet high ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’. Everyone has seen them, though not, perhaps, in the same glory that you saw them from your bedroom window, and Bishop will hear the tale of Mrs Parker’s poppies before he even leaves the station.
It wasn’t unusual for the Reverend J. B. Parker to wake up and find that his wife had already risen. What was unusual was that she had not drawn the curtains back. But he didn’t notice this small aberration as he arose and crossed to the window, for his mind was full of the impending visit from the Bishop. For two weeks the vicar had been away, attending the Ecumenical Synod, something he had been planning for the better part of a year. While there he had struck up a sympathetic accord with his new Bishop, who was likewise a passionate gardener. The two had discussed species and arrangements, the difficulty of finding good gardening staff with so few fit young men about, the distress of sacrificing flowerbeds to vegetables during the War and the joy of being able to once more reclaim their patches of earth for Beauty instead of mundane necessity.
He threw open the curtains and inhaled deeply. It looked to be a glorious day, simply perfect for the Bishop to see his precious garden. He had only arrived home late last night, but he had sent his wife a telegram, and he was sure that Mrs Parker had made all the necessary arrangements. Filled with good cheer, he looked out onto his pride and joy...
What in hell’s name?
Mrs Parker sat on a hard chair in the busy shop she understood was referred to as a ‘greasy spoon’. The thick, white ceramic mug was heavy in her hand, nothing at all like the fine translucent porcelain she was used to, but the hot liquid it held was reassuringly tea-like. Sitting opposite her was Young James (and Young James he would remain to her, even when his black hair faded to grey), his expression forever hidden behind hard scars. The two sat, drinking tea and thinking of the past; the vicar’s wife, soft-skinned and grieving for her son, and the gardener’s grandson, his face horrifically scarred and an eye lost to shrapnel, given his old Pop’s position as an act of charity. Strange allies they made, but allies none the less. He remembered her from when he was a child. She had fascinated him, with her hair as soft and white as the fleeces his mother had handled in the mill until the Woolsorter’s Disease took her. Every time those pale hands had touched him, to give him a slice of bread and jam or a glass of milk, he had wondered what made her skin so soft. Now he knew, of course, that it was because those hands had never worked in her life, but now, when it mattered so much, he didn’t really care. Didn’t care because of Tom.
The Vicar stood in shock, staring out of the window. For moments of eternity his brain refused to take in what he was seeing. It just couldn’t be! Not with the Bishop coming today... oh my God, the Bishop! Pyjamas flapping, dressing-gown forgotten, Mr Parker raced from the room and down the stairs in a panic, his mind still unable to accept what his eyes had seen.
Tom Parker and Jim Calver - the two never should have been friends, the vicar’s sensitive and painfully shy son and the brash, determined grandson of the vicarage gardener. When young, they had carefully kept their distance. Jim had ruled the roost with the local children, in the wild hours between leaving the village school and the moment when the mill shift changed and parents came home. Class difference had separated Tom from the world of the mill-workers who lived on the other side of the vicarage wall, more than any number of miles could have done. Even on the days when Jim was called upon to help his grandfather in the vicarage garden, class kept the boys apart. It had all changed when Tom went to boarding school. There was little tolerance in the harsh bluster of an English public school for a gentle, shy, and deeply religious boy. At sixteen he had come home with a burning sense of the need to make right an unjust world. Attending a lecture from a noted socialist gave him his first opportunity: as both boys made the three mile trek home from the meeting hall, Tom screwed his courage to the sticking place and spoke to his fellow man.
Poor Tom, Jim thought, his eyes looking through his mug of tea to eternity. Fairness was all the heart of you. God in his heaven and should be on earth. What they did to you, my friend, my poor friend.
Mr Parker yelped as he stubbed his toe on the cold stone floor, then broke the Seventh as he tugged at the locked door. Where the hell had Emily been? How could she let it happen? How could she - damn - leave the damn door locked!
Mrs Parker had transformed that night. Soft and snowy, shy as her son, protected her whole life from the harshness of reality; she had swept into the Tup and Shrive like an avenging valkyrie. Jim had never seen a face like hers, streaming tears and set in terrible defiance. Her voice had shaken with rage, but never her resolve. There was no denying her, even if Jim had wanted to. She had been implacable, a force of nature, Demeter bearing a sack of poppy seeds. With a voice hoarse and dry from grief, she had spoken to him as the Burning Bush had spoken to Moses, and Jim had become her slave. He had always known Tom got his shyness, like his deep brown eyes, from his mother, but until that night, Jim had not realised it was from Emily Parker her son got his strength and his faith.
She sipped her tea, looking rather out of place. Lady Bountiful had come to the working classes to see how they lived. But Jim knew it was a lie - Mrs Parker had left such distinctions behind. She would go where Tom could not.
“But don’t you see, it’s not enough for the masses to overthrow the wealthy, Jim. It has to be everyone working together. If you simply overthrow those in power, then someone else will walk into the vacuum. Change must come from both ends.”
Jim shut his eyes to better hear the voice echoing through time. Tom’s face, passionate and shining, in another tea-room not unlike this one. Jim remembered the fire the speaker had kindled in him, the fire of revolution. But Tom had found a different blaze, one of faith, one that said we could walk in the steps of the Saviour. Jim had been willing to fight the world for his own passionate embracing of the words of Herr Marx, who seemed to show a way for the workers of Jim’s world to have something beyond a life of labour. But Tom spoke of More and Hobbes, of Rousseau and Babeouf. Jim, shamefaced, had handed back the books Tom pressed on him. Compassion, that was your light, Tom. When you discovered I could barely read, you read with me, gave me reason to fight my own limits. I still teach others, brother, I still do what you did. God help me, it should have been me dead and you here. The Gospel of Tom gave a new Revelation, a gentler, fairer one to embrace all. But Armageddon still came, oh Tom, it came and destroyed us!
Mrs Parker lent across the table and squeezed Jim’s hand.
“He’s with us, James,” she said, and Tom spoke through her eyes. “Of that I am as sure as I am in the good Lord.”
“I don’t believe in God, Mrs Parker,” Jim said. “I can’t, not anymore.”
“That’s alright,” she replied. “As long as you believe in something, as long as you try to make things better, then it’s enough.”
John Parker was almost weeping as he ripped the flowers from the bed. The tools lay unused in the shed; his bare hands grew muddied as he pulled the offending poppies out in a frenzy. It couldn’t be happening, not today, not of all days. He groaned with despair as the scarlet words wouldn’t leave his vision; they were burned into his retina even as he ripped the flowers out of the ground. Why? How? How could Emily allow it?
For a moment he paused in his frenzy as an impossible idea infiltrated his brain.
“You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen!” Tom pulled off his scarf, his eyes dancing with merriment.
“That girl, Lydia,” Jim replied dryly. Tom’s laughter stopped; his face became cautiously neutral, as it always did on the subject of the Honourable Lydia Winwood.
“Why would you say that, Jim? I know you don’t approve of her...”
“Approve be damned! I don’t care if you go pining after some fluff-brained toff.” Looking at Tom’s carefully blank face, Jim relented. “Sorry, Tom. Who did you see?”
The smile flashed back to Tom’s countenance, and for a moment a mischievous boy peeped from the serious young man’s eyes.
“My mother, sneaking out of a suffrage meeting! Mrs Pankhurst, would you believe? All in a pother lest Father find out. We’ve come to an agreement - I shan’t tell on her suffragist ways, and she shan’t let on I’ve been meeting with Socialists and Communist Agitators.” Tom had gulped down his beer -
“Did you know, Mrs Parker, Tom hated beer? Never liked it. But he drank it with me, with men like me. To make us feel better, to put us at ease."
Mrs Parker nodded, her eyes understanding. She didn’t speak as she passed Jim a handkerchief, and found interest in the bottom of her tea mug until his tears stopped.
“It was him,” she had said, on that night of Revelations. “My husband. He put the feather in the envelope.” His companions may have been confused, but Jim had understood, and he had put his pint down, never to finish it.
“I heard him,” she had said, quietly and coldly, her righteous outrage making her soft voice cut like a glass razor through the noise of the pub. “He is sitting there in our dining room, with our dinner guests, telling them of how Tom - Tom! - shamed him...”
“Why don’t you ask her to go to dinner with you?”
“Jim, you don’t understand. I can’t even summon enough courage to ask her to dance.” Tom sighed. “I guess I’m just a coward at heart. She’s beautiful, vivacious, always chattering. Oh, she might not talk about anything sensible, and I know she’d make a terrible pastor’s wife, but... she’s all I can think about sometimes. She’s like a tattoo, like ink under my skin, and I can’t seem to get rid of her.”
“So talk to her! Ask her!” Jim’s exasperation simply brought the shutters down on Tom’s face. Lydia Winwood was the one thing that kept the class difference between them. Jim could never understand and Tom would not explain why the thoughtless, beautiful socialite kept him so besotted when she barely seemed to notice him.
The vicar knelt in his ruined flower garden, his hands filthy, the mud soaking through the knees of his striped pyjamas. He wept - in frustration, in fear. What would the Bishop think? What lie could he give? That vandals had destroyed his work? That was believable, the mill factory so close by. But Emily, Emily must have known... his mind was not yet ready to accept that his quiet, silent wife, devoted and loving, the perfect parish wife, could have done this. Why? What would have driven her to such madness? And if she was indeed mad, what could he tell the Bishop?
She had been soaked by the early autumn rain, Jim remembered. Her hair had been plastered to her face. Her eyes had blazed, and he had been thankful, for the memory of Tom’s eyes, cold and sightless in the mud of Ypres was still so close to his sleeping thoughts. He could not have borne to have seen the ghost of Tom in her that night. She had told him of going to bed early, leaving her husband with his cronies. Of coming down the stairs, and hearing the vicar’s voice. Of him speaking of Tom, of Tom’s death in Flanders, taken by a shell while carrying the wounded from the field. Of how ashamed he had been of his son, the conscientious objector. Of how, while at the Hunt Ball, he had determined to make his son behave like a man, of taking an envelope on a whim from a desk - silly, scented lilac thing these girls have! - and sealing a white feather into it. Of slipping the envelope, unmarked, into his son’s pocket.
She had stood there in the cold hall, listening to her husband boasting of how it had worked, of how it had steeled Tom’s nerves to do his duty. Joined the ambulance brigade of course - perfectly acceptable for a vicar’s son, but still, never let it be said a Parker was craven!
So shy, gentle Tom died for the sake of a girl who it turned out had not, after all, cared enough even to call him a coward.
“What will you do now, Mrs Parker?” Jim asked at last.
“I’m going to go to London,” she said. “A friend of Mrs Pankhurst is running a soup kitchen in the East End, and I’m going to stay with her, to start with at least. I think... I think I will start a school, a night school for working people, if it is needed. Perhaps teach street walkers shorthand and accounts - I could do that, and there is a shortage of clerical staff since the war.” She looked at him with shining eyes. “I’m going to make Tom proud of me,” she said simply. Jim held her gaze, and fell in love.
“How can I help?” he asked.
Mr Parker fretted as he pulled on his clean shirt. Emily was nowhere, simply nowhere to be found, and the Bishop’s train was due to arrive at 11.15. The garden lay in ruins, flowers destroyed, clods of earth flung here and there. The Bishop’s journey would be for nothing, and how could the housekeeper make amends for it when Mrs Parker was not there to dispense tea and soft conversation?
Foolish, foolish man, to destroy the thing you love to save face, and all for nothing. Poppies do not bloom all at once and overnight. For the last week, while you were away, each day they came out in triumph, to proclaim in scarlet letters three feet high ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’. Everyone has seen them, though not, perhaps, in the same glory that you saw them from your bedroom window, and Bishop will hear the tale of Mrs Parker’s poppies before he even leaves the station.