Death Watch

The fumigator rapped on the black vicarage door using the lion’s head knocker, a door which Reverend Lefroy’s wife had called ‘too traditionalist.’ It should be changed, she argued, to something more modern. He remembered her saying it and thinking of falling. In his mind he imagined a hole opening up to swallow him, to consign him to depths unimagined, where the roots recoiled from him and allowed him to just plummet, without hope, to the centre of the earth.

His mother had once told him that the centre of the earth was where all the odd socks went. He had asked her how to get them back and she had just laughed and kissed his cheek. ‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You just go out and get new ones.’

Over time his mind had embellished the story to include lost pets, lost children and lost husbands and wives, happy to be lost, and all wearing mismatched socks.

Lefroy, who was fond of the vicarage door, and could not imagine what a modern door should look like, believed it was his wife who should be changed. The thought lay so very deep in his core that even his prayers, until recently, had been unaware of it.

‘That should get most of them,’ the man said. ‘It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but another year or so and your rafters would have been compromised. Expect a little black rain for a few days. Perhaps cancel services until the beetles stop dropping.’

‘Yes, I shall probably do that,’ the vicar mused. ‘Well, I’m grateful. Much as I don’t like to kill God’s creatures …’

‘Even God fights his battles, sir.’

‘Indeed. Well, goodbye and thanks again.’

The hall was cold in this first week of January. He had plugged one of those efficient heaters into the guest room where his wife was currently sleeping off the booze, and a manic episode, having finally been persuaded to get back on her medication or risk being hospitalised. ‘It makes everything so grey,’ she had wailed when the police brought her back like an unwelcome parcel. ‘It makes it impossible to feel anything.’

Lefroy would welcome the absence.

He poured port from a decanter in the morning room. Ruth disliked those old-fashioned terms, but really, that is what it was: the little room the sun illuminated in the morning. Without a proper name for it, they would be left with the prosaic ‘that room to the right of the stairs.’ Ruth would have it that she was carefree and creative but in reality she was a dull woman with predictable, student union views. Everything traditional and plausibly interesting was scorned in favour of a permissive and condemnatory form of liberalism.

The Xestobium rufovillosum bores holes in hard wood to provide a burrow for its larvae. Because his living relied on allegory, he saw Ruth as the beetle and himself as the timber. She bored away at him, and while she slept and took her tablets he could, for a while, imagine a place where she was soft and even pleasant. In order to maintain this charade, it was imperative that she was in another room entirely, but it seemed healthy to at least try to imagine it.

In reality, within days, if not hours, she would flush her medication and become rude and rosy again, taking over the parish meetings and annoying the few parishioners they had left in their credit balance.

He had become gaunt. He shied away from his own reflection. His voice barely reached the riddled rafters of his church. He was bullied by another person’s disease - not a child of his flesh, but by a woman he met on a pilgrimage trail who had waited until they were married before revealing, in serried intervals, that she was irreligious, barren and bi-polar. For fifteen years he had carried the weight of her disappearances, (which he must hide), her manic highs and her suicidal lows. To dread her running a bath. It was believed that he was hen-pecked, but it was far worse than that comedy. He had been stripped of life, while she was coddled by doctors who upheld the omertà and reminded him, with patient constancy, that Ruth, poor Ruth, was the victim and not him.

He would like nothing more than to be divorced from her. Ruth, with her bony body and mannish hair, a woman he had never loved but who had once, briefly, unmanned him in the fields of Kent and then in the pubs and cafes of Canterbury. A giddy summer’s month instantly regretted. Had he been more ruthless on their return and not accepted her burden, he would have been carefree and .. well, Ruth-less.

A month before, he had been standing absently in the nave, thinking of something and nothing, when a trickle of sawdust landed on his right shoulder. He knew immediately that it was death watch beetle, and craned his neck towards the lofty source of all that industry. Their agency was not of mindless destruction but of finding a warm, safe place for their larvae, and yet there could be no compromise. Unhindered, the roof would collapse. The bible said that all life was equal, but it seemed implicit that only human life was meant. He wondered how Solomon would adjudge such a dilemma. There had been a time when he, so inspired, would have raced back to the vicarage and formulated a sermon on the subject, which would had served both as an interesting diversion from the usual readings, and to prompt the congregation into fundraising the costs.

That was before the desolation. On the sawdust day, the feeling swept over him so dramatically it propelled him towards the lady chapel, where all the tears were strewn. He did not know what a state of yearning should specifically be called. There did not appear to be an adequate name for it. He yearned for his parents, so far away, and the idea of a Darby and Joan co-existence with a woman who was true and level. He yearned for children and the timber he would use to keep their own selves from harm. He yearned for magic faraway trees and savage islands where keeping oneself alive was a grand adventure. He yearned for the core of the earth, where all the lost socks found their purpose with all the lost people.

That was when he made up his mind. On sawdust day.

It was Lefroy who must leave this time, not for an hour or a day or two, but permanently. Divorce proceedings would result in Ruth gleefully going to the papers, and yes, people would be aghast that a man of the cloth could be so thoroughly unholy. It became clear that in order to remove his wife he would need to remove the cloth too. During this last month his resolve had been capricious. Complete sobriety served his cowardice, and so he drank more than usual, just enough to maintain the light of his yearning.

*****

He heard her moving around upstairs before calling his name, demanding a cup of tea. He ignored her, looking at the application on the screen. Eventually she came down, sleep-heavy and mussed. She learned against the door with her dressing gown exposing her scrawny chest. 'Didn’t you hear me?’ she said.

Lefroy took a sip of port, which soothed his stomach where all his anxieties were stored.

‘My father died when I was fourteen,’ he told her. ‘He was a chain-smoker. When he lay dying, he apologised to me. He wept with remorse, but I didn’t forgive him because it was his fault, you see?’

‘What are you saying?’ she asked.

‘I forgive him now, of course. I weep at the memory.’

‘Is this because I don’t always take my medication? Are you blaming me?’ This was delivered with the mounting outrage she deployed when challenged.

‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ he conceded. ‘Because even when you take your medication, Ruth, the fact is, I don’t like you. I am sorry that your life is difficult, and I know that you can’t help it, but I sincerely believe that you would be unlikeable with or without your illness. When high, when low and when medicated, you believe that the world revolves around you and you alone. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing is ever too much. You are beyond reach.’

She took a coat from the peg and he heard the sounds of irritation: bare feet struggling to find their way in wellington boots.

She left, slamming the traditionalist door behind her. He did not go after her, but began filling in the form for the teaching degree. Fewer people would baulk at a divorced professor of theology. It was reason enough.