Be Near Me Read Free

you.'
    'Shush,' she said. 'You know what I mean. You can't expect a priest to know much about life, but at least you've read a couple of books.'
    'Whatever you say,' I said.
    I could only assume Mrs Poole came to work to live another sort of life. As with all her jealously guarded, self-defining hours—the night classes, the environment, the afternoons down at the Red Cross shop—her time at the rectory was spent, at least in part, in solid opposition to her husband's view of her as a person gaining airs and ignoring the hands of her biological clock.
    One day we visited the garden centre. It must have been a month into my time there in the parish. I had been telling Mrs Poole a thing or two about the older kinds of rose. We looked up some books, and it was decided that rose bushes were exactly the thing for the rectory garden, planted with care round the walls, each of us falling by degrees into a strictly imagined world of old fragrances. That day, Jack was in the children's playground next to the garden centre when we came out bearing our new plants. He didn't see us coming along, though I suspect Mrs Poole saw him, for she flinched and the small leaves on the bushes shuddered as we walked across the gravel.
    'Amazing,' I said.
    'Sorry?'
    'That's actually a twelfth-century rose you're holding.'
    'The weight of it,' she said.
    Jack was sitting on the roundabout with a passive look on his face and a bottle of booze in a paper bag. We put the things in the car and then Mrs Poole went back to use the loo, while I sat behind the wheel and watched her mysterious husband removing table-tennis bats from a large blue bag and throwing them into the trees.
    Before we'd started the soup, the postman came to the door and hammered on it with his usual disregard. 'Nothing gets your attention like a knock at the door,' said Mrs Poole, and she went out. I spent a moment playing a phrase on the piano, placing my foot on a dull brass pedal. Then I stopped and cocked an ear before putting Chopin into the CD player; I could hear very clearly what the postman was saying to Mrs Poole.
    'How's yer English priest getting on then?'
    'He's not English,' she said. 'He was born in Edinburgh.'
    'Don't kid yerself,' said the postman. 'Yer man's as English as two weeks in Essex. Get a load ae that rug lying there!'
    'What are you talking about?'
    'That thing under yer feet,' he said. 'They didnae have that in Father McGee's day. That's a pure English rug, that.'
    'Just go about your business and stop coming round here talking nonsense,' said Mrs Poole. 'This is a Persian rug.'
    'That's Iran or Iraq,' he said. 'You want to get rid ae that.' As he laughed he sent a menacing splutter into the hall. 'There's blood in they carpets. Our troops are over in that place and they're not buildin' sandcastles. There's young men dying out there. You have to watch out for the Iraqis.'
    I'm sure there's an essay in which Liszt writes of Chopin's apartment on the chaussée d'Antin, the room with a portrait of Chopin above the piano, and the belief of the younger musician that the painting must have been a constant auditor of the sound that once flamed and lived in that room, bright and brief as a candle.
    'The postman?' I said.
    Mrs Poole put a letter into its envelope and folded the whole thing in three. She creased it as people do who never file their letters, holding the stiff paper in her hand like a small baton. 'Aye,' she said. 'Just another of yer local idiots.'
    'Isn't Good Friday a bank holiday? Don't they get the day off?'
    'Not in Scotland,' she said. 'That's an English thing.'
    She seemed more than slightly annoyed with the postman, as if his careless and brash way of talking had added some terrible degree of insult to the letter he had given her, the letter she now stuffed into the front pocket of her apron.
    'Are you all right?'
    She smoothed one lip against the other. 'In this country,' she said, 'they prefer to have an extra holiday on the second