Death in Holy Orders Read Free

must have looked as if we were praying, and I would have said a prayer for him only I couldn’t think of the right words. And then the sun came out and suddenly the scene looked as if it wasn’t real, as if the two of us were being photographed in colour. Everything was bright and clear-edged. The grains of sand on Ronald’s hair shone like pin-points of light
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    Mr. Gregory said, “We must get some help, call the police. Do you mind waiting here with him? I won’t be long. Or you can come with me if you prefer, but I think it would be better if one of us stayed.
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    I said, “You go. You’ll be quicker in the car. I don’t mind waiting.
”
    I watched him as he walked as briskly as the shingle allowed towards the mere, then round the promontory and out of sight. A minute later I heard the sound of the car as he drove towards the college. I half-slid down the sand alittle way from the body and settled myself on the pebbles, wriggling to make myself more comfortable and digging in my heels. The pebbles beneath the surface were still damp from the night rain, and the cold wetness seeped through the cotton of my slacks. I sat with my arms folded round my knees, looking out over the sea
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    And sitting there I thought of Mike for the first time in years. He was killed when his motorcycle skidded off the A1 and into a tree. We had been home from our honeymoon for less than two weeks; we had known each other for less than a year. What I felt at his death was shock and disbelief, not grief. I thought at the time that it was grief but I know better now. I was in love with Mike but I didn’t love him. That comes with living together and caring for each other, and we never had the time. After he died I knew that I was Margaret Munroe, widow, but I felt that I was still Margaret Parker, spinster, aged twenty-one, a recently qualified nurse. When I discovered I was pregnant, that too seemed unreal. The baby, when he arrived, seemed nothing to do with Mike or our brief time together, and nothing to do with me. All that came later, and perhaps it was the stronger because it came late. When Charlie died I mourned for both of them, but I still can’t clearly recall Mike’s face
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    I was aware of Ronald’s body behind me, but it was a comfort not to be sitting at his side. Some people taking watch beside the dead find their presence companionable, but I didn’t feel that, not with Ronald. All I felt was a great sadness. It wasn’t for that poor boy, it wasn’t even for Charlie or Mike or for myself. It was a universal sadness which seemed to permeate everything round me, the fresh breeze against my cheek, the sky where there were a few massed clouds moving almost deliberately, it seemed, across the blue, and the sea itself. I found myself thinking of all the people who had lived and died on this coast, and of the bones lying a mile out under the waves in the great churchyards. Their lives must have mattered at the time to themselves and the people who cared about them, but now they were dead and it would have been just the same ifthey had never lived. In a hundred years no one will remember Charlie, Mike or me. All our lives are as insignificant as a single grain of sand. My mind felt emptied, even of sadness. Instead, gazing out to sea, accepting that in the end nothing really matters and that all we have is the present moment to endure or enjoy, I felt at peace
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    I suppose I was sitting in a kind of trance, because I didn’t see or hear the three approaching figures until there was the loud crunch of shingle and they had almost reached me. Father Sebastian and Mr. Gregory were trudging side by side. Father Sebastian had wrapped his black cloak tightly round him against the wind. Both their heads were bent and they walked purposefully, as if they were marching. Father Martin was a little way behind, lurching as he struggled with difficulty over the shingle. I remember thinking that it was unkind of the other two not to wait