One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [47]
Kit’s chest was expanding and Laura and I exchanged smiles. Of course it was wonderful how Kit had answered the call, given up so much, and we were all very proud of him. Particularly what he’d done in Sarajevo. But it was interesting how, over the years, he’d somehow reverted to type, albeit within the Church. The gritty parish in Tower Hamlets that he’d talked of reforming at Bible college had, after three years of cycling around Oxford, become less of a burning issue, and even though he’d been offered just such a parish in Tottenham, when he’d also been offered a curacy on a vast country estate – a duke’s estate, a famous one belonging to a friend of Hugh’s – with its own idyllic church in perfect Jane Austen parkland, and where most of the parishioners were over sixty and feared God anyway, and where he was to be in possession of a dear little brick and flint vicarage, the sort people pay squillions for in Country Life, he’d found himself accepting. Far from being at the cutting edge of the ministry, Kit was firmly at the upholstered end.
‘Done much shooting lately?’ enquired Laura innocently, as she shepherded Charlie to the table by his shoulders, flicking me a look.
‘A bit last season,’ Kit conceded.
‘You shoot?’ Maggie blinked.
‘Kit has fishing and shooting rights on Richard’s estate,’ explained Hugh. ‘I gather you caught a whopper on Saturday. A twenty-pounder, no less.’
‘Yes, but that was a bit of a one-off,’ said Kit uncomfortably. ‘Normally at weekends I can’t get away from parish duties,’ he explained to Maggie. ‘Visiting and so on.’
‘Ah, yes, the needy of Henley-on-Thames,’ grinned Dad, sitting down and spreading his napkin on his lap. ‘Quite a challenge getting round all those manicured lawns, trudging up those crunchy drives. Keep it up, laddie.’ Kit grinned good-naturedly as we guffawed. ‘Actually, we mustn’t tease,’ Dad went on soberly. ‘Kit does sterling work kissing for Oxfordshire.’
Kit took a mock bow to our cheers whilst Maggie looked bewildered. Years ago Kit had made the mistake of kissing an old lady on the cheek after the service at the church door – ‘purely because she proffered it and purely because it seemed rude not to!’ he’d declared hotly later. But the very next Sunday, every old dear in the parish had lined up, cheek at the ready for this attractive young vicar to peck, standing their ground resolutely if he even looked like hesitating. Kit claimed he now kissed so many powdery cheeks on a Sunday his lips were white by the end of it.
‘Manufacture a cold sore,’ Biba suggested. ‘Or a great big zit, just here.’ She curled her lip.
‘Like this.’ Charlie helpfully demonstrated with a blob of mashed potato on his sister.
‘You are so dumb.’ Biba flicked it off with her finger, whereupon the Labrador caught it like a fly.
‘I don’t like this word dumb,’ remarked my mother imperiously as she handed round the carrots. ‘It’s an Americanism.’
‘You’re married to an American,’ yelped my father.
‘Yes, but you wouldn’t say it, darling. You’re an educated American.’
‘Why, thank you, my flower.’ He inclined his head ironically. ‘Nice to know I’m winning the Darwinian struggle.’
‘It comes from watching too much television,’ Mum observed. ‘Too much Friends. I mean, you wouldn’t say “sidewalk”, would you?’ she demanded of Biba. ‘And you wouldn’t take out the garbage?’
‘No,’ Biba agreed, ‘I’d take out the trash.’
As the young dissolved, Laura retorted: ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
‘You’ve been rinsed, Granny,’ Seffy informed her.
‘I’m always rinsed, darling.’ She patted her hairdo. ‘I make my girl do it twice, to get out all the conditioner.’
This struck them as unbearably funny, but Mum ploughed on undaunted, turning her gaze on someone else. ‘And speaking of taking out the rubbish, I gather you’ve got some young man to do just that, Hattie?’
That stopped the laughter instantly: silence descended. I glanced, appalled, at Laura, who got up, pink-cheeked, on some spurious excuse to grab the tomato ketchup bottle. She hissed, ‘She-made-me!’ at Mum’s back.
‘Rather