‘No, I didn’t mean that!’ Jo blurts. ‘No, I just meant you already have good writing.’
‘But it could be better. What are the other tips?’
‘To be honest, the rule everyone talks about, which makes the biggest difference, is that we all need to slow down.’
‘Just when we write?’ Ruth asks, over the top of her coffee mug.
Jo suppresses a smile. ‘Well, we are talking about handwriting here.’
‘I hoped we were,’ Ruth says, unsmiling, but with a gleam in her eye.
Is that it? Had this woman just needed to slow down? Had it all become too much for her? ‘And we need to relax.’
‘When we write?’ Ruth repeats slowly, the gleam becoming more pronounced.
‘That is what we’re talking about,’ Jo retorts, smiling openly now. ‘Most people write too fast and hold their pens way too tight. So it’s a case of slowing down and relaxing.’
‘Is it indeed?’
They look at each other in silence. And Jo feels they are sharing more than just coffee and flapjacks.
‘And now,’ Ruth says, putting her mug down, ‘I want to talk to you about Malcolm.’
‘Have you seen him?’ Jo enquires, anxiously.
‘No. I was going to ask you the same thing.’
Jo shakes her head. ‘When you walked home with him, did he say anything else?’ Jo is searching for how to mention the ‘I didn’t want to die’ comment.
‘About finding out that he didn’t want to die?’ Ruth supplies.
Jo nods.
‘So, you noticed that too. He really did sound quite astonished, didn’t he?’ Ruth muses, then continues, more decisively, ‘We should go and visit him.’
‘Do you think he’d mind? He might not want us barging in.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting we batter his door down. I was thinking of calling around with a bottle of wine.’ Ruth pauses, gazing into the air. ‘Or do you think he would prefer gin?’
It strikes Jo that the vicars she has known, which she admits aren’t many, were more likely to arrive carrying the church magazine rather than alcohol. On impulse she asks, ‘Did you do this in your parish?’
‘What?’
‘Turn up with a bottle?’
‘Of course. If someone is bereaved, haslost their job, their dog’s been put down, or they’ve been diagnosed with cancer … who on earth would want a cup of tea? On the other hand, I have never been turned away with a bottle in my hand.’
Jo laughs. ‘No, I don’t suppose you have been.’
‘It’s what you would do for a friend, isn’t it?’
It is, of course, but she had always seen vicars as distant characters, dispensing strictures about kindness from the pulpit, rather than knocking on people’s doors, wine or gin in hand. ‘Did you do a lot of that?’ Jo asks, distracted for a moment from the worry about Malcolm.
‘What? Drinking?’ Ruth asks, innocently.
‘No, the visiting. It’s just, as you started to list what goes wrong in people’s lives, it struck me it must have kept you busy.’ She wonders: did it keep you too busy, take too much out of you?
‘It was the thing I liked the best,’ Ruth says, simply.
