‘Do you think we could ask her?’ Jo enquires.
‘Ask her what?’
Ruth is back at the table, carrying three steaming glasses.
‘Ask her what?’ Ruth repeats, setting the glasses down.
Jo thinks she and Malcolm must look like children caught stealing chocolates from the Christmas tree.
Jo decides to take the bull – or rather, the Runaway Vicar – by the horns. ‘Ruth, we don’t want you to think we were discussing you behind your back.’ Which she thinks,we were. ‘But Malcolm and I wanted to ask you why you ran away.’ Worried this is a bit too direct, she adds, ‘I hope you don’t think we’re being nosy … and if you don’t want to tell us … well … that’s okay too … of course we’ll understand … it’s just that we …’ And now she wishes she had stopped talking some time ago.
Malcolm comes to her rescue. ‘Joanne and I wondered if we could help in any way?’
‘I don’t think you can.’
‘Aahh.’ Malcolm looks down at his hands, now clasped on the table.
‘And I didn’t,’ Ruth says defiantly, sitting back down.
There is a silence. Jo wants to ask,Didn’t what?but is reluctant to open her mouth after her earlier ramblings.
Again, it is Malcolm who picks up the slack. ‘Didn’t what, my dear?’
Ruth is glaring at them now. She seems very different from the woman who was so reassuring to Malcolm.‘I didn’t run away.’
‘Oh, so the press got it wrong,’ Jo blurts, relieved. ‘It was all …’ But she can’t finish, thinking: there must have been something in it. It can’t all have been a fabrication. Why the hints at staying quiet? Andwhythe wig?
‘A storm in a teacup?’ Malcolm offers, blowing over the top of his mulled wine.
A mulish look comes over Ruth’s face. ‘I didn’t run away. That’s all.’
Jo can’t help herself. ‘But the newspapers? The “leaving the house with a meal half eaten”? No one knowing where you were?’ She doesn’t want to upset Ruth, but she wants to know. Plus, having seen the relief so evident on Malcolm’s face, she can’t help thinking that Ruth would feel better if she confided something of her story. So she persists, ‘Was none of that true?’
Ruth sniffs. ‘Some of it was. But I didn’t run away,’ she repeats. Then, looking down into her glass of mulled wine she says, sulkily, ‘I just didn’t go back.’
Jo is now completely confused. So Ruth left – for some reason – and then what?
It is Malcolm who seems to have made some sort of mental leap. He leans towards Ruth. ‘Ah, going back, finding the will to do that – now that is a much more difficult endeavour.’
Jo suddenly thinks of Uncle Wilbur. Perhaps he hadn’t run away, when he was a young man. He had needed to leave home to join the army. But then? Was it just impossible for him to find his way back to a farming family who he felt were disappointed in him?
Ruth looks up a little sheepishly, a hint of a smile returning. ‘Maybe the wig was a step too far.’
‘Ruth, you don’t need to tell us, but are you still, I don’t know … in hiding?’ Jo asks.
‘The press were very persistent. They rang everyone, tried to find out everything they could about me.’ Ruth’s face is distressed now. ‘I just need some space and time to think.’
Malcolm nods his understanding.
‘“I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea, And the silence of the city when it pauses”,’Jo quotes, recalling what Ruth once wrote with one of her fountain pens. That piece of paper is now pinned up on the noticeboard next to a drawing of a Viking wearing overlarge glasses.
Jo still finds the words intriguing and rather poignant. It also makes her think of the quiet of Highgate Cemetery.
Perhaps the three of them are like the ghosts who meet on Christmas Eve – feeling their way. New friends, finding a way to know each other better, through conversation and through silence. And Jo senses what Ruth needs now, from her and Malcolm, is silence.
Dear Lucy,
I have spent today in a cemetery (and a pub) with a Runaway Vicar and a retired tax analyst called Malcolm. That doesn’t really do them justice, and I’d love you to meet them one day. Malcolm has the most wonderful handwriting – oh, and now the police officer does too. Well, maybe not as beautiful as Malcolm’s, but he wrote me something for my wall of words (I’d like to show you that too) and it was very stylish. It was a limerick about a policeman and was extremely rude, but so beautifully written!
