The Only Problem Read Online Free PDF Page B

had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a
curate and become an actor.
     
     
    Ruth and Effie grew up in
a country rectory that to-day is converted into four commodious fats. The
shabbiness of the war still hung over it in the late fifties, but they were
only aware of the general decay by the testimony of their elders as to how
things were ‘in the old days’, and the evidence of pre-war photographs of
garden parties where servants and trees stood about, well-tended, and the
drawing room chintzes were well-fitted and new. Otherwise, they simply accepted
that life was a muddle of broken barrows, tin buckets in the garden sheds,
overgrown gardens, neglected trees. They had an oak of immense girth; a
mulberry tree older than the house, to judge from early sketches of the place.
The graveyard had a yew the circumference and shape of their oval
dining-table; the tree was hollow inside and the bark had formed itself into
the shape of organ pipes. Yews were planted in graveyards, originally, because
they poisoned cattle, and as they were needed for long-bows they were planted
in a place where cattle didn’t go. All this Ruth picked up from God knows
where; the air she breathed informed her. House-martins nested under the eaves
outside Ruth’s room and used to make a dark-and-white flash almost up to the
open window as they came and fled in the morning.
    There
was a worn carpet on the staircase up to the first landing.
    After
that, bare wood. Most of the rooms were simply shut for ever. They had been
civil servants’ bedrooms in war-time before Ruth was born, and she never knew
what it was like to see the houseful of people that the rectory was made for.
    For
most of Ruth’s life, up to the time Edward became an actor, religion was her
bread and butter. Her father was what Edward at one time called a
career-Christian; she assumed he was a believer too, as was her mother; but she
never got the impression that either had time to think about it.
    Effie
was three years younger than Ruth. The sisters were very close to each other
all their schooldays and in their early twenties. Ruth often wondered when
exactly they had separated in their attitude to life. It was probably after
Ruth’s return from Paris where she had spent a year with a family. Shortly
afterwards Effie, too, went off to be an au pair in France.
    If you
are the child of a doctor or a butcher you don’t have to believe in your father’s
occupation. But, in their childhood, they had to believe in their father’s job
as a clergyman in a special way. Matins and Sunday services and Evensong were
part of the job; the family was officially poor, which was to say they were not
the poor in the streets and cottages, but poor by the standards of a country
rector. Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist and always had some work in hand.
She could do seventy words a minute on her old pre-war typewriter. Before her
marriage she had done a hundred and thirty words a minute at Pitman’s
shorthand. Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping
of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the
woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s
experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie
couldn’t recall any sound effects.
    Effie
went to a university on her return from France and left after her first year
about the time that Ruth graduated and married Edward. Ruth worked with and for
Edward and the parish, organising a live crib at Christmas with a real baby, a
real cow and a real virgin; she wrote special prayers to the Holy Spirit and
the Trinity for the parish magazine (which she described as Prayers to the HS
etc.) and she arranged bring-and-pay garden lunches. She lectured and made
bedspreads, and she taught child-welfare and jam preserving.
    Ruth
was very much in the business. Effie, meanwhile, went off the rails, and when
this was pointed out to her in so many