The Benefits of Passion by Catherine Fox Page A

We’ll go on to live out our faithful, not-very-glamorous lives in parishes up and down the country. What difference will we make? We stake everything on the belief that it makes all the difference in the world, but when we look around, what do we see? Empty churches. Locked churches. Redundant churches. What’s the point? We might as well not bother. Don’t think that way, she chided herself. Faith was like the apostle Peter walking on water. If you looked round at the wind and the waves and asked yourself how you were doing it, you were bound to sink.
    How many others had slid despairingly under the waves in their time at Coverdale? Perhaps they had managed to thrash their way to the shore and were successful barristers and bankers now, attending church on Sundays, looking at the slightly pathetic figure in the pulpit and thinking, Phew. What would she do under those circumstances? She heard her mother tut angrily. You’re hopeless, Anne Brown. You’re always giving up. There’s that pegbag you never finished. You can’t go through life never finishing things, you know. But Annie did. Her whole history was a mess of loose ends. She seldom had the courage to cut things off properly and make a clean break. They just petered out. She was always trying to convince herself that she’d come back to them one day and maybe finish them. She still had that pegbag somewhere.
    If she left Coverdale she’d have to skulk back to teaching. God, you’re so boring, Anne, Damn used to say; and Annie had to admit Damn was right. It would be nice to go out with a little style, for once. To scorch across Coverdale like a bad comet. But that wasn’t done , of course. Or at any rate, not often. The college had produced one enfant terrible in its time, famed for his boozing, bonking and bad language. It was ten years ago, but people still spoke of Johnny Whitaker with a kind of awe. He’d somehow managed to scramble aboard ship again and get ordained, so maybe there was hope. Annie had only contemplated these things, not done them. Maybe he’d sat listening to this very lecture ten years ago with a hangover, plotting the fate of the next sexy undergraduate. She smiled in fellow-feeling. There were several extremely attractive young men in Jesus College next door. Woof woof. Get down, Libby!
    A bit of folded paper landed on the table in front of her. She opened it. ‘Much Blether’. She glanced across at Ted and grinned. He was looking as deadpan as ever.
    That evening Annie looked again at the words They were just , and crossed them out.
    â€˜Stop writing now, please, ladies and gentlemen.’
    Isabella’s pen made a final desperate lunge towards the end of the sentence. Her arm was dropping off. It was her last exam, thank God, and she knew she had done disastrously. All around the students stretched and exchanged grimaces while the exam scripts were collected up. Isabella wiped her sweaty hands on the skirt of her cream slub-silk dress. It was new and outrageously expensive, and she had bought it in the firm belief that if you looked good, you felt good; and if you felt good, you worked well. The system seemed to have broken down somewhere, though. She was heavily overdrawn and felt lousy. Still, she thought, as she got to her feet, being overdrawn made the sums easier. You just added to your total. And in any case, her father would bail her out as usual if she went to him with a trembling lip and admitted she’d got herself into a bit of a pickle again. She shook the full skirt and filed out with the others.
    It was hot. The air filled at once with the laughter and wails of post-mortem. Champagne was cracked open and the end-of-term annihilation began. Isabella wandered off across the marketplace to where she had chained her bike. I don’t feel part of it, she thought. Camilla’s law exams had finished two days earlier, so she had already spent forty-eight hours