It was Saturday. The sort of rain which everyone always complains is unseasonal in July, despite it appearing in high summer with great regularity, lashed down outside the windows of the Parkers' flat and the sky was as dark as it can be at three in the afternoon on a summer's day. Lady Mary Parker emerged from the kitchen to find her husband standing in the sitting room with a hammer and box of nails in his hands.
He sat down in the soft blue armchair, and beamed up at her.
"Scones!", he said sniffing the air appreciatively. "What a wonderful woman you are. Are they cool enough to eat yet?"
"No," his wife replied firmly, "and in any event they aren't for us. Madeleine asked me to make some for the parish tea tomorrow."
Charles deposited the tools on the side table and pulled her down onto his lap. "You needn't get involved in all the comings and goings of the church's social calendar, you know, Mary dear. You needn't even go to church on Sundays if you don't want to."
"Thank you for the dispensation," Mary replied with a teasing glint in her eye. She hadn't really intended to become involved with St Agnes's at all, and had accompanied Charles on the first two Sundays of their married life in London purely for the pleasure of being with him. She wasn't sure quite why she had gone the next Sunday, when Charles had had very grudgingly to go into the Yard to deal with the aftermath of a raid carried out as part of his never ending money laundering investigation, except that it was something to do and it made her miss her husband a little less to do it. After the service she had found herself positively inundated with overtures of friendship and hospitality from people who had only stared at her during the sermon before, and within a fortnight she was part of the sewing circle and frequently took tea with Madeleine, the harassed but wryly humorous vicar's wife. She had been endlessly entertained to learn that people from the church had been trying to befriend Charles for years with no success, and that despite his stand-offishness several of the ladies had entertained hopes of him at one time or the other.
"It's a terrible peril for any reasonable looking bachelor at a church, of course, let alone one like Mr Parker. We knew he worked at Scotland Yard, you see - my husband did get that much out of him - and it seemed so mysterious and important. The fact that he never said a word to anyone didn't seem to put anyone off - I suppose there are some women who would consider it a positive advantage. I did at one point rather want him for Miss Simms," Madeleine had told Mary candidly over tea one Tuesday afternoon. "It's hardly appropriate for a vicar's wife to indulge in matchmaking, of course, but one can't help feeling that the ways in which God works are just a little too mysterious sometimes, and might benefit from some womanly assistance, though Andrew wouldn't like to hear me say so. Anyway, I soon saw that it wouldn't do. Miss Simms is an excellent woman but she would certainly require someone more chatty."
"No, I don't think anyone could call Charles 'chatty'", Mary agreed solemnly, but her eyes sparkled with gaiety.
"Well, and then just after Christmas he amazed us all by coming to church one day and just smiling - beaming, really - at anyone and everyone. We were quite taken aback. He'd always been so serious before. Mrs Lacey said she thought it looked like the beginning of some sort of mental decline so you can imagine how relieved we were to read about his engagement in the newspaper. Nobody talked of anything else for weeks, even though poor Andrew had worked so hard on the Lenten course. We read about the wedding in the papers, of course, and we wondered so much whether he would bring you to church, though we rather feared you might move away from the parish. I'm sorry everyone stared so when you first appeared. It was quite unforgivable, particularly given that there was such a good, clear photograph of you both at the wedding in the paper."
Mary, always amused by the ways and doings of other people, had gone home from that first tea with Madeleine with a great interest in the community which she now saw buzzed around the life of a church. Naturally the community, composed principally of women, took a still greater interest in her, combining as she did both the glamour of beauty and nobility (there were many members of the congregation who derived great pleasure from casually dropping sentences such as "As Lady Mary was saying to me the other day..." into their conversation) and the romance of having turned her back on an apparently glittering world for love. And before she knew it she had firm friends in Madeleine and a couple of the other younger women, and thought nothing of spending an afternoon at the vicarage rummaging through bags of clothes for a jumble sale or arranging flowers for high days and festivals.
"Don't worry", she told Charles, now. "It's nice belonging to something in an ordinary, helpful way."
"Helpful you may be, but never ordinary," Charles said seriously.
"Well, you know what I mean. Not there to represent The Family, and bestow gracious approval on everything and then go away whilst everyone else carries on happily and naturally."
Charles was pleased to find that the ordinariness he had bestowed on Mary's life was a cause of pleasure to her, and he liked thinking of Mary happily occupied whilst he was at work. He was nonetheless baffled and amazed by how quickly she had become entrenched and seemed to know vast hoards of information about so many members of the congregation, when he had attended the church for over a decade and still only knew a handful of names.
"All right, darling. But it's rather hard on an honest hardworking man when his wife neglects his bodily needs in favour of those of every scone-eating Tom, Dick and Harry in the parish."
Unmoved by his words, having in fact already mentally allocated two scones for Charles at tea, Mary lay back in his arms and brushed her fingers lightly over the stubble which had appeared on his chin since his morning shave. Charles raised an eyebrow and ran his hand up her leg questioningly. "Of course, a man has other kinds of bodily needs," he began hopefully, and then he kissed her. The familiar feeling of melting into him washed over her and Mary reciprocated the kiss wholeheartedly, though briefly breaking off to say "I seem to remember spending half the morning attending to my husband's bodily needs."
"That was hours ago," grinned Charles, and no more was said for some time.
Charles was a happy if slightly disheveled man when they sat down to tea later, and happier still when Mary handed him a scone, no longer warm but amply buttered and spread with honey. He surveyed the room with satisfaction. "I'll put the tool box away after tea," he said. "I've done the shelf in the bathroom, and there wasn't anything else on your list. Surely you can't want me to do any more furniture rearranging or room altering now for at least a decade."
Mary paused in the middle of lifting her teacup to her mouth, and set it back down on her saucer slowly.
"Charles," she began with an unusual note of shyness in her voice. He looked at her carefully.
"I went to the doctor yesterday. I'm afraid you will need to do a little more room altering after all. It rather seems that we shall be needing a cot in the little bedroom early in the new year." She met his gaze with a hesitant smile.
"Mary!" Charles sprang up from his seat and pulled her to her feet in a delighted embrace. The news wasn't entirely unexpected to Charles: any observant man who made love to his wife with the frequency that he did would be bound to notice the continued non-arrival of her monthly bleeding and draw inferences from it. But it was nonetheless overwhelming, and he held her in his arms with fervent gratitude.
"How do you feel?", he asked her solicitously.
"Slightly queasy in the mornings, quite unable to drink coffee, rather tireder than usual, and very, very happy," Mary replied. "Are you?"
"Not at all queasy, thanks," he joked. "But - yes, awfully happy. To think of our child - yours and mine equally - growing inside you -good Lord!"
He looked down at her wonderingly. There was something primal about the satisfaction of having wrought this mysterious change, extremely common but always miraculous, by an act of love, and a half-conscious sense of great pride that this woman - the best and most beautiful of women - should be carrying his child. Suddenly he frowned, thinking of their amorous activities of earlier that morning and indeed that afternoon.
"But Mary - ought we to have - should - is it all right that I-?"
Mary sat back down at the table, composedly but too happy to stop smiling at him. "Oh yes, that's quite all right. I asked Dr Lang and he gave me a very strict and quite unnecessary lecture about how pregnancy is no excuse to deny a man his conjugal rights, unless specific difficulties like bleeding should arise. He was really so unpleasant about it that I was about to object when he started on the subject of the different positions which could be used to accommodate the growing stomach in the later months and then of course I was far too embarrassed to do anything but leave as soon as I could."
Charles laughed ruefully. "Let's find another doctor, Mary. Perhaps Madeleine can suggest someone. God, how you women suffer," he added, with feeling. He was thinking partly of his Mary having to contend with a doctor apparently more concerned about her continued availability to her husband than her own comfort or desires, but also the cases he had seen earlier in his career of women abused by their husbands but for whom a country with laws refusing to contemplate that a husband could rape his wife offered no possible recourse. These thoughts filled him with an even greater tender protectiveness towards his own wife, and he touched her shoulder as he moved back to his own place. They finished their tea in happy silence, contemplating the vast unknowns of a new person created by them.
All of a sudden, Mary spoke again. "Charles, on that subject - I'll almost certainly get quite a lot fatter, you know."
Charles'a table manners were unfailingly good so, although his eyes creased with amusement, he finished his mouthful of scone before replying. "So I should imagine, unless it's an exceptionally small baby. Mary darling, do you think I don't know how gestation works?"
"Of course not," she said, "but I wouldn't want you to - I mean, I should think it's different when it happens to oneself. Or to one's wife."
"I expect it is," he agreed, eyeing her thoughtfully. "But surely you know that nothing could make you less beautiful to me, Mary? I don't think there's a single thing on God's green earth that could make me stop wanting you."
She met his gaze and smiled radiantly. "Oh Charles," she said, softly. "I hope it's a boy and that he'll be exactly like you."
Charles laughed. "Have you considered that it's quite as probable that he'll take after the men of your side of the family, and might well come out wearing a topper and a monocle and quoting sixteenth century poetry?" He stood up and went to the window-seat where he was accustomed to smoke his pipe. Mary followed him and arranged herself comfortably in his arms. They watched the rain drive down onto the pavements outside, cocooned in their own happiness. "On balance," Charles added, kissing the top of his wife's head, "I rather hope that it's a girl and that she's exactly like you."