A Passionate Man by Joanna Trollope

Sunday morning, and Lynne Tyler playing the sad, damp piano with several vital notes missing, said yes, without much grace.
    â€˜I wouldn’t ask,’ Chrissie Jenkins said, whose whole life was dedicated to getting other people to do parish work in order to show the world that she was married to Colin and not to God, ‘if it wasn’t a bit of an emergency. She relies on me, you see, being a trained nurse.’
    â€˜No, it’s fine,’ Liza said.
    â€˜We’re doing the miracles this term. I expect little Imogen’s told you. It’s the feeding of the five thousand this week, and we were going to act it out. Lynne says she’ll bring brown bread cut into fish shapes, and will you bring white? And a little basket or two—’
    â€˜Yes,’ Liza said. ‘Yes.’
    â€˜Thank you ever so much,’ Chrissie said. ‘I know how you like to do your bit.’
    â€˜Cow,’ Liza said, putting the telephone down.
    It rang again at once, and this time it was Cyril Vinney, old Mrs Mossop’s son-in-law, to say his sciatica was so bad he didn’t know how he was going to make it through the night.
    â€˜And the awful thing is,’ Archie said, collecting his bag, ‘that I wouldn’t much care if he didn’t.’
    Stoke Stratton village hall had been built just after the war. It was a wooden-framed hut, gloomily creosoted, with metal window frames painted municipal-green. It consisted of one oblong room from whose ceiling hung, alternately, ineffective electric heating bars and unenthusiastic lighting strips, and, at one end, a grim little kitchen and a pair of institutional lavatories. The Women’s Institute, at the instigation of Mrs Betts, had made flowered curtains for the windows and contributed a square of orange-and-brown speckled carpet which swam, isolated, at one end of the polished wooden floor. But for all its charmlessness, Stoke Stratton was proud to have a village hall. Not only were there functions in it twice or thrice weekly – badminton, old-time dancing, Young Wives, Evergreen Club, Mother and Toddler Group, Poetry Circle, Ramblers’ Club, Village Preservation Society, Gardeners’ Club, jumble sales, Christmas fayres, harvest suppers, P C C meetings, Youth Group discos – but Stoke Stratton graciously rented it to neighbouring King’s Stoke and Lower Stoke, neither of whom boasted such an amenity.
    On Sunday mornings, Colin Jenkins turned the heaters on, on his way back from early communion, so that by the time the Sunday School assembled, they could only just see their breaths before them. It was the only Sunday School in the three villages, and provided a blessed child-free hour on Sunday mornings for parents who could be bothered to deliver and collect. Liza, armed with half a loaf – ‘Shouldn’t it be pitta?’ Archie had asked unhelpfully – and several small bread baskets, arrived to find a dozen little children sitting at a trestle table colouring in simplistic pictures of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. Imogen, who knew the form, ran to battle her way into a place at the table and corner the crayons she wanted, but Mikey hung back and said he thought he’d just watch.
    â€˜But why? Why don’t you join in?’
    He put his face babishly into Liza’s side.
    â€˜I don’t want to.’
    Lynne Tyler, a valiant and friendly woman whose husband was Richard Prior’s cowman, came out of one of the lavatories holding by the hand a shrew-faced child clutching a blue plastic handbag.
    â€˜We do this all morning,’ Lynne said to Liza. ‘In and out. She won’t go alone and she won’t do anything when I take her.’
    â€˜Can’t you ignore her?’
    â€˜Last time I did, we had a disaster. Now come on, Kirsty. You sit down and do your drawing.’
    â€˜Wanna wee—’
    â€˜No, you don’t,’ Liza said, lifting her firmly