Miss Rigby by Judy Mitchell

A solitary woman. The same clothes each week, plain and grey. Never a smile on her thin, pale lips. In the crook of her arm, a black handbag, always flat and empty: no secrets bulging in its cheap frame.

Father McKenzie knew her name from the first day she came to Mass but had never said it aloud. If she had any family or relatives they were never mentioned. Even when the bombs had fallen further down the road in ’42, she still slipped quietly into and out of her usual pew, unobserved, leaving without seeking conversation. One of the many lonely people of that City, he had thought.  

For more than 20 years she had approached the altar with the same number of steps, then a pause, a dip, her pink, dry tongue visible for the shortest time. Then her return to the back of the church away from the rest of the worshippers.

 

It was many years before her soft voice with its Scouse accent slipped through the screen into his ears. Words unexpected and shocking, spilling into the space between them.  

She had been in service on the Wirral at the home of the industrialist Sir Abraham Thornton. The work was hard. On her one day off each week, she had been in the habit of walking in the countryside. No family to visit, she left the house in the morning, returning in the afternoon in time for tea in the servants’ hall.

Into that quiet routine came an unexpected confrontation. One of the estate gardeners had touched her arm as she walked past the greenhouses, asked if he could walk with her. He had come too close and then pressed against her so she could feel his body, hard and hot. The following week he would join one of the new Pals battalions, he told her. She didn’t reply but he followed her, touched her neck and her breasts and when he became too insistent, there was a scuffle. They both fell as she pushed him away. She stumbled to her feet but he didn’t get up. From the back of his head, blood oozed on to the canal path, puddling crimson and thick on the stones near the lock. His shoulders were heavy as she lifted him and pushed, stepping back as he folded over into the black water. In the confessional, there was a pause and he thought he heard a stifled sob and the sharp snap of a clasp. He imagined her wiping her eyes and waited silently for her to resume her story.

They said he must have left early to join his battalion and when he wasn’t found, the authorities decided he must have deserted. The estate staff avoided any mention of his name, the shame too great, especially when Sir Abraham’s own sons were at the Front leading their battalions.

In the dark box, the Father’s lips moved silently, the rosary hanging limply in his soft fingers. He heard the door shut and then the receding patter of her feet as she left the church.  

 

Summer 1966 and across the road from the church, the pub door closed sharply on the last of the lunchtime drinkers. A man who had been slumped on the pavement by the door rose unsteadily to his feet and crossed the road, his arms raised as if to part the afternoon traffic by some messianic power. In the graveyard his feet made no sound on the wet grass as he approached the old lady with the handbag. Money to feed his habit. He waited and saw her pick up some rice from the path where a wedding had taken place and then leapt, pushing her thin body into the porch and through the door into the nave. He leaned forward and grabbed her shoulders to force her to the ground. The words of Exodus 21:23-27 filled her ears and she closed her eyes to the stranger believing that he had been sent to deliver retribution. The crozier he grasped to strike her head, clanged as it fell onto the flags.

 

In the end, nobody came. The words of the sermon no one heard, bounced off the cold walls. Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walked from the grave, the Father stepped back on to the path, his feet cold in socks that needed darning and shoes that let in the water from the sodden ground. He turned slowly to look at the brown curve of raw earth where she had been laid to rest and saw a trickle of soil fall, like a tear, to the ground.