Pastoral Read Online Free

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with whom he felt a kinship, but it was like finding a gold ring in a back
garden: you had to wonder to whom it belonged.
    Â Â Â Â Â Then, too, there was the angularity of Lowther’s thinking. As they were driving to Petrolia and talking about southern Ontario,
it emerged that Lowther did not like to speak of the past. He insisted that
what had been was a distraction from the here and now. To Father Pennant, this
seemed a clear contradiction. The past was the place from which Coleridge and
Hopkins reached us, no? Lowther was steeped in the past, wasn’t he?
    Â Â Â Â Â â€“ You must be right, Father, but I don’t think of it that way. A tea bag comes from somewhere, but tea exists when you
pour hot water on it. I’m steeped in the present .
    Â Â Â Â Â â€“ Yes, but what about tradition and the people who came before us? You and I
wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be talking, if it weren’t for what came before us.
    Â Â Â Â Â â€“ I’m sure you’re right, Father, but I don’t see the contradiction. The past has no meaning, absolutely none.
    Â Â Â Â Â  – Hmmm …
    Â Â Â Â Â As they drove over the dirt roads and along narrow lanes, stopping now and then
to admire a farmhouse or a striking vista, it seemed to Father Pennant that his
companion was trustworthy, more or less, but Lowther Williams was also
difficult to read.

    Anne Young, who had asked Father Pennant about the relative weight of adultery,
was not afraid her husband had been unfaithful. For one thing, John Young was
as lazy a man as she could imagine. Though he was still handsome and desirable
at sixty, he was not the kind of man to take on the work of planning,
calculating and deceiving. He might commit adultery, but only if there were
very little movement involved. Besides, he loved her, and she was sure of it.
They had gone through so much together: childlessness, hard times, deaths and,
most importantly, the adoption of his sister’s daughter, Elizabeth. In these crises he had been all that one could have
wanted from a husband. And loving him the way she did, there was no question she  would be unfaithful. He was the only man she had ever slept with. Not that she
hadn’t been curious, from time to time, but she was curious about all sorts of things
and you would no more find her with another man than you would have found her
drinking a glass of Cynar, that greenish, artichoke liqueur her neighbours had
brought back from Italy.
    Â Â Â Â Â Adultery was on her mind, though, because she had seen Robbie Myers with Jane
Richardson, and Robbie Myers was her niece Elizabeth’s fiancé. If he was not, technically speaking, ‘adulterous,’ there was almost certainly a serious name for his behaviour.
    Â Â Â Â Â Elizabeth had come to stay with them under the worst circumstances. She was the
daughter of John’s sister, Eileen, and one summer, seventeen years ago now, Eileen had asked if
they would mind taking care of Liz while she and her husband went off to Europe
for a romantic holiday. Childless themselves, Anne and John adored children, so
they had happily accepted. But Elizabeth’s parents had drowned when their ferry sank somewhere between Piraeus and Naxos.
It was a tragedy on a number of fronts. John was, of course, devastated by the
death of his younger sister and her husband. And then she and John were
bewildered to find themselves entangled in legal proceedings to determine who
should take care of the child. And then there was the three-year-old Liz, a
strange little puzzle. They did not at first know how to tell her that her
parents had died, but when they did tell her, it was as if the child could not
or would not understand. For months Liz would calmly ask after her parents, as
if she were asking after clothes she’d misplaced. Reminded that they were dead,