The pastorate is an upper middle class church fellowship group that meets on a Tuesday and keeps the modern world at bay through social exclusion. When churchgoer Colleen Rose attends the group for the first time they immediately assume that she is working class, urban and possibly an immigrant. She is immediately drowned by a lack of introductions, making her feel redundant and unwelcome. It is the transferred anger of the group leader, Tara King, that trickles down into her members and friends, Gemma and Anna Arbuthnott. Anna is the first to offer friendship, but Tara and Gemma continue to treat her as 'the outsider in our midst'. Colleen attempts to correct their assumptions by explaining her situation, presenting them with the modern face of England. They see her for what she is: someone who is essentially friendless and in search of a society to belong to. Because of this, they remain aloof, reinforcing her isolation, virginity and innocence. At the dinner table they decide to drown her presence in intellectual conversation that, making her feel like an uneducated and untutored child. She becomes withdrawn, relegated to the stauts of an observer of life. She decides to hit back by telling them she is not going to stay in the pastorate because it is not an environment for her to grow spiritually. When they tell her to shut the door on the way out, she leaves with a fractured personality and a fragmented social life, forced to pursue a relentless search for a spiritual home.
