A Talent For Destruction
Page 11
It was idealism that had made her choose medicine as a career, but she gave up her course without any misgivings in order to accompany Robin when he went as curate to a large Hertfordshire parish. She had never been more than conventionally religious, but love, coming to her as a revelation, had so heightened her perceptions and liberated her senses that it seemed to her that it must, in its widest interpretation as the gospel of Christianity, be the answer to everything. Accordingly she didn’t abandon her idealism, but merely changed its course. She had always wanted to do something worthy with her life, and helping Robin with his cure of souls seemed to her a vocation every bit as valid as devoting herself to the cure of bodies.
‘You’ll make an ideal parson’s wife,’ Robin had assured her when at first she voiced her doubts, and she had gradually come to believe that this must be true. Why else should he want to marry her?
‘Because I love you, of course.’
‘But why do you love me, Robin?’
‘Because you’re good and kind and sweet … and impossibly innocent. You need someone to look after you.’
That was what he believed. But his unacknowledged motive in marrying her, rather than one of the pretty girls who clustered round him like wasps round a jampot, was in fact more fundamental. Robin Ainger was afraid of wasps.
Pretty girls – competitive, insistent, demanding girls – terrified him. His mother had spoiled him, and had encouraged a self-centredness that made it essential for him to marry someone who would bolster his feeling of superiority, and at the same time cosset and protect him. Young as she was, Gillian made a perfect mother-substitute, and Robin loved her for it; not so much for herself, as for herself in relation to him.
But he was not a man who attempted any self-analysis, and so this aspect of his relationship with Gillian escaped him. Instead, he prided himself that in choosing her he had looked beyond superficialities and recognized Gillian’s true worth. This made him feel strong and protective. He failed to acknowledge, because he failed to realize, how much he needed her and depended on her. And Gillian, enslaved by his good looks and grateful for his love, prepared to devote her life to helping him in his work without understanding that she was by far the stronger and abler of the two.
The first twelve years of their marriage were happy, chiefly because they instinctively avoided introspection and discussion. They were content simply to live and work together, moving from one benefice to a better as the opportunity arose. Their only disappointment in those years was the non-appearance of children, but their sorrow was more expressed than real: Gillian was quite busy enough coping with Robin, and the moves, and parish affairs, without having babies; and Robin wanted no rivals for her attention.
The demands of a large parish were greater than either of them had realized. Robin, whose father was a scholar by inclination, had been brought up in a quiet country rectory. No scholar himself, and anxious for preferment, he had deliberately sought busier and more important benefices without at first appreciating how total his dedication would have to be. And Gillian, anxious as she was to involve herself, was alarmed to find that as the parson’s wife she became in effect parish property. She had not expected to be so universally recognized, so much observed and discussed, so frequently in demand and yet so often criticized.
At first, this front-line feeling strengthened their marriage. After twelve years they were still very much a partnership; still prepared, whenever the pressures became too great, to say ‘Drat the lot of them!’ and sneak out of the parish like truant schoolchildren for a day off. Occasionally they would lock the doors, take the telephone receiver off its rest, and go to bed for an hour or two in the afternoon. There were, they agreed, so many disadvantages about working from home that they might as well make the most of the benefits.
But by the time they made their fourth move, to Breckham Market, their sense of partnership had begun to disintegrate. Had they been able to admit their personal difficulties and discuss them, instead of confining their conversation to domestic and parish affairs, they might have been able to help each other. As it was, they each tried to find their own solution without reference to the other.
For Robin Ainger, the problem was his faith. He had gone into the church not because of any sense of vocation but because his father and grandfather had been clergymen. It was the only way of life he knew. He had assumed without question that he had faith, but over the years it had diminished until it hardly existed at all. The words and phrases he uttered in church became increasingly meaningless to him.
The guilt this occasioned made him feel like a criminal. His instinctive response was concealment. He refused to think, let alone talk to his wife, about his loss of faith. The church was his livelihood and he enjoyed the status it gave him; as long as he continued to go through the motions, no one needed to know that he no longer believed in what he was saying.
And so he threw himself into the life of the parish and town, deliberately exhausting himself with overwork so as to avoid the leisure for thought. As for the church services, he got through them by putting increasing emphasis on form rather than content. While most churchmen were busily trying to make services more relevant by adopting modern forms of worship, Robin Ainger clung to the Authorized Version of the Bible and to the Book of Common Prayer. And while many believers, clerical and lay, spoke out in favour of allowing divorcees to remarry in church, Robin ducked the issue by adhering rigidly to the traditional Anglican discipline that Christian marriage is for life.
But while he expatiated on the sanctity of marriage, and believed himself to be setting a domestic example to his flock, his wife felt increasingly isolated. Her own religious faith, so radiant when she first married, had dimmed in a way that she felt to be totally unacceptable in a parson’s wife, and she knew no method of reviving it. Going to church and listening to Robin’s confident sonority made her feel wretchedly guilty. She longed to opt out, but that was impossible; the parish would be scandalized.
For herself, she wouldn’t have cared. Her idealism had turned to disillusionment. Gillian was sick of the parish. Sick of the Mothers’ Union and the Young Wives and the Sunday School, of arranging the flower-arrangers and organizing choir treats, of inspiring fund-raising events and sorting out catering problems. Sick of petty controversies, of bickering, and of the appallingly un-Christian lack of charity manifested by some of the most faithful members of the congregation. Sick of the procession of callers at the Rectory, of the sound of the telephone bell, of the absence of privacy.
But she had to keep going, because of Robin. He was working so hard that she couldn’t worry him with her personal problems and uncertainties, let alone lay any extra burdens on him by neglecting her parish duties. After all, she loved him.
It was, though, becoming increasingly difficult to talk to him. Tiredness made Robin irritable, and when he was irritable he would slap down any attempt she made at conversation, ridiculing her into silence. Disagreement infuriated him. She did not side with him on a number of issues – divorce, for one – but she knew that he resented any intervention in what he believed to be his province, and so she kept quiet. The confidence that, over the years, she had of necessity acquired in dealing with parishioners did not extend to her relationship with her husband. She tried to avert his displeasure by being apologetic, not realizing that this only made him more overbearing.
And the trouble was that she had no one else to talk to. She knew scores of people in Breckham Market, but because she was the wife of the Rector there wasn’t a single person in whose company she felt she could let her hair down. Gillian Ainger was intolerably lonely.
In the sixteenth year of her marriage, she could bear the isolation no longer. She made up her mind that – in defiance of her husband if necessary – she would set about finding herself some friends.
‘But why Yarchester? Why waste petrol by going all that way? There are plenty of evening classes you can join here in Breckham Market.’
‘Do you think that I don’t feel the same?’ he demanded. ‘I’d be only too glad to get away for one evening a week, if I could spare the time.’ He sliced the top off his breakfast boiled egg. ‘Try one of the local classes,’ he instructed her. He poked with his spoon at the semi-liquid contents of the eggshell. ‘Cookery or something.’
‘Isn’t it done enough? Oh, I’m sorry, Robin. I’ll boil you another –’
‘Never mind. Leave it, for goodness’sake, I’ll swallow it somehow.
Your father will be down in a minute and I want to have at least one meal a day in peace.’
The habit of placating her husband had become so deeply ingrained that at any time before this morning Gillian would have taken his hint and said no more. Now, although her heart was beating faster than usual, she persisted.
‘The thing is, you see, that I want to do sculpture and there are no classes for it at Breckham. I started it when we lived in Bedford, don’t you remember? I modelled a head, and I’ve still got all the materials up in the attic –’
He looked up irritably. ‘The circumstances then were different. We were only ten minutes’walk from the art school. Going to Yarchester would take all evening – and supposing I want the car?’
‘The sculpture classes are on Tuesdays. You don’t use the car then because you’re taking confirmation classes here at the Rectory.’
Robin Ainger glared at his wife, his irritation mounting. They had almost always spent their leisure time together, and he resented her sudden bid for independence. ‘You’ve got this all planned, haven’t you?’ he accused her.
She went pink. ‘I’ve tried to anticipate the possible snags, that’s all. I don’t want to make things difficult for you.’
‘What about your father, then? What am I supposed to do with him while you’re gadding about in Yarchester?’
‘He’s no trouble in the evenings, as long as you let him watch his favourite television programmes. I can leave a cold supper for you both –’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘– or I could cook you a high tea before I go, scrambled eggs or something. Whatever you like, Robin. Only you won’t mind if I go to these classes, will you?’
His handsome face was dark with annoyance. ‘Frankly, Gillian, I’d have thought you could find enough to do here without wasting time and money by going to Yarchester to play about with clay.’
He would have been a great deal angrier, Gillian reflected guiltily, had he known her real reason for wanting to go to Yarchester. She could hardly believe that he didn’t know, because she was planning what he – and she – regularly counselled lonely parishioners to do. Get out more, they both advised: if you want to meet people, the best way to do it is to join a club or take up a hobby.
She had often wondered, as she trotted out the conventional wisdom, whether in fact it ever worked on any but the most superficial level. Did the exchange of platitudes that passed for conversation at all the Breckham clubs, from the Mothers and Toddlers to the Over-Sixties, really make lonely people feel befriended, or did it merely emphasize their sense of isolation? And could communal participation in yoga or cookery or clay modelling possibly be expected to ensure a meeting of kindred spirits?
As Tuesday evening approached, that began to seem more and more unlikely. She set out for Yarchester School of Art – seen off by her husband with a short, huffed, ‘Mind how you go’ – knowing that it was unrealistic to hope to acquire anything from the course apart from a plaster cast of the head she proposed to model. And for the first two weeks it seemed that she was wise not to be optimistic.
There were a number of women on the course, and they were friendly enough in the larky way that some adults automatically adopt when they return to a classroom environment, but she found it difficult to know how to become better acquainted. She had chafed at the pressures and expectations that were put on her because she was the wife of the Rector of Breckham Market, but once she got away from the town and lost that identity she felt as shy as she had been in adolescence. She had joined the course late, and this made her feel an outsider. When the man next to her on the bench, who had introduced himself as Alec Reynolds and had found some clean clay for her to use instead of the plaster-filled lump the instructor gave her, suggested after her third lesson that she might like to go with some members of the class for a drink at a nearby pub, she was so lacking in self-confidence that she almost refused.
Had she refused, and gone straight back home to her husband, Breckham Market cemetery would today be three graves emptier; possibly four.
Chapter Fifteen
It would have been impossible for anyone to warn Gillian Ainger of the likely consequence of her attempt to make friends, because she wouldn’t have believed it.
She was a straightforward, rational woman; not without imagination or sensitivity, but with no significant depth of emotion. Love, to her, was something basic and enduring, and passion was no more than the occasional physical expression of love. She knew nothing of the terrors of insecurity, of the desperation of dependence, of possessiveness, of destructiveness, of black jealousy, of murderous hatred, of the darkness of the soul. As her husband had recognized from the first, Gillian was an innocent.
She had no idea how fiercely possessive Robin felt about her. When they exchanged their wedding vows, promising to forsake all other, Gillian had meant – and had assumed that Robin also meant – that she was forswearing extra-marital love affairs. It had never occurred to her that Robin took her promise literally, and that when he said, as he was accustomed to say when they made love, ‘You’re mine, mine,’ he meant that she belonged to him absolutely and that she must never give anything of herself to anyone else.
Gillian hadn’t been a parson’s wife for sixteen years without becoming aware of the depressing incidence in every parish of gossip, malice, slander, hypocrisy, fornication, and adultery, but she still preferred to think the best of everyone. She took the view that most of the crimes that were committed in Breckham Market, from vandalism to wife-battering, were attributable to a combination of underprivilege and inadequacy. She never had the time or interest to read newspaper accounts of criminal cases, and so to discover that what powers the foulest of crimes is very often love.
As a regular churchgoer at traditional services, she was well acquainted with the Litany. Some of it she found appropriate to the last quarter of the twentieth century, but other sections seemed to her to be completely outdated. In making the ancient supplication, From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord deliver us, Gillian Ainger was comfortably unaware of the ever-present existence of the power of evil.
But that was before she deliberately set out to make friends outside the parish, and took Alec Reynolds and Janey Rolph home to meet her husband. Reynolds had been a widower for three years. He had loved his late wife very dearly, and the reason he took an interest in Gillian was that she reminded him in many ways of Sylvia.
He was not looking for anything other than friendship, because he was now emotionally attached to a civil-service colleague whose career had recently taken her to live and work in London. She reserved most, though not all, of her weekends for Alec Reynolds, but during the week he was always a widower again.
‘I never have a dull moment,’ he told Gillian as she drank the bitter lemon he had bought her. He spoke cheerfully, but his eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were bleak, still grieving for the happy home life that Sylvia had created. Now, with the children married, the house was empty and neglected; the only attraction there was the whisky bottle. Going out as much as possible during the Monday-to-Friday six-to-midnight wasteland helped to cut down the amount of time he had to spend trying to resist temptation.
His pastimes, though, were not c
hosen haphazardly. Alcohol, which had never had much appeal for him when his wife was alive, had, he discovered, a dangerous effect on him. The first two glasses were enjoyably anaesthetizing, but after that there would begin a slow-burning rage at the malignant fate that had taken Sylvia from him. Then violence was liable to erupt, because Alec Reynolds in drink was not the mild, urbane man that his appearance suggested. On more than one occasion he had swept his arm across the kitchen table, sending his unwashed dishes and the remains of his Bird’s Eye pizza-for-one crashing to the floor. Once, he had flung an empty bottle through the television screen. And so he had wisely opted for pastimes that would not merely keep him occupied but challenge and tire him: Russian lessons mentally, squash and sculpture physically.
‘Don’t you find sculpture tough going?’ he asked Gillian.
‘It’s rather like all-in wrestling,’ she agreed, laughing. ‘All that twisting of metal to make the armature, and then pounding the clay about and slapping it on …’ Her hands, he noticed, were square and blunt and not well cared-for. They didn’t attract him, as Lesley’s slim, manicured hands did, but they looked steady and capable; like Sylvia’s.
He told her about Sylvia, and also about Lesley and her disinclination to abandon her career and settle down as the wife of a provincial senior civil servant. In return, Gillian told him something about her own life, with the doubts and all but the most superficial problems edited out.