The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  At this point Francie asks to see me. We retire to my consulting room; she weeps; her husband’s beaten her up again. He never beats her where it shows, of course. It takes a middle-class thug to beat his wife with cunning. I don’t think there’s any future for her in that marriage, but it’s for her to say that, not me. All I can do is listen with sympathy and keep the Kleenex tissues flowing.

  I get back to the Rectory at five-thirty and when I walk into the kitchen I find Nicholas. Thank God! He’s stuffing some shirts into the washing machine and looking abstracted so I don’t launch straight away into a recital of my troubles. I merely enquire after the paranormal problem which turned out to be just routine stuff in a council house. Then he asks what’s been happening at the Healing Centre but although I give him a quick résumé I realise he’s not listening. This isn’t particularly surprising; one often feels like a zombie after an exorcism.

  To wake him up I tell him Venetia Hoffenberg has phoned twice, and I pretend I’ve no idea who she is. “Now why should the name Venetia remind me of the 1960s?” I enquire with mock innocence to remind him of his pre-ordination days when he messed around with her fast set, but just as his concentration snaps back into focus the phone rings.

  It’s Venetia herself, and this time she finally gets the man she wants. As Nicholas takes the call I mix myself a drink and remember the scene a few weeks ago at Cynthia’s when she got drunk, propositioned me and was rebuffed. Meanwhile Nicholas is saying: “He’s not my curate. He’s my colleague at the Healing Centre.” Venetia knows that perfectly well, of course. She just wants to act as if I’m a nonentity so that she can wipe me more easily from her mind.

  I’m still recalling my memories of that first Sunday in July when Nicholas at last replaces the receiver and I see to my astonishment that he’s very excited indeed. “That’s the only woman I’ve ever met,” he’s saying dizzily, “who can recognise a quotation from Wittgenstein!”

  I think: so who needs a woman like that? But I suppress this sexist question, the latest manifestation of my anti-women fever, and manage to mutter some polite response before asking what’s going on.

  It turns out that by an amazing coincidence Nicholas bumped into Venetia yesterday when he headed for the local cathedral to recharge his spiritual batteries, and not only did she go to Evensong with him but she also promised to visit the Healing Centre.

  This is certainly good news and may well indicate that Venetia is willing to seek help, but on the other hand she may have been motivated by no more than a chummy impulse so there’s no guarantee she’ll follow through on the promise. Not for the first time I reflect what an unusual relationship Venetia and Nicholas have. There’s an affinity between them which isn’t fundamentally sexual, although as with all friendships between a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female, the sexual dimension exists, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes not harmlessly at all. I’m prepared to believe Nicholas is correct when he says he’s been put into her life to be her spiritual friend, praying for her regularly, but I’m not prepared to believe this relationship is without its worldly dangers. After all, that woman is worldly danger personified. She could seduce anyone from a millionaire to a milkman in between swigs of Veuve Clicquot.

  “I’m going to save her!” Nicholas is saying, still addled with excitement. “It’s been twenty-five years now since that man in her past wrecked her, but now it’s all going to come right!”

  He’s in such ecstasy that I know it’s time to take him down a peg or two. “You’re not going to save her, Nicholas,” I say sharply. “If anyone saves her, it’ll be God and you’ll just be his helper—although in fact I doubt very much if it’s possible for you to work directly on this case. If she agrees to counselling, wouldn’t you have to admit you know her too well to achieve the appropriate level of detachment?”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes—” He’s impatient. He knows it all. He’s within an inch of going over the top and swanning around like a wonder worker. “Obviously I can’t counsel her,” he says airily, “but I can supervise her case, encourage her, see her regularly as a friend—”

  “Just keep praying for her, Nicholas. That’s all God’s ever required you to do for Venetia. Leave the treatment, supervision and encouragement to others.”

  He sighs, knowing I’m right. The wonder worker vanishes and I’m facing a balanced priest again.

  “Personally,” I say, finally unable to resist letting my prejudice show, “I can’t help thinking that the less personal contact you have with that woman the better.”

  I’ve blown it. Too bad; I was doing so well. Why on earth couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut?

  “Oh, sod off!” exclaims Nicholas exasperated. “Why do you always behave as if all women are out to seduce me?”

  “Because they usually are.”

  “But you know perfectly well I’ve no desire whatsoever to go to bed with Venetia! You know perfectly well she’s just an old friend, six years my senior, whose path only occasionally crosses with mine! Lewis, I know you have a certain problem at the moment, but can’t you honestly see there’s no need here to talk as if Venetia’s a wicked temptress who can destroy a man’s will-power just by the flick of her false eyelashes?”

  Bingo.

  Dear God!

  The unvarnished truth finally dawns.

  COMMENT: God must be thinking I’m as blind as a bat and as dumb as a donkey. And to think I even dreamed of V-signs last night! Of course the V wasn’t for Victory! It was for Venetia.

  Repression, repression, repression—how I’ve repressed the memory of those amusing, stimulating, erotic, deliriously dangerous interludes with Venetia at Cynthia’s lunch! It’s true I behaved impeccably throughout and made sure I had Alice to chaperone me when I took Venetia home, but underneath all that faultless behaviour …

  No wonder Nicholas was asking me: “When were you last conscious of saying to yourself: ‘I refuse to get my hip replaced’?” My hip was giving me hell that day but I distinctly remember telling myself I was never going to do away with it. I may have chosen to believe at the time that this was because I couldn’t face a sojourn in hospital, but the rock-bottom truth was that I couldn’t face life without my arthritic chastity belt; I knew, on an unconscious (semi-conscious?) level that I’d met a woman I fancied and was tempted.

  But why exactly was I tempted? Logically Venetia should have left me cold. She’s the same class as my wife, she’s wasted her life just as my wife did, and she’s a drunk, just as my wife was. Ah yes, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I failed to save Diana; I had a share in her ruin, and the guilt’s haunted me ever since. But Venetia seems to be offering me the chance to assuage the guilt, redeem the tragedy, put right, in another place and in another time, all that went wrong with my marriage.

  What a dangerous illusion to be harbouring! Now just you face up to the facts, Lewis Hall. Your attraction to upper-class women is always disastrous. That’s because fundamentally they remind you of your mother—the bitch!—and after the first sexual ecstasy has evaporated, that reminder takes over and kills any desire (a) because the desire now feels incestuous and (b) because you couldn’t stand your mother anyway. So you’re then led down the thorny psychological path of splitting off the sexual relationship and dumping it on someone else, preferably the nearest working-class woman (so unlike your mother) available. Result? You wind up in unintegrated chaos with a split-level life and a failed relationship which produces nothing but suffering to yourself and to others.

  No wonder I felt called to celibacy once my marriage had ended! After my career as a walking sexual disaster the only way I could live with the memory of all the shame and mess was to channel the sexual energy into a constructive cause and dump the destructive lifestyle. And that decision worked for me—or at least it did once I’d pulled myself together after the divorce, resigned from that dead-awful parish and taken that absorbing chaplaincy in the mental hospital, the job that led me into the ministry of healing.
All right, so my life wasn’t all purity after that; I wasn’t a saint, and God knows I did get into a terrible mess in 1983 when I was kicked out of my diocese and wound up dead drunk on Nicholas’s doorstep, but I picked myself up again, didn’t I (by the grace of God), and I clawed my way back onto an even keel (by the grace of God) and I’ve been more or less all right ever since (by the grace of God)—until today when I realise that thanks to Venetia I’m in danger of going off my rocker again; I’m flirting with the insane delusion that now I’m a staid old priest working at St. Benet’s instead of a raffish young soldier on leave during the Blitz, I can finally sustain a relationship with a woman of my own class without creating an emotional wasteland.

  Talk about wishful thinking! Pathetic. The truth is that with my hang-ups I’m not fit for any woman, and although I always try to live in the hope that one day I’ll be healed, I know damned well I’m not healed yet, not by a long chalk.

  Merciful God, Almighty Father, what a mess I am, but thank you for giving me the strength to face the truth about myself, no matter how shaming and painful that is, so that having recognised my faults I may struggle afresh to overcome them and live a life more acceptable in your sight. And give me the grace, please, to be a good priest, mindful always of your will and wanting only to serve you as well as I possibly can. I ask this in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ. And in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I beg you to help me make a new effort to forgive my mother for abandoning me all those years ago—help me, please, to treat every woman I now meet with respect in the knowledge that all men and women are of equal value in your sight. Amen.

  Wednesday, 24th August, 1988: I feel better. Of course there’s no question of me having any kind of relationship with Venetia, that cleverer, wittier, more eccentric, more arresting and infinitely more fascinating version of my wife. Besides, I don’t want another alcoholic wife any more than she wants another clerical husband—although not even my worst enemy could describe me as “limp” (her word) in any vital department—and unlike Diana Venetia may well have the guts to make a go of Alcoholics Anonymous. So bearing those vital facts in mind, perhaps …

  No. I’m lapsing into fantasy. Forget her.

  I’m diverted from all this turgid introspection by the arrival of my son-in-law, swirling south from his diocese and sweeping all before him—undertakers, solicitors, Diana’s neighbours, even the staff at the Healing Centre who happen to be in the reception area when he sails in, flashing his purple stock and his trendy made-in-the-Third-World pectoral cross. I feel like bashing him over the head with my crucifix. Fortunately Nicholas is there. Nicholas was so good to me as soon as I told him about Diana. He quite understands how I feel; he accepts my assertion that she was still my wife in God’s sight even though in the eyes of the secular world we were divorced, and he never queries my statement that I’m the one who should have the responsibility of organising the funeral. But Nicholas also understands how Charley feels. Nicholas tells me Charley doesn’t realise how connected I always felt with Diana; Nicholas says Charley honestly believes he’s doing me a favour by muscling in on my territory. After all, my hip does slow me down. And Rachel is, as usual, on the verge of another breakdown. Charley’s muscling in because he wants to be kind to a semi-disabled old man and because he wants to protect his wife from additional stress.

  In the end I just say to Nicholas: “Okay, tell him to get on with it. I won’t make a scene. He’s not the only one who wants to protect Rachel.”

  I have to record that later Charley was very kind to me. He is without doubt a good man. The only trouble is I just can’t stand him. I’d rather have an old-fashioned Evangelical, steeped in Protestant piety, than this subtle, silver-tongued power-broker with his mix-’n’-match selection of theological wares which range from biblical scholarship through trendy liturgy to questionable charismatic histrionics. I hate it when the Church tries to be fashionable in order to kow-tow to secular society. I even heard Charley ask Nicholas if we were planning to employ a woman deacon as the curate once Stacy moves on! And he knows I disapprove utterly of women deacons. Ordaining women as deacons is the thin end of the wedge which the feminists have now used (courtesy of the recent abysmal session of General Synod) to ensure that legislation to permit priestesses will be debated in a few years’ time. Meanwhile the newspapers are constantly yammering about “women priests” whenever they’re not bleating about acid-house parties, AIDS, child abuse, that filthy film The Last Temptation of Christ and all the other revolting aspects of our increasingly decadent society.

  The Church’s decadence in particular fills me with deep gloom. Imagine a mass taken by a priestess! Disgusting! The men in the congregation would be able to think of nothing but sex.

  If the Church of England goes off its collective rocker and approves the legislation to permit the ordination of women to the priesthood, I’ll bloody well go over to Rome!

  COMMENT: That disgraceful use of the word “bloody” shows how disturbed I am, and as for the last two paragraphs of the above entry, they appear to have been written by some nutter who’s behaving like a character in a Freudian case-book. But then a great many ordinary, sane, intelligent people, male and female, are talking like that nowadays whenever the subject of women’s ordination comes up for discussion, and we can’t all be nutters. The truth is that I genuinely believe women priests are incompatible with our great tradition. (Or am I just latching on to this convenient belief to satisfy my hang-ups? That’s a very nasty thought, but no, it’s so nasty that it can’t possibly be true. I’m a traditional Anglo-Catholic and I’m perfectly entitled to believe, for the purest possible theological reasons, that women should not be admitted to the priesthood.)

  All right, calm down, lower the blood pressure. I’m just very upset about Diana at the moment, that’s all, and this is making me a trifle astringent in my comments about the opposite sex. Well … vitriolic, actually. Must call a spade a spade. Vitriolic. Very nasty. Wholly unchristian. In short, disgusting. Dear God, what a mess I am whenever I’m suffering from anti-women fever …

  But at least being anti-women ensures that I don’t start mooning over Venetia.

  Monday, 5th September, 1988: The torn-out pages between this entry and the entry above have now been burnt. I decided to destroy my lengthy ruminations on the funeral. Looking at them today I felt that not only had I never read such maudlin, self-centred, self-indulgent twaddle in all my life, but that such revolting ramblings had no place in any journal kept as a spiritual discipline. Great-Uncle Cuthbert would have puked.

  All that needs to be said about the funeral was that it was hell. Afterwards Nicholas allowed me to get drunk. I suppose he thought it would be therapeutic—as if I could exhaust the urge to blot out the pain in one fell swoop—but in fact I got drunk every night for a week. I sacked my spiritual director (but later reinstated him). I was unable to work. Nicholas sat up with me every night and listened as I reviewed the painful past and wound up rambling on and on and on, just as I always do when I’m very disturbed, about Great-Uncle Cuthbert—how he’d saved me, how I’d let him down by not becoming a monk, how disappointed he would have been with me if he’d lived, how guilty I felt for not fulfilling his high hopes, how haunted I felt whenever I fell short of his high standards, how I wished he’d come back and straighten me out, how I’d loved him, how I’d hated him, how I’d feared him, how I’d admired him … And so on and so on and so on.

  Dreadful. Nicholas was a saint to stand it.

  Refusing to abandon me at the weekend he took me home with him to Butterfold where I spent much time sitting in the garden, reading my favourite spiritual classics and trying not to get on Rosalind’s nerves. As it was during the school holidays, his boys were there. The elder one’s very boring, a hearty extrovert; the younger one’s rather different but apes the older one so that they seem more alike than they really are. Nicholas tries hard with them but there’s no real communication going on. Never mind, I’m sure th
e boys appreciate the fact that he tries.

  Not for the first time I wonder how I would have got on with my own father if he had survived my infancy instead of pegging out with pneumonia after soaking himself on a grouse-moor. How would I have communicated with a soldier addicted to field-sports? What does one say to a simple soul who considers his mission in life is to kill things? When I was growing up I used to mind being fatherless, but now I can see I was spared endless discomfort. And besides … I got the paternal attention I needed in the end, didn’t I? But I mustn’t start drivelling on again about Great-Uncle Cuthbert.

  Finally—today, Monday, the fifth of September—I get back to work. Almost the first person I see is Venetia. She’s in the reception area waiting to talk to Nicholas. The Medusa locks are floating around her shoulders in a most unsuitable style for a middle-aged woman, but does she care? No. She’s made up to the hilt and wearing a sky-blue T-shirt inscribed with the message MAKE MY DAY—THE NIGHTS ARE TAKEN CARE OF, a message obviously designed for some moronic teenage tart trying to be cute, but does she give a damn whether the message demeans her or not? No. She’s also wearing navy-blue trousers, wholly inappropriate for a woman of fifty-plus with large hips, but does this unwise flouting of sartorial convention inhibit her in any way? No. Her green eyes look at me as if I’m some form of very low life which has just crawled out from under a stone, and we’re all set, obviously, for a show-stopping reunion.

  “Hi,” she says in her gruffest voice, looking at some spot beyond my right shoulder.

  “Good morning,” I growl, and disappear at top speed into consulting room two.

  I spend five minutes taking deep breaths and thinking what a stupid old man I am, but finally I stop feeling aroused and get down to work. I listen, I counsel, I pray, I perform the laying-on of hands, and to my surprise everything goes well. I was worried in case I was still too damaged to be an effective channel for the Holy Spirit, but of course God’s no stranger to damaged mankind; he’s constantly working in us and through us to achieve his purposes, yet it’s still amazing what can be achieved, even by a battered old wreck like me, in the name of Jesus Christ, our mentor, the finest healer of all time.