I opened the door. Nicholas was looking haggard, shattered, greyish. His normally neat brown hair was disordered. His eyes were bloodshot.
He said: “Alice, I have something very difficult and very painful to say,” and at once I thought: Rosalind’s been killed in a car crash. But I believe I knew, even before this pathetic sentence slithered across my mind, that the violent death didn’t belong to Rosalind.
Nicholas said: “It’s Stacy. Something’s happened to him, something terrible. I’m so sorry, Alice, so very sorry, I know how fond of him you were.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes, but there’s more I have to tell you.”
I knew what that meant, but I found I was unable to utter the word “suicide.” All I could whisper was: “How?”
“There was a rope. He used a beam in the roof.”
For a split second I visualized the scene but then my imagination blacked out. I heard myself saying in an absurdly calm voice: “I’m to blame,” and then as the shock curled over me like a huge tidal wave, I felt as if I were drowning, wiped out along with my cherished oasis by primitive forces far beyond all human control.
II
Nicholas looked stupefied. “Your fault? But my dear Alice—”
I started to explain but after one stumbling sentence he interrupted: “You know what was going on, don’t you?” and when I nodded dumbly he moved at once to the intercom in the kitchen.
“Lewis,” I heard him say. “There’s another angle on all this. You’d better join us.” Turning back to me he gestured to the sofa and we both sat down. “I was about to call the emergency services,” he said, “but that can wait. It’s vital that we pool our knowledge so that we can work out exactly what happened.”
I nodded, trying to wipe the tears from my eyes, and as we sat down James wriggled through the catflap; he always knew when Nicholas was around. Nicholas picked him up and arranged him carefully in my lap. I began to stroke the stripey fur.
Lewis entered the flat with difficulty, shoved the door shut with one of his crutches, laid a comforting hand briefly on my shoulder and sat down abruptly on the dining-chair which Nicholas had pulled close to the sofa. Like Nicholas he was looking haggard, but unlike Nicholas he showed no sign of being battered by grief. I was sure he was experiencing powerful emotions, but he was in control of them. I could sense his mind focusing sharply on the key problems: how to protect Nicholas, how to evict the dark forces which had invaded the Rectory, how to ensure our survival. Suddenly I felt a fraction less frightened, but the easing of fear opened the way for a fresh onslaught of grief. I began to cry.
“There, there!” said Lewis, effortlessly slipping into a paternal role. “You’ve had a terrible shock. Nicholas, make some tea.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m all right.” But I wasn’t. I stifled the sobs but the tears kept coming. When Nicholas returned to the kitchen and James slipped off my lap to follow him, Lewis heaved himself onto the sofa so that he could sit beside me. “Dear little Alice!” he said. “I’m so sorry.” And somehow when he spoke as gently as that it was hard to remember his chronic grumpiness. Very tentatively, my eyes still blurred with tears, I found his hand and held his thumb. I didn’t quite dare to hold the whole hand in case he recoiled at my familiarity, but he at once curved his palm around my fingers. His customary smell of whisky, cigarettes and Pears soap was immensely comforting.
Nicholas returned with a mug of tea and sat down inches away from me in the chair Lewis had vacated. I took a sip from the mug and found the tea had been well sweetened. In relief I drank some more.
At last I said: “I knew something had gone very wrong, but the trouble didn’t seem at first to be centred on Stacy. I just thought—” But I had to break off and pretend to sip tea.
Lewis said: “Take your time. Your evidence is very important. There’s nothing we can do now for Stacy, but we can still fight to save Nicholas’s ministry at St. Benet’s.”
I nodded but I was barely listening to him. I was looking back over the past week at the Rectory and trying to pinpoint the moment when everything had started to go wrong …
III
In my memory I saw Rosalind, arriving at the Rectory with Nicholas on Tuesday afternoon. I’m not saying life was trouble-free before her arrival—obviously we all had our problems, since we were human beings and not robots—but the problems seemed to be manageable and we jogged along comfortably enough. After all, one can live very happily with several kegs of dynamite provided that there are no matches around. But Rosalind was the box of matches, and all it takes to light a fuse is a single flame.
At the time I was blissfully content. Even my problems had become manageable once I had the right job and the right home. I loved my little flat which looked out over the jungly garden and I loved having a cat again and I loved being part of the St. Benet’s team. Best of all I loved looking after my three men—my substitute father, substitute brother and substitute husband—and keeping them all well fed and neatly organised. Those feminists who believe women are debased by caring for men in this way just don’t have a clue what real life’s all about. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.
Anyway, there I was, so happy that I’d even lost interest in rum raisin ice cream, when disaster struck and Rosalind arrived. Nicholas said she was planning to live permanently at the Rectory and would be staying for a while to work out how the house could best be altered into a family home. I was horrified because she was such a malign presence; I could sense that beneath her immaculate exterior she was a mass of churning emotions, all of them unhappy. Nicholas clearly adored her, and at first I tormented myself by thinking of them having magnificent sex in their vast double-bed, but within forty-eight hours I’d begun to believe that grade-A sex wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—on the agenda. Rosalind was too unhappy. Sex was around somewhere, had to be, since Nicholas adored her so much, but I sensed it would be shadowed in some way, sort of maimed and off-colour—and suddenly the memory popped up in my mind of that tragic scene in the famous film Don’t Look Now when the characters played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie have sex not to express their love for each other but to anaesthetise themselves from their problems.
This visit of Rosalind’s was utterly different from her previous visits. Nicholas was very tense, quite unlike himself, and Rosalind, usually so silky and self-assured, was spiky and restless. I had already spent much time trying to work out why Nicholas was so besotted with this detestable woman, and now, when she was clearly infecting him with her unhappiness, I considered the puzzle afresh, but no explanation I dreamed up ever satisfied me. I accepted that love wasn’t always sensible, but I still didn’t see how he could even like her. She didn’t share his interests. She didn’t even bother to go to the eight o’clock service with him on the morning after her arrival. She obviously hated the Rectory and couldn’t wait to strip it of all its quirky individuality. (Okay, the kitchen was a bit dog-eared, but who cared? I certainly didn’t, but Rosalind the Wrecker obviously thought the entire house was fit only for the scrap-heap.) What on earth was Nicholas doing with such a creature? The whole marriage struck me as totally bizarre.
In the end I was so disturbed by the prospect of Rosalind inhabiting the Rectory on a permanent basis that I confessed my anxiety to Lewis, but he was reassuring. “Don’t worry, my dear,” he said. “The plan will never work—she’ll lose interest and go back to her garden at Butterfold. But nevertheless,” he added sharply as I sagged with relief, “we have to do all we can to try to make this experiment successful. Otherwise when it fails and they look around for someone to blame, we’ll be the prime candidates.”
I knew then, although Lewis was always careful never to say a word against Rosalind, that he disliked her as much as I did and was as appalled as I was by the thought of her coming to live among us. It was Stacy, not Lewis, who regarded Rosalind through rose-tinted spectacles.
“She’s so elegant!” he sighed to me
after her arrival that week. “So regal! I like to think of Nick being married to someone like that. Only someone really high-class could ever be worthy of him.”
This sort of sentimental twaddle irritated me so much that I behaved just like Aunt. “She’s not particularly high-class,” I said tartly. “Her father was just a country solicitor.”
“But her grandfather owned a lot of land in that village where Nick grew up!”
“Probably just an acre of garden plus a paddock for the pony.”
However, Stacy was determined to cling to his vision of Queen Rosalind, the only woman in England good enough for his hero. Stacy worshipped Nicholas. It was all part of his abnormality. “Abnormality” may seem a harsh word, but it is abnormal for a man in his mid-twenties to dote on his boss with the passion of a thirteen-year-old idolising a rock-star. Stacy was immature, indulging in behaviour he should have outgrown years ago, and it occurred to me as I brooded on his arrested development that what he really needed was a dynamic female to blast him out of his adolescence.
Once when I was peeling potatoes—I have so many creative thoughts at the kitchen sink—I thought Francie could play the necessary femme fatale. She had plenty of oomph and was, as I well knew, indestructibly warm-hearted; I thought she might take Stacy on out of sheer generosity of spirit even though she was a practising Christian and (presumably) anti-adultery. However, this brilliant idea came to nothing because I soon realised that Francie was never going to look twice at any man except Nicholas. She was madly in love with him. Of course she did a wonderful job in passing off her passion as harmless hero-worship, but I was ultra-sensitive to all the feminine adoration which swirled around Nicholas and eventually it dawned on me that Francie was not only nuts about him but might just possibly be nuts about everything. I had no proof of such fullscale nuttiness. This was just my intuition working at full blast, but as soon as I sensed that Francie was far nuttier than anyone imagined I started to observe her much more closely in the hope that I would find the proof which would confirm my intuition.
I noticed, whenever we met for coffee, that her husband was usually abroad somewhere. I already knew her children were away at boarding school, but now I picked up the unspoken message that they were teenagers who didn’t want their mother fussing around them whenever they were at home. In short, life on the home front was a desert. She was always saying how busy she was, but it seemed to me that her social life only woke up when her husband came home—and even then it merely consisted of attending corporate events with him or giving dinner-parties for his business acquaintances. She appeared to have no close friends apart from Rosalind, but from the tart comments Francie was now making about her I soon realised that beneath the show of friendship lay envy and dislike.
I saw then that Francie’s warm, outgoing manner, cultivated for her work at St. Benet’s, was no more than a mask, and beyond the mask was the real Francie: isolated, needy and simmering with convoluted emotions which were all stealthily becoming focused on Nicholas. Certainly she was much too preoccupied to vamp Stacy, who was meanwhile continuing his career as an elderly adolescent.
I was just brooding on Stacy’s problems for the umpteenth time when suddenly, quite without warning, he began to act out of character.
Stacy was actually great fun. I’ve been unfair, emphasising the Nicholas-worship and implying he was nerdish. Sunny-natured, keen to help, keen to please, keen to be kind to everyone he met, he bounded around with a zest which only a kill-joy would have criticised. Every now and then he was downcast when reality failed to meet his joyous expectations, but he always bounced back quickly and sallied forth once more with his optimism intact. Sometimes I felt he was too innocent, too nice-natured, to cope with the harsher facts of life, and this made me wonder how suited he really was for the ministry of healing which so often involved working with the depressed, the damaged and the dying. I wondered too if he himself ever questioned his suitability or whether his child-like optimism was his way of shutting out truths which he found too difficult to face. That was why, when he began to act out of character, I was immediately very worried. I thought he might be finally cracking up, unable to come to terms with the fact that he was in the wrong job and unable to imagine a separation from his beloved Nicholas.
He began to behave oddly on Thursday, two days after Rosalind’s arrival, when the atmosphere at the Rectory was so tense that I half-expected it to twang whenever I took a deep breath. Even Shirin our cleaner, who probably thought we were all odd, seemed extra-shy and extra-nervous, as if our western life-style had reached new heights of eccentricity.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, long after Shirin had trundled back into Tower Hamlets after her morning’s work, Stacy came home early from the Healing Centre. I was taking a bag of rubbish out to the dustbins which stood tucked out of sight of Egg Street on the side of the Rectory which faced the office building. There had once been a basement entrance there but it had been closed off when the kitchen was moved upstairs, so when I took out the rubbish I had to use the front door.
As I stepped outside that afternoon with the garbage bag in my hand I saw Stacy chatting with his girlfriend. Tara was large, almost as large as I’d been on my arrival at the Rectory, and although she was so jolly and good-hearted she wasn’t in the least pretty so I couldn’t help wondering how Stacy avoided comparing her to his sisters and finding her wanting. Stacy pined for his sisters. He pined for his mother too, but he pined for those three girls more. Two were brunettes and one was a redhead. In their photographs all were slim, and his favourite—raven-haired, blue-eyed Aisling—was beautiful. Stacy had shed a tear when showing me her wedding pictures but I had pretended not to see it. I knew the Irish had no tradition of maintaining a stiff upper lip, but nevertheless I had felt embarrassed, as if I had uncovered yet another abnormal streak in Stacy’s personality. Surely one didn’t get so emotional about a sister’s marriage? But maybe, if one was Irish, one did; maybe Stacy’s habit of showing the photos of Aisling’s wedding to everyone he met was the height of Irish normality.
As I began to lug the garbage around to the side of the house I waved at Stacy and Tara and they waved back, Tara calling: “Cheers, Alice!” in her usual friendly fashion. Having disposed of the bag I returned indoors, and I was just pottering around the kitchen again when Stacy bounced in and demanded to know the menu for dinner.
“Steak-and-kidney pie,” I said, “potatoes and cabbage, stewed apples and custard to follow.”
“Wowee!” exclaimed Stacy, typically joyous, utterly normal. I deduced that he had finally dredged up the courage to ask Tara for another date. Then he said: “Mrs. Darrow’s just waved to me from her flat and I’m going up to see her.”
Off he went, bounding up the main staircase in a succession of receding thuds.
I began to make the pie. Some time afterwards Nicholas wandered in, looking pale and drawn, and said he and Rosalind would be present for dinner that night after all; he was sorry for any inconvenience this would cause me. I was surprised by this decision, since Rosalind had always given the impression of being too grand for a communal meal, but I assured him there was no difficulty as the pie was large and I could cook extra vegetables. He then sat down and watched for a while in silence as I prepared the food. He liked to do that. He seemed to find it relaxing, and again I sensed the jagged edges of his profound anxiety.
I was now sure he was having terrible trouble with Rosalind, but I couldn’t work out what the trouble was. Surely if he adored her he would be glad that she was planning this horrible take-over of the Rectory? But perhaps I’d got it all wrong and his troubles had nothing to do with Rosalind at all. Maybe they were spiritual troubles (whatever that meant). I knew he had been to see his nun that morning. Lewis had said so when he had been explaining to me why Nicholas would be missing both the eight o’clock service and the communal breakfast.
I had long since learnt that clergymen didn’t wait until there was an emergency be
fore they made an appointment to see their spiritual directors, but nevertheless I felt sure that on this occasion an emergency must exist. For Nicholas to pass up both the service and the communal breakfast was unprecedented. I wondered why he couldn’t have seen his nun later in the day. The obvious answer was that a crisis had demanded immediate action.
I had noticed at breakfast that Lewis was barely touching his food. This too was unprecedented. As I now sculpted the pastry of the pie and recalled his lack of appetite I felt the knot of anxiety tighten in the pit of my stomach.
Suddenly I realised Nicholas was talking after a long silence. He was making a brief, moving speech about how I was the healer at the Rectory, and implying that the official healers were the ones who needed to be healed. I knew by this time that the “official healers” always themselves received the laying-on of hands at the healing services in acknowledgement of the fact that everyone in this imperfect world was in need of healing of some kind, but Nicholas was now giving this fact a very special slant. I hardly knew what to say—–and I certainly couldn’t imagine what had led him to pay me such an extraordinary compliment—but I picked up the hidden message that he was in pain and that I was somehow helping him simply by being there, so I didn’t say: “What a load of old codswallop!” and look embarrassed. I just thanked him as simply as I could and got on with making the pie.
Nicholas smiled. That meant he was feeling better. He stroked James behind the ears, and as James purred I suddenly felt so happy, so absolutely at one with the world, that I didn’t care about that horrible wife of his any more. At that moment I also found I could believe Lewis’s prediction that the plan to remodel the Rectory would come to nothing and Rosalind would return permanently to Butterfold. I didn’t expect that Nicholas would then stop adoring her and turn to me; I wasn’t nuts like Francie. But at least, once Rosalind had slotted back into Butterfold, we’d all recover our equilibrium and live in harmony again.
The Wonder Worker Page 52
