The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  I stopped speaking. There was a deep, deep silence before I concluded flatly: “If nothing did happen with Rosalind, it wouldn’t have been because he was homosexual. It would have been because he was so hung up on his sister that he found all sex with women taboo.”

  Both men appeared to be carved in stone. Then as Lewis finally exclaimed in stupefaction: “What a lesson for the arrogant priests!” Nicholas leant forward again and this time clasped both my hands in his.

  II

  Beside me Lewis flinched and violently crushed out his cigarette on the rim of the plate which protected the end-table from my latest pot-plant. At once I tried to detach my hands but I failed; Nicholas was holding them too tightly. I was acutely aware of his hot skin and strong bones and the flowing lines of his long fingers as I said in a rush: “You both believe me?” I knew it was immensely important to keep the conversation moving.

  “Of course we believe you,” said Nicholas.

  Lewis added dryly: “Fortunately we’re still capable of recognising the truth when we meet it eyeball to eyeball. Nicholas, I think Alice would prefer her hands to be released.”

  “Thank you,” said Nicholas, “but I’m quite capable of reaching that conclusion myself.” His fingers trailed lightly over my flesh as he withdrew them again.

  “What’s so extraordinary,” said Lewis before any kind of pause could develop, “is that Stacy was able to confide so completely in Alice. He was never so frank with us.”

  “Well, of course he wasn’t!” I exclaimed exasperated. “And it wasn’t extraordinary at all that he always found it easier to talk to me—Stacy was so used to confiding in women! As a matter of fact I could never understand why you sent him to a male spiritual director. Why couldn’t he have gone to see your nun, Nicholas?”

  “Yes, Clare would have been right for him, I see that now.”

  “But why wasn’t it obvious to you earlier?”

  “A lot of things weren’t obvious to us earlier.”

  “The fact is, my dear,” said Lewis, “that it’s really better if spiritual directors are priests. And of course all priests are male.”

  “Why is it better if spiritual directors are priests?” I said, feeling quite irrationally angry. “And why are all priests male?”

  “They won’t be for much longer,” said Nicholas.

  “If Stacy had had a woman spiritual director,” I persisted fiercely, “a woman spiritual director who was also a priest, then I’m sure he wouldn’t have ended up in a vile mess where he was so lonely and so homesick and so miserable that he—”

  “No priest should have allowed Stacy to muddle on as he did,” interrupted Lewis tersely, “but I hardly think our failure here is an argument for the ordination of women!”

  My fury overwhelmed me. “Why, you horrid, bigoted old brute!” I shouted at him. “Have you any idea how bloody offensive you are when you act as if women were a subhuman species? I bet Jesus wouldn’t have stood it! He’d have bashed your teeth in!”

  And scooping the cat into my arms I burst into tears and blundered from the room.

  III

  I didn’t blunder far. The living-room of my little flat adjoined the bedroom. Slamming the bedroom door behind me I leant back against the panels, held James more tightly than ever and let the tears flow unimpeded as I shuddered with my violent emotions. Grief for Stacy was now rapidly elbowing aside my anger with Lewis.

  The door was ill-fitting, made of cheap wood. I could still hear their voices clearly. Nicholas was saying in exasperation: “You silly old sod!” and Lewis was snapping: “I was distracted. If you’d behaved properly with Alice instead of pawing her repeatedly like a wonder worker on the make—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! You touched her yourself at the start of the conversation!”

  “That was a justifiable professional gesture, entirely appropriate for the occasion, and I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of repeating it by grabbing both her hands and staring soulfully into her eyes!”

  “I categorically deny—”

  “Anyway I don’t count, do I? I’m just a bigoted old brute who deserves to have his teeth smashed in!”

  “You surely can’t have found that judgement surprising!”

  “Yes, I did! Dear little Alice, talking like a hard-boiled feminist—”

  “Well, if you insist on making idiotic remarks about women at exactly the wrong pastoral moment, what the hell can you expect?”

  “All right, all right, all right—”

  “Okay, maybe it was healthier for her to vent all her anger about Stacy’s death on you rather than turning it inwards on herself—maybe you performed a brilliant pastoral manoeuvre—”

  “Fat chance. Dear God, why can I never get it right with women?”

  “Forget it. Let’s refocus. Where have we got to?”

  “We’ve established,” said Lewis, sounding unutterably relieved to be reined in, “that you’d be entirely truthful if you told the coroner that Stacy was currently only interested in dating Miss Tara Hopkirk from the Isle of Dogs. That means there’s no need to get into any discussion with the police about whether or not Stacy was gay. On the other hand—”

  “—on the other hand, if there’s no gay angle and the police are still trying to work out why he committed suicide, they’ll wonder if Tara was the only woman in his life, and—”

  “—and Francie will eventually be unable to resist spilling the beans about Rosalind.”

  “But if we assume that Francie’s so infatuated that she’d want to protect me from scandal—”

  “She may want to protect you now, but will she be so supportive in future when you keep rejecting her? Remember that the dynamic behind full-blown erotomania isn’t love; it’s hatred. It’s all about control and domination, the attempt by inadequate people to assert themselves on the objects of their desire.”

  “I wish,” said Nicholas, “I was more confident that we knew precisely what was going on with Francie.”

  “Never mind the diagnosis for the moment. The only thing that matters in this context is that Francie’s unreliable, and if you can’t rely on Francie not to spill the beans, it might be better to head off the police by playing the gay card, admitting Stacy had a homosexual past and saying he’d just been tested for HIV. That would not only make it easier to discredit Francie’s story later—it would stop the police dead in their tracks right now. It’s well known that young men can commit suicide if they fear they have AIDS, and once the police know about the gay angle they’ll never stop to wonder if another woman was involved.”

  “Yes, but Lewis, we can’t push that line. We can’t push it because we know it’s not true. Stacy didn’t commit suicide because he feared he was HIV-positive. He committed suicide because he couldn’t face up to the consequences of having gone to bed with my wife.”

  “But the HIV possibility must have been a factor—”

  “It was by no means inevitable that he was infected. He would have waited for the result of the test.”

  “You’re assuming he was thinking calmly and rationally. But if he panicked, decided he had HIV and feared he’d infected Rosalind—”

  “He couldn’t have feared that if he was impotent.”

  “There might still have been oral sex. If there’d been a cut or a lesion—”

  “This is all speculation, Lewis, and we can’t speculate now, there’s no time. If we could somehow work out which line we’re going to take to the police so that the press pick up the right information—”

  “Well, one thing at least is certain: we’ve got to cut out the Rosalind angle. We agreed that at the Barbican.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There’s nothing scandalous about a young man rejecting a homosexual way of life, going into the Church and never again looking at another man. But for a curate to bed his boss’s wife—”

  “Wait, there’s something we’ve entirely overlooked. Lewis, even if Francie and Gil keep quiet and even i
f you and I manage to avoid talking of Rosalind while making a succession of truthful statements to the police about Stacy’s life prior to the seduction yesterday afternoon, the fact remains that the police will want to interview Alice. They’re bound to. As a resident of the Rectory she can provide evidence about his state of mind. And how on earth can we ask Alice, of all people, to lie about his final conversation with her last night?”

  I tucked James under one arm, wrenched open the door and blazed back into the living-room to sort them out.

  IV

  I said strongly: “You’re only thinking of yourselves. But what about Stacy? And what about the family he loved so much? Is no one to speak for them?” Then as both men rose to their feet I fought back my tears, struggled to keep my voice level and declared: “I believe one should keep faith with the dead. The last thing Stacy would have wanted is for Nicholas to be dragged through the tabloid press—as he will be if the mess with Rosalind gets out. And the second to last thing Stacy would have wanted is for his family to know he ever—ever—had a homosexual affair. I suppose there are gays who would say that was a pathetic attitude but I don’t care—–I think it would be very wrong to cause extra pain to Stacy’s family when they have to grapple with the horrible fact of his suicide.”

  I paused, waiting for them to argue with me, but when neither of them spoke I said in a calmer voice: “Tell the police the truth by all means, but tell them the real truth, tell them the facts which really lie at the bottom of this catastrophe, tell them Stacy was lonely, cut off from his family and his culture, missing his favourite sister, worried about the difficulties of finding a steady girlfriend, not doing well at his job, perhaps worried deep down that he became a priest for the wrong reasons, frightened of failing in his career and disappointing the family who were so proud of him—and frightened too of failing and disappointing his hero Nicholas. If you tell the police all that, what more do they need to know? Do you really think Stacy would have got into such a mess with Rosalind if he hadn’t already been unbalanced as the result of all the problems he couldn’t handle? Tell the police he was vilely depressed but then for God’s sake shut up about the consequences! The only consequence the police need to know is that he wound up dead with a rope around his neck, and that’s a consequence they can see for themselves.”

  Lewis stepped forward, propped one crutch against the wall, scooped James from my arms, dumped him on the floor and hugged me. It was a very fast one-armed manoeuvre but it was quite definitely a hug. As he turned away he said to Nicholas: “Now it’s your turn to squirm at the sight of an excessive tactile gesture—and when you’ve finished squirming you can call the police.”

  But Nicholas was barely listening. He was looking straight into my eyes and saying: “If the police ask about Rosalind you must tell them the truth.”

  “Of course. I shall answer every question truthfully. But they don’t know there are any questions to ask about Rosalind, do they?”

  Lewis said suddenly: “What Alice said just now chimes with the suicide note—it’s obviously what Stacy wanted us to say. So why couldn’t we have seen that from the start, Nicholas? Why have we been tying ourselves in knots like this?”

  “Guilt. So long as we focused on the gay issue and the Rosalind disaster we could avoid admitting how thoroughly we mishandled him for so long.” Without warning he slumped down on the sofa before exclaiming with despair: “How are we ever going to come to terms with all this?”

  “Shut up!” said Lewis savagely—so savagely that I knew he too was shattered. “Save all that for later. Now call the blank-blank emergency services before we’re all arrested for trying to conceal a corpse.”

  Without another word Nicholas trudged back upstairs to make the call.

  V

  When we were alone I said to Lewis: “Sorry I yelled at you about teeth-bashing.”

  “I’m sure any woman would say I got what I deserved. Sit down, my dear, and rest for a moment. This is the kind of situation which can slice one to ribbons in less time than it takes to say ‘catastrophe.’ ”

  We sat down together again on the sofa and I stared blankly at the far wall, but eventually I dredged up the energy to remark: “I hate the thought that Francie might wind up in the witness-box at the inquest.”

  “You couldn’t hate it more than I do.” Lewis started to give me the latest report on her nuttiness. Apparently she had met Nicholas at Westminster Abbey earlier that evening and Nicholas had only been able to escape by running away.

  “But why on earth did Nicholas suggest a meeting in Westminster Abbey?”

  “It’s a long story, but the short version is that he thought he could best defuse her there.”

  “I can’t imagine how he came to that conclusion! Lewis, supposing she turns up at the Rectory tonight just as she did last Monday?”

  “No, that won’t happen because Harry’s just come home from Hong Kong. The odds are we’ve got Francie on ice until Monday.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Then we’ve got to defuse her, but how that’s going to be done I’ve no idea. I doubt if she’d ever consent to see a psychiatrist and so long as she can keep up an appearance of normality we’d never get her sectioned.”

  “Sectioned?”

  “Confined to a mental hospital under a certain section of the Mental Health Act.”

  “But couldn’t she be heading for a complete nervous breakdown?”

  “Possibly but not necessarily. The trouble is that without a diagnosis by a psychiatrist who’s spent time with her, we can’t be sure what’s going on. The whole situation’s a nightmare.”

  “Nicholas should have left her well alone!”

  “Of course he should! But Nicholas is at present as destabilised as Rosalind—which reminds me, I’d like to offer you a piece of advice. Don’t make the mistake of casting Rosalind as the villainess of the piece. When a marriage founders there are almost always faults on both sides—and that leads me to yet another piece of advice I’d like to give you: don’t assume that just because the marriage is in difficulties the Darrows are going to wind up divorced.”

  “But surely only a marriage on the rocks would explain why Rosalind—”

  “Marriages can be floated off the rocks. What you may not understand is that the Darrows’ marriage is very durable. If it wasn’t it would have collapsed long ago.”

  I managed to say levelly: “I know he loves her,” but Lewis just shrugged his shoulders as if this fact were hardly relevant.

  “They’re certainly very deeply connected,” he said, “and the connection is without doubt very real, but what that’s got to do with ‘love’ in the conventional romantic sense I’m not sure. Alice, the big question here isn’t: ‘Do they love each other?’ It’s: ‘Can they live permanently apart?’ And I have a suspicion that a permanent separation may prove far more difficult than Rosalind’s currently willing to believe.”

  I heard myself say: “You’re warning me off, aren’t you?”

  “I’m telling you the truth as I see it. What you do with that truth is up to you.”

  “Tell me the truth about something else: why did you make such a fuss about Nicholas holding my hands?”

  “It was the way he held them. We work in a ministry where certain boundaries are essential and tactile gestures should be governed by strict rules. Nicholas should take care.”

  Glancing down I saw that my fists were clenched in my lap. Watching them I said: “I’m not another Francie.”

  “No. You’re a very remarkable young woman, Alice, but you too should take care. Don’t get blinded by illusions just because Nicholas is so destabilised at present that he’s taken to throwing common sense to the winds.”

  “Fat plain women like me don’t have illusions,” I found myself retorting in a high, rapid voice. “They get all their romantic dreams smashed to pieces at a very early age. I’ve no illusions about Nicholas—I can see he’s just a mixed-up mess at the moment
, but so what? That means I love someone real and it’s not a crime for me to love someone, particularly when I’ve always realised that my love’s never going to be reciprocated. Fat plain women don’t expect any man to love them, least of all men who are very attractive, so they don’t have the same expectations as ordinary women. They don’t expect ever to sit down to a square meal. They’re just content if they’re lucky enough to gather up a few crumbs of comfort occasionally in the form of liking and respect. They know that’s far better than having no food at all and starving to death.”

  I was breathing very hard by the time I had finished this speech. I was also feeling nauseous, as if someone had compelled me to strip off all my clothes in public. I had never before said such things to anyone. I had never revealed such deep and private wounds for inspection by another. I thought how furious Aunt would have been by such embarrassing behaviour. Tears sprang to my eyes as I thought of her, and as I turned my head away sharply I realised I too had been destabilised by the succession of terrible events at the Rectory.

  There was a pause before Lewis said in a studiedly neutral voice, as if he knew I would have interpreted any hint of kindness as pity and resented it: “My dear, you should distinguish between being obese and being plump. You’re no longer obese and I assure you there are plenty of men in the world who find plump women attractive. So there’s no reason why you should settle for anything less than a square meal.” Without giving me the chance to reply, he levered himself to his feet. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he was saying, “I must go and find out how the mixed-up mess is getting on.”

  The door closed.

  Screwing my eyes shut I clenched my fists again so tightly that they hurt and began to nerve myself to face the police.

  17

  At Burrswood we find the hours after death are a time when personal and corporate healing takes place.