Alice Hartley‘s Happiness

by Gregory, Philippa

  He knew of course that the Anglican Church is dedicated to exploring such deep and important theological questions as whether it is worse to have a fairy for a vicar than to have a woman. Overall, as far as Michael knew, the Church has ruled that a fairy is the lesser of the two evils. It’s all right to have a fairy for a vicar as long as he doesn’t sleep with anybody. He can be a fairy but not a practising fairy. A sort of theoretical fairy, a fairy-in-permanent-waiting. A fairy in limbo. A laid-up fairy.

  But nothing can redeem a woman from being a woman. Either you are a woman or you are not. You can’t really be a woman without being a practising woman. Michael was ignorant of the numbers of deaconesses in the Anglican Church who are giving it a good try …

  These complex theological points were of little interest to Michael, and this vicar was of little interest too. But he was a polite boy and did his mother credit by sitting nicely in the chair and waiting for the vicar to leave.

  ‘Now, I know that you are living here with a woman,’ the vicar said. His smile was intended to convey a broad-minded acceptance of changing styles.

  ‘WHY DOESN’T HE RIP MY CLOTHES OFF?’ came from the dining-room in a Lorelei-howl.

  Michael looked at the vicar and wondered why this stranger should be so familiar with Michael’s domestic arrangements and why he was smiling as he described them. Michael’s hackles rose slightly. Did this strange man find Michael living with Alice somehow funny?

  ‘So I just wanted you to know that though there are some real old-fashioned people here who are stuck on all the discarded morality – you know – marriage and chastity and sin and redemption – well, I’m not like that, and you won’t meet anyone like that at our church. You’re welcome at any time to come and take part in our services.’

  Michael blinked. ‘I don’t think we believe really …’ he said vaguely, thinking of Alice and the Great Earth Mother and what the two of Them would say about going to church.

  The vicar spread his hands. ‘Oh no!’ he said. ‘Nobody believes these days, we all doubt. It’s healthy! And no one reads the Bible or the old prayers, of course. We just have a coming together with a few songs with guitars from the youth group, of course, and then we all shake each other’s hands and then we go up to the end of the church and have a bit of bread and wine – we don’t call it communion or anything – don’t think you’re getting into any out-of-date mumbo-jumbo here! And then the real part begins when we have coffee at the back of the church and we get together as a group of people with shared doubts and uncertainties. I see it as more a community than a church. It’s really great!’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ Michael said feebly, going to the door. He hadn’t been to church for some time, but the memory he had of it was not that of a coffee morning made especially hideous by amateur young guitar players. ‘I’ll get her.’

  ‘You need not get her! She is Here!’ Alice said, throwing open the door and sweeping into the room.

  She had changed her dress since the babies had been sick on her shoulder and now she was wearing a long flowing purple sari. The brilliant gold hem swept the floor, the loose end, woven with gold thread, was flung carelessly over her shoulder. Her long black hair was combed free over her shoulders, a gold band tied across her forehead. Her breath, panting with passion, smelled sweetly of the elder-flower champagne which had worked such wonders with the babies.

  Even Michael, who was accustomed to her dress-style, gaped. The vicar, who was not, goggled, stepped sharply backwards, stumbled on a footstool and saved himself with a wild grab for the mantelpiece.

  ‘I know your sort!’ Alice said to him with unconcealed loathing. ‘I’ve met your sort before. You’re cocktail vicars, you are. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. A little bit of reincarnation and a little bit of Buddhism. A little bit of meditation and a little bit of psychiatry. A little bit of counselling training, enough to muddle people up, and a bit of humanism and liberalism. A lot of tolerance towards other religions because we’re all worshipping the same God, aren’t we? And a lot of sneering and unkindness to the old ladies on the flower rota who want to decorate the church and have a crib at Christmas. Sliced loaf for communion bread, and water instead of wine. Sweaters in the pulpit and the office hours in the vicarage.’

  The vicar gaped and clung to the mantelpiece as if it were a spar in a stormy sea.

  ‘No wonder people want magic!’ Alice thundered. ‘No wonder people want revivals! No wonder people want fundamentalism! They ask you for bread and you don’t even have the conviction to give them a stone. You give them Play-Doh!’

  Michael gasped. She was magnificent.

  The vicar gave up clinging to the mantelpiece and sank to the floor at her feet. Alice spurned him with her sandalled foot. At least, she stuck out her toe and gave him a prod, if that is what ‘spurning’ means.

  ‘I have more spirituality in my morning cup of tea than you have in the whole of a Sunday!’ she said disdainfully. ‘And you come around here pretending you are just biking past, to try and sell us this mish-mash of watered down half-heartedness! Good God! I should be ashamed of you if I was Jesus!’

  The vicar gave a pitiful little wail and buried his face in his hands. Alice looked down at him, unrelenting.

  ‘Yes, I would weep if I were you,’ she said fiercely. ‘No one has a clue what you think or what you mean. You don’t even have the guts to stick to a faith which has lasted two thousand years. You have to muck it about and dress it up and pretend that it’s trendy.’

  Despite her anger, her voice softened at that. Two thousand years, to a priestess of the Old Faith of the Great Mother, is chicken-feed – but Alice was too generous to taunt him with it. Between Alice and the Great Mother the vicar represented a passing phase, pathetic in its temporary nature – a kind of Jesus-come-lately.

  ‘You have to mash up your faith, and mix it up so that it blends with silly little fads which won’t last two seconds,’ she said. ‘No wonder people don’t go to church. They can get that sort of stuff at evening classes!’

  The vicar broke into a deep bellow of grief and sobbed into the hessian weave of Professor Hartley’s sofa. Alice tossed the end of her sari over her shoulder and stepped back a little.

  They waited. Michael looked at Alice for prompting. When Mrs Wheatley had cried like this they had charged her thirty pounds to do ‘YOU KNOW WHAT’. But he was not sure how to do that with a clergyman. He would not know quite where to start.

  Alice did not look at him, her eyes rested on the vicar and she stood with her head on one side, listening. His sobs showed no signs of abating, indeed they steadied into a rolling bawl. He sounded as if he were settling in for a good weep.

  Michael cleared his throat nervously. ‘What shall we do with him?’ he asked in an undertone.

  ‘Leave him to cry and charge him twenty-five pounds as he leaves,’ Alice said softly. ‘He’s a vicar, he understands about tithing. And set an extra place for supper. They always stay for tea, you’d think vicarages came without a kettle.’

  ‘Oh,’ Michael said. It wasn’t like this for Catholics.

  The vicar’s name was Maurice and he had second and third helpings of soup.

  That was a mistake, for Stephanie, who was learning to cook under Alice’s negligent tuition, had sliced some of the red mushrooms into it and it was spicey and slightly hallucinogenic. Everyone got very relaxed and friendly sitting around the kitchen table, and the vicar did balancing tricks with the glasses.

  Aunty Sarah watched him with her bright dark eyes. ‘Never visited me before then,’ she said sharply.

  Maurice looked at her, without recognition. ‘Are you one of my parishioners?’ he asked. He giggled delightedly. ‘One of my little flock?’ he asked. ‘One of my little flockers?’

  Stephanie stared at him with her huge black eyes.

  Alice cocked her head. ‘There’s a car coming up the drive,’ she said. ‘Anyone expecting someone?’

  They all shook th
eir heads. The young mothers were struggling home on the bus together, Stephanie was staying the night. Gary, Timofy and Jonafon would drive home in Gary’s Mini.

  ‘Yes, I am one of your parishioners all right!’ Aunty Sarah said with some of her old malice. ‘But I never saw hide nor hair of you before!’

  There was a sharp knock on the back door, Alice got up from the table and flung it open. The sweet smell of the dark spring night wafted into the kitchen, the onion and garlic and magic mushroom smell wafted out.

  Two pale faces stared in at them.

  ‘Excuse us intruding,’ the woman said in a sharp unapologetic voice. ‘We’ve not been introduced … but my husband’s bike has been leaning against your gate since two forty-three this afternoon. Is Maurice still here?’

  She was a pale-haired, pale-faced woman, about Alice’s age, with a mouth set in a narrow weary line. She wore her hair scraped back in a half ponytail on the back of her head. Her companion was an older woman with blue-rinsed hair and sharp grey eyes. She took a little step forwards so that she could see the kitchen more clearly.

  Maurice giggled. ‘My wife!’ he said. ‘Ssshh! My wife! Ooops! My wife! I forgot I was due home for tea!’

  He stood up, but the bench caught him at the back of the knees and felled him instantly.

  ‘I’m Anne Mayberry,’ the vicar’s wife said to Alice, taking in every detail of the purple sari, the long dark flowing hair, and the inane beaming face of Maurice over his empty soup plate. ‘And this is Patricia Simmonds. You met her husband the day you moved in, Doctor Simmonds.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Alice said. ‘Hello.’

  Both women were scenting the air like well-trained bloodhounds. They could smell the tang of Stephanie’s soup, they could scent gossip and scandal and untoward doings.

  Maurice disentangled himself from the bench and started saying his farewells. The two women hovered in the doorway, longing to cross the threshold but not daring to step over without invitation. Alice’s welcoming smile had died on her lips. She was watching them, her face guarded.

  ‘Goodnight everybody,’ Maurice said. ‘I’ve had a love, I’ve had a love, I’ve had a love-love-lovely time. Goodbye Michael, goodbye Stephanie, goodbye Janet, goodbye Gary and Timofy, goodbye Maureen, goodbye Jonafon.’ He came to Aunty Sarah and paused. ‘I am sorry, I don’t remember your name,’ he said.

  Aunty Sarah gleamed wickedly at him. ‘Sarah,’ she said. ‘Miss Coulter to you.’

  ‘Goodbye Sarah, Miss Coulter-Tooyew,’ Maurice continued impenetrably high. He floated towards the back door and, ignoring the icy glare of his wife, clasped Alice’s broad white hand in his own. ‘I can’t tell you what a meaningful exchange we have just had,’ he said. ‘This really has been a challenge and an exploration for me. I feel reborn. I feel deeply satisfied by my experience with you. I’ve had a love, I’ve had a love, I’ve had a love-love-lovely evening.’

  Alice disengaged herself with rare tact, glancing towards Anne Mayberry who was taking in every detail of her husband’s appearance from the undone clerical collar to the eyes still red from weeping, and his born-again beaming face.

  ‘It was nice to meet you,’ Alice said formally. She nodded at the pair of sphinxes on the doorstep. ‘How kind of you to call. Please come again,’ she said.

  ‘Running some kind of club here, are you?’ Patricia Simmonds asked sharply. ‘I see people coming and going at all hours. I live opposite, you see. I never pry, I’m not that sort of person. But my kitchen faces out this way and there’s such a lot of traffic in and out of your drive the past two days. Not like it used to be when the old lady was alive. I can’t help noticing.’

  ‘We are running a growth centre for people who need spiritual or physical help,’ Alice said smoothly.

  Patricia’s eyes were bright with curiosity. ‘Perhaps you’d better have a talk with my husband,’ she said. ‘He’s very down on all that amateur medicine stuff,’ she laughed, a thin insincere cackle. ‘Witchcraft he calls it!’

  Alice did not laugh with her. ‘So do I,’ she said.

  ‘Goodbye again,’ Maurice said. Alice smiled her farewell to him and to the sharp faces of the two women. They all three walked across the courtyard to the Mayberrys’ old Volvo car when Maurice suddenly stopped.

  ‘Did she say Miss Coulter?’ he demanded. His feet wove quickly in and out of each other’s path and his wife slipped an arm around his waist.

  ‘She said Miss Coulter!’ he exclaimed. ‘The old lady! But she’s dead. I have her funeral booked for next week! Yet I saw her having her tea!’

  Both women stopped abruptly.

  ‘Did you say Miss Coulter was there?’ Patricia Simmonds demanded.

  ‘I saw. I saw. I saw. I sought I saw her,’ Maurice said.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Anne Mayberry said between clenched teeth. ‘Get in the car, I’m driving.’

  ‘No, wait!’ Patricia said. ‘There’s something funny going on!’

  She turned back towards the house and took two steps towards the open kitchen door. Alice, standing in the doorway, straining her ears to hear the slurred tones of Maurice, saw the brightness of Patricia’s made-up face and the sudden delight in her eyes.

  ‘I say …’ Patricia cried.

  Alice quickly shut the back door.

  Sunday

  Alice passed a restless night. There was something in the bright hard eyes of Mrs Simmonds which gave her an uneasy feeling. Even a handful of fresh Michael’s essences could not smooth away the worry lines on her forehead that were so irritatingly clear in the mirror that morning. Alice confronted herself in the dressing-table mirror while Michael slumbered in bed behind her. Rumpled in sleep he looked like a boy of sixteen. Alice repressed a flicker of irritation at all that taut epidermis and rapid metabolic rate being wasted on young people who do nothing with their skin except squeeze spots out of it.

  Aunty Sarah was downstairs brewing tea. ‘Someone phoned for you from the university,’ she said. ‘Some writers’ circle, coming here.’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Alice. ‘I had forgotten!’

  The Suffix University writers’ circle met monthly in members’ houses. Alice had joined on the advice of Mrs Bland during the heyday of marital counselling when Mrs Bland, prompted by Charles, thought that Alice should take her energies and her powers of analysis elsewhere. She told Alice that she had talent. She encouraged her to join the writers’ circle in search of an audience who would (unlike her husband) occasionally listen to her. Alice was attracted by the idea of describing, barely veiled with fictional names and in intimate detail, Charles’s many failures as a husband. She wrote, with little skill but much suppressed venom, some dramatic Plath-like poetry about entrapment, enslavement, and being married to Hitler, A. or Napoleon, B.

  Within months this had palled; but Alice, suffering from loyalty and inertia, never shed the habit of wasting a Sunday morning once a month. It was Alice’s turn to play host and she had barely time to defrost another carrot cake before they arrived. It was a large turn-out, inspired by literature and driven by the quite astounding rumours which were murmuring their way around the university about Alice Hartley’s new address.

  ‘Alice, darling!’ said the first one through the door, her horn-rimmed spectacles sweeping the hall. She was Mary Hutchinson, the natural leader of the group, who had published a romantic war novel in 1942 when patriotism had obscured the lack of literary merit. With her came George Groves (The Life and Works of George Finnegan Blakemore Groves in three volumes, 1972, as yet unpublished), Sarah Finlay (Cry the Bright Star Downhill – and Uphill Again, unpublished collection of prose-poems), and Barbara Wray (Nurse Bobs and Heartbreak Hospital, Nurse Babs on Holiday, Nurse Babs and the Hi-jack, Nurse Babs and the Plane Crash, Nurse Babs Alone in the Jungle, Nurse Babs and the Cannibal Islanders, Nurse Babs in Big Trouble, published by True Life Love Stories 1975, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985).

  Alice was pouring the herbal tea and slicing carrot cake when
the others arrived: Piers Winterman (Little Men with Big Tools: Ten Years with the Gurkhas, Mutiny in the Ranks: Five Extra Years with the Gurkhas, The End of Glory: A Commander’s Thoughts on Being Ordered to Leave his Gurkhas, The Gurkha’s Great Mistake: A Transcript of the Court Martial of a Gurkha Officer who Rightly Refused to Abandon his Command); Piers had brought Letty Finch (Dithering Heights: A Novel of Uncertainty Set in Yorkshire, Far from the Irritating Crowd and June the Obscure); two new members of the group came together, Sylvia Hayward (‘Writer’s Block’, an unfinished poem), and Claud Church (Blood!, Rage!, Sweat!, Bother! published by Macho Books 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968).

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ said Alice gaily, showing them into the sitting-room. Mary Hutchinson and Barbara Wray noted with one eager glance the familiar sight of Professor Hartley’s hessian-covered suite and Professor Hartley’s recliner-rocker chair in the unfamiliar surroundings.

  Alice passed plates heavy with leaden lumps of carrot cake. Piers Winterman, who had once soldered his dentures to his gums for forty-eight hours with Alice Hartley’s carrot cake, repressed a grunt of disappointment.

  Alice poured caffeine-free coffee while Mary called the meeting to order.

  ‘At our last meeting we all agreed to write a little piece – I call them fugitive pieces – about our earliest memory,’ she said.

  Piers Winterman came out of a reverie of thick gateaux fearlessly bitten in early years, with a start. ‘Eh? I don’t remember,’ he said.

  Barbara Wray looked earnest. ‘That’s very significant,’ she said. ‘Not remembering your earliest memory. Very significant! What they call a Freudian slip.’

  ‘I suggest we all read ours, and share some positive and helpful criticism,’ Mary said. ‘Shall I start?’

  Since no one had the courage to shout ‘no’ and flee from the room, Mary pulled a loose-leaf folder from her shoulder bag and turned the coloured pages. Mary, as a professional author, colour-coded her work to match what she called her ‘market’ by which she meant magazine editors too tired, too drunk, or too lacking in taste to tell her to take her outdated and ungrammatical drivel elsewhere.