I lay there stiff and cramped and aching, my nostrils filled with the stench of dead humanity. But I knew I couldn’t fool them into thinking I was dead. Uncontrollable breathing—shudders—tear ducts. I prayed. God, in your infinite mercy, take me forward to my next life. Don’t let me fall into the hands of these barbarians. Pardon my sins. Show me pity.
Take me.
But in truth I had no faith that his mercy was infinite. Or that he hadn’t simply left me to the devil.
22
We were having problems we hadn’t had before.
Down-and-outs. Charitable appeals. Flag days.
But mainly down-and-outs.
Although in Birmingham, where we lived now, there weren’t as many destitute and homeless as there would be later, not nearly, there was still a distressingly large number. I felt a need to give, and to give substantially. I knew I would sometimes be duped but this seemed unimportant. “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” I wanted—no, felt driven—to act out the teachings of Jesus as fully as I could. I didn’t wait to have hands held out to me in want, I searched for those who looked as though they needed help. No special virtue here, I simply couldn’t stop myself. In fact, in some ways I felt it was very far from being a virtue. Witness the dissension it provoked at home.
“But this is madness. We are getting into debt.”
She was always accusing me of madness, though this took many forms. Prison-visiting, “when you can’t even find the time to visit your own parents!” Helping out in missions, “until you’re practically sleepwalking and no doubt thoroughly in the way of those whose job it is!” Giving shelter to derelicts, “who might steal everything we have, or be sick on our Persian rug, or even murder us while we sleep—though on these occasions, as you very well know, I never do sleep! Not that you ever care about that, naturally!”
“And not only are we getting into debt,” she added now, “we are getting steeply into debt! Frighteningly so! What a fine example to our children!”
She had been talking, of course, only about financial management, but inadvertently had gone straight to the nub of it. When I was out with my children—and I was out with them as often as I could be, despite her taunts about not visiting my parents (which I didn’t believe justified)—when I was out with my children I neither repressed this urge towards giving, nor exaggerated it. Actually, all four of them put it down to ‘Daddy being in one of his crazy moods’, a phrase they had possibly picked up from Geneviève herself. But whereas Anne and Philip would speak about it with me, and sometimes shyly hold out a coin on their own account, to the ‘poor people who just aren’t as lucky as we are’, Jacqueline and Arthur often appeared uncomfortable, Arthur even more so than his sister. “Don’t, Daddy—don’t! It makes us look so silly. And Mummy says they only drink it.” Later I heard Philip say to him, “If they have to drink money they really are very poor people!” and out of the corner of my eye I saw the six-year-old Arthur—having first decided, erroneously, that my attention was engaged elsewhere—give him a pinch.
Philip was three. He was our youngest and our last. Geneviève had put her foot down about having any more—and indeed I had even had a fight to secure Philip. I wasn’t sure what I’d have done if she had continued adamant; his life had been more crucial to me than Arthur’s—although in a vastly different way. He was precisely the same Philip as before, good-humoured, generous, funny, endlessly endearing. We enjoyed a rapport, he and I, which I knew to be very special but which I didn’t feel in the least guilty about. Clearly, I tried to keep it secret.
We had other problems, Geneviève and I, again related to money, or partly so. Partly related to prestige. Not all that much related to education.
“Darling. How would you feel about our keeping the children at home and educating them ourselves?”
I’d realized this would be contentious but I hadn’t known how to lead up to it in easy stages. It wasn’t as though the three who were already at school were unhappy there—bullied or repressed or friendless. It wasn’t as though they weren’t doing well and getting good reports. They just weren’t doing as well, obviously, as if they’d been getting a lot more individual attention. “Wouldn’t you like the thought,” I said, “of being able to control our children’s progress? Academically?”
“No. I should hate it. I should find it terrifying.”
“One person on his own maybe. But the two of us together. Think how enriching it could be: widening our horizons, drawing us closer, all the time teaching us something new.”
“Why, don’t you feel we’re close now?”
“What I meant was—it could form yet a further bond between us.”
“No, you don’t feel we’re as close as we should be, do you?”
“Geneviève, I love you. Very much. You know I do.”
“Pooh! You love everybody.”
“That’s nonsense. But don’t let’s get sidetracked. We were talking about the children.”
“No. I think you were talking about Arthur.”
“Darling, all our children. I haven’t got a particular preference for Arthur…except in some ways. I have a particular preference for each of our children…in some ways.”
“What about Anne, for instance?”
I hesitated.
“The way she buys us presents for no special reason. The way she’s always wanting to give us small surprises. A dozen things.”
“And Jacqueline?”
“Oh—Jacqueline. The way she looks like you; the way she walks about in your shoes, little coquette, and looks so very pleased with herself…so mignonne and adorable. The way she’s so determined and will stand up to anything, large dogs, angry parents, but then will suddenly get very shy as well…” My grin broadened. “Why do I have this strange idea you might be testing me?”
“Perhaps because you always think that, in the end, everything comes back to you.”
“Ouch!”
“You always rely on your charm to get you your own way. Your own way in everything.”
I wasn’t sure that I could see any connection. “But, darling, won’t you please try to stick to the subject? Which is about teaching our kids at home.”
“Ethan, you’re not being serious about that? No, you can’t be!” She stirred her coffee for the second time. “In any case. A partnership, you said. But you meant you. Right? Basically, you meant you. Yet how could you ever stay at home long enough to give a proper education?”
“Well, that brings us to my next point.” I announced this, wishing I had a little more of my second daughter’s fearlessness.
My next point involved leaving the Church. Leaving the Church involved moving to rented property probably inferior—greatly inferior—to that which we’d grown used to. I had already been asking questions about possible night work in hospices and hostels—hostels, say, catering for ex-offenders—or in refuges or old people’s homes. Geneviève would also need to take a job. None of this would be easy. But I hadn’t envisaged it as impossible.
“No, I refuse to talk about it. I refuse! Now you really have taken leave of your senses.”
“Geneviève, this means a lot to me. Right or wrong, you can’t dismiss it out of hand.”
“We’re nearly at the end of your second curacy. Nearly there. Your being a vicar means a lot to me. All those years of study. (Which, perhaps you need to be reminded, my father mainly paid for!) All those platitudes. All those expressions of…?”
“Piety?”
I offered the word grimly.
“Pretensions of caring.”
“No, I do care. I care very much. But there are other curates, other vicars. Our children have only one father and I genuinely believe I’ve a duty to them which transcends—”
“And what about your duty to me?”
I looked down into my own coffee cup.
“Because,” she said, “
please glance around you! We’re surrounded by people with young families. But the fathers are normal loving fathers who want the best for their children—like we all do—yet don’t expect their wives to give up everything, go out to work, have no fun, never see their husbands…” Since we now lived very close to a large housing estate where there was much poverty and drunkenness and wife-beating—in stark contrast to the parish where we’d started out in Nottingham—I felt her picture was not a fully impartial one, any more than was her subsequent comment. “They’d be amazed to hear a smart middle-class person like you thinking for one second of taking on anything so far beneath him. Working as a porter—or a cleaner—or a janitor! So immature, so irresponsible! And what would you suggest for me? To superintend a public toilet?”
This was quite a diatribe and there were occasional disadvantages to Geneviève’s having so quickly acquired such very good English.
So I let the subject drop, and continued to pray about it and try to be thankful. But Geneviève remained immutable. I couldn’t believe that God wanted my marriage ruined for the sake of a unilateral decision which was in any case debatable. And why had he encouraged me to enter the ministry in the first place if I was only going to let down so many who’d been relying on me? Certainly my children hadn’t been relying on me, not for their education.
So that same September, September 1970, I became a fully-fledged vicar, with my new incumbency in Dorset. Geneviève was happy and busy and full of common-sense supportiveness; there was no question but that I’d done the right thing. Friends from Amersham, Nottingham and Birmingham came for the induction, and Geneviève’s parents flew in from Paris, and from London Johnny brought not only Mary, his wife of six months, but Gordon Leonard as well, whom he had bumped into one day in Selfridges. Gordon, on hearing of the event, had thought it would be fun to join in and had phoned me that very night. In fact, to be completely accurate, it was Gordon who’d brought Johnny and Mary, in his latest Porsche. And it would have been fun…well, to an extent it was fun…all of us making do together in our grand new vicarage, rustling up a totally impromptu supper. But my father had just died from lung cancer (his funeral had been eleven days earlier) and though Mum came to Bridport—driven there by Max, with Gwen in the back seat—still, the fact that my dad couldn’t be with us inevitably cast something of a blight, at least as far as she and I were concerned, and probably Gwen and Max as well. “He was so proud of you at Southwell and later at your priesting,” said my mother. “And he was so looking forward to being here with us this afternoon!” I told her I was sure he had been here with us this afternoon but I suppose she saw this only as some typically churchy remark. Anne, too, said that it wasn’t the same without Granddad, Jacqueline agreed, and Philip climbed onto my mother’s lap and put his arms about her neck and looked into her eyes and said, “I loved my granddad!” I said, “Yes, I know, Pip, we all did. Didn’t we, Art?” and Arthur said, “‘My daddy said his daddy’s dead, the moment I got out of bed!’ Granny, I want to be a poet when I’m older, and that’s a poem I’ve made up.” I found I had to restrain myself, the vicar so recently returned from his induction and from the small party thrown afterwards in his honour—the small party at which he’d spoken a few honeyed words to every member of his parish then present in the church hall. Had to restrain himself from giving his older son a fair old clip round the ear.
23
I plodded on, regardless. As Arthur grew older it seemed to me he became less and less the sort of person I had hoped for. But I didn’t want to judge and I did want to stay true to my prayer—what had it been?—for patience, tolerance, calm and understanding! And in many ways, too, he was undeniably kindhearted, there were moments when he really surprised me with his thoughtfulness. But he was naturally rightwing and chauvinistic. Narrow-minded. Or so it appeared. And whereas the others would all, more or less willingly, help out with chores about the house, Arthur often took a lot of persuasion and might then only perform his share with resentment. He insisted on rosters, which was fine, but if the rosters got snarled up, as for one reason or another they invariably did, he wasn’t adaptable, he just got angry and refused to step in, unless, that is, Geneviève bribed him…which she knew I didn’t approve of and which generally, therefore, I didn’t get to hear about till later, if at all. Arthur didn’t profit from example, either. In fact I think he probably reacted against it; the rightwing business might well have been a pose—although his mother could also on occasion display similar proclivities. But he glowered more often than he smiled. He was far more inclined to indulge in tantrums than any of his siblings and to hit out with apparently minimal provocation. Perhaps his namesake had been that sort of fellow too; perhaps it was appropriate for a king, certainly a fifth-century king, to be obstinate and aggressive, arrogant and something of a Philistine. Yet Arthur—my Arthur—didn’t appear to exhibit the qualities of leadership which might have excused, or explained, those other facets of his character. One sensed an underlying weakness, rather than a latent strength.
Philip was much more, was exactly, the kind of material I had hoped for and expected. But Philip wasn’t Arthur. He hadn’t been born in Nottingham on my twenty-seventh birthday. He hadn’t been the focus of a dying man’s recurring dream. It contravened the rules to attempt to give to Philip the role that had been designed for Arthur. For surely it had been designed for Arthur?
But I plodded on, regardless. What else was there to do? I’d got into the habit of preparing my son for kingship and—as I say—who was I to know what changes the years might bring, or what groundwork should have been laid by the time those changes had occurred? And if Arthur didn’t seem responsive, certainly Philip did—and, to a lesser extent, the girls. So, to put it at its lowest, at least those three were likely to benefit from the kind of education and example with which I sought to supplement their schooling.
There was a date engraved upon my memory: November 23rd 1980. On that day I felt tempted not to let Philip out of the house, not for a moment, but clearly this was paranoid. Before, we had been living in London; Philip had been attending a grammar school in Hampstead. The car which he hadn’t seen until too late, hidden from his view by a parked delivery van, would still presumably be speeding along that same stretch of the Finchley Road at 4.25pm, and the van would still be stationed in the same position, but nobody would step out from behind it at 4.25; assuredly not Philip, who’d be three hundred miles away. Poor Mrs Bancroft’s life—along of course with Geneviève’s and mine—wasn’t again about to be destroyed; supposing that it ever had been. I hadn’t felt inclined then to call her poor Mrs Bancroft, although undoubtedly she must have suffered.
But even so, despite all the differences between that time and this, I felt scared. The closer drew the day, the more apprehensive I became. It was absurd.
Prayer didn’t help. I decided the only way to cope would be through direct action—through my personally ensuring that no one else’s child was going to fill the vacuum left by our own son.
“Geneviève, I’ve decided to go to London tomorrow.” After Bridport I’d been sent to Newcastle.
“Oh, yes. Why?”
“Something I’ve got to see to.” There was a funeral arranged for the afternoon, which my curate would now have to handle. Otherwise, providentially, there was nothing that couldn’t be rescheduled—not even, for once, a meeting of any kind.
“I thought that tomorrow we were supposed to be having a quiet evening at home.” On such occasions, by way of minor celebration, she often planned a special dinner.
I said: “I could probably make it back by eight, or eight-thirty.”
“What can you possibly need to go to London for, at such short notice?”
“Ah…secrets!” I tried to make it sound as if, for instance, I were going to look for her Christmas gift there; although what I could get in London that I couldn’t get in Newcastle, or what would be worth all those hours spent in travelling, might present me with a r
eal quandary. “But, look, why don’t you come too? Make it a day out? I’d only have to desert you for about an hour.”
“Oh, it may be all right for vicars to swan off at just a moment’s notice. It’s obviously much harder for the vicars’ wives.”
Nowadays, Geneviève had mixed feelings about the role of vicar’s wife. She still thought it carried a certain cachet and even enjoyed the element of exposure—was happy to think it would be noticed when she put on a new dress or styled her hair a bit differently. Always vivacious and popular, she liked to believe she was fairly much at the centre of things, had her finger on the pulse. But on the other hand it annoyed her that a vicar’s wife was so often regarded as being a mere adjunct of her husband, an unpaid worker who was available at any time to come to coffee mornings, sort out grievances, open fêtes, answer the door to hard-up strangers. “I am spied on, I am spied on!” she had once cried. “I can’t do anything without the whole world knowing! I am not a person in my own right!”
I’d suggested she should take a job. “To escape the claustrophobia, I mean.”
“A job! What am I trained for? Selling in a sweet shop?” (At least she didn’t allude to public toilets.)
“Then why not train for something?”
“Well, perhaps I shall. One of these days. When Philip has left home.”
Arthur was now at sixth-form college, the two girls had already started at university. Geneviève had often spoken about studying for a degree herself but I didn’t think she ever would.
In the meantime, perversely, she didn’t really mind serving on committees and being always in demand. She probably felt as pleased as she felt disgruntled that she couldn’t swan off at just a moment’s notice, although if truth be told she often had.
I emerged from Finchley Road Underground in good time. When I reached the spot where the accident had taken place there wasn’t as yet any van parked there. However, I knew that one must come. There was a space waiting for it and no reason why that space should not be filled. And come it did: at twenty-one minutes past the hour. The driver climbed down and took out of the back two large boxes containing packets of matzos for a nearby convenience store.
Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 30
