Bad Blood (10 page)

It's a painfully drawn-out process and more than once his ‘loneliness' gets the better of his resolve. But he perseveres until bit by bit he comes to hate MB and – given the way he's behaving – maybe it's mutual. One sad sub-plot to the end of their affair involves poor Molly, whose young man was drowned in the mere in the August heatwave that first brought vicar and nurse together. Molly had been working on and off for Hilda in the house, but on 26 April she broke down and drank ‘paraffin oil', and MB took charge of her. The next day, he records in the diary, ‘MB is now driving the case against Molly. Molly is taken to the Wrexham workhouse and looks like being charged with attempted suicide.' The day after that Hilda talks to the inspector and as a result ‘Molly is to return to us from custody. But she must leave Hanmer as soon as possible . . .' It looks very much as though Molly had become a pawn in the game. The vicarage can hardly have been much of a sanctuary for a girl mourning her lover, and now Hilda and MB were using her plight to score points against each other. For once Hilda came out on the side of humanity in Grandpa's account, so pleased was he to have evidence that MB was overbearing, callous, sadistic even. Summing up the whole wretched episode, he concluded (Molly already forgotten): ‘I have come to detest MB, really and properly.' All the same, it wasn't until June that they made the final break. That gave him an opportunity to put the boot in by writing her a Dear Nurse letter on her birthday in May, only to retract it a week later, plus other refinements of torment.

Neither of them was disposed to drink paraffin oil for grief, that's certain. Only the lower orders dreamed so naively of
oblivion, or got moved on.
They
both lived still in Hanmer, tied to their posts, hating each other and Hilda, who hated them both. This is another aspect of rural life that's lost now that the middle-class diaspora has populated the countryside with property-owning vagrants: the peculiar hell of having to live with such substantial ghosts from your past. It's this that gives the story of Grandpa and MB its tragicomic character – they're too resilient for tragedy, too horrid for comedy. In Shakespeare's tragicomedy
Measure for Measure
an inept moralist called Elbow, who's wiser than he knows, pronounces the most harsh and inescapable of life sentences – ‘Thou seest, thou wicked varlet, now, what's come upon thee: thou art to continue, now, thou varlet; thou art to continue.' That's what happened to them. If the Almighty had been watching their goings-on, he couldn't have sentenced MB, Hilda and Grandpa to a more appropriate fate than Hanmer.

MB was a survivor, she was still doing her job in the late 1950s, in her fifties. I remember her very well. She'd be a bit out of puff sometimes after she'd pushed her bike uphill, her rosy cheeks showed broken veins if you got close, and her curls were white, but she was hale and stout and all of a piece, every firm inch the district nurse. The reason I remember so exactly is that after Grandpa's death, when Grandma had been evicted from the vicarage and was living with us, Nurse Burgess called every day to test a urine sample (Grandma couldn't be trusted not to binge on sugar) and give her her insulin injection. Grandma was unable to inject herself because by now she also had Parkinson's disease and shook too much, and my mother refused because she was squeamish. So Hilda and MB were reunited daily, when MB would sterilise a big needle (this was before throwaway syringes, but Grandma insisted she kept a specially blunt one for
her
), briskly rub Grandma's soft, flabby
arm with surgical spirit and plunge in the cruel point. After she'd gone, Grandma would complain that her treatment was ‘rough' as was only to be expected of a woman so
coarse
(a very strong word back then). The ritual was rendered fascinating, of course, because
everyone knew
– even
I
knew – that Nurse Burgess had been Grandpa's girlfriend once upon a time, and that was why she and Grandma loathed one another.

Marj

What I didn't know until I read the diary, for it hadn't become part of local folklore, was the story of his next amorous adventure, the one that would really count against him. Perhaps gossip as a communal art form actually censors out the unacceptable, rather than exposing it? At any rate, compared with MB, Marjorie (Marj for short) was a most suppressed and insubstantial ghost. When I asked about her people remembered
her perfectly well, though. Marj was my schoolgirl mother's brand-new best friend. Valma, my mother, had just turned sixteen that spring of 1934, and Marj was a year or at most two years older. She'd left school and was at a loose end, waiting for a hospital place to train as a nurse. She spent a lot of time at the vicarage, almost lived there, because she had in a sense no home. Her maiden aunts, the two Misses Griffiths who taught at Hanmer school, had taken her in – she was their sister's illegitimate daughter. Marjorie was socially ambiguous and morally at risk (no patriarchal protector), just the sort of young person the vicar should be taking a fatherly interest in. His affair with her wasn't just bad behaviour, it was sin squared. Or possibly cubed, for he used his own daughter as a kind of bait and as camouflage.

Or maybe he wasn't quite so calculating. It's true that after vanishing from his diary for months Valma suddenly resurfaced that spring. In January he'd arranged for her to attend the Whitchurch Girls' High School (fee-paying pre-war) and he bought a dress for her first ball, given by Lady Kenyon at Gredington. This was just at the time when he was messily disposing of MB, in post-panto gloom, and perhaps he was suddenly charmed with the young woman his daughter had become (a real-life Cinderella?) when he flirted and worse with her friend Marj. The paradox is that if you add a hint of incest, the whole thing looks more innocent, or at least more impulsive. He was now desperately in love with youth, potentiality, the fleeting sense of lightness and freedom, and the future stretching ahead unresolved. It was his own youth he was reaching out for: ‘I wish I was free of all encumbrances so that I could go where I liked,' he wrote on 3 March. He got his bicycle out and oiled it for the spring, also noted that time hung heavy . . . He wanted to feel that life was still before him. And there
was Valma, slender, pretty, at the beginning of things. And there was Marj, right next to her, a bit older and more knowing, hungry for attention, wanting a father figure,
asking for it
. According to the diary it was Marj who made the running. On 21 April Valma and Hilda went to Chester, and Marj took advantage of their absence to tease him: ‘Marj has worried the house all day . . . I don't know what to make of her.' Except that he did, for he adds melodramatically, ‘Must alter my handwriting after this entry.' There's a certain lack of logic about this resolution. If he'd really wanted secrecy he'd have written backwards, or in code, or in invisible ink. But it's the gesture that counts – always the showman, Grandpa, even (or especially) when he's talking to himself. His handwriting stays just the same.

He was still disentangling himself from MB and perhaps had as yet no fresh offences to report. On the face of it he was making a
new
new life, starting again. He worked hard in the garden, cut the grass and rolled the lawn until it was once more flat enough for a game of bowls. He did the housework, too, after Molly's departure: on 11 May he ‘scrubbed the passage and kitchen', and a week later he ‘cleaned the study and all the rooms downstairs', while Val and Marj rode off fancy-free on their bikes to Ellesmere. (Hilda took no part in any of this skivvying; already she was concentrating on going to the pictures.) Despite his labours, there are fearful tracts of boredom – ‘To bed tired out with inertia,' says one entry in early June; and ‘spent a very useless sort of day' another confesses irritably. The old futile busyness seems just around the corner.

He reports on Val and Marj's comings and goings like a fretful voyeur – only occasionally does he even contrive to freewheel alongside them on their rides. Indeed, he might never have got closer if puckish providence hadn't supplied him with
a go-between, in the form of the curate he'd been asking for for months. This young man, whose name was Percy Davies, turned up in June. To start with Grandpa was sour and suspicious – ‘he is a blinking snob I think. I would like to have a human being with me . . .' But he changed his tune almost immediately, for Percy Davies (or PSD) was an obliging and convivial young fellow, and what's more he had a motorbike. Two days after PSD's arrival, Grandpa is riding pillion and life speeds up again. PSD has only just been ordained, nonetheless he can perform the magic that matters and redeem the time. He receives a rare and real accolade: ‘The curate has now had a whole week here and the week has passed quite quickly.' Soon he is almost one of the family – like Marj, and like Grandma's plump younger sister with the musical laugh, sweet Katie, who's come for a holiday.

This family, though, is dangerously fissile, falling apart, orphaned, since nobody wants to play the part of parent. Grandma regarded the role of wife and mother with revulsion even before Grandpa justified her by carrying on with that coarse nurse. Grandpa is doing his best to keep up appearances (you might think) by scrubbing the kitchen and dusting the drawing-room, but then that in itself would have seemed shockingly bohemian in the 1930s – not at all manly or proper. No one in the vicarage that summer of 1934 admits to belonging to the older generation, it's an extended family with nothing to hold the pieties in place. No one sits still for a moment. It's as though the old house is a centrifuge – expelling its inhabitants in every direction, in ever-changing permutations, off to Wrexham, Chester, Shrewsbury, Llangollen.

It's also the season of garden fêtes and trips to the seaside – the bell-ringers, the Sunday School, the Choir, the Women's Institute all have their outings to Rhyl or New Brighton. On
the last day of July the whole vicarage tribe piles on to the Tallarn Green Choir bus to Rhyl: ‘We are quite a little party –
ego
, Val, Katie, Hilda, Billy, Marj and PSD' (even Hilda will join a ‘party'). All the fun of the fair. He sounds as if he's still on the big dipper when the August anniversary of his arrival in Hanmer comes around: ‘A year ago I came to this parish. On the whole I have been very happy and I have known misery also. PSD is a good friend. MB is a big disappointment. I trusted in her but she is a complete failure, a woman of no principle at all. I have done with her finally. This has been a happy week and I think that we have spent a decent time . . .' Naughty Marj has been gossiping about her rival's promiscuity and in any case he's free to discard the boring truth about his affair with MB because he's living all in prospect. Their relationship, as it turns out,
had no future
and that suffices to damn her by the logic of now. Meanwhile he's taking his turn to hitch lifts on the back of the curate's machine, trailing clouds of glorious exhaust fumes.

As the hot days pass a pattern emerges in the vicarage party's seemingly random excursions. There's a kind of phantom foursome (now you see it, now you don't) who never exactly go out together, but who match and mirror-reverse each other. PSD takes Valma off on his motorcycle, and
ego
and Marj find themselves alone. This time Grandpa at least has the grace not to try to claim that it's God's doing. Indeed, he sounds for almost the first time consciously wicked, daring the big policeman in the sky to punish him. On 6 August: ‘Val and curate go off for a ride. Marj on my lap in the study. So ends this day. What of it!' Well, no thunderbolt strikes and so he does it again, and again. And on the surface of things there's only a jolly family party. He even survives a holiday plus Hilda and Katie and children but minus Marj and PSD back in the South.
But Katie stays behind in the Rhondda to go back to work in the shop and bit by bit the summer's party atmosphere dissipates. In September he meets MB in a cold professional capacity over a parishioner's deathbed, which strikes him poetically as an emblem of the transience of passion – ‘All that is at an end.' Only as far as MB is concerned, however, for he adds slyly, ‘Time does fly even in the country.' Outings to the cinema on PSD's bike (Marlene Dietrich, in October, in
The Scarlet Empress
) keep the illusion alive, as do secret assignations with Marj under cover of Valma's jaunts with the curate: ‘PSD takes Val to pictures at Wrexham.' (23 November) ‘So the days fly by.' Days with wings are code for cuddles with Marj.

Even his cover wasn't very respectable. ‘Fast' would have been the world's kindest word for the public aspect of vicarage life. But given Hanmer and his history with MB, people suspected the worst and started to draw away. Lady Kenyon herself, although too grand to fear contagion, was giving up on Grandpa. True, she took the trouble to chivvy Marj to make ready to leave for her nursing training; but invitations to Gredington were fewer and further between. Cynically, you might say that the Marj affair was a snub to the charms of maturity and so caused extra offence to the Hanmer ladies who'd patronised him. There'd have been genuine shock, though, too – especially at the way he blithely encouraged his daughter to compromise her reputation. The sheer moral untidiness of the breaking down of boundaries between generations and classes (Marj being neither respectable nor safely an outsider) would have had a real whiff of decadence about it, sexual intrigue apart. And in a sense Hilda also colluded, refusing her wifely duties and (even worse) her maternal responsibilities too. The all-night rows – which now started up again – only spiced the witches' brew of badness. You can see how
the vicarage began to be surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of scandal, spoken and unspoken, and became a moral slum.