And it no longer made sense to bring up the subject of my reading habits. The book on the coffee table—which revealed that Eudora, too, succumbed to the temptations of a romance novel—made nonsense of my concern that I might be jeopardizing my marriage. I was not a romance novel junkie. I could quit anytime I chose.
“My life is fine,” I told Eudora while putting on my professional thinking cap. What this room called for was a decorating plan that would not prove a death sentence to every piece of furniture now looking at me with abject reproach. I was toying with the idea of re-covering the sofa in a houndstooth pattern and finding a new shade in hunter green for the standard lamp, when the telephone on the side table by Eudora’s chair rang. Excusing herself, she picked up the receiver and was speaking in a lowered voice to the caller, when her husband walked into the room.
Gladstone Spike was silver-haired, and slender in build, with the stooped shoulders of a much taller man. His demeanour was particularly gentle, and upon first meeting him I had thought it ironic that he looked so much the traditional vicar, when it was his wife who was in the clergy. Today, as he invariably did, Gladstone wore a grey
cardigan, one which I had no doubt he had knitted himself.
“Hello, Ellie! Am I intruding?” He hesitated in the doorway, glancing from me to his wife, who was still on the phone. “I can always go away, you know”—his pale grey eyes twinkled—“and not come back until you give the all-clear!”
“Eudora and I were having a chat about the redecorating,” I explained.
“Ah, lovely!” He crossed the floor silently on his slippered feet and settled himself on the sofa, hands crossed primly on his knees. “You’re the expert on such matters, Ellie, but if I may make the suggestion, I do think that some ruffles and lots of pink, I’m particularly fond of fuchsia, would make for a very nice change.”
“Well …” My heart sank.
“And what do you think, my dear—and do be frank—of a heart-shaped mirror in a gilt frame to hang above the mantelpiece?”
God was good. Before I was forced to answer, Eudora hung up the phone and, standing, blurted out to her husband, “Gladstone, that was the surgeon, Mr. Sundrani, on the phone. He’s going on holiday to India and won’t be able to do your operation until he gets back next month.” She looked extremely upset.
“That is a nuisance, my dear.” Mr. Spike’s face turned the fuchsia of which he was so fond as he avoided my eyes and fussed with his trouser knees. “But I suppose I can be patient in waiting a little longer.” He attempted a valiant smile.
“Your parents should have taken care of the matter when you were a baby.” Clearly, Eudora was so rattled that she failed to notice she had embarrassed her husband. From the look and sound of her, she was also oblivious to
my
presence. “If they’d had the emotional stamina to make the appropriate decision, you wouldn’t now be facing invasive surgery.”
“Is there any other kind, my dear?”
“This one has particular repercussions to a married couple.” Eudora pulled off her glasses, blinked wildly, and rammed them back on her nose. “I’m not blaming you, Gladstone. This isn’t your fault and I do realize that you
are the major sufferer, but sometimes all I can see is a future of your sleeping in the guest bedroom.…” Smothering a sob with a trembling hand, Eudora rushed out into the hall, leaving her husband and me to the loud ticking of the mantelpiece clock.
Gladstone hummed a few bars from a hymn and tapped out the melody on the table at his side, while I avoided his eyes. “I’d better go and make her a nice cup of tea.” He stood up after an emotion-packed few moments. “Why don’t you go after her, Ellie, and continue your chat about doing up the house? I know she wants a new wardrobe for”—the next word caught in his throat—“our bedroom.”
“Perhaps it would be better if I left.…”
“Not at all!” Gladstone sounded quite panicked by the idea of my abandoning ship. “Eudora needs cheering up, and sad to say I’m not for the job. What with one thing and another”—he bowed his head over his steepled fingers—“I’m being something of a trial, in more ways than one, at present.”
My first instinct was to tell him I was sorry about the operation. But because I could hazard a guess as to what it entailed, and could appreciate his acute embarrassment, it seemed best to merely press his shoulder in passing before slipping quietly out the door in search of his wife.
After mounting the stairs, whose third and fifth steps creaked loudly enough to waken the dead in the churchyard, I found Eudora on the rectangular landing. It was an area made somewhat dark by the olive-green wallpaper and by the closely knit row of oak doors. But a narrow window at one end admitted enough pale light for me to see that Eudora’s eyes were reddened from crying.
“Please accept my apology, Ellie, for my dreadful behaviour.” She rubbed at her forehead with two fingers, as if trying to ease an intolerable ache. “I don’t, for the life of me, know what made me go to pieces like that. Gladstone is so dear and good. For years he has consistently put my work—my needs—ahead of his own. It is the epitome of selfishness for me to let my fears of an impending change in our lives come between us. And to blow up at him about the operation, in front of you, was inexcusable!”
I put my arm around her. “You love him. And when
we are worried about those dearest to us, we sometimes turn the tables and blame them for putting us through grief on their account.”
Eudora squeezed my hand. “No, I was thinking only of myself. I wished that he’d taken care of the matter years ago, when it was clear he had a problem. And I lashed out at him because I was resentful of a choice he is fully entitled to make. He has the right to his own identity.”
I couldn’t see how the impending operation would make an entirely new man of Gladstone; but that perhaps showed how little I knew of the miracles of modern surgery. What I did suggest was that Eudora might feel better if she went downstairs immediately and talked to her husband. But she said she preferred to give herself five or ten minutes in which to pull herself together.
“It won’t do Gladstone any good to see me looking like this.” She tugged at her sleeves and stood up straight. “A woman of my age and build doesn’t look the least enchanting when she’s been snivelling. So why don’t you and I, Ellie, march into the bedroom and see how you can advise me regarding making some changes? The wardrobe isn’t the only problem, as you will see.”
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” I asked and, upon receiving her nod, followed Eudora through the door at the end of the landing.
“Well, what do you think?” She switched on the light, to reveal a good-size room with a fireplace on the wall facing the circa World War II bed. “The wallpaper”—she pointed at the rambling red roses—“was here when we came, and I know it clashes horribly with the yellow bedspread. What do you think about our getting a duvet, Ellie? I like the idea of the easy bed-making, but I’m concerned that the down filling might irritate my allergies.”
“Ben and I have a duvet with a synthetic filling,” I told her, “because Ben was worried about real down, with his ticklish nose. Luckily I don’t have a problem. You’d have to hold a feather under my nose for the purpose of checking whether I was still breathing to make me sneeze. But there are really wonderful substitutes these days, and if you decide you want to keep the rose wallpaper and curtains for a while, a white eyelet duvet cover would work
very nicely.” My voice sounded a little too loud, as if I were talking to ward off the gloom that enveloped Eudora as visibly as the mist gathering outside the window.
“No, I think I’d like to change everything in the room except the fireplace.” She laughed unsteadily with the result that she had to resettle her glasses on her nose. “And maybe we should rip that out.”
“You may want to wait before doing anything major.” I watched uneasily as my friend gravitated between the dressing table and a tallboy. “It is usually better to make decorating decisions when you are in reasonably good spirits. Otherwise you could end up with black wallpaper and a coffin for a coffee table.”
“You’re not going to make money this way, Ellie.”
“And I don’t want to see you waste yours,” I told her.
“For once in our lives, Gladstone and I have it to spend.” She looked thoroughly miserable as she said this. “Our daughter is married and settled in Australia, and Gladstone and I have always lived frugally. And … given the circumstances”—she shook herself like a dog coming out of water—“well, it seemed time to have a bit of a splurge. But you’re quite right, Ellie, perhaps it would be better to wait until our lives settle back down.”
“Let me have a think about the wardrobe.” I eyed the present one with mixed feelings. It was rather a nice late Victorian piece which, if refinished and its front panels painted with a pastoral scene of sheep grazing under twin trees, would provide a handsome accompaniment to an iron four-poster and complementary side tables. But if Eudora really wanted a change of wardrobe, I had several ideas in mind. “Why don’t I work up a variety of plans for here and the sitting room,” I suggested, “and get back in touch with you in about a week, or even next month, when Gladstone has had his surgery and you’re feeling more on top of things?”
“That does sound the more sensible approach.” My friend smiled at me with determined cheerfulness. “Now, why don’t you go down and ask Gladstone to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.” She laid the hairbrush she had been fiddling with back on the dressing table. “And tell him I’ll join you both in a few moments.”
“I really should be getting home.”
“Don’t leave without a cup of tea and a slice of the sponge cake Gladstone made this morning.” Eudora walked with me out onto the landing. “I’ll be down as soon as I’ve washed my face and dabbed a bit of powder around my eyes.”
“Don’t rush.”
I gave her a hug before heading down the stairs. A glance at my watch as I stood on the fourth step from the bottom showed that the stupid thing had stopped at one-thirty. I was peering at the hall clock on the wall across from the banisters, when the telephone in the sitting room rang once. Before I could finish resetting my watch, I heard Gladstone Spike’s voice. Through the open door it sounded a little breathless and high-pitched.
“Ah, lovely! Yours is the one voice I needed to hear! No one but you could possibly understand how much I want to be done with this business of being a woman in a man’s body.”
Good heavens! My hand went to my mouth, but otherwise I was immobilized. Even had I been able to get my legs going, I couldn’t risk the stair creaking. And only think what agonies of embarrassment poor Gladstone would experience on realizing I had overheard his painful revelation!
“I’ve determined that I can’t keep up the pretense any longer,” he was now saying in a quavering voice. “But my dear wife is naturally very worried about how some of her congregation will react when I reveal that I am a woman. Eudora doesn’t like the name Zinnia, too flowery for her, but I never could see myself as an Alice or a Ruth.”
While Gladstone Spike listened to the response from the other end of the line, I quaked at the prospect of being caught eavesdropping on the stairs by Eudora heading down from the bathroom. The poor woman already had enough to bear, with her husband about to end his gender confusion by having a sex-change operation. She didn’t need to discover I was a snoop. Upon hiring an interior decorator, it is always understood that cupboard doors would be opened and some embarrassing contents revealed. But the domestic chaos in this house should remain private for as long as possible. When the tabloids got hold of the scoop, I could only imagine the headlines:
Congregation
Chattering in Chitterton Fells. The Vicar Is a Woman, Now So Is Her Husband!
My heart broke for both Eudora and Gladstone! What an agonizing situation in which to find themselves! No wonder she was entirely to pieces! I would have been a basket case if Ben had announced that he wanted to be Benita; but at the same time I wouldn’t want him to live out his life in emotional torment, when a snip here and there could free him up to be the female of his fantasies.
And apparently Eudora did not plan on abandoning Gladstone. She had spoken about his moving into the guest bedroom, not out of the vicarage. I pictured them both in future years—him, or I should say, Zinnia, knitting a shell-pink bed jacket while Eudora sat on the other side of the fireplace, reading. No wonder St. Anselm’s lady vicar had taken up romance novels as an outlet for her needs as a woman.…
Suddenly I heard something. A heart-stopping silence. Gladstone must be off the phone. Swiftly I got my legs in gear. I was making my way down the last couple of steps, when he came out into the hall.
Blushing all the way down to my toes, I gabbled that Eudora had sent me to tell him that she would be down in a moment for a cup of tea.
“Ah, lovely.” Gladstone eyed me mildly. The man in the grey cardigan and carpet slippers, a husband in a thousand, one would have thought. And so I reflected sadly, as I envisioned the tabloids, indeed he was. “I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who also writes”—he was clearly making this up as he went along—“for his church bulletin.”
“How very nice,” I stammered, “for you to have someone with whom you can pour your heart out. Would you be awfully kind”—I edged towards the front door—“and explain to Eudora that I have to hurry home? I don’t like to leave Gerta, our new nanny, for too long on her first day. She’s already under a lot of stress because her marriage recently broke up. Her husband left her for another man.”
The words were out before I could bite them back. Great! I thought savagely, now Gladstone will think I’m a narrow-minded busybody! Just the sort to start wagging
my vicious tongue the minute he gets out of hospital after his operation.
“Life is not easy.” He shook his head as he followed me to the door. “Eudora and I will remember these troubled people in our prayers.”
“You are such a dear.” Impulsively, I planted a kiss on his cheek before heading down the steps onto the garden path. I was wiping away a tear when he called out to me.