The Judgement of Strangers (28 page)

I locked the door behind me and walked slowly through the churchyard. I looked at my watch. It was ten past eight. I was fifty minutes early. I did not mind. There was pleasure even in being alone and being able to think of her.

I passed through the gate from the churchyard into the grounds of Roth Park. It was cool under the oaks and noticeably darker than in the churchyard. The sky was cloudy. I stopped for a moment and waited, looking around. This was, after all, a public place. People walked their dogs along the footpaths. Children played here. Adolescents found other pleasures. For all I knew, Audrey had chosen this evening to mount another detective expedition into the grounds of Roth Park. The need to be furtive heightened my pleasure.

I looked at my watch again. Another forty-five minutes, assuming Joanna was on time. I knew nothing about her, I realized – not even whether she was the sort of woman who was usually early or late. I patted the pockets of my jacket, looking for cigarettes.

At that moment, Joanna slipped from behind the trunk of an oak tree fifty yards away from me. She wore a long, pale-coloured dress which swayed as she walked and glowed against the greens of the leaves and the grass and the brown of the trees. She saw me and began to walk towards me. Faster and faster she came. I held out my hands to her and, at long last, I felt the touch of her fingers on mine.

Love is a form of haunting, and Joanna was my ghost.

I knew the terrible danger I was in – both socially and, far more importantly, spiritually. I ran the risk of hurting all those I loved. I was wantonly endangering the happiness of Vanessa and Rosemary. The feelings that Joanna and I shared had no future. We had very little in common.

I also knew that, even if I had the power to rewrite the immediate past and to prevent what was happening now, I would not choose to exercise it.

Joanna and I packed a great deal into that week, into a handful of meetings.

‘You’re early,’ she said on Tuesday evening, still holding my hands in hers.

I was so happy I could not stop smiling. ‘So are you.’

‘Toby’s out.’

‘When will he be back?’

She glanced to her right, towards the drive. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ Her fingers tightened on mine. ‘I think someone’s coming.’

We snatched our hands apart. For a moment we listened. I heard traffic on the road and a distant burst of laughter, perhaps from one of the televisions in Vicarage Drive.

‘It’s no one,’ I said.

‘Come into the garden.’

‘But if Toby –’

‘We’ll hear the car on the drive.’ She smiled at me. ‘Trust me.’

She led me through the oaks and up the drive towards the house. We cut through the shrubbery on to the lawn. As we came on to the grass, she took my hand.

‘We can go into the house if you like.’

I felt a shiver running through me. Fear and desire, inextricably mingled. ‘We’d better not.’

‘Then let’s go down to the pool.’

Hand in hand, we walked quickly across the lawn. The pool was a good choice. It was masked by trees and set lower than the surrounding garden. We could hear and not be seen. If need be, if someone came from the house, I could slip away through the fence into Carter’s Meadow. Conspirators plan ahead.

We sat on one of the benches recessed into the stone wall around the pool. The stone was warm to the touch. The evening sun slanted across the swaying waters of the pool, creating shifting black stains of shadow against the clear blue of the water. A passenger jet flew overhead and Joanna covered her ears with her hands and pushed her face against my shoulder. Slowly the sound diminished and silence flooded back. She reached up, cupped the back of my head with her hand, and pulled my face towards hers. With my free hand I stroked her arm. Without moving her mouth, she took my hand and placed it over her breast.

I pulled away from her. I was trembling like a man with a fever. ‘I can’t do this.’

Her face was flushed and smiling. Suddenly she kissed me again. This time her tongue darted into my mouth and flicked to and fro like the tail of a landed fish. Despite myself I responded.

Afterwards she said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that since I met you in church.’

‘You were in there when I came to lock up. You said you couldn’t get used to the quiet here.’

At that moment another aeroplane went over our heads. We looked at each other and started to laugh.

‘Do you remember when we found that cat?’ she asked. ‘You put your arms around me.’

‘I remember.’

Joanna’s hands were under my jacket now, exploring and stroking my body like two small animals. Suddenly the hands stopped moving. She pulled her face away and looked up at me.

‘We mustn’t let Toby find out.’

‘We mustn’t let anyone find out.’

‘No, you don’t understand. If Toby finds out, he’ll use the knowledge.’

‘How?’ I tried to smile. ‘Blackmail?’

I had intended the suggestion as a joke. But Joanna nodded.

‘He’ll be out of luck,’ I said. ‘I haven’t any money.’

‘He’d find something else you could give him. Or do for him.’

‘You make him sound like a monster.’

Joanna said nothing. She looked away from me and stared into the dappled surface of the pool.

‘Joanna,’ I whispered; even saying her name was a pleasure, intensified because the pleasure was touched with pain.

‘He’s my brother.’ She spoke to my chest; she would not look at me. ‘I’ve known him all my life. But I don’t know
why
he’s like he is. All I know is
what
he is.’ She swallowed. ‘How do you think he got that car? His precious bloody Jaguar?’

A rich boy’s toy.
‘Tell me.’

‘He was dealing. Not dope, or acid, or even speed. I could have handled that. He was dealing heroin. He was going out with a girl called Annabel. Poor little rich girl. Her dad gave her everything, including the E-type. Toby got her into heroin, I’m sure of that. Then he started using her as his front for the dealing. She had a flat at the back of Harrods. He was very clever. When the police began prowling around, everything led to her not him. They busted her. They could have done her for dealing, but the father could afford a good barrister. Toby’s name just didn’t come into it. In the end they did her for possession, instead, and now she’s in a nursing home in Switzerland. She worshipped Toby, you know. Still does, I expect. She told him he could use the car while she was gone.’

‘And you?’

She stirred in my arms and looked up at me. ‘What?’

‘Do you use drugs?’

‘Nothing you need worry about.’

‘What about you and Toby? Why are you together? Why did you buy this house with him?’ I hesitated and added a further question, one that bubbled up unexpectedly, surprising me perhaps more than her. ‘And why are you so scared of him?’

Joanna did not reply. My lips brushed her hair. She was breathing rapidly and shallowly. A small black ant scurried along the stone bench and climbed rapidly up to the top of my left thigh. It ran down to my left knee. It stared over the swimming pool like stout Cortez over the Pacific. Suddenly it turned through 360 degrees as if searching for his fellows. Finally it plunged over my kneecap and ran down the shin to the unknown territory of my foot and the paving slabs beyond. Like myself, the ant had gone too far to turn back.

‘Joanna? Why?’

I wanted to say that I loved her so much that I had a right to know, but I felt that that would be putting unfair pressure on her. She raised her head and stared at me with those green-brown eyes, wide and innocent. Her lips parted but, instead of speaking, she pulled my mouth down on hers.

While we were kissing, we heard the dark throb of the Jaguar’s engine on the drive.

For the rest of the week, time behaved capriciously, sprinting and crawling by turns. Joanna and I managed to meet every day, usually in the evening. On Wednesday, we went to the cinema in Richmond. I cannot remember what the film was. We bought tickets separately and met in the darkness. We sat side by side, unable to speak, our fingers exploring each other. Afterwards we left separately, just before the lights came on. I had parked in a side road near the green and Joanna joined me in the car. While we were kissing, I thought how easy it would be for a policeman to pass by and shine a torch into the car; how easy for a colleague or parishioner to recognize the car and come over to talk to me.

Joanna pulled slightly away from me. ‘I want all of you. I want you inside me.’

‘No. That’s impossible.’

‘I’m not a virgin, you know. Not since I was sixteen.’

I wanted to ask about those nameless lovers she had known before.

‘I wish you were my first,’ she went on. ‘I’ve never felt like that before.’

I kissed her again.

A few minutes later she returned to the subject: ‘So why don’t we make love properly?’

Why not indeed?
‘Not yet,’ I managed to say.

‘But why? You want me.’ Her hand was working between my legs and I could hardly deny what my body made so clear. ‘I don’t care where. We can do it here if you like. Now.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because …’ For me, I knew, penetration would be the final step, the point of no return. I had surrendered so much else but I was not – illogically but powerfully – prepared to surrender that. ‘I’m not ready. Just give me a little time.’

‘That’s the one thing we don’t have.’

‘One of several things we don’t have, actually.’

Joanna giggled. ‘I love you.’ Her hand began more vigorous operations. ‘Still –’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly. ‘There are other possibilities.’

She lowered her head over me. I stroked her hair.

All this should have been squalid, even ridiculous. Many people would have used worse words, and perhaps they would have been right. There are few defences left for a married, middle-aged clergyman who furtively exchanges sexual favours with a vulnerable young woman in a variety of undignified and uncomfortable situations.

I thirsted for Joanna as, at other times, I had thirsted for God. Discomfort, guilt, fear of discovery, lack of time – everything fed whatever emotion bound us together. It was not merely lust, because lust is straightforward and this was not; and lust can be satisfied, at least briefly, and this never was. Obsession? No, because that is entirely selfish and neither of us wished solely to take from the other – we also wished to give. What else was left? Only love, that vague and much-maligned word: a love that embraced lust and obsession.

During that month, I skimped and neglected the religious framework of my life, the framework that had sustained me for so long. I was afraid of God. I felt as though I were in the Garden of Eden but had no right to be there, and at any moment the order for my expulsion would come. Nor did I have time for Him. There was no longer enough room in my life.

There was little room for anything except Joanna. My in-tray filled up with unanswered letters and unpaid bills. The pad by the telephone filled with messages asking me to phone people I did not want to phone.

On Thursday I invented an attack of flu to avoid a diocesan meeting, a lie which gave us five whole hours in the afternoon and early evening. Joanna and I drove down to Hampshire, parked the car in a lay-by and followed a footpath into a wood. We left the footpath and followed tracks made by small animals until we came to a little clearing in a hollow. I laid out the rug from the car. Then, for the first time, I saw Joanna naked.

Despite everything that happened later, that afternoon glows in my mind. Sunlight trickled down through the leaves, casting shifting patterns on our bodies. I had never known such pleasure, such excitement, such happiness. Morally, I knew, avoiding penetration was a mere quibble – my guilt was already absolute. But I clung to the quibble as if it meant something, like a man holding a life belt in the face of a tidal wave.

What happened did not feel squalid: it felt inevitable, sad, guilt-ridden and wonderful. We knew that there would be a price to pay; and there was. But neither of us could have known how high that price would be.