The Life and Loves of a She Devil (20 page)

Mary Fisher wakes alone, writhing and sobbing in her silken sheets. She wants no one else but Bobbo, and there is no one else to want, in any case. Garcia makes love to Joan the village girl in all the stray corners of the house. Mary Fisher remonstrates.

‘I’ll do as I please,’ says Garcia. ‘And who are you to object? There was a time you couldn’t even bother to answer the telephone, you were so hard at it, and didn’t care who knew!’

Mary Fisher is frightened of Garcia, who knows too much and could always tell, though what and to whom she can scarcely remember. All she knows is that she has to keep him happy.

She sinks into sloth: the pangs of unsatisfied lust grow less, or perhaps she is just used to them. She eats ravioli out of tins, and bags of boiled sweets, and grows thick around the middle.

She cannot remember Bobbo’s face, any more than he can remember hers. She remembers love, though, and still writes about it. She finishes
The Gates of Desire.
Her publishers are pleased. Perhaps she will soon be rich again? Perhaps!

Mary Fisher tosses and yearns and waits to be filled, and writes about love. Her lies are worse because now she knows they are lies. She remembers her past: she understands what she is.

Mary Fisher did a wicked thing: she set herself up in a high building on the edge of a high cliff and sent a new light beaming out into the darkness. The light was treacherous; it spoke of clear water and faith and life when in fact there were rocks and dark and storms out there, and even death, and mariners should not be lulled but must be warned. It is not just for myself that I look for vengeance.

I can, I suppose, in the end, forgive Mary Fisher for many things. It was in the name of love that she did what she did, before I brought her to the understanding of what love is; or indeed, of what it is to be abandoned by a husband, to be condemned to a living death of humiliation, anxiety and woe. I daresay I might have done the same myself, had I stood in her little Size 3 shoes. But I don’t forgive her novels. She devils are allowed to be petulant.

Garcia rings to ask if he should get Harness put down. He cannot get a clear answer from Mary Fisher, who is as inconsolable at Bobbo’s absence as the dog. Harness, says Garcia, is now disturbed, incontinent, uncontrollable in traffic, and has taken to snatching the food from Mary Fisher’s plate. Even the vet says there is nothing for him but merciful oblivion. What do I think?

‘I think you must do as the vet suggests,’ say I. I cannot have Harness eating the food from Mary Fisher’s plate. As she grows fat, I shall grow thin. That’s the way it is.

Harness goes to the vet and does not return.

‘Do you believe in God?’ Mary Fisher asks Garcia.

‘Of course I do!’ he says.

‘I used to,’ she says. ‘If only I could believe again. He was such a great consolation.’

F
ATHER FERGUSON LIVED IN
the house next to his church, in a central area of the city where the new high-rises had not quite ousted the low stone brick buildings of the original town. He had been looking for a housekeeper for some time, but without success, for the house was large and cold and old and reputed to be haunted, and had no heating in winter or air-conditioning in summer. Father Ferguson did not like being too comfortable: he felt easier in his soul when slightly hungry, or too hot or too cold, or when he had toothache. He was a familiar sight in the city, a lean, white-haired, anguished figure, jogging to and from his church to the Mission in Bradwell Park, morning and evening. It was a distance of five miles.

‘There he goes!’ his parishioners would say. ‘Isn’t he a wonder! He has some odd notions for a priest, but a priest he is. Or else a saint!’

He was thirty-five. His hair had turned white when he was twenty-nine, when he had been obliged to deliver a baby to a drug-addicted mother in a derelict house. The baby was stillborn. The mother rejoiced. He felt that the Devil was loose in the world.

Now he worked amongst the people. He was not popular with his ecumenical superiors, for he not only dabbled in political matters, but was unpredictable in his attitudes generally. He had been known to say in public that mouths must be filled before souls could be fed. He would lay the blame for sin at the State’s door: he all but preached revolution while maintaining an almost absurd quietism in his personal affairs. He wanted the alcohol removed from the communion wine. He signed petitions which sought to outlaw nuclear warfare. His flock didn’t like him either, although they felt duty bound to admire him, because he recommended celibacy for the unmarried, and abstinence for the married if they had decided against children. His flock thought he was mad: now there were antibiotics for social diseases, and contraception — and if necessary abortion — to prevent the accidental birth of children, what was he going on about? The welfare agencies thought he was wicked, and hopelessly old fashioned. As well blame the moon for lunacy!

Father Ferguson’s church was falling down: no one would help him put it back up. Not just the house but the church was said to be haunted. Push open the door on a lonely night and sounds of music and the scent of incense and glimpses of bright colour within could be heard, and smelled and seen. Outside in the new big city the sound of traffic rose, day and night, never stopping: here in the old church lingered a memory of that other little world, long ago, which formed the new one, and left its poetry, and its lingering customs to enrich it. People shivered and shook at the notion of a haunting that was divine, not diabolic. And in the house itself, they said, shadowy monks came and went, although certainly monks had never lived there.

Father Ferguson himself had never encountered either the ghostly service in his church or the ghostly monks in his house, and was scathing about those who had.

‘I believe in God,’ he said, ‘not ghosts. To believe in ghosts is an insult to the Almighty’s creation!’

A property developer wanted the land on which the church and house stood to build yet another high-rise office block. Father Ferguson’s masters, being in financial difficulties, would have liked the sale to go through, but Father Ferguson was obstinate. He was quoted in the local press as claiming that the Church was opting out of its responsibilities and abandoning the inner city to the Devil and the feminists (the property company was run by a woman) and turning its back upon the wretched of the world. Father Ferguson appeared to equate the Devil with capitalism, not communism, which was unfortunate. The matter reached the national press, and Father Ferguson made further headlines by suggesting that priests should be allowed to marry, that celibacy must be a matter of choice: that it was impossible to deal with God’s breeding, teeming world properly as a half-man. The phrase was his. ‘Half-Man.’

‘Father Ferguson,’ said his masters, ‘do we hear you right? You recommend marriage without sex to the sheep and marriage with sex to the shepherd? Is this not inconsistency?’

‘Not so inconsistent as Jesus,’ replied Father Ferguson, unabashed. ‘Blasting fig trees one day, turning cheeks the other.’

Father Ferguson advertised weekly for a housekeeper. He needed one: he could not manage his clothes. He washed his shirts carefully but they did not come clean. He would rub the collar fabric thin, but still the dirt remained; he didn’t understand it. Whenever he opened the great creaky wardrobe that had been his mother’s, and a wedding present to her from her grandmother, and took out his trousers, there would be stains on them he could have sworn were not there the day before. Or perhaps he had put them away in a poor light, and taken them out in a strong one? Except the light in the house was never good. Once it had been surrounded by fields and flowers and trees, and the windows had let in more than enough; now the garages and the high-rises crowded in and sopped up God’s light, leaving only dimness and fumes behind.

Sometimes he thought he was living in hell. The food in the refrigerator went bad. He did not understand it. Cold was supposed to preserve food. The inside of the cabinet was covered with a blackish, spotty mould. Perhaps he just left food in there for too long, forgetting the passage of time? He did not much appreciate or need food, but liked to have the odd square of cheese, or an egg for supper.

When Molly Wishant applied for the job of housekeeper it seemed to Father Ferguson that his problem was at last solved. She was a woman like no other. She could not possibly be seen by his parishioners as a source of erotic excitement. She was strong, well-spoken and intelligent; she was escaping from nothing; and her reason for wanting the job — a desire to fill in time usefully while losing three stone, as a doctor had suggested she should — seemed to him unusual but acceptable. She would not become hysterical and claim the house was haunted. She was too sombre a person to chatter at breakfast time; she did not wear a gold cross around her neck, in mockery of Our Saviour’s death, as so many did. She had facial moles from which hairs sprouted, so presumably lacked vanity, and would not spend so much time in the bathroom, night or morning, as to inconvenience him. She would not run up the food bills. He did not think that the mere losing of weight would help the poor creature much: she would remain ungainly; but it was scarcely his business to point this out.

‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ he asked.

‘I used to help out at Vickie’s house. You know, the pregnant girl with two children, and no husband, down at Bradwell Park.’

‘I can’t quite place her,’ he said. ‘There are so many like her.’

‘And will be more,’ said Molly Wishant, ‘if you go on telling them what you do.’

‘We are all God’s children,’ he said, startled.

He hoped she did not feel the cold: that she would not waste the electric fires unnecessarily. She said she imagined her work would keep her warm. That was on the first day of her employment. She slept in one of the attic rooms, where plaster flaked from the ceiling whenever a lorry went by in the street below. The bed was wire mesh hung from an iron frame, and the mattress old, old horsehair.

After a week Molly mentioned that Father Ferguson’s shirts needed replacing. Father Ferguson replied that they were only ten years old and when she said that was quite old, for a shirt, he said that his father’s had lasted twenty, so she agreed to make do. She took fabric from the bottom hems and patched underneath the arm. The priest’s collars were detachable; he had been left an extra dozen in an uncle’s will: they were lasting rather better than the shirts.

‘God looks after His own,’ said Father Ferguson.

Presently she asked for soap and hot water to help her with the laundry, and he said that in the seminary in Italy in which he had been trained washing was done with cold stream water and without soap. Molly pointed out that the water there may well have been softer, but that the city water was hard; but she agreed to use those new detergents which worked in cold water as well as in hot.

She investigated the stains on his trousers and found some kind of fungus life in the top of the wardrobe which exuded drops of sticky liquid from time to time; this she eradicated.

She put 100-watt bulbs in the sockets instead of the 40-watt bulbs he had taken for granted, and the monk-like shadows were revealed for what they were: the long curtains in the hall flying up in the draught that came blustering down from the attic when the dining-room fire was lit, casting vague shapes on the upstairs gallery. Father. Ferguson worried about the expense of the stronger bulbs but she assured him the difference in price was minimal.

He believed her. She inspired trust. She lost one stone in the first month she worked for him. She seemed to know what she was about. She was lonely and he was sorry for her.

She would not clean his church. She laughed and said it would not be suitable for an unbeliever to do so. She said she didn’t believe in God, but she did believe in the Devil. She’d met him only recently, and had had closer contact with him than was pleasant. He thought he would rather deal with someone who acknowledged the Devil than with those many who professed to believe in God, but who saw Him only in anthropomorphic terms. That is, who trivialised Him.

He told her about the rumours that the church was haunted, and she said no doubt the rumours had been put about by the property developers who wanted to buy the land.

He came to think, in the space of six weeks or so, that she was precious: a pearl amongst women. For someone so large she moved silently. He hoped she would never leave. He began to tempt her with little morsels of food — at first squares of cheese, and apples, but then he would drop by the corner store and bring home jam doughnuts and apple turnovers. Not cheap; but the faster she lost weight the sooner she would go.

He saw that perhaps life could be pleasant without being frivolous. He accepted a bottle of sherry as a gift from one of the parishioners — a woman who, he later discovered, had given out her three children, two born and one unborn, for adoption. They had gone to good Christian families, albeit in the Lebanon. He called Molly down from her attic to help him drink it. His deep eyes flashed with a softer fire, and hers glittered redly. Outside the juggernauts rumbled by, and china clinked and lamps trembled, as if in an earthquake. It was never quite dark or quiet in the house, no matter how ancient the spirits within it.

‘What was the woman’s name?’ asked Molly.

‘Vickie, I think,’ said Father Ferguson, and Molly raised her glass.

‘How much did she get for them?’ she asked.

‘Not even in Bradwell Park,’ said the Father, ‘do women sell their children for money!’

‘Then they should start,’ said Molly.

They drank the entire bottle of sherry between them.

‘Jesus turned water to wine,’ said Molly. ‘He can’t have thought so badly of it.’

‘True,’ said Father Ferguson, and opened another bottle, which Molly happened to have by her. She wouldn’t have any herself, pointing out that she was on a diet, so he was obliged to drink it all himself.

‘Otherwise,’ said Molly, ‘it will go off.’