Authors: Susan Howatch
“No, I’ve got to have a male director,” I say, but making a big effort I add: “That’s not because of any defect in your nun. It’s because of the defect in me.”
“A woman might succeed in healing you even though all the men have failed.”
I find I can only say: “No. Great-Uncle Cuthbert wouldn’t have approved.”
“Then get a male director you can respect,” says Nicholas, very flinty-eyed again, “and get one fast. If you wreck Venetia now, at this most crucial stage of her life, just because you can’t get your act together on the celibacy question—”
I assure him I’d rather be castrated than wreck Venetia, and five minutes later I feverishly start phoning my friends for information about any new star who’s appeared in the spiritual direction firmament.
Two other London priests recommend this nun. Amazing! If I didn’t know that Great-Uncle Cuthbert would never have trusted me
to be honest with a female director, I’d think that God was trying to tell me something …
COMMENT
: I’m still shilly-shallying around like an arch-ditherer over this spiritual direction business, and I
must
come to a decision. Here are the indisputable facts:
(1) I have to get a new hip in order to be fit enough to serve God to the best of my ability.
(2) With the new hip I could get into a sex-mess unless I sort myself out PDQ.
(3) If I don’t sort myself out PDQ I might wreck Venetia.
(4) In order to discover if I have any viable future with Venetia I’ve got to discern what God requires of me at this stage of my life and what kind of life I’m supposed to lead to meet those requirements.
(5) In order to arrive at the correct answers to these crucial questions I need help.
(6) In order to get the kind of help I need so that I can (a) line myself up properly with God through prayer and (b) work out what has to be done, I must find an experienced spiritual director who knows which end is up when it comes to sex, and
(7) I must find this paragon
without delay.
So far, so good. Now, let me think …
Maybe the words “without delay” are the crucial ones and that’s why I automatically underlined them. The truth is, though, that unless one’s exceptionally lucky, finding a new spiritual director—the right new spiritual director—always takes time, and if time is something I just don’t have …
No, I’ll have to stay with Simon for the time being. Better the spiritual director I know than the spiritual director I don’t know, and I mustn’t rush into a new association here just for the sake of speed. That could prove disastrous, far more disastrous than sticking with Simon until the right person turns up.
I hereby vow to keep conscientiously looking for the streetwise, sex-wise spiritual genius who’ll rescue me whenever I’m tempted to reach into my personality and push the button marked
SELF
-
DESTRUCT
.
Ought I, perhaps, to take a look at Nicholas’s nun?
No, waste of time, she’d never cope with me.
Dear God, please transform Simon into a streetwise, sexwise spiritual genius! Amen.
Wednesday, 5th October, 1988
: I demand an emergency appointment with Simon and get it, but when the time comes I feel lukewarm and want to cancel. Only the memory of Nicholas being flinty-eyed deters me.
So off I go, but it’s a wasted journey. Simon just waves his middle-class fixation at me again and spouts drivel. Why does Simon, who had a perfectly respectable upbringing in a forty-room mansion in Northumberland, idealise the middle-classes like this? I’m beginning to think his idea of heaven must be Surbiton.
He says it does sound as if I might just possibly be having a call to marry again, but perhaps the call is not to marry Venetia, so like Diana, but to marry someone quite different, a nice middle-class girl, for instance, who would like nothing better than to cook and sew and keep house and who would look after me beautifully in my old age.
The trouble is that Simon, having been a monk for fifty years, has no idea whatsoever what the modern middle-class girl is like. She either has a career, drinks scotch and brutalises every man in the boardroom, or else she’s dumped the children on the au pair and taken to fornicating with the house-husband next door.
I escape, feeling depressed, and head for Claridge’s to pussyfoot with Venetia.
All goes well—what a relief! Maybe I’m putting too much faith in spiritual directors and not enough faith in my own intense desire to do nothing which would blight Venetia’s chance of escaping from a living death into Life with a capital L. We don’t sit too close together. I behave impeccably and she makes no passes. In short, we talk and laugh and enjoy ourselves in a boringly normal fashion, but the meeting works and before we part we arrange a date to go pussyfooting at the Connaught.
COMMENT
: I’m extremely pleased and feel I’m in control of the situation—which probably means I’m not in control of it at all. “Let he who thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall …”
I’d better confide in Nicholas.
I can’t be too careful here.
Thursday, 6th October, 1988
: I swear to Nicholas I’ve been transformed into a knight in shining armour and Venetia’s safe. He’s im
pressed by my sincerity but not entirely convinced I’m incapable of making a balls-up at a later date. I at once declare that I’m now going to find a new spiritual director as soon as I possibly can.
Nicholas just says very politely: “I’m glad that’s now top of your agenda.”
To divert Nicholas from my humiliating flounderings over the spiritual direction question—not to mention my questionable flounderings over Venetia—I raise the subject of that other troubled woman, Francie Parker, who’s still busy floundering with a sadistic husband, but Nicholas finds her situation as baffling as I do. She won’t go to the police. She won’t go to a lawyer. She won’t go to a women’s refuge or seek support from a women’s group. She does periodically leave her husband, but she only goes to her mother in Kent and she’s always back home within forty-eight hours.
“Do you think there’s a risk,” I say worried, “that this upsetting private life may affect her work as a Befriender?”
We mull over this possibility, but come to the conclusion that listening devotedly to other people’s problems probably provides Francie with the perfect escape from dwelling on her own.
“She keeps saying her work’s a life-line,” Nicholas reminds me, “and there’s no evidence of incompetence—on the contrary, everyone says how wonderful she is. In fact only this morning Alice said to me how nice it was to see Francie regularly again …”
We agree, not for the first time, that we can’t force Francie to seek help and that all we can do at present is listen if she wants to talk. But I can’t help feeling this isn’t a very satisfactory solution.
After this conversation with Nicholas I leave the Centre and go upstairs into the church to do the ecclesiastical chores: I change the altar-cloth, tidy the prayer notice-board, put out a new supply of information booklets about our work at St. Benet’s. I’m still pottering in this fashion when Francie herself slips in to pray. I loiter, pretending to be deeply engaged in checking the supply of Communion wafers, and eventually she approaches me. She says she’s been giving thanks to God because her husband’s sworn to reform.
I think: Almighty God, please show me what I can do to help this woman.
But I already know I mustn’t collude with this new fantasy.
“Francie my dear,” I say gently, very gently, so gently that I sound like a cuddly old priest in one of those ultra-sentimental Hollywood films long ago instead of a grumpy old codger battling through 1988
with an uncertain sex-life, “I seem to remember your husband’s sworn to reform before.”
“But this time he really means it!”
She
can’t
believe that! Or can she?
“Well, if he breaks his word this time,” I say, “you should consider taking a completely different approach to the problem.”
She says she will but I can see she now thinks she’s going to live happily ever after.
Of course it’s notorious that abused women do get so mesmerised by the abuse that they become incapable of reacting rationally to their torment, but even so I find I’m still inclined to boggle.
Cautiously I enquire: “Have you told Nicholas this?”
“Not yet. But of course I will. Nick’s so sympathetic,” sighs Francie, momentarily letting her guard slip. “So understanding.”
But there’s nothing new there. Francie’s just one of several women at the Healing Centre who think Nicholas is the cat’s whiskers. This pardonable degree of admiration—mild hero-worship)—vague crush—whatever one wants to call it—is quite harmless, merely part of the normal fall-out from a charismatic ministry, and Nicholas knows all about how to deal with these commonplace psychological projections; he’s very skilled. Probably Francie’s idealising him more than usual at the moment because her husband’s so unsatisfactory, but she’s basically a sensible woman and there’s no danger of her going over the edge. I’m sure of this because I feel that if the danger existed she’d be confiding her problems only to Nicholas and leaving me well alone.
I light a candle for her before moving on to prepare for the lunch-time Eucharist.
COMMENT
: I was lighting a candle for Francie but thinking of Veneria. That’s spiritually sloppy. I must improve my concentration.
But how splendid it is to think that there’s only five days to go before the next pussyfooting session …
Tuesday, 11th October, 1988
: I meet Veneria at the Connaught and we pussyfoot together in a very amusing fashion. I’m delighted to hear that she’s increased her sessions with Robin to two a week because she finds them so profitable. I’m also delighted to be able to record that I behaved IMPECCABLY.
The only difficult moment comes when I ask after her daughter, now twenty-two, who’s working in Germany. Venetia sees little of Vanessa. The child was mostly brought up by Venetia’s favourite sister who likes children. Venetia says this was for the best as she herself “couldn’t cope.” She’s probably right, as it’s no fun for a child to have an alcoholic mother, but guilt is engraved in every line of her face and I see this failure has exacerbated her self-hatred and her rock-bottom self-esteem.
However, this brief discussion of Vanessa takes up less than a minute of the conversation, and soon afterwards we’re laughing again as if it had been instantly forgotten; Venetia’s suggesting we should pussyfoot again next week and I’m agreeing, adding what fun it is to check up on all these grand hotels. Then she asks idly: “Are you rich?”—which is the sort of stimulating, no-nonsense question that a nice middle-class girl would never dare to ask, and I answer: “No, my cash-flow problem’s so severe that I’ve had to sell the second Bentley and cut back on the weekly order of caviar from Fortnum’s.” The rich are always moaning about their cash-flow problems.
This amuses her but she refuses to be diverted. “As a follower of Jesus Christ,” she says, “why don’t you set up a charitable trust and give your money away?”
I explain that I have no intention of making a gaggle of lawyers and accountants rich by setting up a charitable foundation, but that if she’s interested I’ll give her a list of the charities I support. When she says: “Sorry,” and looks ashamed I say at once: “No need to apologise—your query was justified. Wealth gives rise to all sorts of spiritual questions which need to be asked and answered.”
But she only says: “I should have realised you’d be generous. After all, look at the way you’re spending money now on a raddled old has-been like me!”
I hear the pathetic craving for reassurance, the longing that someone, somewhere, might believe she wasn’t entirely disgusting.
“Where’s the raddled old has-been?” I demand truculently. “I see only a courageous wannabe!”
She tells me that if I can see that I can see anything, but I’ve struck the spark of hope. Her beautiful green eyes become misty. The cigarette trembles between her fingers. “You’re rather a dear old pet!” she whispers emotionally.
This is too much. It’s bad enough having to act the Cuddly Old Priest for Francie, but to be diagnosed as a Dear Old Pet by Venetia
is more than my aged flesh and blood can stand. “I’m not a dear old pet at all,” I rasp in my best cantankerous voice. “I’m mean, stroppy and exhausting to know. Ask Nicholas or Stacy.”
She rasps back: “Good, that makes two of us! Now we can stop pretending we’re so adorable!”
We gurgle and giggle as we puff away at our filthy cigarettes, and I’m sure we both feel that life’s suddenly very worth living indeed. Sailing home later in a taxi I remember an old Vera Lynn hit. “ ‘We’ll meet again—don’t know where, don’t know when,’ ” I warble as if I were dead drunk instead of stone-cold sober, but in fact I do know exactly where and when. And I can hardly wait to go pussyfooting next week at the Dorchester.
At home I find Rosalind’s staying the night; she’s come up to town to meet a friend for lunch and see how the new cleaner’s getting on. The new cleaner is very shy and industrious and answers to the name of Shirin, but her English is uncertain. I won’t let her in my bedsit, not because I want to be anti-women, racist or xenophobic, but because I like my privacy and I’d rather hoover the carpet and wipe off the dust myself. I do this without fail every six months.
I want to tell Nicholas that I’ve behaved IMPECCABLY with Venetia, and as my hip’s not so bad tonight I clamber up the stairs to his flat. He and Rosalind, sitting hand in hand on the sofa like a couple of teenagers from the chaste 1950s, are watching a rerun of
Fawlty Towers
on television.
Seeing that I’ve been driven to climb the stairs Nicholas jumps up at once, thinking something’s wrong, so I hasten to reassure him. “I’m fine,” I say, “and so’s Venetia.”
“Venetia Hoffenberg?” says Rosalind, making what I believe is known as a “moue” of distaste. “God, what on earth are you doing with that old wreck?”
As I bend my whole will towards keeping my mouth shut, Nicholas says mildly: “Darling, is that quite fair? You haven’t seen Venetia for a while. She’s changed.”