Authors: Susan Howatch
However, Lewis now had a new hip. He could be sent back upstairs to the curate’s flat which he had occupied originally, long before Nicky had been permitted to take on a curate. He wouldn’t want to share the curate’s flat with Stacy, but Nicky had said the flat could be divided … to provide a games-room for the boys. If Lewis was shipped up to the top floor, where could I put the games-room? In the basement, was the obvious answer, but in that case, what happened to my proposed flower-room? My mind was just beginning to spin with the effort of trying to solve this seemingly intractable problem when I realised the phone conversation had finished and Nicky was talking directly to me again.
“When we hit London,” he was saying, glancing at his watch, “don’t panic if we get separated by traffic—I’ll pull in as soon as possible and wait till you catch up. I’ll be stopping in the King’s Road to get a bottle of wine, so watch carefully for the left turn once we’re through Earls Court and Kensington.”
I nodded meekly, wondering why he should be treating me as if I were a learner-driver adrift in the great metropolis. London might seem like a foreign country to me, but I was not unfamiliar with it. It was true I never normally chose to drive there—who in their right mind would?—but I was still capable of finding my way from the western fringes to the City. I could only suppose he needed to boss me around a bit to boost his bruised ego.
The traffic was frightful, but the sheer volume of vehicles meant that it was easy to chug along in convoy. In the King’s Road Nicky bought a bottle of champagne at an off-licence. Then we dropped down another block and began following the River all the way to the Square Mile.
The leafless trees of the Embankment were looking wan but the River was all glamour; every now and then I glimpsed the racing tide, the rippling waters and the sucking, sexy swirling of the currents around the bridges. The glamour doubled as we approached the City. Giant cranes were silhouetted against the skyline, symbols of the building boom which marked the country’s prosperity, and as the skyscrapers swung into view beyond the dome of St. Paul’s I seemed to
feel the throbbing pulse of world-class London, revved up by the dynamism of Mrs. Thatcher to become the greatest money-market on earth. A primitive thrill of patriotism made the adrenaline surge through my veins and as I exclaimed aloud: “London’s for winners!” I miraculously found myself even looking forward to the challenges my new life posed.
But by that stage I suppose it was almost inevitable that I should have been willing to retreat from a harsh reality into a euphoric fantasy-world.
Driving buoyantly around St. Paul’s I followed Nicky through Cheapside towards Poultry and north up Egg Street to St. Benet’s.
III
The Rectory
stood next to the churchyard in a cobbled alley which ran south from London Wall. German bombs had blasted away much of the pre-war surroundings, but although the church had sustained minor damage the Rectory, unfortunately, had survived intact. There had been a house on that site for centuries, but the present Rectory had been built late in the eighteenth century and extended in the nineteenth. I could have coped with a beautiful Georgian town-house. But the Victorian architect, intoxicated by Gothic ideas, had concocted a vast new wing full of mysterious passages and gloomy rooms and little flights of stairs, oddly placed, which made hoovering hell.
At the Georgian front of the house the basement barely peeked above ground but at the back it was on a level with the garden, a turgid little wilderness which no one, least of all me, had ever bothered to tend. On the north side of the garden was the churchyard of St. Benet’s, however, and this was well kept and attractive. It was on a higher level than the garden and separated from it by a substantial wall. On the east side of the garden was the back of a modern office block, deserted at weekends, and on the south and west sides the garden was flanked by the Rectory which, thanks to the Victorian extension, now formed the shape of a reversed L.
On the ground floor, which was raised a few feet above the cobbled forecourt and therefore not, strictly speaking, on the ground at all, the Georgian rooms had been rearranged and renovated in the twentieth century when the kitchen had been resited, but the first floor flat allocated to the Rector was still a slab of rampant Victori
ana; not even the Georgian rooms at the front had escaped the lust of the architect for Gothic interior decoration, and in the Victorian wing the rooms were crammed with monstrous fireplaces, dusty panelling, the occasional stained glass window in frightful taste and heavy lighting fixtures. There was no central heating, although each room had a gas fire.
The best room in the flat was the lavatory, a magnificent chamber with steps which led up to the “throne”; there was a blue-and-white flowered bowl, a mahogany seat and a long chain which reminded me vaguely of medieval tortures. Next door to this masterpiece in a room which was always freezing, even in summer, stood a long bath on legs. The rest of the accommodation consisted of four bedrooms (including one each for the boys to use on their occasional holiday visits), a dining-room and a drawing-room but not Nicky’s study; he preferred to work on the ground floor in the reception room on the north side of the front door.
I had never been tempted to “take the house in hand,” as Mummy would have put it, and on my infrequent visits I had simply gritted my teeth and endured the discomfort and the inconvenience. I hadn’t even complained about the decor, arranged by Nicky after his arrival in 1981. He and I had quite different tastes in furnishings. I liked comfortable armchairs and sofas, ranges of chintz in warm colours, thick carpets peppered with antiques. Nicky liked austerity, a rug or two on bare floorboards, plain drugget in the passageways, stark white walls whenever there was a respite from the heavy panelling. He also saw nothing wrong with buying cheap furniture, and he had even put up DIY shelves in the drawing-room. It was not that he was devoid of taste. The furniture was pleasantly upholstered and the few pictures, all posters of modern paintings, were very striking if one liked that kind of thing—and it had to be said that they looked very odd amidst the Gothic ambience—but he had no interest in pursuing excellence in interior decoration and he was indifferent to the lack of modern comfort. Since he always ate downstairs with the others it was small wonder that the flat’s kitchen was reminiscent of a 1950s slum, but he had never even bothered to buy a new refrigerator to house his Coca-Cola. The yellowish antique which wheezed and clanked in a corner could hardly manufacture solid ice-cubes.
I hated that grisly, dark, poky kitchen which made all thought of giving dinner-parties in the flat inconceivable. Even if the place had been modernised it would still have been much too small to permit any self-respecting cook to work there, but on the other hand the
house’s main kitchen, formerly in the basement but now covering a substantial area of the ground floor, was an excellent size because two rooms had been knocked into one in order to produce a satisfactory dining area. I liked this arrangement and thought the kitchen had considerable potential, but it did need revamping; one could have spent twenty-five thousand pounds there very rapidly with no trouble at all. However, when I reclaimed the ground floor for the Darrow family the problem would be not the shabbiness of the kitchen but the lack of a formal ground-floor dining-room. One can hardly ask one’s guests to eat among the pots and pans.
In addition to Nicky’s study and Lewis’s bedsit, there was one other reception room on the ground floor but this was used for church business unconnected with the Healing Centre and I saw no way of annexing this space; one needed a room not only for meetings but a room in which to dump both casual callers and people who had an appointment to see Nicky in his study. Yet again I realised that the obvious solution to all the difficulties was to shoehorn Lewis out of that interconnecting double reception room and convert it into a dining-room and drawing-room, but I felt sure Lewis would tenaciously resist being shoehorned.
As I reviewed these possible changes to the Rectory, I was unpacking my suitcases in the main bedroom of the Rector’s flat. This room contained my sole contribution to the house: an ultra-modern, ultra-comfortable double-bed. I can’t bear discomfort when I’m trying to sleep.
Having finished unpacking I discovered that someone had switched on the immersion heater after learning of our imminent arrival and that the water was now hot enough for a bath. Nicky liked his bathrooms to be very clean so I had no cause for complaint on the grounds of hygiene, but I hated that enormous trough, so uncomfortable, and the room itself was, as usual, freezing. Back in the bedroom I crouched over the gas fire and dreamed again, like Mrs. Thatcher, of radical change.
I knew exactly what needed to be done to this floor when the Rector’s flat ceased to exist and the house became one home again. I wanted a master bedroom with bathroom en suite, a guest-room with bathroom en suite, the boys’ rooms with a large bathroom they could share and last but not least a sitting-room for myself, a private and luxurious space to which I could retreat when the inevitably churchy atmosphere of the Rectory got too much and I needed a breather. I
knew I could have great fun designing that sitting-room … Idly I began to visualise carpets and fabrics.
Nicky had long since disappeared and I assumed he had gone down to the bedsit to bring his henchman up to date with the news, but I had no wish to see Lewis again that day and every wish for a large gin-and-tonic. Scanning the cupboards in the kitchen and drawing-room I found one bottle of tonic, left over from my last visit, but no gin. Nicky had probably taken it downstairs and used it to oil the churchwardens. I was just muttering a curse when I remembered the champagne and felt better. But there was no sign of it. I assumed that Nicky, wanting the bottle to chill quickly, had bypassed the clanking antique in the flat and consigned the champagne to the modern refrigerator in the main kitchen.
Having gone downstairs I found the new cook-housekeeper, a very plain girl, moving—or rather, lumbering—around her domain. She was wearing a red plastic apron over a blue skirt and a voluminous purple sweater. It’s strange how often fat people wear colours which make them look fatter than ever. Alice could have benefited from some advice about how to dress properly, and as for her hair … I wondered if she cut it with garden-shears.
Curled up in a basket near the dresser was a cat. “Oh!” I said, very much surprised.
Alice was so startled that she dropped the spoon she was carrying. “Mrs. Darrow! I didn’t hear you come in!”
“Sorry to give you a shock. Is that your cat?”
“No, Nicholas got it. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten,” I said airily, but that was a lie. He had never told me. I have nothing against cats but in the past I had always felt that with two children and a garden I couldn’t cope with looking after animals as well. This attitude was undeniably wimpish, but I’d covered it up by taking a strong anti-animal line and declaring that I didn’t want the carpets infested with fleas and the upholstery torn to shreds.
Looking at the cat which Nicky had failed to mention to me, I said to Alice: “I suppose you’re the one who looks after it?”
“Yes, but I don’t mind and I promise you he’ll never go to your flat. Nicholas has been helping me train him.”
What was all this talk of “Nicholas”? As my brain began to add up certain facts with the speed of a calculator I stopped looking at the cat and started looking at her.
“Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” said the girl awkwardly. “I hope that’s convenient.”
I pulled myself together. “Lovely!” I said, flashing her a dazzling smile. “Thank you so much.” Gliding to the fridge I extracted the champagne and caressed the bottle lightly to make sure it was chilled.
“I do hope you don’t mind about James,” said the girl behind me. “He’s really very good.”
“James? What an elegant name for a cat!” I took another look at the animal. It was a tabby. That meant Nicky had chosen it. Nicky always preferred tabbies. But why had he suddenly decided to acquire a cat? As the obvious answer occurred to me I said sharply to Alice: “Has there been a problem with mice?”
“Well, as a matter of fact—”
In disgust I thought for the umpteenth time what a dump the Rectory was. I hate mice.
“—I believe a mouse
was
spotted once before I came but since we’ve had James there’s been no problem at all.”
“Good for James!” I gave her another dazzling smile and walked out.
At Lewis’s door I paused to adjust my grip on the bottle before I tapped on the panel and peeped into the room. I had seen Lewis briefly on my arrival so I didn’t bother to say anything further to him. This was not, as might be supposed, because I was embarrassed that he should know all about the current state of my marriage; I had long since reconciled myself to the fact that Nicky had no secrets from his former mentor. My taciturnity simply stemmed from the fact that I was dying for a drink. Holding up the bottle of champagne I just said to Nicky: “Shall we?” and at once Nicky jumped to his feet as if he could hardly wait to take his first sip.
“Enjoy your dinner à deux!” said Lewis, putting on the excessively courteous voice he often used to disguise how much he disliked me. “Alice has devised a dazzling menu.”
“Too sweet of her!” I said brightly. “Which reminds me—Nicky darling, why didn’t you mention Alice’s playmate, little James?”
Nicky at once looked very vague, as if he couldn’t quite remember who James was, and began to drift across the room to the door. “I didn’t think you’d be interested in such a trivial domestic detail,” he said, as if I always had to have my mind fixed on the most exalted of subjects, “but there was a mouse problem and when Alice suggested the obvious solution I decided not to object. You don’t mind, do you? He’ll never trouble you. Alice looks after him.”
“Yes, I can see there are all kinds of things she might like to look after.”
Lewis at once heaved himself to his feet. “Don’t let that champagne get warm!” he advised jovially. “If you both hang around here much longer I shall drink the whole bottle myself!”