Authors: Susan Howatch
Nicky seized the chance to escape without commenting on my barbed remark.
In silence we retired upstairs.
IV
“
Honestly
, Nicky!” I exclaimed as soon as the front door of the flat was closed. “Honestly!”
“Look, I’m sorry about the cat, but I didn’t foresee you coming to live here, did I, and I knew he could be kept out of sight during your visits—”
“I’m not talking about the cat, you chump! I’m talking about Alice!”
“Alice?”
“Yes,
Alice!
God, men are so stupid sometimes—no wonder more women are staying unmarried and just raiding sperm-banks whenever they want children—”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply, but if you seriously think for one moment—”
“Oh, for God’s sake open the champers and let’s get stoned.”
He peeled off the foil from the bottle while I extracted a pair of the cheap glasses he had bought at Habitat, and just as the cork yielded with a satisfying pop there was a most pleasant surprise: Alice arrived with a platter of canapés.
“I thought you might like these with the champagne,” she said shyly when I responded to her knock on the door.
“Good God!” I exclaimed astonished. “How super! Thanks very much.”
She smiled, peeped over my shoulder and smiled again. “Thanks, Alice,” said Nicky behind me in the kitchen doorway.
Alice disappeared. The door closed. Nicky and I were left looking at each other over the luscious hors d’oeuvres.
“Well, ‘Nicholas,’ ” I said in my pleasantest voice, “I think it’s time you and I had a little talk about that girl.”
V
In the
living-room he poured out the champagne. “I honestly don’t see what your problem is.”
“That’s the problem. Cheers, darling.”
“Cheers.”
The glasses clinked. We took a sip and subsided onto the rock-hard cheap sofa. In front of us, beyond the woolly rug which Nicky had rescued from a jumble-sale, the gas fire burned fiercely while above the chimney-piece Nicky’s favourite Kandinsky poster glowed in a riot of bright colours within its plain black frame.
“Here’s to our new life,” said Nicky.
“Here’s to our new life,” said I.
We had another swill and began to gobble the canapés. Soon the memory of the sandwich lunch and the horrors of the morning began to recede at the speed of light. Not for the first time it occurred to me that there was nothing like a glass of champagne for restoring one after a short holiday in hell.
“Now listen to me, darling,” I said after my third swill. “It’s very naughty of you to employ that girl when you must know that she’s in love with you—no, don’t interrupt! Let me have my say. I’m speaking here, please note, in defence of Alice, who’s obviously the most respectable of nice girls and more than worthy of being a Rectory employee. It’s about time she had a woman to stand up for her in the face of all this rampant male exploitation!”
“What exploitation?”
“Oh God. Nicky, it’s simply not fair to that girl to keep her under your roof when she’s in love with you. I’m sure you only wanted to be charitable and Christian, but it’ll screw her up emotionally if you continue to let her yearn for you with no hope of a reward.”
“But—”
“It’s not healthy! Can’t you see you’re exploiting her by taking advantage of her infatuation? She’d be much happier in the long run if she went back to Belgravia and took a job with one of Cynthia Aysgarth’s pals!”
He stared down at the champagne as if he wished he was drinking Coke. All he said was: “Alice isn’t infatuated with me.”
“Well, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything!”
He continued to stare at the champagne in his glass but now it was
as if he was peering into a crystal ball which would tell him what to say. Nicky’s the only person I’ve ever met who can make a glass of champagne last for an hour and even, if necessary, for a whole evening.
At last he said with care: “I agree the situation must be carefully monitored, but so far Alice is all right—in fact she’s doing well, getting to know everyone at the Healing Centre and enjoying community life. She’s not pining away from unrequited love or living in some fantasy-world. She’s at last having a decent life firmly anchored in reality.”
“Nicky, I do accept that you’re trying to do the right thing by that girl, but you just haven’t a clue how painful it must be for her to worship a very attractive man whose only response is to treat her with Christian kindness!”
“Alice doesn’t worship me. She simply sees me with great clarity and values what she sees. That’s different.”
“Look, one of us is being very stupid and I don’t think it’s me. If you believe—”
“Try to see the situation within the context of the ministry of healing,” he interrupted, looking me straight in the eyes at last. “A lot of people who come here are emotionally deprived. For them to experience love in any form, even in a form which you and I would consider childish, is for them a big step forward and the last thing they need is rejection. The wonder worker would exploit that love and use it to feed his own ego, but the Christian priest should accept the love—hero-worship—whatever you care to call it—and offer it back to God, the source of all love, so that the love is contained and sanctified instead of corrupted and destroyed. It’s all part and parcel of treating the poor and needy with special care, as Christ did, and living out the belief that each one of us has value in God’s eyes.”
“Well, that’s certainly very fine and idealistic, but …” My voice trailed away. By this time I was conscious that the conversation had become very different from the one I’d anticipated. It had become far more serious, far more profound, far more … But I could not quite think of the adjective I wanted. “Baffling” implied I was too thick to grasp Nicky’s simple sentences, and “disturbing” implied I was being needlessly neurotic. Then I realised that the right word was “enigmatic.” That implied both mystery and complexity, qualities I had never once expected to encounter in Nicky’s relationship with Alice Fletcher.
I didn’t care for this conclusion at all, but as soon as I had reached it, Nicky said swiftly: “Darling, you can be quite sure that if I thought Alice wasn’t thriving here I’d find her a job elsewhere. So there’s no need for you to worry about her, I promise. No need at all.”
That sounded sensible enough. What exactly had I been worrying about anyway? The girl could hardly be considered a threat to me, and Nicky had long since learnt how to deal with infatuated females. Then it dawned on me to my astonishment that I had been identifying very deeply with Alice. Poor girl! No man, not even a man armed with ESP, can really begin to imagine the horrors plain women have to endure …
I drained my glass of champagne and silently thanked God that my plain adolescence now seemed like another life on a distant planet.
VI
Alice
had cooked chicken forestière with duchesse potatoes and carrots followed by peaches in brandy with a sweet white wine sauce. The carrots were a trifle
al dente
but otherwise I had no complaints. During the meal neither Nicky nor I bothered much with conversation, and afterwards when I was preparing the coffee, he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. The drama of the past twenty-four hours, capped with the dose of champagne, had finally taken its toll.
Abandoning the coffee with relief I fell into bed and was asleep five minutes later.
At five-thirty I was aware of him having a bath and dressing in fresh clothes before going downstairs to his study. Here, I knew, he would do his spiritual exercises: reading, meditating, praying. At six-thirty he would tackle his correspondence—he conducted much of his spiritual direction by letter—and at five to eight he would go over to the church for the first service of the day. This one was too early for the office-workers; they would flock to the lunch-time Eucharist, but the principal people at the Healing Centre would all try to attend alongside the prayer-group which met regularly to support the ministry. Only the Healing Centre’s personnel, however, would show up at the Rectory afterwards for the communal breakfast. The members of the prayer-group were not concerned with the administrative matters which surfaced at this daily staff meeting, and would disperse after the service to their homes.
At quarter to eight, just as I was dreaming I had won an enormous gold cup at the Chelsea Flower Show for exhibiting a wilting red rose dripping blood, Nicky woke me up and asked if I wanted to go to the eight o’clock “mass.” Why Anglo-Catholics can’t be decently British and talk of “Communion” I shall never know.
“Oh Nicky, I could never be ready in time and anyway I’ve got to revive this rose before the judges realise it’s dead—”
He disappeared.
When I awoke properly half an hour later I felt guilty. I should have gone to Communion to mark the fresh start in our marriage. For a split second as I stared around the bleak bedroom I longed for Butterfold, but that anguished stab of desire was so disturbing that I repressed it. I decided to devote the morning to making a comprehensive survey of the Rectory so that I could flesh out the ideas I had already had and dream up some new ones. I still hadn’t solved the problem of where to put the boys’ games-room.
Having dressed in a dove-grey suit to encourage a business-like frame of mind, I borrowed some A4 paper and a clipboard from Nicky’s study and retired again to the flat where I drank coffee and drew diagrams of rooms dotted with furniture. After completing the third diagram I decided I ought to make a polite appearance at the communal breakfast, but fortunately an earnest discussion was in progress about whether the proposed fax machine should be abandoned and I was able to escape in less than a minute. Apparently someone had just discovered that messages on fax-paper faded away when stored and had to be photocopied on arrival, a procedure which added to the expense involved. As I slipped out of the room Lewis was announcing with relish: “The idea that technology will save us all time and money is one of the great urban myths of the late twentieth century.”
Closing the door of the kitchen I paused in the hall. I was wondering whether to inspect the garden but then I remembered it was only accessible at present through Alice’s flat, known as the hell-hole in the days when it had been used to store files and other clutter from the Church and the Healing Centre. This junk was now choking the area which Nicky said I should use as a garden-room. But where was the junk to go next? The whole problem began to seem very knotty indeed, almost as knotty as the problem about where to put the games-room if a shoehorned Lewis was dispatched to share the space at the top of the house with Stacy.
I was just beginning to feel depressed when Stacy himself lolloped out of the kitchen and caught sight of me musing by the main staircase. I guessed he was probably en route to the curate’s flat, formerly the servants’ attics, to change from his cassock in preparation for his morning’s work.
I had a soft spot for Stacy, not just because I was partial to young men but because I felt sorry for him, living alongside Nicky and Lewis, both former public-schoolboys from moneyed, privileged backgrounds. Stacy had been chosen by Nicky to broaden the social base of the ministry. I thought this was actually rather patronising, as if Nicky and Lewis were saying: “Gosh, we’re so elite that we really need a yob like you to teach us how the other half live!” and I wondered how happy Stacy was not only with his clerical colleagues but with the middle-class southerners who helped to run the Healing Centre.
St. Benet’s, being a Guild church, was not classified as a place where curates could be trained, but the clerical authorities in Westminster and Lambeth had liked the idea of a young priest being groomed for this flourishing, fashionable ministry, and when a legacy to the Centre had enabled Nicky to pay a clerical salary, special arrangements to authorise the engaging of a curate had been made at Church House. Stacy’s interest in the ministry of healing had begun some years ago in his home town of Liverpool when his “Mam” had been in hospital for a cancer operation and the Anglican chaplain had applied the laying-on of hands. “Mam” was still very much alive, battling away in her council flat with the local authority whenever she wasn’t organising a wedding for one of her daughters. There was no “Dad,” who had expired in the 1970s after what was described as a “tiff” with a neighbour in a pub. Dad had been prone to tiffs, and shortly after his arrival from Ireland he had had a tiff with the local Roman Catholic priest; this had resulted in the entire McGovern family transferring their religious allegiance to the local outpost of the Church of England, an Anglo-Catholic set-up which proved to be to the right of Rome. The McGoverns had felt quite at home there.
Stacy was huge, about six foot three, and had long lean limbs which he had only a hazy idea how to control. He was always knocking over furniture or smashing things by mistake. He had beautiful red hair, glowing and wavy, and beautiful blue eyes and beautiful cheekbones. But the rest of him was very plain. Fortunately, however, he had so much energy and enthusiasm that it was easy to overlook
his defects, and even the ugly Liverpool accent was alleviated by his unstoppable flow of Irish charm.
“Stacy dear,” I said as he bounded out of the kitchen, “may I have your permission to go into your flat this morning? I’m making a survey of the house in order to take it in hand.”
“Wow!” said this delightful overgrown child. “Help! The flat’s a tip—I haven’t picked up anything lately!”
“Oh, Benedict and Antony never pick up anything either, I’m used to that. Just hide the naughty pictures of page-three girls and I shan’t bat an eyelid.”
The child blushed. He really was rather sweet. “You’re a real tease, Mrs. Darrow!” he said. “You’re like my sister Aisling!”
I had told him at least three times to call me Rosalind, but he couldn’t. I was so many years his senior and I came from the South and I had a cut-glass accent and I was his boss’s wife. I could see him practising calling me Rosalind but could never imagine him taking the plunge and calling me Rosalind when we met.