Authors: Susan Howatch
“Now that we’re away from the Centre we can really talk, can’t we?”
“No, we only have a few minutes because the Abbey closes at six in winter. Francie, I just want to say—”
“I’ve got the car parked on a meter behind Dean’s Yard. Why don’t we go there straight away and I’ll drive us both back to Islington?”
“Francie, you’re a trained listener. Could you please listen for a moment?”
She laughed. “Sorry, darling! It’s just that it’s all so wonderfully exciting—the consummation of all my dreams—”
“I repeat: could you please listen for a moment?”
“Oh gosh, sorry, there I go again!” She gazed at me with glowing eyes and fell silent.
Carefully I said: “I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in arranging this meeting. I now think it would be better if we met at the Centre on Monday. Then Robin can be present.”
“Robin?” She looked blank. “But what on earth’s Robin got to do with us?”
“I think it could be useful to include him in a discussion about the viability of your position at St. Benet’s.”
“About the—oh,
vulnerability!
For a moment I thought you said
viability.
Don’t worry, darling, I’m tougher than you think! I can take the bitchy comments when people realise you’re leaving her for me!”
I saw I had to abandon the subject. “I’m afraid you can’t hear what I’m saying,” I said evenly, “but never mind, we’ll put the matter on hold until Monday. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Francie—”
“But of course I can hear, don’t be so silly! I won’t let you leave until you’ve explained why you wanted to meet me here!” She leant forward and gave my arm a playful pat.
Hurriedly, wanting only to avoid further playful pats and terminate the conversation without delay, I said: “I’d thought I might tell you something about Rosalind, but since this is obviously entirely the wrong moment—”
“Rosalind! Oh my dear, it’s not necessary for you to say a single syllable! She’s told me everything—
everything
—and I must just say
that although I took care to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear, my sympathies, darling, were entirely with you. No wonder you had to hypnotise her to get some decent sex! I always knew she was frigid. Promiscuous women so often are, aren’t they? Always searching for the orgasm they never find!”
There was a pause. Nothing much seemed to happen. The huge shadowy interior of the Abbey was still dotted with people, and the faint drone of multiple conversations mingled with the sound of muffled footsteps. It was just the end of another day at the Abbey. No one around me knew that an entire cherished private world had suddenly come to an end.
It had ended silently, without a whimper, and smoothly, without encountering an impediment. The safe, secure world of my marriage had finally died not from confessions of adultery and not from mud-slinging rows but from the knowledge that my wife had told this deeply disturbed woman details which should never have been disclosed to anyone but a priest or a doctor or some other professional qualified to help us. Moreover she had lied to me afterwards to conceal the depth of her betrayal. Could I argue that Rosalind had lied merely to spare me from pain? No. That would be giving her a moral stature she didn’t possess. The truth was she had lied in order to avoid a scene. In her view anything was better than enduring a scene: lies, writing cruel notes, two-faced behaviour—anything.
I saw then how shallow she was, how unreliable, how utterly lacking in integrity, and it seemed strange to me that I should have derived such security for so long from a woman who could in truth offer me no security at all. I had trusted her love and loyalty, but I saw both had been illusions, conjured up to meet my own emotional needs. I’d been projecting qualities onto her which contained and neutralized my own flaws and problems, and beneath the projection was a woman I scarcely knew. I’d been obsessed with an image—how typical of the 1980s’ preoccupation with “style”!—but reality had all the time lain elsewhere.
It was at that moment that I suffered the most horrific shock. One moment I was drowning in pain, every inch the crucified victim, and the next moment the truth had exploded before my eyes so that I saw myself in quite another light.
The trigger was the word “obsessed” which had just skimmed across my mind. I had been
obsessed
, I had told myself, by an image. I HAD BEEN OBSESSED.
My whole consciousness seemed to shift and bend almost to break
ing point before snapping agonisingly into a new and unbearable position. It was like an earthquake: the grinding roar followed by the ear-splitting cracks as the earth ruptured and re-formed at lightning speed. I had been obsessed,
obsessed
, OBSESSED—as obsessed as this mad woman in front of me, and in Francie’s shining eyes I finally saw my own insanity reflected.
The earthquake roared again, the ground breaking open with a volley of whiplash cracks, and at my feet I saw the abyss open up to reveal the unspeakable, indescribable darkness churning below. I shrank back, but not before I had seen the horror I had inflicted on Rosalind, the unreasonable demands, the violent pursuit, the mental and physical oppression. No wonder she had finally snapped, blurting out all her despair and terror to someone who was not only an old friend but a trained listener! I’d driven her to it. I’d broken her integrity. And to think that a moment ago I’d been wallowing in injured pride and accusing
her
of shallowness and betrayal!
I
was the shallow one, never seeing my wife in any depth, never making any effort to understand how she must be feeling.
I
was the expert in betrayal, kidding myself I’d been a loving husband yet leaving her to struggle on alone, running my home and bringing up my children. And to think I’d accused
her
of self-centredness! To think I’d sermonised to
her
about the evils of individualism and the virtues of living in community! I’d neglected my primary community, my family. I’d gone my own individual self-absorbed way under the guise of helping others. No wonder worker, it seemed to me at that terrible moment of revelation, could have gone more adrift in his arrogance and his vanity, and no wonder worker could now be better set up for the just retribution of a grisly and scandalous end.
“Nick?” Francie was saying somewhere a long way away but I barely heard her. In my head I was with Rosalind, the beloved childhood friend with whom I would always feel so deeply connected. In my head I was saying to her: “It’s all right. I understand now. I understand.”
“Nick, is something wrong?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t there. I’d broken free from my father and I was scrambling to the top of the bonfire to save Bear from his attempt to immolate himself. “He’ll be free now,” my father had said. But I didn’t want my bear to achieve freedom by death. I wanted him to have freedom through the gift of a new life.
“Life.” I suddenly realised I had spoken the word aloud. “Life.”
“Oh
yes
, darling!” cried Francie in ecstasy, her words scoring deep
gashes across my consciousness. “Life, life, life with a capital L—just you and me, together always in an utterly glorious future!”
The picture of Bear atop the bonfire was wiped out. As my mind abruptly snapped back into alignment with the present I realised that I was in Westminster Abbey with Francie Parker, who was mad. Then I remembered. I had to fix Francie. But there was a problem: I couldn’t. My strength had been used up. I could only stare at her dumbly and wish she would go away.
“You’ll be a new man once you get away from Rosalind!” Francie was saying with manic enthusiasm. “Poor darling, how ghastly it must have been for you to have a frigid wife!”
I said automatically: “Rosalind’s not frigid.”
“But of course she is! Why else would you have needed to hypnotise her to get some sex?”
“You’ve jumped to all the wrong conclusions. About everything.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean you haven’t a clue what’s going on.” I stood up. “Excuse me, please. I’ve got to go.”
Francie’s eyes widened. “Oh, poor Nick!” she exclaimed passionately, leaping to her feet. “Poor, poor Nick, you’re the one who’s jumped to all the wrong conclusions if you think that sheer Christian charity can continue to save this marriage! My dear, I know for a fact that Rosalind’s planning to have another affair to drill home to you that the marriage is beyond salvation!”
I stared at her. She was breathing hard, eyes glittering, bosom heaving in an almost sexual satisfaction, lips shiny and moist with saliva, and suddenly I felt revolted. I no longer cared about “fixing” her, whatever that meant. I just wanted to shove her aside and escape. With my patience exhausted I snapped: “That’s nonsense. I don’t believe it.”
“Oh darling!” cried Francie powerfully. “You’re in denial! Listen, I know exactly what her plan is—she’s going to seduce Stacy!”
At once I said: “That’s not just rubbish, Francie. That’s disgusting rubbish.” I was moving forward as I spoke. Increasing my pace I began to hurry down the side-aisle to the west end of the nave.
“It’s true, it’s true, it’s true!” She rushed after me. “She said she realised she could only get you to see the truth by doing something so frightful that you’d have no choice but to let her go!”
I spun round to face her. “Be quiet! Be quiet at once! You’re lying, you’re deluded, you’re—”
“Rosalind’s made up her mind to seduce Stacy, I tell you—why,
she’s probably already done it! That’s why I said to you when you rang up: ‘Is it about Stacy?’ I thought you must be calling because she’d done it and you’d found out!”
I suddenly realised she was telling the truth. And as the shock swamped my mind I saw the waters of darkness roaring towards me in a filthy, annihilating tide.
Knowing I was within seconds of going under I could think only of self-preservation. I had to escape. And I had to escape immediately. No more conversation. No more delay. Even another second in her company could prove disastrous.
Sprinting from the Abbey I jumped aboard a bus which was moving forward slowly after pausing at the traffic lights on Victoria Street, and the last thing I saw as I looked back was Francie gazing after me with an adoration undiminished by my desertion.
Her mad eyes even seemed to be blazing in triumph.
II
I left
the bus minutes later at Victoria, plunged across the station’s forecourt and was nearly run over by a taxi. That proved the final shock. I vomited into the gutter, and immediately every passerby shunned me as if I had the plague. No Samaritans in that particular crowd. Inside the station I lurched into a phone-booth.
Lewis answered my call on the third ring. “Rectory.”
“It’s me,” I said. “I’m ploughed under.”
“Where are you?”
“Victoria.”
“I’ll come and pick you up.”
“No, I’m still capable of grabbing a cab but I don’t want to go to the Rectory, I don’t want to see Stacy. Meet me at the Barbican—that window next to the Balcony Cafe.”
“I’ll be there.” He hung up.
Staggering outside I joined the rush-hour queue waiting for taxis.
III
The
Arts Centre at the Barbican was crowded when I arrived at six-thirty. Visitors were having supper before the plays and the concert began. The multi-storeyed building, confusing as ever with its
yawning chasms and acres of staircases, swallowed me the instant I was disgorged from the taxi. Unable to endure either the wait for a lift or the thought of being incarcerated in a small steel box, I fought my way up the stairs to the Balcony Cafe, which faced St. Giles Church and the artificial lake. The wall of glass nearest the cafe’s entrance usually had seating in front of it but when I arrived I found no sofa and no sign of Lewis. I was just wondering if, in my distraught state, I had named one of the other restaurants, when he called my name. He was occupying one of the tables which flanked the walkway spanning level six. Beyond the table was a drop to the floor below but fortunately I was too wiped out by that time to add vertigo to my list of discomforts.
I had also been too wiped out to remember that Lewis was battling with a new hip. Immediately I saw the crutches I felt guilty that I had dragged him out of the Rectory, where he should have been spending a quiet evening. Lewis had been travelling far too much lately, attending that lecture at Sion College last Monday and bucketing around the Anglo-Catholic strongholds the day before. Even though he had done his travelling in taxis I was sure all this activity was hardly compatible with his surgeon’s idea of a sensible convalescence. Supposing the new hip was a failure? By hauling him out to the Barbican that night I’d be at least partly responsible.
“You silly old sod, you should be at home! Why didn’t you refuse point-blank to meet me here?”
“Cut the crap and just tell me what the hell’s going on. You look like death.”
I slumped down opposite him. Then I said: “I know what’s happened to Stacy. I know why he’s on the edge of breakdown and I understand now why he can’t confide in me. He’s been to bed with Rosalind.”
Lewis looked me straight in the eyes, paused as if silently counting to ten and finally said in his most neutral voice: “I see. Well, that’s certainly an interesting theory.”
“It’s no theory.”
“You’ve got proof?”
“No, but it all makes sense—Rosalind—Francie—Stacy—everything. I’ll bet Francie put Rosalind up to it and Rosalind was too desperate and damaged to resist. Oh, and Francie’s psychotic. No question about that. She’s not possessed, but there’s a heavy demonic infestation and the Devil’s using the psychosis to infiltrate—”
“Hold it. You need some sweet tea. You’re in shock.”
“No, I’m all right. Listen, Lewis—”
“Well,
I’m
not all right and
I
need some sweet tea, and if it wasn’t for these blank-blank crutches I’d play the waiter and bring us what we both need, but—”
“Okay, I’ll get it.” After dragging him out of the Rectory the least I could do was humour the old boy.
“On second thoughts,” said Lewis as I scrambled to my feet, “I’d rather have a brandy.” Now that the battle was won and I had agreed to take the anti-shock medicine, he could afford to change his mind and indulge himself.