Authors: Susan Howatch
I saw then that Francie’s warm, outgoing manner, cultivated for her work at St. Benet’s, was no more than a mask, and beyond the mask was the real Francie: isolated, needy and simmering with convoluted emotions which were all stealthily becoming focused on Nicholas. Certainly she was much too preoccupied to vamp Stacy, who was meanwhile continuing his career as an elderly adolescent.
I was just brooding on Stacy’s problems for the umpteenth time when suddenly, quite without warning, he began to act out of character.
Stacy was actually great fun. I’ve been unfair, emphasising the Nicholas-worship and implying he was nerdish. Sunny-natured, keen
to help, keen to please, keen to be kind to everyone he met, he bounded around with a zest which only a kill-joy would have criticised. Every now and then he was downcast when reality failed to meet his joyous expectations, but he always bounced back quickly and sallied forth once more with his optimism intact. Sometimes I felt he was too innocent, too nice-natured, to cope with the harsher facts of life, and this made me wonder how suited he really was for the ministry of healing which so often involved working with the depressed, the damaged and the dying. I wondered too if he himself ever questioned his suitability or whether his child-like optimism was his way of shutting out truths which he found too difficult to face. That was why, when he began to act out of character, I was immediately very worried. I thought he might be finally cracking up, unable to come to terms with the fact that he was in the wrong job and unable to imagine a separation from his beloved Nicholas.
He began to behave oddly on Thursday, two days after Rosalind’s arrival, when the atmosphere at the Rectory was so tense that I half-expected it to twang whenever I took a deep breath. Even Shirin our cleaner, who probably thought we were all odd, seemed extra-shy and extra-nervous, as if our western life-style had reached new heights of eccentricity.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, long after Shirin had trundled back into Tower Hamlets after her morning’s work, Stacy came home early from the Healing Centre. I was taking a bag of rubbish out to the dustbins which stood tucked out of sight of Egg Street on the side of the Rectory which faced the office building. There had once been a basement entrance there but it had been closed off when the kitchen was moved upstairs, so when I took out the rubbish I had to use the front door.
As I stepped outside that afternoon with the garbage bag in my hand I saw Stacy chatting with his girlfriend. Tara was large, almost as large as I’d been on my arrival at the Rectory, and although she was so jolly and good-hearted she wasn’t in the least pretty so I couldn’t help wondering how Stacy avoided comparing her to his sisters and finding her wanting. Stacy pined for his sisters. He pined for his mother too, but he pined for those three girls more. Two were brunettes and one was a redhead. In their photographs all were slim, and his favourite—raven-haired, blue-eyed Aisling—was beautiful. Stacy had shed a tear when showing me her wedding pictures but I had pretended not to see it. I knew the Irish had no tradition of main
taining a stiff upper lip, but nevertheless I had felt embarrassed, as if I had uncovered yet another abnormal streak in Stacy’s personality. Surely one didn’t get so emotional about a sister’s marriage? But maybe, if one was Irish, one did; maybe Stacy’s habit of showing the photos of Aisling’s wedding to everyone he met was the height of Irish normality.
As I began to lug the garbage around to the side of the house I waved at Stacy and Tara and they waved back, Tara calling: “Cheers, Alice!” in her usual friendly fashion. Having disposed of the bag I returned indoors, and I was just pottering around the kitchen again when Stacy bounced in and demanded to know the menu for dinner.
“Steak-and-kidney pie,” I said, “potatoes and cabbage, stewed apples and custard to follow.”
“Wowee!” exclaimed Stacy, typically joyous, utterly normal. I deduced that he had finally dredged up the courage to ask Tara for another date. Then he said: “Mrs. Darrow’s just waved to me from her flat and I’m going up to see her.”
Off he went, bounding up the main staircase in a succession of receding thuds.
I began to make the pie. Some time afterwards Nicholas wandered in, looking pale and drawn, and said he and Rosalind would be present for dinner that night after all; he was sorry for any inconvenience this would cause me. I was surprised by this decision, since Rosalind had always given the impression of being too grand for a communal meal, but I assured him there was no difficulty as the pie was large and I could cook extra vegetables. He then sat down and watched for a while in silence as I prepared the food. He liked to do that. He seemed to find it relaxing, and again I sensed the jagged edges of his profound anxiety.
I was now sure he was having terrible trouble with Rosalind, but I couldn’t work out what the trouble was. Surely if he adored her he would be glad that she was planning this horrible take-over of the Rectory? But perhaps I’d got it all wrong and his troubles had nothing to do with Rosalind at all. Maybe they were spiritual troubles (whatever that meant). I knew he had been to see his nun that morning. Lewis had said so when he had been explaining to me why Nicholas would be missing both the eight o’clock service and the communal breakfast.
I had long since learnt that clergymen didn’t wait until there was an emergency before they made an appointment to see their spiritual
directors, but nevertheless I felt sure that on this occasion an emergency must exist. For Nicholas to pass up both the service and the communal breakfast was unprecedented. I wondered why he couldn’t have seen his nun later in the day. The obvious answer was that a crisis had demanded immediate action.
I had noticed at breakfast that Lewis was barely touching his food. This too was unprecedented. As I now sculpted the pastry of the pie and recalled his lack of appetite I felt the knot of anxiety tighten in the pit of my stomach.
Suddenly I realised Nicholas was talking after a long silence. He was making a brief, moving speech about how
I
was the healer at the Rectory, and implying that the official healers were the ones who needed to be healed. I knew by this time that the “official healers” always themselves received the laying-on of hands at the healing services in acknowledgement of the fact that everyone in this imperfect world was in need of healing of some kind, but Nicholas was now giving this fact a very special slant. I hardly knew what to say—–and I certainly couldn’t imagine what had led him to pay me such an extraordinary compliment—but I picked up the hidden message that he was in pain and that I was somehow helping him simply by being there, so I didn’t say: “What a load of old codswallop!” and look embarrassed. I just thanked him as simply as I could and got on with making the pie.
Nicholas smiled. That meant he was feeling better. He stroked James behind the ears, and as James purred I suddenly felt so happy, so absolutely at one with the world, that I didn’t care about that horrible wife of his any more. At that moment I also found I could believe Lewis’s prediction that the plan to remodel the Rectory would come to nothing and Rosalind would return permanently to Butterfold. I didn’t expect that Nicholas would then stop adoring her and turn to me; I wasn’t nuts like Francie. But at least, once Rosalind had slotted back into Butterfold, we’d all recover our equilibrium and live in harmony again.
All I wanted was for life to go on as before. I knew I couldn’t expect more than that, but I felt that so long as I was living at the Rectory and looking after Nicholas as well as I possibly could for five days out of seven each week, I’d be content. More or less. Of course in my lonelier moments I’d have liked more, but that wasn’t possible and one always had to recognise what was possible and what wasn’t. The fact was that Nicholas was never going to desire me sexually. I was
quite clear about that and was even glad my ugliness gave me no chance to deceive myself. If I’d been as attractive as Francie, I might have succumbed to all sorts of pathetic illusions and wound up just as nuts as she was.
But I wasn’t nuts. I did love Nicholas but I didn’t deceive myself about the situation. Of course before I’d come to the Rectory I’d been like Stacy, an elderly adolescent in the grip of hero-worship; I’d been infatuated, nurturing a big romantic dream—not a delusion, as Francie now seemed to be experiencing, but a fantasy which I knew at heart was unreal. Francie, I was sure, had lost sight of the fact that her infatuation was unreal, but then Francie was very unhappy and I wasn’t, not now. I had my three men who all cared about me, and I had the respect of the people who worked at the Centre. I did a useful job well and derived immense satisfaction from it. In short, reality was so stimulating nowadays that romantic dreams took a back seat. I didn’t exactly discard the dreams, but as I was able to see how unreal they were, I was able to keep them in their correct place. So although I occasionally still found myself day-dreaming of marrying Nicholas I never for one moment kidded myself that this was ever going to happen. Nicholas adored Rosalind and would stay married to her for ever. I accepted those two facts completely. But I accepted too that I loved him. I couldn’t not accept it. It was the most real thing in the world for me, a gift from God (the real, living God, not Aunt’s fossilised, useless old relic) and no one, not even horrible Rosalind, could ever snuff it out.
The love I felt for Nicholas enriched me. It made the world seem inexhaustibly rewarding and worthwhile. In fact sometimes I felt the gift wasn’t love but life itself, but then I knew that love
was
life—or rather, love was the driving force of life, the energy which powered not only the world but the whole universe—or so it seemed to me whenever Nicholas sought my company, whenever he sat at the kitchen table in silence and watched me work.
Yes, I loved Nicholas. But by this time I loved not a perfect hero who didn’t exist but a man who was as flawed as any other human being. I saw him in the light of reality. I saw all his faults: the way he worked too hard, leaving too little time for his family; the detachment which kept people at arm’s length all the time he was caring for them; the solitary nature which would make true intimacy difficult; the arrogance which lurked always in the shadow of his genuine humility. I saw him as akin to Kipling’s “cat which walked by
himself,” a splendid cat, powerful and arresting—but as dangerous as a tiger on the prowl. The staff at the Healing Centre had plenty of stories of women who had fallen for Nicholas and writhed in humiliating enslavement beneath the weight of his meticulous, professional caring which never once strayed into impropriety. He did do great good in his ministry, but the big state secret of the Healing Centre was that he also, without meaning to and while acting with the very highest motives, did much harm. It’s degrading to wallow in a mire of unrequited love which can so easily slip over the edge into a pathetic infatuation. Francie wasn’t the only one who had drifted onto the emotional rocks surrounding Nicholas. The shipwrecks in those chaotic waters were legion.
I kept asking myself why Nicholas didn’t see what was happening to Francie. Then I realised that he probably did see but was waiting for the right opportunity to get her into treatment—and wash his hands of her. That was no doubt sensible, professional behaviour, but at the same time it implied that whenever broken people displayed too many jagged edges he disappeared behind bullet-proof glass and left others to clear up the mess. Perhaps he thought that so long as he himself behaved according to the rules, attending Communion daily and treating his clients with his morally correct but psychologically bruising detachment, his God would sort out all the boring women who fell for him and made fools of themselves. But I wondered sometimes what his God really thought of this very streetwise retreat from the damaged people who looked to him for healing.
Personally I felt that
my
God—the God that wasn’t quite Nicholas’s but certainly wasn’t Aunt’s—the God who had begun to inch stealthily into my mind and stroke all my muddled thoughts into some sort of coherent shape—
my
God, I felt, would have wanted much more co-operation from Nicholas in sorting out the human shipwrecks. Nicholas should have seen that more was required of him here; after all, he did care about people and he was so often unusually perceptive. I realised he had to be careful in order to preserve his reputation, but I still wondered if his lethal detachment sprang purely from a desire to protect his good name and play the game by the rules. Sometimes I thought that perhaps, deep down, he feared the temptation these women represented when they revealed their rampant sexual desire—but I always dismissed this theory because I knew he adored Rosalind and so therefore no temptation to commit adultery could exist.
I finished the pie and with Nicholas still watching me silently I decided to peel the potatoes.
As usual, when a spell at the kitchen sink was in the offing, I then began to meditate creatively. If I really loved Nicholas, I told myself, I was safe from madness because real love had nothing to do with wanting to control the beloved and then raging around in frustration when control proved not merely elusive but impossible. Real love wasn’t possessive. Of course I was a bit jealous of Rosalind—just a bit—every now and then—but that was natural. If I’d had no twinge of jealousy I would have been inhuman. But what I wanted above all, I thought as I brainwashed myself fiercely, was the best for Nicholas, and if the best for him was Rosalind, then so be it.
I offered this conclusion cautiously to the God who was now moseying around in my mind like some clever, elegant caterpillar, inching hither and thither, laying trails, exploring the uncultivated, disorganised environment with a peculiarly unconditional acceptance of all the mess and muddle. Then I added silently to my elegant caterpillar whom I knew I would one day see as the most beautiful butterfly: “Please help me
never
to stand in the way of what’s best for Nicholas,
never
to be possessive and selfish and
never
to deflect him from his job of serving you as well as he can.” And in a burst of longing I tacked on an additional request which seemed to bypass my brain altogether and come straight from the heart. Soundlessly I cried to my caterpillar: “Please use me to help Nicholas somehow—use me, use me, use me!”—and then I saw this had already happened; Nicholas had been talking of how I was the real healer at the Rectory and he was behaving as if I had made him feel better.