Authors: Susan Howatch
“Yes, but surely the real message there is that no one has a clue what’s going on and everyone’s desperate to find out? I personally think that apart from the people who are infected by needles and transfusions, this is primarily a gay disease.”
“In Africa—”
“We’re not in Africa. We’re in England and talking obliquely—excuse me, Alice my dear—about sodomy.”
Nicholas said with startling truculence: “I wish you’d stop treating Alice like a Victorian maiden!”
“I can think of worse ways of treating her.”
Rapidly I said: “If we can get back to the subject of—”
“Yes,” said Nicholas, suddenly taking control of the conversation. “Alice, think hard. What did Stacy actually admit to doing with Rosalind?”
Lewis did a double-take. At first I thought he was merely embarrassed again on my behalf, but then he exclaimed: “Of course! Why didn’t I think of asking that question myself?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m all at sea.”
At once he turned to me. “Alice, Stacy did admit, didn’t he, that he went to bed with Rosalind?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t look at Nicholas.
“But did he admit to a consummation?”
I finally saw the point of the questions, but as soon as I tried to recall Stacy’s words my memory started blacking out again. “I’m not sure,” I said in despair. “Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps I just assumed—” I stopped. I’d remembered that Stacy had twice tried to tell me something but in my rage I’d cut him off. “Maybe he did try to tell me nothing happened in the end,” I said in a rush, “but I didn’t want to hear any details.”
“Of course you didn’t,” said Lewis soothingly. “Quite right too.” He turned to Nicholas. “The boy was obviously impotent. I’m sure Rosalind’s safe.”
Nicholas at once became truculent again. “Lewis, could you please stop being so homophobic? First of all you imply that AIDS is a gay plague—a statement for which there’s no evidence whatsoever—”
“How about thousands of dying homosexuals?”
“—and then you imply that anyone with homosexual inclinations is incapable of performing with women!”
“Nonsense! You’re getting in such a liberal huff that you’re grossly misinterpreting me—all I was implying is that this particular homosexual would be incapable because (a) he was hopelessly immature and (b) he’d be terminally inhibited by the fact that Rosalind’s your wife!”
“But you said just now at the Barbican that he’d see going to bed with Rosalind as a substitute for going to bed with me!”
“Yes, and I still think I was right, but going to bed with someone and being capable of intercourse with them isn’t necessarily the same thing—which is why we’re having this very difficult and painful conversation!”
“But if, as I’ve always argued, Stacy was bisexual and not homosexual—”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Nicholas, if you weren’t so infatuated with all this modern guff about sexual spectrums—”
“Excuse me,” I said, “can I just say something?”
“Lewis, if
you
weren’t so infatuated with these black-and-white views drummed into you by Cuthbert Darcy—”
“
Stop!
” I shouted.
They both jumped and started to apologise for upsetting me, but I interrupted them again.
“I’m only upset,” I said, sitting bolt upright on the edge of the sofa, “because you both seem to have gone crazy! What’s all this about Stacy being homosexual or bisexual?”
“My dear, naturally we wouldn’t expect you to have any profound understanding of Stacy’s sexual orientation, but—”
“Go on, Alice,” said Nicholas. “Why are we crazy?”
“Because you’ve made such a bloody stupid mistake!”
They stared at me. I stared back, shocked by their absurd waffling, but at last I was able to say in a firm voice: “Stacy was heterosexual. I always knew that, and in our final conversation he confirmed it—he told me very plainly that he found gay sex a big yawn, and if you ask me, the main reason why he became a priest was to escape from that relationship with Gordon.”
They went on staring at me. I waited a moment, but when there was no response I added rapidly: “He was in love with his sister Aisling. No woman ever measured up to her, that was the problem, and even if anyone had he wouldn’t have wanted to go to bed with her because you don’t go to bed with your sister, it’s forbidden. That’s why he found it safer to stay an adolescent. He didn’t want to grow up because he knew that once he was grown up he’d have to snog and have sex. It was so much easier for him to indulge in a teenage crush on Nicholas and take out jolly old Tara who didn’t attract him physically at all.”
I stopped speaking. There was a deep, deep silence before I concluded flatly: “If nothing did happen with Rosalind, it wouldn’t have been because he was homosexual. It would have been because he was so hung up on his sister that he found all sex with women taboo.”
Both men appeared to be carved in stone. Then as Lewis finally exclaimed in stupefaction: “What a lesson for the arrogant priests!” Nicholas leant forward again and this time clasped both my hands in his.
II
Beside
me Lewis flinched and violently crushed out his cigarette on the rim of the plate which protected the end-table from my latest pot-plant. At once I tried to detach my hands but I failed; Nicholas
was holding them too tightly. I was acutely aware of his hot skin and strong bones and the flowing lines of his long fingers as I said in a rush: “You both believe me?” I knew it was immensely important to keep the conversation moving.
“Of course we believe you,” said Nicholas.
Lewis added dryly: “Fortunately we’re still capable of recognising the truth when we meet it eyeball to eyeball. Nicholas, I think Alice would prefer her hands to be released.”
“Thank you,” said Nicholas, “but I’m quite capable of reaching that conclusion myself.” His fingers trailed lightly over my flesh as he withdrew them again.
“What’s so extraordinary,” said Lewis before any kind of pause could develop, “is that Stacy was able to confide so completely in Alice. He was never so frank with us.”
“Well, of course he wasn’t!” I exclaimed exasperated. “And it wasn’t extraordinary at all that he always found it easier to talk to me—Stacy was so used to confiding in women! As a matter of fact I could never understand why you sent him to a male spiritual director. Why couldn’t he have gone to see your nun, Nicholas?”
“Yes, Clare would have been right for him, I see that now.”
“But why wasn’t it obvious to you earlier?”
“A lot of things weren’t obvious to us earlier.”
“The fact is, my dear,” said Lewis, “that it’s really better if spiritual directors are priests. And of course all priests are male.”
“Why is it better if spiritual directors are priests?” I said, feeling quite irrationally angry. “And why are all priests male?”
“They won’t be for much longer,” said Nicholas.
“If Stacy had had a woman spiritual director,” I persisted fiercely, “
a woman spiritual director who was also a priest
, then I’m sure he wouldn’t have ended up in a vile mess where he was so lonely and so homesick and so miserable that he—”
“No priest should have allowed Stacy to muddle on as he did,” interrupted Lewis tersely, “but I hardly think our failure here is an argument for the ordination of women!”
My fury overwhelmed me. “Why, you horrid, bigoted old brute!” I shouted at him. “Have you any idea how bloody offensive you are when you act as if women were a subhuman species? I bet Jesus wouldn’t have stood it! He’d have bashed your teeth in!”
And scooping the cat into my arms I burst into tears and blundered from the room.
III
I didn’t
blunder far. The living-room of my little flat adjoined the bedroom. Slamming the bedroom door behind me I leant back against the panels, held James more tightly than ever and let the tears flow unimpeded as I shuddered with my violent emotions. Grief for Stacy was now rapidly elbowing aside my anger with Lewis.
The door was ill-fitting, made of cheap wood. I could still hear their voices clearly. Nicholas was saying in exasperation: “You silly old sod!” and Lewis was snapping: “I was distracted. If you’d behaved properly with Alice instead of pawing her repeatedly like a wonder worker on the make—”
“Oh, for God’s sake! You touched her yourself at the start of the conversation!”
“That was a justifiable professional gesture, entirely appropriate for the occasion, and I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of repeating it by grabbing both her hands and staring soulfully into her eyes!”
“I categorically deny—”
“Anyway I don’t count, do I? I’m just a bigoted old brute who deserves to have his teeth smashed in!”
“You surely can’t have found that judgement surprising!”
“Yes, I did! Dear little Alice, talking like a hard-boiled feminist—”
“Well, if you insist on making idiotic remarks about women at exactly the wrong pastoral moment, what the hell can you expect?”
“All right, all right,
all right
—”
“Okay, maybe it was healthier for her to vent all her anger about Stacy’s death on you rather than turning it inwards on herself—maybe you performed a brilliant pastoral manoeuvre—”
“Fat chance. Dear God, why can I never get it right with women?”
“Forget it. Let’s refocus. Where have we got to?”
“We’ve established,” said Lewis, sounding unutterably relieved to be reined in, “that you’d be entirely truthful if you told the coroner that Stacy was currently only interested in dating Miss Tara Hopkirk from the Isle of Dogs. That means there’s no need to get into any discussion with the police about whether or not Stacy was gay. On the other hand—”
“—on the other hand, if there’s no gay angle and the police are still trying to work out why he committed suicide, they’ll wonder if Tara was the only woman in his life, and—”
“—and Francie will eventually be unable to resist spilling the beans about Rosalind.”
“But if we assume that Francie’s so infatuated that she’d want to protect me from scandal—”
“She may want to protect you now, but will she be so supportive in future when you keep rejecting her? Remember that the dynamic behind full-blown erotomania isn’t love; it’s hatred. It’s all about control and domination, the attempt by inadequate people to assert themselves on the objects of their desire.”
“I wish,” said Nicholas, “I was more confident that we knew precisely what was going on with Francie.”
“Never mind the diagnosis for the moment. The only thing that matters in this context is that Francie’s unreliable, and if you can’t rely on Francie not to spill the beans, it might be better to head off the police by playing the gay card, admitting Stacy had a homosexual past and saying he’d just been tested for HIV. That would not only make it easier to discredit Francie’s story later—it would stop the police dead in their tracks right now. It’s well known that young men can commit suicide if they fear they have AIDS, and once the police know about the gay angle they’ll never stop to wonder if another woman was involved.”
“Yes, but Lewis, we can’t push that line. We can’t push it because we know it’s not true. Stacy didn’t commit suicide because he feared he was HIV-positive. He committed suicide because he couldn’t face up to the consequences of having gone to bed with my wife.”
“But the HIV possibility must have been a factor—”
“It was by no means inevitable that he was infected. He would have waited for the result of the test.”
“You’re assuming he was thinking calmly and rationally. But if he panicked, decided he had HIV and feared he’d infected Rosalind—”
“He couldn’t have feared that if he was impotent.”
“There might still have been oral sex. If there’d been a cut or a lesion—”
“This is all speculation, Lewis, and we can’t speculate now, there’s no time. If we could somehow work out which line we’re going to take to the police so that the press pick up the right information—”
“Well, one thing at least is certain: we’ve got to cut out the Rosalind angle. We agreed that at the Barbican.”
“Yes, but—”
“There’s nothing scandalous about a young man rejecting a homo
sexual way of life, going into the Church and never again looking at another man. But for a curate to bed his boss’s wife—”
“Wait, there’s something we’ve entirely overlooked. Lewis, even if Francie and Gil keep quiet and even if you and I manage to avoid talking of Rosalind while making a succession of truthful statements to the police about Stacy’s life prior to the seduction yesterday afternoon, the fact remains that the police will want to interview Alice. They’re bound to. As a resident of the Rectory she can provide evidence about his state of mind. And how on earth can we ask Alice, of all people, to lie about his final conversation with her last night?”
I tucked James under one arm, wrenched open the door and blazed back into the living-room to sort them out.
IV
I said
strongly: “You’re only thinking of yourselves. But what about Stacy? And what about the family he loved so much? Is no one to speak for them?” Then as both men rose to their feet I fought back my tears, struggled to keep my voice level and declared: “I believe one should keep faith with the dead. The last thing Stacy would have wanted is for Nicholas to be dragged through the tabloid press—as he will be if the mess with Rosalind gets out. And the second to last thing Stacy would have wanted is for his family to know he ever—
ever
—had a homosexual affair. I suppose there are gays who would say that was a pathetic attitude but I don’t care—–I think it would be very wrong to cause extra pain to Stacy’s family when they have to grapple with the horrible fact of his suicide.”
I paused, waiting for them to argue with me, but when neither of them spoke I said in a calmer voice: “Tell the police the truth by all means, but tell them the
real
truth, tell them the facts which
really
lie at the bottom of this catastrophe, tell them Stacy was lonely, cut off from his family and his culture, missing his favourite sister, worried about the difficulties of finding a steady girlfriend, not doing well at his job, perhaps worried deep down that he became a priest for the wrong reasons, frightened of failing in his career and disappointing the family who were so proud of him—and frightened too of failing and disappointing his hero Nicholas. If you tell the police all that, what more do they need to know? Do you really think Stacy would have got into such a mess with Rosalind if he hadn’t already been un
balanced as the result of all the problems he couldn’t handle? Tell the police he was vilely depressed but then for God’s sake shut up about the consequences! The only consequence the police need to know is that he wound up dead with a rope around his neck, and that’s a consequence they can see for themselves.”