A Talent For Destruction (17 page)

‘Are you – is everything all right?'

He nodded, conscious chiefly of weariness and of the stiffness and soreness of his hand. He wanted to go to her, to put his arms round her and to be looked after, but he had been too much hurt to make so quick a reconciliation.

‘Where have you been, Robin?' It was a nervous question, not an outraged demand, and he answered it with dignified melancholy.

‘Just driving.'

Her apprehension vanished. She ran to him and put her hands on his chest, telling him how worried about him she had been. ‘And, Robin, I shan't bother with those classes any more. I've learned enough about technique to carry on with my sculpture at home, and that's what I'll do. It's stupid to let a hobby come between us.'

He drew a deep, victorious breath. ‘I'm glad you see it that way. And now I must go to bed, I'm dog-tired and I'm taking an early service tomorrow. Did you get out the blankets for the spare bed?'

She blinked, and stepped back. ‘I made it up, as a matter of fact,' she admitted, ‘just in case … But surely, now –'

He saw the hurt in her face, and was not sorry. ‘I'll sleep better on my own,' he said. ‘I really am desperately tired.'

‘Yes, I expect you are,' she agreed sadly. It seemed that giving up her classes and her friendship with Alec Reynolds was insufficient to restore her relationship with her husband, and she felt completely bereft; until she remembered that she had another friend.

‘Just tell me this,' she begged. ‘Janey Rolph, an Australian student I met in Yarchester, is coming to tea on Saturday. She's young and homesick, and I want her to feel that she's welcome here. You will be nice to her, won't you?'

Her husband felt that he could afford to be magnanimous. He bent his head and pressed his cheek for a moment against Gillian's hair.

‘Don't worry, of course I'll be nice to her,' he said.

On her first visit, Janey Rolph parked her third-hand red Datsun, with the
Australia
sticker, just beyond the Rectory gates and on the opposite side of the road, under the copper beech trees that overhung the palings at the top of Parson's Close. Gillian, greeting her at the door, suggested that she should bring her car into the Rectory drive, but the girl declined.

‘I'd rather leave it outside, thanks. Then I'll be ready for a quick getaway when you throw me out.'

‘Why on earth should I want to do that?'

‘You will, when I commit some desperate social blunder. This'll be the first time I've had tea with a clergyman's wife. If you hear an odd noise it'll be my knees knocking together.'

Gillian was disarmed. She was of course aware of the girl's striking looks: the urchin-cut fox-red hair, the full mouth, the large brown eyes. But nothing in Janey's nervous demeanour, or in Gillian's experience, suggested that the girl might be a potential rival. Far from feeling threatened by Janey's looks, Gillian felt flattered by them, as any plain woman does when an attractive one seeks her company.

Under the influence of tea and cherry buns, Janey seemed to relax. Gillian took her on a tour of the house, pleased to observe that the girl's hands went out with instinctive appreciation to touch the early nineteenth-century joinery. In the empty bedroom that Gillian used as a studio, Janey went straight to a completed plaster cast, the head of a young man, amateur in execution but boldly conceived. She stroked his profile with one finger.

‘Hey, I like your friend,' she told Gillian. ‘He's beaut.'

‘Thank you. He was the first one I ever made, some years ago. Do you do anything like this?'

Janey pulled a wry face. ‘No, I'm hopeless with my hands. I do envy your ability. I wish I had some kind of talent.'

‘But you're an academic, a writer,' protested Gillian. ‘What about your thesis?'

‘
English Satirical Novelists, 1950 to 1980
? Dissecting their work's a destructive process, not a creative one.'

‘Oh, but later on, when you've finished the thesis, you'll have more time to discover your own talents,' said Gillian with parson's-wife warmth and encouragement. ‘Now, would you like to see the church? It really is rather fine. I expect we'll find my husband over there.'

It seemed a sensible precaution to introduce them in a place where Robin could be relied on to act with propriety. His behaviour, since the evening when Alec Reynolds came to supper, had been civil but cool, and Gillian was wary of him.

But Robin was in a good mood that evening. He was proud of St Botolph's, and enjoyed showing visitors round. And on Saturday evenings, when the urns were filled with fresh flowers and the organist, practising for the following day, was making a joyful noise unto the Lord, the church was always at its best.

His wife's friend was obviously impressed. Robin was never to forget – although afterwards he did his best to obscure the memory by never willingly recalling it – his first sight of Janey Rolph. She was standing beside a pillar at the far end of the nave, small, fragile, her hair a glory against the grey stone, her face rapt as she gazed up at the angels that hovered under the lofty roof.

After he married, Robin had tried never to think of other women in physical terms. But what he permitted himself at that first meeting to see in Janey Rolph affected him far more deeply than any acknowledgement of her beauty. Gillian's bid for independence had hurt him so profoundly that he had regained a measure of stability during the past few days only by distancing himself from her. The realization that he was more dependent on her than she on him was terrifying. But Janey, lonely and vulnerable, was so obviously in need of care and protection that he responded to her immediately.

The girl was fascinated by everything he pointed out to her. The finest of the monumental brasses, that of Sir John Bedingfield and his lady, lying in the chancel almost as large as life, made her gasp with delight.

‘Oh, but look – he's holding her hand!'

Sir John, who had died in 1410, was fully armoured from bascinet to spurs; except that he was not wearing his gauntlets. His bare right hand reached out to clasp that of Isabella his wife, who lay with her left hand on her breast and her eyes cast down, modest in plain gown and wimple. The dog at Sir John's feet looked up at them both with affectionate approval.

Janey crouched to touch the brass with reverent fingers. ‘Oh, you're beaut,' she told the knight and his wife. ‘You too, cobber,' she added to the dog.

She straightened slowly, still gazing at the engraving. ‘It's like the Philip Larkin poem,
An Arundel Tomb
,' she said. ‘I'd meant to go to Arundel, on a sort of pilgrimage. But now I've seen this, I don't need to.'

Gillian and Robin glanced at each other over the girl's head, and for the first time for what seemed like months they exchanged spontaneous smiles. Gillian's heart lifted, and she blessed Janey for having brought them together again. It seemed appropriate that at that moment the organ's sound swelled to a crescendo powerful enough to have kept the roof's angels afloat even if they had not been pegged into the hammer beams.

Michael Dade, the deputy organist – a good musician, and deputy only because he couldn't keep the choirboys in order – had seen Janey through his rear-view mirror and had expressed his admiration musically. When he finished playing he hurried round the pulpit so that he could meet her. He had sad brown eyes, lank dark hair that flopped over his beaky nose, and a bad stammer. On his organ bench he felt that he was someone of consequence, but by the time he faced Janey the musically aroused adrenalin had ebbed, leaving him shifting from foot to foot in a silent agony of embarrassment.

Gillian went to his rescue and introduced him to the girl. Janey expressed her admiration for his playing, and was patient and sympathetic when consonants eluded him. By the time she had finished chatting to him, both Gillian and Robin were impressed by her kindness. As for Michael Dade, he was already in love.

Janey made another conquest that evening. When she and Gillian returned to the Rectory, old Henry Bowers was just collecting his garden tools after weeding and staking the herbaceous plants that edged the drive. Janey was quick to admire his work and at supper – for which both Aingers insisted that she must stay – she talked with affection about her own grandfather. She listened when Henry began to reminisce about Gallipoli, and encouraged him with questions; and the old man was so taken by her that he invited her with sly gallantry to call him Grandad. When she left eventually, seen off by all three of them, it was understood that she would be welcomed at the Rectory whenever she liked to call.

For the remainder of the evening, the Aingers talked Janey Rolph. They were captivated. She had told them that her student's permit to reside temporarily in the United Kingdom expired at the end of the academic year, and that she would have to leave the country in a few months'time, and this made them all the more anxious to see her as often as possible.

They were still talking Janey as they prepared for bed. Robin had been sleeping in the spare room ever since Alec Reynolds's visit, but having cleaned his teeth he wandered absent-mindedly in his pyjamas into the marital bedroom to continue the conversation.

‘She was really bowled over by the brasses of Sir John and his wife, wasn't she? That poem she mentioned,
An Arundel Tomb
– what's it about?'

Gillian paused in the act of brushing her hair, and turned to look at her husband. ‘Love,' she said. ‘The enduring quality of love …'

It had been a long time. They hadn't made love for months, and even then – as in the previous two or three years – it had been nothing more than a perfunctory means of relieving physical tension, a hurried act that had left them both feeling besmirched. But now it was beautiful, a long slow exchange of tenderness and mutual adoration that left them exhausted with joy.

It was only then, lying peacefully in her husband's arms, that Gillian admitted to herself how unhappy she had been, and for how long. She had never stopped loving Robin, she knew that, but it was many years since she had been able to like him. This evening, though, he was quite different from the overbearing, bitingly sarcastic man she had reluctantly become accustomed to living with. He seemed his old self again, the Robin she had fallen in love with sixteen years before.

It was weeks before she made the connection, in anything but the most general terms, between the resumption of their sex life and the first meeting between Robin and Janey Rolph. And when she did make the connection, the hurt of it was that she knew she would never know, despite his protestations, which one of them had been in Robin's mind when he was making love to her.

There was no need for Janey Rolph to wait until she had finished her thesis before taking stock of her other talents. Her major talent was for manipulating people, and she had been exercising it for years.

She needed people; fed on them. She could never bear to live alone, but she was incapable of sustaining a long-term relationship with any one person. Instead, she cultivated childless married couples.

What she had in mind, when she sought the company of married women, was their friendship and their hospitality. She was a perpetual student, moving from one university to another in search of degrees and diplomas, and she was perpetually short of money. If she played her hand properly, she could be sure that sooner or later her new friends would take pity on her ‘homesickness' for the town she hoped never to see again, and would invite her to move in with them.

Janey made a delightful house-guest: amusing, considerate, endearingly anxious to make no social blunders, to cause no trouble, to be treated as one of the family. She had a good eye for picking out unworldly people as potential hosts, and before long her welfare and happiness would become their prime consideration. They would plan meals round her likes and dislikes, and rearrange or miss appointments so that they could take her on sightseeing expeditions. Like a cuckoo in the nest, she would gradually take over their lives.

But the material benefits that Janey obtained were incidental. The people themselves were her real interest. She listened, and she watched, and she encouraged separate confidences from husband and wife, and before long she knew all their hopes and dreams and fears, their strengths, their weaknesses, and the current state of their marriage.

It was possession of this kind of knowledge that Janey prized above all else. The sense of power that it conferred on her, the puppet-master's authority, gave her a far greater kick than she could have obtained from drugs or alcohol. She made no immediate plans to use her power but sooner or later, in every friendship, she would find the temptation irresistible. It was almost inevitable that by the time she was ready to move on, the marriage would have foundered. Janey felt no compunction because she felt no responsibility; she had observed, as a child, that marriage was anyway a process of mutual destruction.

‘She's widened our horizons so much,' said Gillian Ainger to her husband on the night when Janey moved into the Rectory. They had just gone to bed, having made sure that their guest was comfortably settled, and Gillian was smiling with self-congratulation in the dark. Janey was exactly what she and Robin had needed, someone from outside the parish to talk to, someone with completely different ideas and interests. ‘She's really enriched our lives, hasn't she?'

‘She's certainly done that,' agreed Robin. ‘Your father's, too. He'd have made a good grandfather, wouldn't he? Pity we couldn't have given him some grandchildren.'

‘We did try.'

‘And we're still trying.'

Later, from across the corridor, Janey heard Gillian's prolonged orgasmic cry. Listened for it, identified it, and, with neither envy nor malice, recorded it on her mental retrieval system for possible future use.