Glittering Images (52 page)

‘She’s very well,’ I said. ‘So’s my father. Both my parents are well.’

I did remember Darrow talking of forgiveness. I did remember my hours of prayer and discussion at Grantchester. I did remember my resolve to open my Pandora’s Box with a steady Christian hand, but at that moment I was beside myself with rage. I wanted only to brandish my loyalty to my father in every sentence.

‘Still flourishing in Epsom? Splendid!’ said Romaine warmly, but he had turned away from me and although the lines of humour still shaded his mouth a stillness touched his face for a moment. Then he dropped my card on to a side-table and gestured gracefully to the cluster of decanters nearby. ‘Let’s have a drink!’ he said with a smile. ‘Or do you believe alcohol’s the invention of the Devil? Our local vicar’s very fierce on the subject – in fact he berates us so unmercifully so often on the subject from the pulpit that I always find myself longing to take a swig from the largest bottle I can find.’

‘You’re a churchgoer?’

‘Yes, I’m a churchwarden.’

In the silence that followed I felt as if God had rapped me across the knuckles. Rage, remorse, guilt and misery began to shudder sickeningly through my beleaguered psyche in a series of emotional tidal waves.

‘Whisky, sherry or gin?’ Romaine was saying agreeably.

‘Sherry. Thanks.’ It hardly seemed possible that I could speak but I not only spoke; I even sounded casual.

‘Well, this is the most astonishing surprise!’ said Romaine equally casually as he handed me my glass. ‘How did you find out where I was?’

‘I looked you up in the medical directory.’

‘Of course! What an idiotic question – maybe I’m finally going senile. I see now that the question I should have asked was: when did your mother tell you about me?’

‘Oh, it wasn’t my mother who told me,’ I said. ‘It was my father.’

‘Dear me,’ said Romaine, shooting the barest fleck of sodawater into his double-whisky, ‘how extremely difficult … My dear chap, do sit down – the chairs aren’t nearly as frightful as they look. Have a cigarette – I hope you smoke as well as drink?’

‘Not in my clerical collar.’

‘What magnificent self-control! I smoke like a chimney, terribly bad for me –’ He was lighting a cigarette as he spoke ‘– what a bore one’s bad habits are, but on the other hand how dull life would be without them … Now where were we? Ah yes, your father – such an extraordinary man! I underestimated him, of course, thought he was a dry-as-dust old fogey who enjoyed being a crosspatch, but the main problem in those days was not that I underestimated Ashworth but that I overestimated myself. I thought I could walk on water.’

‘Walk on –’

‘Water, old chap. Terrible delusion. Only the very best fellows like your father can walk on water. The rest of us just sink like stones. Did he tell you about our final meeting?’

‘Yes, he –’

‘I thought he would, and I’m sure he didn’t do himself justice. He was superb. I can see him now as if it were yesterday, very dapper in his wing-collar, not a hair out of place. What an executioner! And after he’d hung, drawn and quartered me he simply pulled on his gloves, donned his top hat and strolled away while I was left wondering whether to shoot myself. However I didn’t have a gun, I passed out with drink before I could borrow one, and when I recovered I found myself gripped by the most ungentlemanly desire to survive … But that’s typical of life, isn’t it? It’s only in novels that the villain meets that scintillating bloodstained end which conveniently puts him out of his agony. In real life God much prefers him to toil away trying to live with what he’s done – and talking of God, I must say I’m absolutely
delighted
that you should be a clergyman! Much more fun than being a doctor – all those interesting sermons to write and a beautiful church to work in and a nice wife whom everyone likes … You’re married, of course?’

‘My wife died in a car accident.’

‘How very terrible … Children?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. I’ve been married three times,’ said Romaine after drinking deeply from his glass. ‘I – but no, I’m talking too much and I mustn’t be a thundering bore. One of the worst things about getting old is that one’s so often afflicted with the urge to talk garrulously about the past.’

I said, ‘I’ve come here to indulge that urge, Dr Romaine. I see no point in not being frank; I want to hear exactly what happened.’

‘Exactly? No comfortable euphemisms? Just the plain unvarnished truth?’ He hesitated as if weighing the challenge but he remained unflustered. Then he said: ‘Very well, but hold on to your clerical collar, my dear chap, because this is where your Christian charity really gets exercised to its limits.’ And sinking into the nearest armchair he crossed one leg over the other and embarked with the most appallingly charming insouciance on the narrative I so urgently needed to hear.

‘I was mad, of course,’ said Romaine. ‘Nowadays some kindly GP would have referred me to an alienist and I’d have spent numerous happy hours lying on a couch while I talked interminably about my childhood, but in those days one was judged sane unless one was raving so I got away with pretending to be normal. I was always pretending to be something or other. When I was a young man I pretended to be a romantic hero, and I suppose, looking back on my life, that was the most disastrous role I ever played.

‘It all began when I was a child and started playing the poor little orphan. However I’m not going to tell you some long story about how when I was seven my mother died in childbirth and my father expired in bankruptcy and even my toys were seized by the wicked bailiffs – it’s all true but I wouldn’t like you to think I had a Dickensian childhood because when I was orphaned I went to live in Starbridge with a doting maiden aunt who provided me with a delightful home, a nursery full of new toys and a nanny who thought I was the cat’s whiskers. Did I go down on my knees every night and thank God for my astonishing good fortune? I did not. Like the horrid spoilt child I soon became I took it all for granted and thought my aunt’s sedate little house in the shadow of the Cathedral was the last word in dreariness. As far as I was concerned wealth and success, not painstaking respectability, was the key to security; I never forgot the painstakingly respectable little room where my father had blown his brains out.

‘However I didn’t want to think of my father blowing his brains out so I pretended it hadn’t happened, and at school, when I invented some interesting clerical connections for myself based on my aunt’s staid circle in Starbridge, I discovered I had a flair for telling stories which everyone believed. So then I realized that I didn’t have to be stuck with my unromantic past because all I had to do to be accepted by the right people was to pick the right role to play.

‘Up at Oxford I played the dashing young aristocrat, but I didn’t have the money to sustain that for long and besides I did genuinely want to pursue that middle-class profession, medicine. However I didn’t want to be just any old doctor. I wanted to go down in history as the doctor who had done the most to save women in childbirth. I was always so angry that my mother had died in her misguided attempt to give me a sibling, and perhaps the only way I could master the anger of bereavement when I was young was to put the blame on medical science and then vow to put right what had gone wrong.

‘Eventually I wound up at Bart’s to complete my training. How my aunt paid for it all I’ll never know but she paid until I qualified – at which point she died happy with no money in the bank. I was so disgracefully spoilt by that time that when I heard she was dead my first reaction was: damn it, whom can I touch now for a loan? It took money to be a fashionable medical genius, and besides I liked to cut a dash up in town when I mixed with the right people.

‘Detestable, wasn’t I? But take heart – Nemesis was waiting in the wings. I met this girl. She was a patient. I was still doing general work before embarking on specialization and at that time I’d been assigned temporarily to what would nowadays be called the psychiatric ward. The girl was brought in suffering from delusions. She was very pretty – and very rich. The brain specialist thought the girl’s prognosis was poor, but I didn’t believe that. I just thought: silly old fool, I can do better than he can. I thought I could cure anyone, especially a pretty girl with a rich father; I saw the shining water in front of me and I said to myself: lovely! I’ll walk on it! It never even occurred to me that such a thing couldn’t be done.

‘I told your mother I was the victim of the “Jane Eyre” syndrome – a latter-day Mr Rochester who married his wife for the best of motives in complete ignorance of her insanity. What a lie! And how deluded I was to think I could cure the incurable – although unfortunately I did manage to achieve a temporary cure. I made love to the girl in the old-fashioned sense of holding her hand and gazing soulfully into her eyes, and I got her out of hospital. She really did seem miraculously better. In fact she seemed just as sane as I did at the wedding, but of course the truth was we were both lunatics living in a fantasy. She attacked me with a knife on our honeymoon; a week after she was locked up she had a further relapse and never spoke rationally again. All the income from the marriage settlement was diverted to pay for the best asylum and the best doctors, so within a month of the wedding I was penniless again – and shackled, at the age of twenty-seven, to a woman who could live another fifty years.

‘That was reality – and of course I couldn’t begin to face it. I was a man who liked women, and the private life of a doctor is almost as restricted as the private life of a clergyman. How was I going to manage? I had no idea. I couldn’t even begin to imagine. So I just thought: it didn’t happen; it’ll go away if I don’t think about it. And like all people who need to keep reality at bay I started to drink too much.

‘I got out of London. I was due for a break anyway before I began my specialist’s training and I’d already decided to do a locum because I needed the money, but what a huge relief it was to escape to Epsom to help out poor old Dr Barnes! No one knew at Epsom, not even Barnes himself. He’d merely applied to Bart’s for help, and when they referred me to him they didn’t mention my marriage.

‘So I went to Epsom and began a new life. I thought: it’s just as if I’m a bachelor. I wasn’t clinically mad but I was certainly deeply disturbed – although please don’t think I’m making excuses for what happened next. Nothing could excuse what I did, but I just want to explain in accurate terms what was going on. Well, I met your mother and … Poor girl, what a rotten time she was having! I felt so sorry for her because no one seemed to understand what hell she was going through, her mother dying by inches and that old great-aunt clanking around like a walking coffin. I admired your mother so much for not developing some hysterical illness as so many young girls did in those days when everyone was too well-bred to scream with frustration. That’s a brave girl, I thought, a girl of character, intelligent, sensitive – and very lovely … I started having fantasies that my wife would die – and after a while it was reality which seemed the illusion and only the fantasies which seemed real.

‘Helen had a hard time facing reality too, and in my fantasies she saw an escape from the painful dreariness of her daily life. Later – much later – I realized what a good thing it was that I hadn’t been free to marry her. I nearly destroyed her with my fantasies; I
would
have destroyed her if we’d ever married. She needed someone who could offer her the sort of reality she deserved, a decent home, a normal family life, stability – and all I could offer her was a string of day-dreams which hadn’t a hope of coming true.

‘Well … where do I go from here? You know what happened next – here you are to prove it. But perhaps you’re wondering how on earth I let it happen. Had I never heard of that wicked word “anticonception”? Yes, of course I’d heard of it, but I believed that sheaths – which in those days were pretty damned awful – were for use only with loose women as a prophylactic against VD – Sheaths weren’t
romantic
, you see, and I was moving in this fantasy of high romance. I was also still trying to tell myself I could walk on water – which meant, in this context, that I thought I could achieve perfect control in a situation where control is famous for its absence … What a dangerous belief for a man who’s fallen into the habit of drinking too much! Certainly that was the last time I ever fooled myself I could walk on water.

‘After your father had hung, drawn and quartered me I went abroad, not to be a noble soul in darkest Africa – that was just the story I spun to make my Epsom friends tell me how wonderful I was – but to South Africa, to the Boer War. I stayed out there till the war’s end but I didn’t win any romantic medals because I was working in a safe dull military hospital. At the end of the war I decided to stay on but as I couldn’t afford to set myself up in private practice I volunteered to work in a Roman Catholic missionary hospital in Rhodesia. Well, all went smoothly at first but then I got in an awful mess with a nun – there’s something about those white wimples which absolutely brings out the worst in me – so I ended up as a ship’s doctor on a liner bound for India. I won’t bother you with my Indian adventures but I got in a mess there too and eventually I wound up in Hong Kong – drinking far too much, I regret to say, and unable to hold down a job in one of the good hospitals. I ended up working for a protestant mission in the slums where I had to deal with a lot of diseases which I prefer not to think about, and the result was I drank harder than ever because I hated my work yet couldn’t scrape up the money to move on.