Heartbreaker (6 page)

IV

The house on Wallside was in darkness, a fact which startled me because Eric had promised to have supper waiting. Grabbing the phone I dialled his studio.

“So where are you?” I said aggrieved when he picked up the receiver. “Where’s dinner?”

“Oh, my God! I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

Storming to the kitchen I flung some scotch into a glass and began to make myself a low-calorie, vegetarian-cheese sandwich on wholemeal bread. Then I saw the bread was mouldy. With a curse I binned it, swilled some scotch and winkled a couple of biscuits from the packet of Tuc in the store-cupboard.

When Eric arrived I realised he was still mentally and emotionally in his studio where he was reworking a difficult segment of his new novel. “I’ve got Marks and Spencer’s fish pie,” he was saying from far away in 1940 where he was living with his characters in Norway during the Second World War. “It won’t take a moment to nuke it in the microwave.”

“But you were going to get that low-cal chicken and broccoli dish!”

“Was I?”

“Oh, spare me the Alzheimer’s routine!”

“Darling, is something wrong?”

“He finally noticed,” I said to an imaginary audience.

“I’m sorry I lost track of the time, but the commandos were delayed and my hero was almost garotted—”

“Eric, that’s fiction—
fiction
—and my problems are for real! I’m totally stressed out after messing around with a tart, and—”

“I’ve always said you were too obsessed with dieting! If you ate sensibly—”

“Not that kind of tart, you fruity-loop! A tart, a tom, a hooker, a hustler, A PROSTITUTE!”

“Blimey, what were you doing with one of those?”

“Well, I haven’t mentioned it before because it was confidential, but—no, forget it. Listen, I’m cross, I’m starving, I’m—”

“I’ll take you out. Let’s go to Fish Heaven.”

“I don’t want fish and chips! Let’s go to Searcy’s!”

“I can’t afford Searcy’s.”

“I’ll pay.”

Silence. Suddenly all the humour drained out of the conversation and an invisible curtain dropped noiselessly between us. We were two years into our relationship but the money problem had never been solved, even though we often pretended that it had. I always told myself that this problem was the reason why we weren’t married; I was too afraid that if Eric was unable to share my money with good grace before we were married he would be most unlikely to do so afterwards, and the marriage would quickly become dislocated.

“God, I’m so sick of you being neurotic about money!” I burst out. “If
you
were the one who had the cash, this problem wouldn’t exist!”

“We’ve had this conversation before. If you’d only commit yourself by agreeing to marry me, I wouldn’t feel so like a kept man whenever you fling money at me!”

“I never fling money at you!”

“You flung Searcy’s at me just now when you know damn well I have to go back to office-work next week to pay for my research trip to Norway!”

“Sometimes I think all you’re interested in is your writing and I’m just an accessory to keep you amused between chapters! If you feel like a kept man, I feel like a cheap sex-aid!”

Eric plonked down the frozen fish pie. “Okay, let me try again. Marry me.”

“What?”

“MARRY ME! You say you’re over that first marriage, you say you’re fully healed from that terrible time you went through with Kim in 1990, but if you were truly recovered you wouldn’t have this paralysing fear of commitment. We’d get married and—”

“How can I commit when we haven’t solved the money problem?”

“But can’t you see? You’re using the money problem to avoid—”

“No, I’m not,
no, I’m not,
NO, I’M NOT!”

“Oh yeah? Think about it,” said Eric, and walked out, leaving me alone with my empty whisky glass and the frozen fish pie.

V

A minute later I was calling my best friend Alice Darrow, the Rector’s wife. There’s nothing so therapeutic as a good moan to one’s girlfriend when men are driving one up the wall—as Alice herself said to me before I could even confess I had a problem. I volunteered to be with her in ten minutes. Then I called Lewis Hall, the retired priest who lived with Alice and Nicholas at the Rectory.

“I’m just about to drop in to see Alice,” I said to him. “Could I please look in on you afterwards? I’ve got mixed up in a weird way with a prostitute and I’ve had a row with Eric and I feel I could use a head transplant.”

“My dear,” said Lewis, “my dull evening has been miraculously transformed.”

I sighed with relief. Then I grabbed my bag, left the house and headed for the St. Benet’s Rectory, which stood in Egg Street less than quarter of a mile away.

VI

If I had stayed at home that evening I would have moped, wept and drunk too much in an orgy of anxiety and depression, but fortunately I had been saved from all this rubbishy behaviour because my friend Alice needed me. I had to shape up; I had to stop thinking me, me, me and start thinking you, you, you—always a startling philosophy for a former high flyer who had not so long ago thought of no one but herself.

Alice and I were both in our mid-thirties, and although we were in many ways very different, we had one important thing in common: we had both encountered St. Benet’s by accident when we had been quite outside any formal religion and had had no interest in God. Alice’s encounter had taken place in 1988, mine in 1990 at the time of my disastrous marriage to Kim. Now, in 1992, I felt that although Alice’s journey and mine were continuing down different paths, they were still running parallel, still cementing our friendship, still making it not only possible but natural for us to reach out and help each other whenever the going got rough.

Alice had married Nicholas last year after a lengthy engagement complicated by his dragged-out divorce, and she was now beginning to worry that she might have a fertility problem. The doctors refused to take her worries seriously, since she hadn’t been trying to conceive for long, but what disturbed her more was the question of whether Nicholas would have time to be an attentive father if a baby showed up. He enjoyed his work too much, and although with the help of his spiritual director he was always battling away not to be a workaholic, it seemed to be a never-ending war in which there were more defeats than victories.

To complicate this stressful situation, Nicholas’s first wife Rosalind, who lived only thirty miles away, was always phoning him to talk about their two trouble-prone sons and conjuring up excuses (or so it seemed) to stay closely in touch. Nicholas and Rosalind had been friends since childhood; the marriage might have been dissolved but the friendship was apparently indestructible. Alice had reached the stage where she felt something should be said about Rosalind’s persistent intrusiveness, but couldn’t quite work out what that something should be.

“. . . so Rosalind phones and says she simply has to talk to Nicholas about Benedict’s arrest for drunk-driving and would I mind if she and Nicholas met for lunch, and I say: ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t mind at all!’—why are the English so hopeless about complaining?—and of course that’s a lie and I’m seething. So I say: ‘The trouble is he’s so busy I doubt if he’s got time for lunch,’ and she says: ‘Oh no, he’s already told me he’s doing nothing on his next day off!’ And I think: that day off is supposed to be spent with
me,
and I feel so furious that I want to slap her—but of course I never will . . .”

Alice was too nice, that was the problem. I said that if I were her I’d tell Rosalind to piss off and then I’d shake Nicholas till his teeth rattled.

“Oh Carta, you do me so much good!” exclaimed Alice gratefully. “I don’t know what I’d do without your moral support. Have another piece of cake—or would you like a slice of deep-dish apple pie with cream?” A cordon bleu cook with a richly curving figure to bear witness to the irresistible food she produced, Alice was always generous in her hospitality.

“But enough of
my
problems,” she was saying, refilling my plate. “Tell me about yours . . .”

That’s the good thing about being part of a community. People care. People are interested. One never has to endure bad times alone. However, although I did talk to her about how Eric had driven me crazy, I never mentioned Gavin and I was careful not to moan about Eric for too long. That night I was clearly meant to be Alice’s listener, and besides, the confidentiality issues meant that Gavin was difficult to discuss.

“. . . and when Eric’s working I hardly see him at all,” I said, concluding my brief whinge.

“Welcome to the club!” sighed Alice.

Eventually I left the Rector’s flat and went downstairs to the main hall on the ground floor. This was in the handsome Georgian section of the house where Nicholas had his study, I had my office and Lewis occupied a pair of interconnecting rooms known as “the bedsit,” a nicotine-stained, whisky-smelling, dust-laden retreat crammed with Victorian furniture, icons, books, records, tapes, CDs and bound volumes of The
Christian Parapsychologist.
There was no television. On his seventieth birthday Lewis’s daughter, who was married to one of the northern bishops, had given him a computer “to keep his brain active in old age,” but this white elephant was consigned to a corner and covered twenty-four hours a day with a disused altar cloth.

Lewis was now seventy-one, a state of affairs which he claimed didn’t suit him even though we all knew it gave him an excuse to be as eccentric as he chose. He was chunky in build, neither tall nor short, and had silver hair, sharp black eyes and a foxy look. Apparently in his youth he had sailed close to the ecclesiastical wind, but in his old age he had become something of an elder statesman, respected for his traditionalist views.

Nicholas and Alice had both invited him to stay on at the Rectory after their marriage, and although Lewis had said to me more than once that they should be “left alone to enjoy married life without some senile pensioner cluttering up the landscape,” he had so far made no attempt to move out. He and Nicholas went back a long way and were as close as brothers. He had been Nicholas’s spiritual director at one time and even now often assumed the role of mentor.

Although Lewis had officially retired he still helped out at the church and still saw a certain number of people for spiritual direction. He was reputed to be better at dealing with men than women, and indeed he always cited his divorce as evidence that he had never been good at long-term relationships with the opposite sex, but for some reason he and I had always got on well. Since Lewis disliked feminism, female high flyers and women who prized their independence, and since I disliked crabby old heterosexuals who were convinced a woman’s place was in the home, our friendship was all the more remarkable, but he had been very kind to me after my marriage ended, and very helpful as I had struggled to understand the Christianity of the Christians who had come to my rescue. Lewis dished out certainties. It’s all very well for liberal Christians to sneer at clergymen who do this, but when one’s starting out on the spiritual journey and making a serious attempt to understand a complicated major religion, one needs certainties in order to find a patch of firm ground to stand on; the sophisticated approach can come later. I had reached the stage where I had dug myself in on a patch of firm ground but had so far been unable to work out how to move on.

The truth was that I was a mere beginner in a situation where an Oxford degree in law did not guarantee enlightenment. I don’t mean to imply that the intellectual side of Christianity is irrational. How can it be when it’s engaged the best minds of Western Europe for hundreds of years? I merely mean to stress that academic prowess doesn’t necessarily produce spiritual wisdom—the ability not just to see the world as it really is but to make sense of it so that one can live in the best possible way.

“I can’t make sense of this,” I said to Lewis after I had described the row with Eric and given him a bowdlerised account of my meeting with Gavin. “I know I love Eric so why can’t I make a full commitment to him? And I know Gavin Blake’s scum, so why do I have this suicidal urge to swoon into his arms like a pre-feminist airhead?”

“Personally I’m rather partial to pre-feminist airheads.”

“Lewis!”

“I’m sorry, my dear, let me haul myself out of my dotage and address this problem. Can you give me a little more information? How exactly did you meet this man?”

Knowing I could say anything in a one-to-one conversation with a priest, I escaped with relief from the bonds of confidentiality and told him that I had encountered Gavin through Richard. Lewis and Richard had never met, although Lewis had been introduced to both Moira and Bridget at one of the healing services, and he knew Bridget was being treated for anorexia.

When I had completed my story, his comment on Richard’s homosexuality was: “The family was obviously dislocated—it was clear there was a hidden dimension somewhere which was causing trouble.”

“Did Nicholas suspect that Richard was gay?”

“I don’t know. Nicholas is bound by confidentiality over Bridget Slaney’s case, and it’s not one of the cases where I know all the details— nowadays I no longer attend every case-conference.”

“But how could Richard’s homosexuality have dislocated the family when he went to such enormous lengths to cover it up?”

“I’d say that if you consistently lie to those closest to you and invest enormous energy in pretending to be what you’re not, you’re almost begging for dislocated relationships. People, particularly children, pick up falseness on a psychic level and feel not just alienated but frightened and confused. Then even if the unease is never fully brought to consciousness it can manifest itself in ill-health or inappropriate behaviour . . . And talking of dislocated relationships, let’s get back to your most immediate problem—”

“Gavin?”

“No, Eric. If your relationship with Eric was right, you wouldn’t feel so threatened by this unfortunate young man.”

“
Unfortunate?
That scumbag?”

Lewis never hesitated. “Carta, I’m sure you want to pursue a Christian course here, so I think the first thing you have to take on board is that it’s not up to you to condemn him.”

“That’s all very well, but—”

“Don’t misunderstand. I’m not condoning his abusive behaviour which left you feeling frightened as well as angry. I’m just reminding you that only God knows the full story about why Gavin behaves as he does, and therefore only God is in a position to pass judgement on him as a person.”

“Okay,” I said, “okay, I take back the scumbag judgement, but—”

“—but you’re still worried by his behaviour.”

“Yes, I am! Supposing he now starts to stalk me? Supposing he turns up at my house?”

“Well, if he does, try not to reward him by giving an emotional reaction—simply be courteous but firm. If, on the other hand, he shows any hint of violence—”

I shuddered. “I did come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be violent to a friend of Richard’s. But I still feel he’s dangerous to me.”

“Of course he’s dangerous to you! When people are deeply disturbed, they have a capacity to damage those they interact with. They’re like the typhoid carrier who moves from job to job and leaves a trail of infected people in his wake.”

“You mean he could make me cheat on Eric, destroy Eric’s trust and wreck the relationship.”

“I mean he could undermine and perhaps destroy the whole life you’ve worked so hard to build for yourself since Kim died in 1990. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by this. Is it really such a coincidence that you, a new Christian, should suddenly find yourself under attack from powers who are using this man to spread disintegration and disruption wherever he goes? And you won’t laugh at this suggestion, will you, Carta, because you know how people can be damaged by the powers of darkness, you saw at first hand how your husband was fatally damaged by that evil woman, Mrs. Mayfield—”

“Don’t talk about her,” I said in a voice I barely recognised as my own, “don’t, don’t, don’t—if I start to think of how she got away scot-free—”

“Yes, we’ve reached the core of all your difficulties, haven’t we? Mrs. Mayfield destroyed Kim and got away with it—and how can you let go of Kim and move on, you say to yourself, when that woman’s still evading justice for her role in his death?”

“Well, how can I?” I cried, but then made a huge effort to pull myself together. Levelly I said: “All right, I know I must allow Kim a certain responsibility for the choices he made, getting mixed up with the occult and a fraudulent healer, but the fact remains that if that woman had never crossed his path he’d probably be alive today and receiving
real
treatment for all his repulsive problems!”

Lewis only said: “Does Eric understand how strongly you still feel about Mrs. Mayfield’s escape from justice?”

“We don’t talk about it any more, but I don’t blame him for opting out. He hates to think I’m still bound up with my marriage to Kim.”

“Do you intend to tell Eric in detail about Gavin?”

“No. Now that Richard’s dead the confidentiality issue isn’t quite the same as it was, but Eric and I have problems enough at present because I can’t make the commitment and agree to set a wedding date. Why risk making things worse?”

Lewis was silent.

“Am I wrong?” I demanded.

“How about asking God instead of me?”

“Well, since I’m not much good at praying—”

“Surely a lawyer like you can draft a couple of simple sentences asking for help!”

I brooded on this challenge for a moment before saying: “I’d like to say to God: ‘Please mete out justice to Mrs. Mayfield and let me know when you’ve done it. Then Kim can rest in peace and I can finally get on with my life with Eric.’ ”

“How splendidly concise and pertinent! If only all prayers were that good!”

“But
how
can God mete out justice to that arch-cow Mayfield?” I exclaimed in despair. “And more important still, how will I ever know he’s done it?”

But before Lewis could reply we were interrupted. Footsteps echoed on the marble floor of the hall, there was a knock at the door and the next moment the Rector of St. Benet’s was entering the room.