The Wonder Worker (37 page)

To divert myself from the wave of homesickness which washed over me at that point I went outside to inspect the cottage’s little back garden but it was bare, bleak, dead, and I felt more homesick than ever. Fleeing back indoors I made a new effort to take control of the situation by plonking myself down at the kitchen table with my Filofax and writing THINGS TO DO at the top of a blank page. I was just thinking how fortunate I was not to be a penniless woman seeking shelter in a women’s refuge from a violent husband, when I heard a car draw up outside.

I told myself someone was calling at the cottage next door, but the next moment a thunderous knocking made me jump straight out of my chair. Immediately I assumed that Francie had driven all the way down to Devon to tell me that Nicky had had a terrible accident.

Gasping with fear, my imagination already visualising the tangled wreckage of his car, I rushed across the room and flung wide the front door.

Nicky shot across the threshold, shoved the door shut and shouted: “You selfish, stupid bitch, how dare you do this to me—how dare you!” And having slammed me against the wall he began to shake me till the room spun before my eyes.

V

I was
plunged so deep into shock that I was even unable to scream. There was no question of struggling. My limbs refused to work. All I could do was close my eyes to blot the scene out, and Nicky, thinking I was fainting, at once took a different course. I was picked up, carried to the sofa and cradled tightly in his arms as he slumped down on the cushions. He was saying: “I love you, I can’t live without you, I’m not letting you go.” He said this over and over again.

I tried opening my eyes. Nothing dreadful happened. Nicky even tried to apologise but I cut him off by announcing: “I’m going to be sick.”

Escaping to the kitchen I vomited into the sink.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” That was Nicky, resuming his broken-record act.

“Go away.” When I vomit I like to do it in private. He knew that. Obediently he trailed back into the living-room.

Five minutes later I had swished away the filth, mopped myself up and filled a glass of water. I felt unspeakable. With the glass clutched tightly in my hand I staggered back to the living-room and collapsed not on the sofa, where he would have seated himself next to me, but on one of the armchairs. At last I managed to say: “You were supposed to spend last night in Chichester.”

“I changed my mind because I was so worried about you. So I got back to Butterfold and it was all in darkness and then I found that disgusting note—”

“Oh God—”

“I don’t know how you could have written anything so cruel, I don’t know how you could have brought yourself to do any of this, I don’t understand one single damned thing here—”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve been so desperate, so demented, so—”

“Well, how do you think
I
felt after reading that note? I went mad, I rushed back to London because I couldn’t think properly, my brain felt as if someone had put a meat-cleaver through it, but Lewis calmed me down, fed me some brandy, persuaded me to get some sleep before I started searching for you—only I couldn’t sleep, I tried but I couldn’t, so at dawn I drove back to Butterfold and ransacked the house for a clue about where you’d gone—and at last when I looked at the notepad by the bedroom phone I saw traces of a message so I got a pencil and shaded the paper and this address came up—you must have been pressing very hard on the top sheet because the imprint was so clear below—”

“The pen was running out.” I found myself remembering the old nursery rhyme about how a battle had been lost just because some horse had lost a nail from its shoe. Meanwhile Nicky was still talking at top speed.

“—and then I recognized the address and remembered that weekend we spent here, so I jumped in the car again and I drove and I drove and I drove—”

“Oh, Nicky—darling—” Wave after wave of deadening despair began to pound me. I hated myself for hurting him yet I hated him too for making me hate myself. The cauldron of unbearable emotions was boiling so hard by this time that I felt faint with the effort of keeping the lid on.

“I’m not letting you go,” he said in his most obstinate voice. “Obviously there are things that aren’t right but we’ll sort them out. If you could just tell me, very simply, what you feel has gone wrong—”

“Everything’s gone wrong.” I could say no more. To my horror I was beginning to cry.

“But I’ll put everything right! I’ll fix it!”

“Nicky—”

“I’ve got to have you in my life. You keep me normal, you keep me on the rails—okay, I know you can’t stand the psychic side of me, but at least you don’t try to change me, you accept me as I am, and I need that support, I depend on it, I’ve got to have it—”

“But what about me?” I burst out, dashing away the tears. “Don’t I get to have a life too? Or is my purpose solely to keep you ticking over by dishing up normality—whatever that is—whenever you deign to pay me a visit?”

He was stunned. “But you’ve been having such a rewarding life—you’ve had that wonderful career!”

“Only because you neglected me and I was so bloody lonely that I had to do something in order not to die of unhappiness!”

He stared at me in horror. “That’s not true. You’re exaggerating. That can’t be true—”

“What’s true is that I
can’t go on!
” I bawled, and unable to bear his devastated expression a second longer I rushed out of the room and hurtled upstairs.

But he was too quick for me. He grabbed me before I could lock myself in the bathroom.

“But why didn’t you tell me before?” he was shouting. “Why couldn’t you talk to me? I’d have done anything to make you happy—you know perfectly well how much I love you!”

“No,” I said, and my voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. “I was never entirely sure how much. You’re so very attractive and there are so many greedy women in the world and I found I could never quite forget how you screwed around when you played the wonder worker back in the sixties.”

“But that was before I was ordained—before we got married—before Lewis straightened me out and I turned over a new leaf!”

“I know. But sometimes I think the wonder worker’s still around. Sometimes, when you talk of ‘fixing’ everything as if all you had to do was wave a magic wand, I think—”

“Wait a minute, let me just get this straight. Are you saying you seriously believed I might be unfaithful to you?”

“Yes. I was afraid that if I stopped serving up normality on weekends you’d fall in love with someone else. I’ve always loved you more than you loved me.”

“But I adore you! I can’t live without you!”

“But you do, Nicky. Five days out of seven you do live without me.”

“But that wasn’t my choice! It was
you
who decided not to live at the Rectory!”

“Only because I knew you’d never cope with family life if I did.”

“
What?
”

“Oh, be honest, Nicky! Why were you hardly ever at home when you were a chaplain? I brought up those boys single-handed while you were always out somewhere being wonderful! You only turned up when you wanted sex!”

“That’s a bugger-awful thing to say! You talk as if I just regard you as an upmarket tart!”

“But that’s exactly how I feel! I feel I’ve been used and abused for years, and I can’t take it any longer, Nicky, I’m sorry but I’ve reached the end of the line and now all I want is OUT!” And twisting away from him in a paroxysm of pain I blundered into the bathroom, bashed the door shut and banged home the bolt.

He started to break the door down.

VI

I let him in. That sounds ridiculously feeble, but I panicked at the thought of having to explain to Francie why the bathroom door had been vandalised, and the moment I drew back the bolt Nicky burst across the threshold. Grabbing me again he started bruising my mouth with his own. I choked, gulped for air, tried to scream and finally started to retch. That was when he came to his senses and released me. I retched again after staggering to the basin but there was nothing left to come up. Meanwhile Nicky was flitting around saying he was sorry, sorry, sorry, and filling a tooth-mug with water from the bath-tap. This grisly scene lasted some time but at last I drained the mug, staggered to the nearest bedroom and fell on to the bed just before I fainted. At that point I felt so ill that recovery seemed inconceivable.

When I regained consciousness Nicky was lying on the bed beside
me and enfolding me in a tight, fierce clasp. As I opened my eyes he said flatly: “You’ve got to believe I love you and that I’ll do anything to put matters right.” Evidently we were back at square one.

I drank some water from the refilled tooth-mug, sank back on the pillows and managed to say: “It’s not so easy for me to believe that when you crash around like a caveman with a rock-bottom IQ.”

This time, when he said he was sorry, I felt the balance of power shift. He was contrite now, ashamed of the violence. Having slackened his clasp to allow me to prop myself on one elbow and drink, he made no attempt to imprison me again. Life was improving.

“I really do love you,” he said humbly. “I really do, I promise.”

“Okay,” I said, lulled by this new, meek approach. “I believe that
you
believe that you love me—and maybe
I
even believe that you love me—I hardly know what I believe any more, I’m in such a muddle—but I feel as if your love’s got nothing much to do with ordinary married love and nothing whatsoever to do with the woman I am now. In fact you don’t even know the woman I am now. That’s all part of the problem.”

He started to feel insecure again. Grabbing back my hand he held it tightly as if he needed to keep me tethered. “Of course people should evolve as they go through life,” he said, “but no matter how much you’ve evolved in recent years, you’re still Rosalind.”

“How do you define ‘Rosalind’? I’m not the shy little yes-girl you married, Nicky. I’m not the retarded adolescent who adored you enough to put up with anything. That ‘Rosalind’ has quite gone.”

“But I’ve been so proud of the woman you’ve become!”

“How can you know what kind of woman I’ve become when you’ve made no effort to share my new life with me?”

“Well, you’ve never made any effort to share my ministry!”

“That was because I never felt I had any place in it—you were never able to fit me in! But we’re talking about my career, not your ministry, and what I’m trying to say is—”

“What we’re both trying to say, obviously, is that there’s been a complete breakdown of communication, but that’s not uncommon, that can happen even in the best of marriages, that’s something that can be put right.” The thought seemed to cheer him. Releasing my hand he sat up, swung his feet off the bed and announced: “Let’s go downstairs and have some coffee. Then we can work out how to restructure our relationship.”

I saw then that by luring me into describing what was wrong with
the marriage he had trapped me into listing symptoms which he could now pretend formed the problem itself. In other words, I’d been manipulated again. The real problem was that we had nothing in common and needed to go our separate ways. That meant no restructuring of the relationship was possible because the relationship itself was finished, but how could I convince Nicky of that when he was apparently capable of nothing except trying to manipulate me in order to avoid facing reality? I began to feel the entire situation was now slipping rapidly far beyond my control.

Following him downstairs I waited like a zombie in the living-room while he boiled water and scooped the Nescafe into mugs. At home I always served filtre-coffee, but last night I had been so dazed at the supermarket that I’d grabbed the first jar of instant I saw. I realized I was equally dazed now, thinking trivial thoughts about coffee when I should have been beating my brains out to concoct a speech which would convince Nicky our marriage was over, but the nightmare scenario of control totally lost was stealthily reducing me to pulp. Making an enormous effort I tried to think sensibly. I told myself that although the violence had been literally sick-making, I knew that Nicky would never beat me up. Or did I? Men fixated on women could be capable of any atrocity … although Nicky was a clergyman and so quite different.

Or was he?

My scalp prickled as I remembered the day long ago in kindergarten when he had bashed the children, male and female, who had tried to kidnap his bear. But that was a long time ago. People evolved from their childish selves … except that sometimes, in some way or other, they didn’t. Sometimes they got stuck, went peculiar, lost control—

I shivered from head to toe.

“Here,” said Nicky, returning to the living-room with the coffee. “This’ll warm you up.”

“Thanks.” I put my hands around the mug but remained ice-cold. “Nicky,” I said tentatively, “wouldn’t it be better to talk about all this somewhere else?”

“You mean at home?”

“No, I mean … well, I mean in a controlled setting … with a skilled mediator present.” As I spoke I realised with relief that this was the only possible solution to the current hell. I also remembered that Relate, the marriage-counselling agency, not only helped couples to achieve a reconciliation when this was possible but also assisted
other less fortunate couples to part with dignity. In a burst of enthusiasm I added to Nicky: “I’m sure if we went to Relate we could find the right person to counsel us!”

“Good heavens, there’s no need to bother with counselling!” said Nicky surprised. “I can sort everything out myself—I know all the right moves.”

I was so appalled by the sheer arrogance of this statement that I was struck dumb. Nicky did have an arrogant streak, but it was years since I had seen it so openly displayed. Undiluted arrogance, flaunted without shame, was part of the wonder worker syndrome, and suddenly, queasily, I found myself remembering how he had performed psychic parlour-tricks at the smart parties long ago and how he had vibrated with pride afterwards when his fast set had fawned on him in admiration.

“Nicky,” I said shakily, “wake up! You’re dreaming.”