The Wonder Worker (62 page)

“That’s good of you, Francie, but I’ve other plans for the next few hours and I’m not with the Fordites, I’m somewhere near Parliament Square. Can you meet me at Westminster Abbey for Evensong?”

“Oh, what heaven—yes, of course! And afterwards—”

“Afterwards we’ll have a short talk in the nave. Thanks, Francie. By the way, Evensong begins at five—I’ll get seats for us in the stalls so look out for me as soon as you enter the quire.”

“Wonderful!” breathed Francie fervently before I hung up.

I found another coin, dialed the Fordites’ number from memory and left a message to say I’d gone to see my spiritual director and wouldn’t be back for lunch. But as soon as I had replaced the receiver I knew I still couldn’t see Clare. I needed to spend a restful afternoon so that I was in prime condition to tackle Francie. Leaving the phone booth I wandered down to the little park on the Embankment beside the Houses of Parliament and sat down on one of the elevated seats which overlooked the River. A large gull was perched on the parapet. His chest was so white that I wondered how he cleaned it. Surely there were spots his beak couldn’t reach? I wondered if his partner helped to groom him. But I didn’t want to think of partners. Didn’t have to either, now that I was so satisfyingly occupied with Francie. As the gull flew away downstream I began to review my conversation with her.

I thought I’d been both clever and skilful. Clearly it would have been idiotic to suggest a meeting in her home or in surroundings where there would be no witnesses. To meet in a large place amidst plenty of people was the perfect solution, just as to meet for a service was the perfect prelude to our conversation; Francie would be reminded that I was a priest unavailable for fornication and adultery. It might have been awkward if we had been obliged to sit close together, but the stalls at the back of the quire would ensure that Francie had no physical contact with me, even though we were sitting side by side.

Congratulating myself on this brilliant scheme I suddenly realised I needed to eat. I left the park. Then I walked down the Embankment to the Tate Gallery, refuelled by downing a sandwich and spent the afternoon contemplating some interesting modern pictures.

Or at least, that was what I appeared to be doing. In another dimension of reality I was behaving like a lemming rushing at full speed towards the nearest cliff, but unfortunately at the time this insight never crossed my mind.

I

When did I
first realise I had made a catastrophic error? Perhaps it was when Francie entered the quire and turned her mad, shining eyes in my direction. I made myself believe that she was merely excited by the prospect of meeting me, but my heart continued to beat rapidly, as if my psychic eye glimpsed the reality which my physical eyes were too afraid to see. Or did the awareness finally surface when she sat down in the stall beside me and in greeting put her hand briefly on my thigh? The physical contact, unsought and unwanted, was the equivalent of an ice-pack on the genitals. It was hard not to wince, harder still not to allow a vision of disaster to flood into my mind, but somehow I convinced myself that this was a mere spontaneous gesture and that my best policy was to ignore it. It was only when Francie sank to her knees to say a prayer before the service that the truth blasted my delusions aside and I sensed not her prayers but the panting breath of the demons which yearned to destroy me.

In a flash I not only recognized my error but understood why I’d made it. I hadn’t wanted to convince Francie that there was no possibility of divorce. I’d wanted to convince myself. My chaotic emotions had blinded me to danger and shoved me in entirely the wrong direction. Unable to face the possibility that my marriage might be be
yond saving, I had seen Francie’s fervent belief in a future divorce as a threat to me which had to be eliminated so that my own fears could be kept under control. So here I was, playing the wonder worker again despite all my earlier lectures to myself on the subject, and facing the one person whom I should have avoided at all costs.

Game, set, but not quite match to the Devil.

Was I talking the religious language of metaphor and analogy? Yes. But I was describing something that was real. Evil exists. Those who forget that fact or ignore it or reject it are at best taking a big risk and at worst conniving at their own destruction.

All creation has its dark side. That’s inevitable; it’s built into the creative process, as I myself had discovered when I’d tried to paint water-colours. One wrong stroke of the brush and the whole picture is under threat. Then one has to sweat blood trying to make good the mess.

But I’m more familiar with the dark side of God’s creation than with the dark side of painting water-colours. I’m more familiar with the darkness which can’t be weighed and measured in the laboratory but which is nonetheless chillingly real. Artists and poets can represent it best with symbols because it’s not easily accessible to straightforward description. The old religious code-words still bear traces of the terror they once invoked, but they’ve changed over time and lost their power. But the underlying reality doesn’t change. The underlying reality
is.
Lives get smashed up. People, even nations, are destroyed by what appear to be huge unseen forces far beyond the control of politicians or economists or scientists. Accidents happen. Psychopaths wander around with dead eyes. And people pushed off balance by extreme stress make bad decisions and rush lemming-like to their doom.

My hand automatically clasped my pectoral cross as I expressed my intense desire to make contact with my Creator. I was so horrified that I couldn’t frame an extempore prayer of any kind, but my memory regurgitated the lines from the Litany which begged for deliverance. Meanwhile Francie was sitting back again in her stall with a sigh of pleasure. My flesh crawled. I went on clutching my cross and trying to think coherently. Should I bolt or should I stay? I was aware of a strong urge to bolt, but at that moment the choir began to sing the Introit as they stood gathered around the nave altar, and seconds later they were processing into view. Bolting would still have been possible but it would have been awkward, especially as the members
of the choir were now taking their places in the rows directly below us. I decided I had to stay and use the time to figure out what on earth I was going to do.

It seemed plain to me now that Lewis had seriously underestimated Francie’s condition … Or had he? No, probably not. Probably he had played it down because he knew that if I had realised the size of the crisis I’d have wanted to postpone my retreat. He had been helped by the fact that his crucial conversation with Francie had been confidential, enabling him to censor the truth with a clear conscience. Yet Lewis had clearly said she was neither psychotic nor possessed. Would he have told an outright lie? No. So that meant …

I then realised that the truth could be more of a muddle than I had anticipated. Probably Lewis had both tried to play down Francie’s condition
and
seriously underestimated it, although to be fair to Lewis I had to remember that Francie’s illness, whatever that was, might not be in the same stage now as it was when he had made his diagnosis last Monday night. Sick people can deteriorate rapidly. The borderlines of mental illness aren’t clear-cut, and in the general haziness the patterns of different illnesses can emerge, blend, fluctuate, disappear and emerge dominant. And what did we really know about Francie anyway? We only saw her at the Centre when she wore her mask of Befriender. Once that was discarded all manner of abnormality might be surfacing at her house in Islington but no one would be around to see it. I thought of Alice, who occasionally called there, saying: “Francie isn’t quite the simple, friendly soul everyone thinks she is …” The more I thought about this the more sure I felt that Alice, who was highly intuitive, had been picking up the vibes of profound abnormality.

Francie certainly wasn’t behaving normally now. She was surfing on big waves of adrenaline, living in an unreal world. By this time I was sure she wasn’t unbalanced merely in the area of her life which related to me. The euphoria made me start thinking again of manic-depressive psychosis. Or if she was completely out of touch with reality maybe I was seeing some form of paranoid schizophrenia. Or maybe—

But I had to stop speculating. I was a priest, not a doctor, and anyway even if a posse of psychiatrists had been present they might well have been unable to agree on what was going on. The one undeniable fact was that Francie was sick. The second undeniable fact was that this sickness was very dangerous to me. And the third undeni
able fact was that if I wanted to survive this nightmare I had to calm down so that I could correctly work out when and how to escape.

By the time I reached this conclusion the service was well under way. I had risen to my feet for the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, subsided into my stall for the readings and sunk to my knees for the Collects. As the choir began to sing their anthem I tried some covert observation of Francie, but found myself agreeing with Lewis that there was no sign of possession. Apart from the total absence of all the more florid symptoms, she seemed without fear and without awareness that something was very wrong. It was true that her febrile excitement was unnatural—bright eyes, dry lips, shallow breathing, hand slightly unsteady as she turned the page of her prayer-book during the psalm—but this could be explained entirely by the fact that she was sitting so close to me. Or in religious language, the demon of lust was certainly present, but there was no sign that the Devil had taken up residence. In which case why did I feel so convinced that the situation was thoroughly evil and that I stood in very great danger? I reminded myself that although I was spiritually debilitated at present there was no diminishment of my psychic powers. Quite the reverse. Stress always had the effect of rubbing my psyche raw and making it even more perceptive than usual. That was why I had been so keen earlier to fight my way clear of the paranormal rubbish tip. The trouble with going through an ultra-perceptive phase is that one picks up far too much, most of it meaningless junk. Yet I didn’t think the impression I was currently receiving from Francie was meaningless junk at all, particularly now that the fog had cleared from my brain and I knew exactly why I had fallen into the trap of arranging a meeting with her. I was always wary of psychic twinges, but this wasn’t a twinge, it was a thump. I knew myself in danger just as I knew Francie showed no outward sign of wishing to harm me.

The next moment I found myself toying with an unusual but not impossible explanation of what was going on. Maybe Francie’s obsession with me was a way of blotting out the fear caused by the initial symptoms of possession. Maybe she was even using the obsession on an unconscious level to hold on to her identity which was being consistently undermined by an alien force. I reminded myself that at the Healing Centre she had always been completely in control of herself. If her trouble had stemmed from a chemical imbalance in the brain she would have been unable to regulate her behaviour in that way. But maybe it wasn’t Francie who had been doing the regulating.

I suddenly realised I was on my knees and reciting the grace which
concluded the service. Was Francie able to say the words “Jesus Christ”? Yes. I had also heard her say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed without faltering. As I had already noted, there were no signs of possession. Yet my forehead was damp with sweat and my fingers ached from gripping the cross and my psyche, picking up the disordered emotions of the woman sitting next to me, was reacting as if it were being beaten up. I felt as if I might be wiped out at any moment by an invisible assassin.

This was hardly a pleasant thought. Maybe the Devil had triggered it. With an enormous effort I remembered the saving power of the Holy Spirit and prayed in Christ’s name for deliverance, but I still felt as if I were about to be liquidated by some malign side-effect of the rough, tough, brutal process of creation. I knew my Creator was there, desperate to save me, but maybe I’d jumped so far into the jaws of darkness that he would be able to do no more than toil to redeem the mess left by my destruction. All creators are omnipotent in their created world, but they can only work with the material at hand and sometimes the material proves fatally intractable.

I prayed feverishly again for deliverance.

There was no organ music in the Abbey that night so the choir and the clergy padded away in silence. After that the congregation knelt for a moment of private prayer, but a moment later, still clutching my cross, I was obliged to rise from my knees.

“Wasn’t that a beautiful service!” breathed Francie starry-eyed, allowing her arm to brush mine.

“Very professional.” I deliberately selected an unromantic judgement but it had no effect. She remained starry-eyed. Obviously she believed I had lured her to the Abbey for the thrill of sitting close to her and was now entirely convinced we were on the brink of an affair.

Leaving the quire we paused to exchange a few words with the canon in residence before moving to the other side of the nave. I threaded my way through the rows of chairs to the north aisle, and as Francie bobbed along behind me I realised she was still chattering about the service. On reaching the end of the row I pulled out the last chair and set it well back at right angles to its neighbour. Since I was now deprived of the protection afforded by the choirstalls I wanted to ensure that Francie and I didn’t wind up sitting too close together.

“Have a seat,” I said, gesturing to the chair which was now the last in the row, and sank down on the chair I had detached.

“This is so wonderful of you, Nick—such a divine idea—”

“I agree it’s always a good idea to go to church and keep in touch with reality,” I said dryly, “but I don’t think it’s particularly wonderful of me to suggest it. In fact it seems to me to be a pretty mundane suggestion for a priest to make. Now, Francie, let’s try and remain in touch with that reality spelt out by the service—let’s try to—”