The Wonder Worker (66 page)

“For the test. And you know what a long time it takes to get a result.”

“You mean … are you saying …” But I knew exactly what he was saying. I knew that for the homosexual activist there was only one test which needed no qualifying description. I felt cold again, but much, much colder than I’d felt before. My lungs felt as if they were icing up.

“Rosalind told Stacy she wasn’t sleeping with you, so I knew you were in no danger, but …”

I ceased to listen. I had ceased even to think of Stacy and his former lover in Liverpool. At that moment I could think only of Rosalind, and as I pictured her savouring her return home in blissful ignorance, I knew the escalating disaster had finally exploded into a catastrophe which stretched as far as the eye could see.

Part Five

ALICE
The Cutting Edge of Reality

We confess that there is no health in us and in doing so begin to find it. Elusive, intangible, always evading us and escaping us, it is our wholeness and our holiness.

CHRISTOPHER HAMEL COOKE

“Health and Illness, Pastoral Aspects,”

an entry in
A Dictionary of Pastoral Care

I

It was Nicholas
who broke the news to me. I was taking in the waistband of my best skirt and listening to the television. The news presenter was droning on about the usual global disasters, but my little living-room was warm and serene. Violent death always happened elsewhere to people I had never met, and the Rectory was an oasis of peace, immune from the carnage which raged in the surrounding desert—or so I had always thought until that evening when Nicholas came to tell me what had happened to Stacy.

I knew straight away that something was wrong because no one ever disturbed me in the evenings unless there was an emergency, and besides, Nicholas was supposed to be away for the weekend. I had heard Lewis return to the house with someone half an hour before, but it had never occurred to me that the someone might be Nicholas. Normally at that hour I would have been in the kitchen cooking, but since Nicholas was supposed to be away and Stacy had retired sick to the curate’s flat, Lewis had given me the evening off.

I opened the door. Nicholas was looking haggard, shattered, greyish. His normally neat brown hair was disordered. His eyes were bloodshot.

He said: “Alice, I have something very difficult and very painful to say,” and at once I thought: Rosalind’s been killed in a car crash. But I believe I knew, even before this pathetic sentence slithered across my mind, that the violent death didn’t belong to Rosalind.

Nicholas said: “It’s Stacy. Something’s happened to him, something terrible. I’m so sorry, Alice, so very sorry, I know how fond of him you were.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes, but there’s more I have to tell you.”

I knew what that meant, but I found I was unable to utter the word “suicide.” All I could whisper was: “How?”

“There was a rope. He used a beam in the roof.”

For a split second I visualized the scene but then my imagination blacked out. I heard myself saying in an absurdly calm voice: “I’m to blame,” and then as the shock curled over me like a huge tidal wave, I felt as if I were drowning, wiped out along with my cherished oasis by primitive forces far beyond all human control.

II

Nicholas
looked stupefied. “
Your
fault? But my dear Alice—”

I started to explain but after one stumbling sentence he interrupted: “You know what was going on, don’t you?” and when I nodded dumbly he moved at once to the intercom in the kitchen.

“Lewis,” I heard him say. “There’s another angle on all this. You’d better join us.” Turning back to me he gestured to the sofa and we both sat down. “I was about to call the emergency services,” he said, “but that can wait. It’s vital that we pool our knowledge so that we can work out exactly what happened.”

I nodded, trying to wipe the tears from my eyes, and as we sat down James wriggled through the catflap; he always knew when Nicholas was around. Nicholas picked him up and arranged him carefully in my lap. I began to stroke the stripey fur.

Lewis entered the flat with difficulty, shoved the door shut with one of his crutches, laid a comforting hand briefly on my shoulder and sat down abruptly on the dining-chair which Nicholas had pulled
close to the sofa. Like Nicholas he was looking haggard, but unlike Nicholas he showed no sign of being battered by grief. I was sure he was experiencing powerful emotions, but he was in control of them. I could sense his mind focusing sharply on the key problems: how to protect Nicholas, how to evict the dark forces which had invaded the Rectory, how to ensure our survival. Suddenly I felt a fraction less frightened, but the easing of fear opened the way for a fresh onslaught of grief. I began to cry.

“There, there!” said Lewis, effortlessly slipping into a paternal role. “You’ve had a terrible shock. Nicholas, make some tea.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m all right.” But I wasn’t. I stifled the sobs but the tears kept coming. When Nicholas returned to the kitchen and James slipped off my lap to follow him, Lewis heaved himself onto the sofa so that he could sit beside me. “Dear little Alice!” he said. “I’m so sorry.” And somehow when he spoke as gently as that it was hard to remember his chronic grumpiness. Very tentatively, my eyes still blurred with tears, I found his hand and held his thumb. I didn’t quite dare to hold the whole hand in case he recoiled at my familiarity, but he at once curved his palm around my fingers. His customary smell of whisky, cigarettes and Pears soap was immensely comforting.

Nicholas returned with a mug of tea and sat down inches away from me in the chair Lewis had vacated. I took a sip from the mug and found the tea had been well sweetened. In relief I drank some more.

At last I said: “I knew something had gone very wrong, but the trouble didn’t seem at first to be centred on Stacy. I just thought—” But I had to break off and pretend to sip tea.

Lewis said: “Take your time. Your evidence is very important. There’s nothing we can do now for Stacy, but we can still fight to save Nicholas’s ministry at St. Benet’s.”

I nodded but I was barely listening to him. I was looking back over the past week at the Rectory and trying to pinpoint the moment when everything had started to go wrong …

III

In my
memory I saw Rosalind, arriving at the Rectory with Nicholas on Tuesday afternoon. I’m not saying life was trouble-free
before her arrival—obviously we all had our problems, since we were human beings and not robots—but the problems seemed to be manageable and we jogged along comfortably enough. After all, one can live very happily with several kegs of dynamite provided that there are no matches around. But Rosalind was the box of matches, and all it takes to light a fuse is a single flame.

At the time I was blissfully content. Even
my
problems had become manageable once I had the right job and the right home. I loved my little flat which looked out over the jungly garden and I loved having a cat again and I loved being part of the St. Benet’s team. Best of all I loved looking after my three men—my substitute father, substitute brother and substitute husband—and keeping them all well fed and neatly organised. Those feminists who believe women are debased by caring for men in this way just don’t have a clue what real life’s all about. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.

Anyway, there I was, so happy that I’d even lost interest in rum raisin ice cream, when disaster struck and Rosalind arrived. Nicholas said she was planning to live permanently at the Rectory and would be staying for a while to work out how the house could best be altered into a family home. I was horrified because she was such a malign presence; I could sense that beneath her immaculate exterior she was a mass of churning emotions, all of them unhappy. Nicholas clearly adored her, and at first I tormented myself by thinking of them having magnificent sex in their vast double-bed, but within forty-eight hours I’d begun to believe that grade-A sex wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—on the agenda. Rosalind was too unhappy. Sex was around somewhere, had to be, since Nicholas adored her so much, but I sensed it would be shadowed in some way, sort of maimed and off-colour—and suddenly the memory popped up in my mind of that tragic scene in the famous film
Don’t Look Now
when the characters played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie have sex not to express their love for each other but to anaesthetise themselves from their problems.

This visit of Rosalind’s was utterly different from her previous visits. Nicholas was very tense, quite unlike himself, and Rosalind, usually so silky and self-assured, was spiky and restless. I had already spent much time trying to work out why Nicholas was so besotted with this detestable woman, and now, when she was clearly infecting him with her unhappiness, I considered the puzzle afresh, but no explanation I dreamed up ever satisfied me. I accepted that love wasn’t
always sensible, but I still didn’t see how he could even like her. She didn’t share his interests. She didn’t even bother to go to the eight o’clock service with him on the morning after her arrival. She obviously hated the Rectory and couldn’t wait to strip it of all its quirky individuality. (Okay, the kitchen
was
a bit dog-eared, but who cared? I certainly didn’t, but Rosalind the Wrecker obviously thought the entire house was fit only for the scrap-heap.) What on earth was Nicholas doing with such a creature? The whole marriage struck me as totally bizarre.

In the end I was so disturbed by the prospect of Rosalind inhabiting the Rectory on a permanent basis that I confessed my anxiety to Lewis, but he was reassuring. “Don’t worry, my dear,” he said. “The plan will never work—she’ll lose interest and go back to her garden at Butterfold. But nevertheless,” he added sharply as I sagged with relief, “we have to do all we can to try to make this experiment successful. Otherwise when it fails and they look around for someone to blame, we’ll be the prime candidates.”

I knew then, although Lewis was always careful never to say a word against Rosalind, that he disliked her as much as I did and was as appalled as I was by the thought of her coming to live among us. It was Stacy, not Lewis, who regarded Rosalind through rose-tinted spectacles.

“She’s so elegant!” he sighed to me after her arrival that week. “So regal! I like to think of Nick being married to someone like that. Only someone really high-class could ever be worthy of him.”

This sort of sentimental twaddle irritated me so much that I behaved just like Aunt. “She’s not particularly high-class,” I said tartly. “Her father was just a country solicitor.”

“But her grandfather owned a lot of land in that village where Nick grew up!”

“Probably just an acre of garden plus a paddock for the pony.”

However, Stacy was determined to cling to his vision of Queen Rosalind, the only woman in England good enough for his hero. Stacy worshipped Nicholas. It was all part of his abnormality. “Abnormality” may seem a harsh word, but it
is
abnormal for a man in his mid-twenties to dote on his boss with the passion of a thirteen-year-old idolising a rock-star. Stacy was immature, indulging in behaviour he should have outgrown years ago, and it occurred to me as I brooded on his arrested development that what he really needed was a dynamic female to blast him out of his adolescence.

Once when I was peeling potatoes—I have so many creative thoughts at the kitchen sink—I thought Francie could play the necessary
femme fatale.
She had plenty of oomph and was, as I well knew, indestructibly warm-hearted; I thought she might take Stacy on out of sheer generosity of spirit even though she was a practising Christian and (presumably) anti-adultery. However, this brilliant idea came to nothing because I soon realised that Francie was never going to look twice at any man except Nicholas. She was madly in love with him. Of course she did a wonderful job in passing off her passion as harmless hero-worship, but I was ultra-sensitive to all the feminine adoration which swirled around Nicholas and eventually it dawned on me that Francie was not only nuts about him but might just possibly be nuts about everything. I had no proof of such fullscale nuttiness. This was just my intuition working at full blast, but as soon as I sensed that Francie was far nuttier than anyone imagined I started to observe her much more closely in the hope that I would find the proof which would confirm my intuition.

I noticed, whenever we met for coffee, that her husband was usually abroad somewhere. I already knew her children were away at boarding school, but now I picked up the unspoken message that they were teenagers who didn’t want their mother fussing around them whenever they were at home. In short, life on the home front was a desert. She was always saying how busy she was, but it seemed to me that her social life only woke up when her husband came home—and even then it merely consisted of attending corporate events with him or giving dinner-parties for his business acquaintances. She appeared to have no close friends apart from Rosalind, but from the tart comments Francie was now making about her I soon realised that beneath the show of friendship lay envy and dislike.