“And?”
“And I’ve organised with Signor Gabrielli that Stanko will bring them along to the parish hall. I’ll be conspicuously friendly, I’ll introduce him to people—as Silvio, of course—and that should stop people’s tongues.”
Rosemary saw no option but to kiss her husband and seem to applaud his notion. It seemed the only possible reaction to his puppyish, pleased-with-himself air.
“Dear old unsuspicious Paul! When I do decide to have an affair your simple trust will be an invaluable asset.”
“You think it’s a good idea?”
“Excellent. But don’t imagine it will stop people’s tongues. Nothing ever does that. But it may slow them down a bit.”
But privately she thought that they would be drawing attention to Stanko, just when they ought to be letting him fade from people’s minds. Because she was determined that Selena Meadowes was going to withdraw her slanders, and well before the spring parish party.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Party Going
Rosemary bearded Selena Meadowes next day in her bland semi off the Otley Road, distinguished only by looped satin curtains in the front room, which made the bay windows look like a toy stage at which Selena might be expected to appear as Maria von Trapp and sing of her favourite things.
Rosemary marched up to the front door and gave a single businesslike ring on the doorbell. When Selena opened it with a nervous smile Rosemary said, “Hello Selena. I want to have a talk about what you’ve been saying about me.”
Selena seemed inclined at first to bar her entrance, but Rosemary marched straight past her, down the hall and into the sitting room. Selena was alone in the house, luckily: her anonymous-looking husband was at work at his bank and her 2.5 children at school. She could be taken on in single combat.
Rosemary sat down in a fat armchair and had to resist the impulse to gesture to Selena to do likewise. Truth to tell, she was going to use to the full her seniority and her moral superiority. She felt rather like a headmistress preparing to give an almighty dressing-down to an unsatisfactory pupil.
“Right, Selena,” she began, “let’s not beat about the bush. You and I both know the rumours about me that have been put around the parish.”
“Well, Rosemary, I have heard,” said Selena, in her littlest voice, “but of course I would be the last person to spread anything like that.”
“Don’t pretend to be above gossip, Selena. Very few of us are that. And if not you, who else? You got the idea that I had been up to something in Scarborough—whether this was because you felt that someone who had lost her faith was bound to feel free of all restraint and go wild, or because you saw me happy and relaxed and put your own interpretation on it I can’t guess. The last thing I’d care to do is go into your thought processes. But you went to Scarborough intending to find out any dirt that was going, and you succeeded. You heard—or by dint of questioning you learnt—that there had been comment on the fact that Silvio had been seen coming out of my room during the evening.”
“Well, I must say Rosemary I was most surprised—”
“You were delighted, Selena: be honest with yourself for once. It was exactly the sort of information you’d hoped for. And then, when Silvio turned up in Leeds some days later, and when he and I were seen together, you put two and two together and made the sort of fantastic number people do come up with when they try to work out that particular sum.”
Selena Meadowes dabbed at her eyes, which were dry.
“You’re most unfair, Rosemary.”
“I am, on the contrary, unduly charitable, since I haven’t gone into your motives. Now, I have no intention of defending myself or explaining myself to you, Selena. I would only ever do that to someone I respected. What I insist on is that you use the same energy and devotion you’ve been using in spreading this story to retracting it. I want you to tell everyone that you’ve made a terrible mistake, that it was a result of a complete misunderstanding of what happened at Cliff View, and that you’ve been assured by the landlady that there’s no question of Silvio having been sacked after being seen coming out of my room.”
“But Rosemary,” said Selena, a cunning look coming into her eyes, “that wouldn’t be true, would it? I know the man—Silvio, is that his name?—was seen coming out of your room. And I haven’t spoken to Mrs Blundell about it. You wouldn’t want me to tell lies, would you?”
“Selena, after stretching the truth in the way you have in the last week or two, you can hardly jib at stretching it an inch or two further. You knew perfectly well, and ignored the fact, that there were weeks between my visit and Silvio being sacked. If you want to you can ring Mrs Blundell at Cliff View and find out the truth.”
“Oh, that would be rather awkward.”
“It would be very awkward for you. Because by chance you did hit on the truth about Silvio. He was asked to leave after being seen coming out of a guest’s bedroom. Unfortunately the bedroom in question was yours, Selena.”
For the first time she showed real emotion.
“Rosemary! It wasn’t!”
“Oh but it was. No doubt you’d been asking probing questions about him and me. I haven’t discussed that with him, not wanting to embarrass him. But it’s unfortunate for you, isn’t it? Because if you do not start retracting your story—vigorously, comprehensively, totally—I shall tell people the truth about Silvio’s dismissal with a great deal of pleasure.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“You think not? I don’t know how stable your marriage is, Selena. That wasn’t something you thought about when you started spreading stories about me, and I won’t greatly concern myself with it if I have to start spreading stories about you. But I wonder how Derek would feel if all the parish was talking about his wife and an Italian waiter. A bit conventional, your Derek, isn’t he? And a bit of a snob as well, I would guess. Think about it, Selena, and if you’re wise you’ll start spreading your retraction, and making it as convincing as you know how. Time to do a bit of grovelling, I think, Selena.”
So much for turning the other cheek, Rosemary thought, as she left the Meadoweses’ bijou residence. Perhaps turning the other cheek needs to alternate at times with the threat of strongarm tactics to be fully effective. In any event she decided not to give Paul anything but a very generalised account of her conversation with Selena.
There was one other reason for being satisfied with the interview, and this she could share with Paul. It was obvious that Selena had never bothered to find out Stanko’s name when she was at Scarborough, or even his nationality. One less thing to be explained, one more dangerous possibility avoided. The main thing was that talk should die down, and Stanko be allowed to fade into the background.
Die down it did, somewhat to her surprise. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she had always been liked and respected in the parish, both for herself and as the vicar’s wife. The retraction, as it progressed (much more slowly, inevitably, than the gossip), was believed: people stopped avoiding her, snubbing her, pretending she wasn’t there. Though the retraction lacked the specificity of the original gossip—inevitably, since Stanko and his situation had to be kept out of it—it was accepted by most of those who had heard it. Perhaps it was the deadly earnestness of Selena Meadowes that did the trick.
Rosemary took the renewed warmth as she had taken the quiet ostracism, but just once she did say something. She had walked in the pale sunshine to meet Paul from St Saviour’s and perhaps go with him to the Five Hundred Tavern when Timothy Armitage, emerging with the congregation, saw her waiting and made a point of coming over and greeting her.
“So good to see you, Rosemary. It’s nice that you’re not shunning us.”
Remembering his scurrying off to avoid having to talk to her she said, “I won’t shun you if you don’t shun me, Timothy.”
He looked down at the pavement.
“Oh, my dear, you noticed!”
“Of course I did. Gossip’s so easy
to believe, isn’t it, even when you don’t want to?”
“You make me feel very small, Rosemary. I feel that I’ve let you down.”
“No hard feelings.” To soften her words—because Timothy was really one of the nicest members of the congregation, and she had spoken as she had only because he was one of the ones who would understand—Rosemary added: “Remember me when Lassie has her litter. I think I’m ready for another dog.”
“You have been out of things, Rosemary. She had them last week. Come round and see them when they’re a bit bigger.”
The shift in parish opinion gave Rosemary the hope that Stanko’s appearance at the party after the spring fete would be unsensational. It couldn’t be too much of a nonevent from her or from his point of view: talk about Stanko almost inevitably meant questions about Stanko. Or Silvio, as she tried to call him, even in her own mind.
Meanwhile her children were coming up for the weekend of the fete and party.
It hadn’t been planned like that. Or had it? Janet had certainly promised to bring her new boyfriend up during his half-term. Mark had said nothing about coming, but now suddenly he was too. Had there been collusion between the two? Recently there seemed to have grown up a closeness between them, which somehow Rosemary didn’t like. Stop being paranoid, she told herself. Still, there was the possibility that Mark’s antennae had caught the new gossip and he was coming up to smell out the lie of the land and give her a thoughtful little lecture in the phraseology of a Times leader. A Times leader of the Rees-Mogg era. If so, he could expect an explosion. There is just so much lecturing that parents can take from their children, Rosemary said to herself.
They arrived on the Friday before the fete and party. Janet and Kevin arrived in Kevin’s old banger. Kevin was a cheery, fresh-faced young man, very different from Janet’s former boyfriends, who had tended to be saturnine, smouldery types who seemed to be auditioning for roles in prewar films set in Ruritania. Whether there was anything to Kevin, Rosemary couldn’t decide. There certainly hadn’t been anything to his predecessors.
Kevin was sleeping at friends’. Rosemary was sure this was to spare her and Paul embarrassment. She rather resented this sort of cossetting. She felt she could have coped with the idea that her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were sleeping together.
Mark arrived by coach from Oxford with a prim little suitcase and a large bag of dirty washing. He was much as usual, only more so. He brought up Rosemary’s loss of faith almost at once and at every subsequent opportunity thereafter. He was very dissatisfied with Rosemary’s explanation that “it just went,” but he failed to get much more out of her. He clearly had ambitions to be a Torquemada without any of the necessary skills.
Paul and Rosemary had agreed that something had to be said about the recent rumour-mongering. The opportunity came up on Friday night at dinner, when Mark asked how things were going on in the parish.
“Buzzing,” said Rosemary, helping herself to more potatoes. “Someone has been spreading the rumour that I’m having an affair with a fast-food chef.”
“Mother! You’re joking!” said Mark.
“How exciting,” said Janet. “I presume you’re not.”
“I don’t think I’m flattered that you should presume that, but no, I’m not.”
“How did the idea get around, though?” asked Mark, increasingly headmasterly.
“Let me see,” said Rosemary, pretending to think. “I got him his present job. He was a waiter at my guesthouse in Scarborough. He was seen coming out of my room there at around half past nine one evening.”
Mark puffed out his cheeks, already plump, and looked very concerned. Or looked, to be precise, like a turkey about to lay an egg.
“Mother, you haven’t been silly, have you?”
“As a matter of fact I think I’ve been very responsible.”
“You do realise, don’t you, that with your loss of your Christian belief, people in the parish will be on the lookout for falling standards in other matters as well? You will need to be very careful not to do anything that could give rise to scandal. You should think about that.”
“What does give me pause for thought, Mark, is the question of how it has come about that your father and I have somehow produced a pompous and sanctimonious little prat like you.”
There was a silence, Mark went tomato-red, and Paul stepped into the breach.
“Would anybody like some more carrots?”
Later that evening, when she was helping Rosemary with the washing up, Janet said, “That was glorious, Mother. Absolutely spot-on.”
But reaction had set in, and self-doubt.
“It was rather cruel, I’m afraid, and premeditated as well. I knew I was going to get a sermon from him.”
“Yes, that was easy enough to guess.”
“Anyway, why the congratulations? I thought you and he were rather close at the moment.”
“Close? Good heavens, no.”
“You just seem to be seeing more of each other.”
“Well actually . . .” Janet shuffled a little, then gave her mother a little grin. “Kevin, you see, writes these little plays, one-acters, for his kids to perform at the end of term. The first time he met Mark he started badgering me to invite him to this and that—hence Carousel. He’s put this wonderful prat, to use your word, Mum, into his present play, and Mark keeps providing him with wonderful things to say.”
“Well, it’s nice to know he has his uses. Good for Kevin,” said Rosemary, thinking that there must be more to him than to all those gigolo types who had preceded him. “Golly, I do hope this is just a dreadful passing phase with Mark. What I really worry about is the Church.”
“The Church?”
“Well, I do care about it, in spite of what’s happened to me. It’s been my life up to now. Mark will be the most terrible clergyman if he goes on the way he is going—the congregation will defect in droves. There’s no chance of his leaving over the ordination of women, is there?”
“None at all. He thinks it provides the most wonderful opportunity for renewal and revival.”
“Oh dear. The Catholic Church does seem to be able to embrace awful people much more easily than the Anglican one. Look at all those dreadful politicians. Paul was talking about them only the other day. We seemed to give them a platform, whereas now they’re Catholics they keep wonderfully quiet . . . . Tell Kevin he’ll have to come to the church party tomorrow night. We can introduce him to lots more terrible types for his plays.”
That night they all watched the ten o’clock news together. The peace processes in the former Yugoslavia were gathering momentum, and the guarded optimism of recent months was giving way to a sturdier hope. Rosemary was conscious that she was making an almost physical effort not to show more than a normal humanitarian interest. The truth of the lines about what a tangled web we weave was neatly illustrated in her case, though she told herself that her deceptions were quite selfless, designed only to benefit Stanko. Still, it didn’t feel good to hold back such an important part of her recent life from her own children.
Fete days had an ordained pattern, an almost mechanical routine, like coronations or (for all Rosemary knew) bar mitzvahs. Who did what was known, and was varied only by illness, retirement or death. The fact that some members of the congregation were beginning to feel that they had done their bit would lead to changes in the Mothers’ Union next year, but did not yet mean changes in the arrangements for the fete. The various ladies had their usual stalls, and the men understood their various backup functions without even being asked.
Rosemary, of course, had her allotted part in all this activity: fetching, carrying, filling in during tea breaks and pee breaks, getting change, transporting takings to the all-day safe at the bank, encouraging, exhorting and generally exhausting herself. The St Saviour’s fete was genuinely popular, and people came in droves. It had a reputation for cheapness and quality, and Rosemary always saw people she did not recognise as reside
nts of the area, let alone members of the congregation. Students came in large numbers too, in quest of cheap food. The hungry student was one of the phenomena of the nineties that Rosemary was saddest about: one of those revivals of an old tradition, like the worn-out working-class woman, which the country could do without.
She did manage—again, this was by tradition—a brief rest back at home around about five o’clock. Then it was up, change into her vicar’s-wife uniform (olive-green woollen dress, calf-length, with a chunky necklace) then off across the park to the parish hall, where the party was always held, and where the preparations were already under way.
“Florrie! How nice to see you!”
Social occasions, in Rosemary’s experience, generally began with a lie.
“Rosemary, you are looking well. But we’ve all said so all along, ever since you—”
“Are you doing the soft drinks as usual?”
“That’s right: soft drinks free with the price of the ticket; glass of wine seventy-five pee.” She paused, thrusting out her bosom. “Mr Mills has got some very good value Bulgarian and Rumanian wines, I believe. Are you going to supervise the food as usual?”
“Yes I am.”
“Pizza, I hear. So good that awkward little business is sorted out. I never believed it. Some people have terrible minds, don’t they? Makes you ashamed to be human—”
Rosemary moved on mid-flow. The woman disgusted her, and she had the excuse of going about her business, which there was plenty of. Turning away she realised the encounter had been watched and overheard by Dark Satanic Mills.
“Good for you, Rosemary. I’m glad you stood up to them.”
“Did I stand up to them?”
“I heard rumours of a visit to Selena Meadowes.”
He nodded towards the centre of the hall, where the Meadowes family—Selena, Derek, and little Matthew and Flora—were clustered with some of the other younger people, having all the smiling anonymity of a family in a TV commercial.
The Bad Samaritan Page 8