by A. N. Wilson
On that first day, she had been given a quick tour of the house; it was how she imagined a subaltern would be briefed by the major when he joined a new company. ‘Refectory – there’s a rota for washing-up, cooking and so forth.’
She quickly became aware of his routine. Up betimes. Showered and shaved by six, but after hours of prayer and meditation in the dark. A bowl of porridge taken at the long refectory table with the tramps was washed down by a cup of black coffee. If he had time, he would come in at twelve when a simple lunch was on offer, sometimes helping to dole out the bread and soup to those who attended it. (Most of the campers came to this meal, as did many of the crowds who drifted in and out of the house all day.) The evening meal was served at seven, after the mass. It consisted of good NAAFI food, toad in the hole with onion gravy; liver and bacon; sausages with mash. There was always a pudding, often a suet pudding, and there were large metal jugs of custard. Tea was drunk with this meal.
Throughout the day, Father Chell was available to people. She was not aware of him having any time to himself, apart from the wakeful hours of meditation in the dark, when he sat up on his deckchair. Even then, though he was communicating with his mysterious God in whom Rachel did not believe, he was not necessarily alone, since figures like the peculiar and rather sinister boy, Tuli, would often spend the night in the room, lying on the floor beside the chair. She had even slept the night there herself once during one of the sessions when he had allowed her, or encouraged her, to pour out her heart.
The first time she had begun to confide in Vivyan, she found herself unable to stop. Everything came out, as if she were undergoing therapy, which in a way she was. Apart from the loss of her friend, and her grief, and her agonizing wish to have seen more of Kitty than she had done in the last years, Rachel felt that this death was a terrible lesson.
‘I thought, okay, it would be fun to work on a newspaper, and not many people my age are given that degree of responsibility, or, frankly, that much money. So of course I took the job, thinking it would be fun for a bit, but always, at the back of my mind, this thought … that one day I would do something … serious.’
She told him of her affair with L.P., which had led to her getting the job. Her attitude to this had been a life-choice of a comparable kind: it was not something which she intended to do for the rest of her life … No, that was too cynical. She had been in love with L.P. She still was in love with him – if crying when you think about someone is being in love. But she had now seen through their relationship. She had seen how utterly unfair it was to Julia. She had seen the tawdriness of it, the shallowness of her job, her love affair, her life.
‘Then Kitty died, and, I know this sounds so egotistical, but I said to myself, my God, Rachel, what if it was you lying there in that coffin? What if you were the one who was dead, and all you had to show for nearly twenty-eight years of life was work on a newspaper you despised, and a love affair with someone who was married to someone else and who had been lying to you both?’
Sometimes, during this first outpouring, Vivyan would say something. In his drawly old officer’s voice he would interrupt, ‘It isn’t egotistical – or not in a bad sense; to lead a good life one must examine oneself. That’s Socrates.’ Such remarks were spoken in an almost detached vein. His hooded old eyes were half closed, as if he were praying even as he spoke. And he spoke to clarify. It was half like having your fortune told, half like a philosophy tutorial.
He never made false excuses when she said she was guilty. He did not coo. He never by so much as a syllable spoke as if he approved either of adultery or journalism. She was strengthened by his silences, his acknowledgement that wrong had been done, that her life needed to be redirected.
After that first session, he had suddenly decided that she had talked enough. He leaned forward and put his hands on her shoulders. All subsequent sharing-sessions had been much shorter – twenty minutes or half an hour. Then he would bring them to an end by squeezing her shoulders or shaking her gently, or by saying, ‘But – hey! You’re young. There’s work to do!’
‘Hey – you!’
She teased him after a few weeks by saying that this should be the title of his memoirs, he said the words so often to different people throughout the day.
When it became apparent to her that he was listening to comparable outpourings of guilt, sorrow, sadness, puzzlement for almost all his waking hours, Rachel decided to limit the time she spent talking to him about herself. She willingly settled down into the life of the household, sleeping in a kind of girls’ dormitory in a sleeping bag on the floor, and helping with the domestic chores. She undertook all the visiting which Vivyan or one of his assistants assigned to her. There was old Gordon. There was a Pakistani family whom she saw every other day. Neither the grandmother nor, shockingly, the mother, who was only aged about forty, knew any English at all. Rachel’s task was to decipher DHSS forms for them, to accompany them to the doctor’s surgery and act as a sort of interpreter, though the notes they wrote for her in Urdu were completely incomprehensible. She also helped to fetch the daughters of this family, three girls between six and twelve, from school. It was her ambition to teach the entire family English. The mother and grandmother, sitting in their saris and thick cardigans in a crammed terraced house, were effectively in purdah and never went out. Rachel tried to tell them about her own family, her great-grandparents and grandparents coming from far away, and becoming assimilated into London life because they spoke English. These concepts seemed frightening to the women; the grandmother was positively hostile to the notion of learning proper English, though the mother of the children clearly wanted to do so.
Only a month had passed since she left the Legion but already it had faded; in her head it was an old photograph exposed to sunlight. But now something had happened which threatened to reawaken all the old demons of the Legion world. When she had finished helping Gordon put on his bedroom slippers, and when she had propped him in front of the television and helped him eat his Meal on Wheels, she had an appointment to meet a Mrs d’Abo, a West Indian nurse who lived in the flat below Gordon’s.
Vivyan had asked her to call on this woman, whom she had often seen in the vicarage. It was evident that something very serious was afoot. His manner was both shifty and pleading with her.
‘I’d so much like you to go and speak to Lily d’Abo – you know about the world of newspapers. There’s something very painful about to happen …’
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you about it this evening.’
That was all he had said. He had apparently already made an appointment for Rachel to call on Lily d’Abo. She did not know what it was that the woman wanted to discuss with her, but it was ominous that the newspaper past was being mentioned. So it was that as she helped the old man with his shoes and listened to his war memories, Rachel was conscious of a sudden ray of happiness in her heart; but knew it as a burst of sunshine only, before the clouds once more darkened the sky.
TWELVE
Mercy had decided that the braided golden hair had been that little bit over the top. At her next visit to Afro-Styles she had the whole elaborate artifice unwound. The gilded extensions were restored to their skein on a hook. She had her hair blackened once more, and straightened. She wore a V-necked black jumper which showed plenty of bust, and a black and white checked skirt, with knee-length boots.
Unlike her mother, who was used to walking boldly in and out of the front door of the vicarage, Mercy felt shy in approaching the priest’s house. Memory of former intimacies with Father Vivyan combined with a natural diffidence when dealing with the clergy. Today was different. Today was much, much worse. Today was hell.
She did not know how she was going to approach him, or what she was going to say. The nightmare of what was beginning to unfold at home was so terrible, so bizarre, that she had been slow to admit at first that it was happening. She realized now that she had been burying her head in the sand for months,
even for years. Peter was a sick boy, a lad who needed help, and neither she nor Trevor had been in a position where they could see quite how bad things had become. It was easier to take each problem as it arose – this little incident at school, that moment when the police had complained.
Mercy now saw that it was all part of one big nightmare – the schools which had suspended Peter, or accused him of theft, or arson, or disruptive behaviour; the troubles at home, with Lucius and Brad and Trevor; the terrible death of old Mr Hackle wit … Mercy had tried to take each of these problems as quite isolated moments. She had tried to see them as having no connection. She had tried to believe that schools, policemen, members of the public all shared Trevor’s perverse desire to pick on the boy.
This latest thing, though, was something else.
She had been furious with her mother when Lily told her over the telephone. Absolutely furious. ‘Mum, you had no right to keep that from me.’
‘I didn’t keep it from you. He told me ‘cause he didn’t want to talk ‘bout things like that in front of his brothers. I don’t blame him. It’s a terrible shock for me … after all I thought of Father Vivyan.’
‘It’s a shock for YOU! Mum! How do you think I feel?’
‘When The Daily Legion rang me up I nearly fell off my chair. I said, “Father Vivyan’s a good man, a holy man.” “What,” they say, “you mean, Peter’s not told you yet?” “Told me what?” ’
‘Mum,’ Mercy had yelled, ‘you realize those people are evil, they’re out for a story, they don’t care about the truth.’
‘Listen, I’m telling you. This was The Daily Legion who rang me.’
Her mother could hardly have been more impressed if she’d been telephoned by the Archangel Gabriel. She was naive. She liked to pretend that she was a woman of the world, and to say that there was not much a nurse did not know. This, Mercy had long realized, was rubbish. Lily might be physically unsqueamish. Whereas most of us would faint rather than administer a bedbath or an enema, Lily could look upon the human body without embarrassment. But this did not mean that she was anything more than a child when it came to understanding grown-up relations. She had made a saint out of Father Vivyan. At every meal Mercy had shared with her mother since the monk returned to England, she had had to sit there and listen to Lily telling her about Father Vivyan: how he’d started a fund to help the mine workers in Zinariya, how he stayed up all night praying; what he’d said in this sermon or that; how he’d been on telly, demonstrating about the situation in Africa. Mercy was prepared to believe that Father Vivyan was a good man – a bloody sight better man than most of the clergy who just talked about doing good and never did anything. But she did know some of his flaws. She had no idea whether he’d given up his peccadilloes and settled down into a celibate old age, but she had a clear enough memory of her encounter with him during the parish retreat seventeen years ago to know his true character. She’d seen that look in his eye since – when she met him again. He was a randy old goat. He might also be a holy man and a man who cared passionately about his fellow humans, but he was a randy man – who loved women. Of that there could be no doubt. She had the strongest and surest sense of these things.
That was why the things her mother started to say about The Daily Legion, and Peter, and Father Vivyan were so absurd. In fact when Lily had first said them, Mercy had just burst out laughing.
‘I suppose you think it’s funny – your own son, being abused … The Daily Legion said Father’s had a history of it. That’s why they expelled him from Africa …’
Lily had been full of it. As a nurse, she had already appointed herself as the expert on her grandson’s troubles. The evidence all pointed, she knew now, to sexual abuse. The boy’s decision to retreat into a dream world; the apparent changes of personality. These were all symptoms of a very wounded person, who had been hurt in a very specific way …
‘Who’ve you been talking to, Mum?’
‘I don’t need to talk to anyone. I can read, you know.’
Never, never had Mercy been angrier with her mother. Even if this grotesque story had been true, who was it who nagged them all to go to church day in, day out? Peter had been a churchgoer for most of his sixteen years, but it was only since living part-time with his grandmother that he had become an altar-server, and started hanging around at Father Vivyan’s house.
Peter had not been living with Lily for some weeks now. Since he’d turn sixteen in the late summer, he no longer bothered to attend school, and there was a place for him in the maisonette in Streatham. Mercy had told herself that since he got the job in a restaurant ‘up West’ he had been so much better.
Now, she wondered quite what he had been up to in all the months that he had supposedly been living with Lily, and keeping out of Trevor’s way. Lily, it seemed, had often not been there. She had worked nights at the hospital; she had allowed the boy to stay overnight at the vicarage, because she was so sure that he would be ‘safe with Father Vivyan’. Now there was this ridiculous story about Father Vivyan being an abuser of young boys.
Mercy was coming to the vicarage to discuss the way forward. She entered the porch, shook her transparent plastic umbrella and stepped gingerly into the untidy hallway. A young monk approached her and asked if she was lost.
‘I’m looking for Father Vivyan.’
‘Ah, Mercy …’
He appeared at the top of his staircase.
‘Step up here, if you would, Father Aidan. Could you bring Mercy with you?’
The younger monk, who was dressed in the full rig, the fancy dress which Vivyan had been wearing on the day of their memorable tryst seventeen years before, led the way into the large upstairs room where Father Chell lived. Her eyes took in the large table by the window, covered with letters, papers and paperback books. A few camp-beds littered the room – they had been put up at angles to one another and there was nothing orderly about them. A large figure of Jesus on the Cross hung on the wall at one end. Father Chell gestured to one folding deckchair and he himself sat down on another.
‘The thing is,’ she said, looking at Father Aidan, ‘it’s rather private.’
‘I’ve asked Father Aidan to stay with us at all times, Mercy. I think you know why.’
She realized to her embarrassment and to her extreme surprise that he was angry.
‘Vivyan – I’ve got to talk to you alone.’
‘I’m not going to be tricked twice,’ said the priest curtly.
‘Tricked?’
‘Presumably you have a recording device about your person now.’
‘Do I look as if I have?’
She had taken off her PVC mac. Her jumper was tight, her skirt was tight.
He smiled sheepishly. She could see him enjoying the sight. She watched his eyes straying towards her breasts and feasting on the sight of her nipples which showed through bra and jumper. She thought what a handsome man he was.
‘Well, what I have to say is very embarrassing,’ she said, ‘and I’d rather I said it to you alone.’
‘Father Aidan, I’m asking you to stay,’ said Vivyan.
The blushing young monk looked from one of them to the other; but like an obedient junior he did what Vivyan told him and stayed put.
‘Look, Vivyan, The Daily Legion has been ringing up my mother with—’
‘The Daily Legion, who presumably paid you a lot of money for a tape-recording of our last conversation,’ said Vivyan curtly.
There was silence between them. It felt like an hour, though it was probably only half a minute.
‘What did you say?’ asked Mercy.
‘I said, the newspaper presumably paid you to record our last conversation together. They telephoned me some days ago to ask whether I recalled saying to anyone the following words – “If I’ve done something to you to hurt you, I am deeply sorry.” Words to that effect. They were the words I used to you when we last spoke. In private – or as I stupidly thought …’
‘What
are you saying?’
‘You know what I am saying. I am saying that the newspaper telephoned me with what amounted to a blackmail. They asked if I intended to deny saying those words to, as they put it, “a certain person”. They then added that they did not suppose – I’m sorry, Father Aidan, but you must stay and hear this – they then added that they assumed I would not deny that I had been intimate with the person to whom I said those words. I hung up on them. I have considered approaching the police, and I have consulted a lawyer. Mercy, Mercy …’
‘Vivyan. Listen to me. The newspaper has rung up my mother. A woman there has told my mother that … I don’t know how to say this to you …’
‘I don’t think it is funny. You, evidently, do.’
‘I’m not laughing because it’s funny. It’s bloody TRAGIC.’ But she was smiling. ‘And it is also funny, come to think. My mother thinks they are accusing you of being a … well, of being GAY.’
The young monk looked at his shoes and blushed scarlet.
‘How do you work that out?’ asked Vivyan.
‘Look, I don’t know how they managed to record our last conversation. Maybe this room is bugged, who knows? But if you think I’d … Oh, how could you think I’d do a mean trick like that? That makes me really, really angry, you know, Vivyan! I came here to warn you, to help you, to see what we can all do about Peter.’
‘About Peter? What does he have to do with it?’
‘Just about everything, I think. Look, let’s get out of this room if it’s bugged. Let’s go for a walk in the rain. You and I have some talking to do, Vivyan, we do, really.’
THIRTEEN
Brad, who was twelve, had been doing well at school, but Peter persuaded him it would be better to take the morning off. The school sucked, Peter could tell them. He’d been there once. Little Lucius had resisted their half-brother’s desire that they should both skive off. So it was only Brad who came with Peter. He took his half-brother on top of a bus, and they rode out of Crickleden together through the driving rain into the new world, the cool world which Peter had persuaded Brad was waiting for him if he’d only leave that fucking school of his. Forget ‘bout lessons. Who needs fucking teachers, man – did Brad not know they were all ignorant perverts? Shits? Fucking pervert shits who deserved having their dicks cut off and stuffed down their throats?