The Heartbreaker

by Susan Howatch

  “You were a gift too, Gavin, identifying Mrs. Delamere as Mrs. Mayfield.”

  “Mrs. Mayfield!” he said with scorn, but I noticed how he looked away as if fearful he might betray the complexity of his emotions. “Hey, did they nick her yet?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you about her, but I loved her and I thought she loved me.”

  “I understand,” I said, but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine him loving Mrs. Mayfield, and to distract myself I asked: “Why did you never mention Susanne?”

  “We hated each other till last weekend. I hated her because unconsciously I was jealous—she’d got out of prostitution and I hadn’t. And she hated me because unconsciously I reminded her of the way she used to be.”

  From some distant corner of the past I remembered Nicholas—or was it Lewis?—saying to me: “We hate and fear in others the faults we unconsciously hate and fear in ourselves.” Enlightenment overpowered me. I think I even gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” said Gavin at once.

  “I’ve had a revelation. About Eric.”

  “Oh him! You know, you could do better for yourself, you really could—you should marry someone truly amazing, like Nicholas.”

  I got a grip on my cosmic thoughts. “Nicholas?” I yelped. “A clerical workaholic long on charisma but short on spare time? No, thanks!”

  Nicholas chose that moment to look into the room. “The nurse says keep it brief, Carta.”

  “I’m out of here.” I gave Gavin’s hand another squeeze. “Take care of yourself. I’ll be back,” I said, and blowing him a kiss I slipped away into the corridor.

  III

  I was still waiting for Nicholas to finish his visit when I heard the clack-slap of high-heeled boots ploughing purposefully down the corridor, and the next moment a tall, tarty-looking piece had planted herself in front of me. “You Carta Graham?”

  “Uh—”

  “You the one who dragged Gavin into all that fundraising crap and nearly got him killed?”

  “I—”

  “Well, great! He needed a wake-up call to get him out of the Life. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” I said, silently cursing Alice for making me expect a shy little fluffette, and added in my politest voice: “You must be Susanne.”

  IV

  She had pouty orange lips, black eyes and also black hair which was twisted and skewered into a topknot. Her surgically deformed figure consisted of enormous breasts, a tiny waist, androgynous hips and very long legs. Wearing black tights, a short mauve skirt and a silver-spangled sweater under a fake-fur jacket, she was flaunting junk jewellery so copious that she clinked in time to the clacking of her high-heeled boots.

  Hiding my horror as best I could I said in a heroic effort to be sociable: “Any enemy of Elizabeth’s is a friend of mine!”

  “Fuck Elizabeth,” said Susanne. “It’s that pinhead in there we gotta talk about. You shagged him?”

  I realised honey-voiced diplomacy was a waste of time. “Never.”

  “Just checking. Seen the mums?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The chrysanthemums! In his room!”

  “Oh yes, very nice—”

  “I brought them earlier. I’ve been here all day. In fact I’m going to be around in his life more and more from now on. Got it?”

  “Yep. Great. Good luck.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “He’s all yours.”

  Susanne still looked suspicious. “You do realise he’s got a thing about you? Says that no matter who he shags in future you’ll always be his Beatrice.”

  “Who?”

  “Some cow in a book. The hero’s lost in a dark wood and remembers this Beatrice who represents things.” She looked me up and down as if I’d missed a trick. “I’m surprised you don’t know about the book,” she said severely, “seeing as how you’ve been educated.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I’m getting educated right now, as it happens. Computers today, law tomorrow. Got to have a career because Gavin’s not the career type, he just likes opera and boats.”

  “Maybe later when he’s recovered—”

  “Nah. But I don’t mind. Career-crazed men are usually swine— which is why I think you were smart to hook up with a bloke who just writes stories. Going to marry him?”

  “Well—”

  “Everyone says marriage is going out of fashion but as far as I can see people keep doing it.”

  “True, but I think a lot of people are justifiably nervous about making a long-term commitment in view of the fact that—”

  “Nervous? God, how wimpish can you get? Can’t those people recognise happiness even when it stands up on its hind legs and kicks them in the teeth? Fuck all the fear-of-commitment rubbish, this is real life, for God’s sake, it’s not a bloody rehearsal! Well—” She turned away. “—I’d better go and see what that pinhead’s dreamed up next. Glad to have met you, I’m sure, and I suppose we’ll meet again once Gav’s with me at the Rectory, but if you so much as think of shagging him you’re dead, know what I mean, and don’t think I’m not serious because I am.”

  “I assure you—” I began, but yet again I was not allowed to complete a sentence.

  She turned her back on me and clip-clopped away.

  V

  “Nicholas,” I said crossly as we left the hospital, “why on earth didn’t you warn me about Susanne? She’s frightful! And how could Alice possibly have described her as shy?”

  “She was shy when she arrived at the Rectory last night. Or perhaps ‘overwhelmed’ would be a better word to use.”

  Realising that a traumatised Susanne might have acted out of character, I said no more on that score but merely commented: “The sooner Gavin ditches her the better.”

  Nicholas looked politely interested. I knew that look. It meant he had a devastating reply to make but had decided now was not the time to offer it.

  “Okay!” I exclaimed, feeling crosser than ever. “Okay, okay, okay! I’m jealous of her because she’s got him and I haven’t—but this is ridiculous because (a) I hate jealous people and (b) I don’t want him anyway and (c) I’m much too sensible to be so irrational, and the fact that I’m being so irrational makes me absolutely furious!”

  “Well done!” said Nicholas amused. “Keep going!”

  “I only want to add that despite all this I’m not totally fruity-loops. I’m still capable of deciding—in a rational manner quite unconnected with jealousy—that Susanne’s not nearly good enough for Gavin!”

  “Fair enough, but look at it this way, Carta: even when Gavin’s physically recovered, he’s going to need all the support he can get when he grapples with the reality of his new life, and Susanne’s presence could well be crucial.”

  I saw I could not argue with this, but I was still cross enough to ask: “What are the Healing Centre’s trustees going to say when you tell them two ex-tarts are sharing the attic flat of your Rectory?”

  “Should anyone complain,” said Nicholas, very steely, “I shall tell them that I’m not the bedroom police, monitoring my guests on CCTV, and that there’s no reason why the Christian tradition of hospitality shouldn’t be extended to two former prostitutes who want to lead a better life.”

  After a pause I said: “Right.”

  “And besides,” said Nicholas, moving in for the kill, “although marriage is the ideal for couples, I’m not about to turn my back on two people who have a valuable one-to-one relationship. As you well know.”

  At that point I did ask myself why the thought of an unmarried couple should now be arousing such strong feelings in me, but unfortunately the answer seemed only too obvious: the stress of my relationship with Eric had to be twanging some very discordant strings in my unconscious mind.

  I felt mortified.

  VI

  The news I had been longing for came twenty-four hours later. Lewis rang me at home.

/>   “They’ve got her,” he said.

  The whole world paused on its axis, tilted, then began to revolve at an entirely different angle.

  My voice said: “Where—when—how—”

  “It was just as Gavin suspected. She waited until the police had searched her friend’s Pimlico house and then she hid in the basement flat where Susanne had been living. The police made a second raid early this morning.”

  Hot tears burnt my eyes and scorched my cheeks.

  “Carta, are you all right? Would you like me to come over?”

  But I just wanted to be alone to digest the fact that my unfinished business was finally finishing. It was as if the year 1990—my 1990—was ending twenty-three months late, and I was set free to move forward into the future. I said to Kim, whom I still thought of so often: “You can rest in peace now,” and the moment the words reverberated in my mind the peace enfolded me so tightly that I could no longer cry.

  I thought about Kim then with great clarity. It had been a rotten marriage but for a brief time we had been happy. He had been a damaged man, but he had had a good side as well as a bad side, and I had loved that good side before the bad side, nurtured by Mrs. Mayfield, had destroyed him. He was part of my past, an important part of my past, but he no longer had to exist in my present as an unavenged ghost nagging for retribution and making sure I was unable to make a full commitment to anyone else. Now I no longer had to look at an unmarried couple and feel subconscious guilt and shame about my inability to cut myself loose from someone so corrupt. With the “good” Kim avenged, the “bad” Kim would be free to wither away, and suddenly I caught a glimpse of him existing as a benign pattern in my mind, a catalyst in a dynamic process which in 1990 had led me to St. Benet’s and revolutionised my life.

  I stayed with my memories for a long time but at last I felt strong enough to call Eric in Norway. I had been unable to talk to him about Gavin’s stabbing, and in fact it was several days since our last conversation, but I was sure I could talk to him now.

  And I did talk. I talked and I wept and I got in a muddle and I apologised and I repeated myself and I thought in despair how very unlike a cool rational lawyer I was being, but in the end none of that mattered; in the end all he said was:

  “I’m coming home.”

  VII

  After I had wasted time shedding still more tears, I said shakily, trying to strike a lighter note: “I was afraid you might play hard to get!” I was standing at my living-room window, and below me the strip of water, which separated the Wallside houses from St. Giles Cripplegate, was glinting in the moonlight. “In fact,” I added, “I was afraid you might finally ditch me and I’d feel compelled to take a suicidal leap into the moat here like a latter-day Lady of Shalott.”

  “The Lady of Shalott didn’t actually jump into a moat. She—”

  “Oh God, why can’t I ever get a literary reference right? What with you lecturing me on Byron—”

  “Tennyson.”

  “—and Gavin comparing me with Beatrice, who I suppose was someone in a Shakespeare play—”

  “Which Beatrice?”

  “The one who was loved by some guy who got lost in a dark wood.”

  “Ah, you mean Bay-ah-tree-chay!” said Eric, rolling out the Italian pronunciation. “That’s not Shakespeare, that’s Dante!”

  “Well, whoever it was I can report that Gavin’s moved on—you should just see this new girlfriend of his! She’s an ex-tart called Susanne who has breasts like footballs, and she wears black leather boots with six-inch heels.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Dream on, pal!”

  “Does she actually talk or is there a string you pull to get a prerecorded greeting?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact she made a great speech today about fear of commitment being strictly for wimps.”

  “I definitely want to meet this goddess! Can we invite her to dinner?”

  “Gavin would have to come too—”

  “I’d be too busy ogling Susanne’s cleavage to notice. Incidentally, can I finally say something rational on the subject of Gavin Blake?”

  “Yes, but let me just say that I’ve had a blinding revelation about your past attitude to him.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “You had a blinding revelation as well? Does it relate to your sexy past?”

  “What a polite way to allude to my career as a toy-boy, living off women to finance my career as a novelist!”

  “Well, what I was thinking was—”

  “Let me tell you. I looked at Gavin, didn’t I, and hated what I saw, and what I saw was the self I’d been when I was young and stupid and hurt a lot of people who shouldn’t have been hurt at all . . . God, I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to work that out! How can I apologise enough for being so dumb?”

  “I wasn’t exactly the last word in intelligence myself, was I? I shouldn’t have got so involved with Gavin. But on the other hand—”

  “—on the other hand, you wound up saving his life and he wound up delivering Mayfield—and Susanne! Can’t wait to see those footballs!”

  “Should I get my breasts enlarged before we meet at the altar?”

  “If you do, you’ll be left at it. Okay, put the champagne on ice and I’ll call you as soon as I reach Heathrow tomorrow.”

  “I love you!” I shouted, but he had gone.

  After I had mopped myself up I found I was remembering how Gavin’s words had enabled me to understand Eric’s behaviour, and suddenly I thought: the journey continues. I supposed that we would stay close until after the trial, at which point the road we were travelling would peter out, bringing the journey to a quiet, undramatic close.

  Blissfully unaware of my total failure to predict the future, I started to wonder how Gavin was coping with the news of his Elizabeth’s capture.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gavin

  Yet at the same time these are the people for whom Jesus had the greatest compassion—the poor in spirit, outcasts . . . People with crippling low self-esteem, with no value or regard for themselves nor, therefore, for others; deprived, disadvantaged and damaged in their development, maybe as much victims themselves as they are perpetrators of an offence against others; prisoners within their own minds . . . locked into self-defeating patterns . . .

  A Time to Heal

  A REPORT FOR THE HOUSE OF BISHOPS

  ON THE HEALING MINISTRY

  Healing is never just cure. What else it is may be either good (e.g. a sign of new life) or bad (e.g. return to function in an unchanged situation). Some people would argue for a third category, indifferent; but that is to forget that there is no neutrality within the dynamic of salvation. We are always either being saved or perishing, whether cured or not. That is the knife-edge on which we live.

  Mud and Stars

  A REPORT OF A WORKING PARTY CONSISTING

  MAINLY OF DOCTORS, NURSES AND CLERGY

  So they’ve nicked her.

  Of course I knew she couldn’t have got far after I removed the passport and credit cards of her new identity, but I’m told she’d already filled out a passport application for Edith Binns, which turned out to be her real name. She’d also found time to dye her hair red and take her wardrobe downmarket (beige twinset, brown skirt and granny-shoes, according to my cop-totty mole). Let no one say she wasn’t resourceful when under pressure from the P-O-L-I-C-E.

  Well, so much for Elizabeth. I don’t want to have anything to do with her now. I just want to get on with my life. But I can’t. Dimly I realise I’m in limbo till after the trial. I can’t move on. But on the other hand there’s no way I’ll back down from giving evidence. There’s got to be justice here. Not just vengeance, which is personal payback time, but justice, which rights the record for all victims everywhere. I want not only justice for myself but for Jason and Tony as well.

  I know I have to focus on holding myself together, but I start feeling nervous in case Elizabeth does a
sicko-psycho number. She told me once it was possible to will someone to death, and although I thought at the time this was rubbish I now find I’m taking it seriously, particularly when the St. Benet’s team starts to take it seriously too. Old Mr. Exocet-Missile, aka the Reverend Lewis Hall, says the special prayer-group’s praying to repel any psychic attack she may make, but although this is supposed to reassure me, I feel more shitbrickish than ever.

  The police identify Elizabeth from the fingerprints they have on file. I never knew she’d done time, but it turns out she was jailed years ago for minor vice charges plus indecent assault on some fifteen-year-old kid. It also turns out that Asherton was fired from his former job in banking, although he never went to prison. I won’t rest until he’s banged up for bloody life, even though the police explain it’ll be tough to convict him of the assault that put me in hospital. That’s because even though I gave them the knife which had his fingerprints on the handle and my blood on the blade, he can always claim he wounded me in self-defence.

  But sod that. They’ll get him for multiple murder, and if I have my way they’ll get Elizabeth for commissioning it. My evidence is going to be crucial in showing how the Elizabeth–Asherton axis worked. It can’t be proved conclusively that she turned Jason and Tony over to him for disposal once she tired of them and/or they failed to live up to her expectations as prostitutes, but I can bear witness to the probable sequence of events. And if they can’t prove she commissioned the murders, at least they can show she went along with them. She made a bad mistake when she kept that snuff movie, the video and its case both plastered with her fingerprints.

  Now and then I try to imagine the trial when I get to play Gavin Blake Star Witness, but each time my stomach lurches and I have to stop. Sorry, Mum, wherever you are, but at least you’re no longer Mrs. Blake now you’ve remarried and perhaps you can pretend to your new friends that we’re not related. Thank God Dad’s dead and out of it all.