Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  Then the baby gave a healthy enough wail, and the moment for the blessed absolution offered to the sinless passed.

  What happened next was not especially edifying. Marion Yves tried to snatch her baby away from the vicar. She clearly felt that here was a man who could no longer be trusted to hold her precious offspring. By now the Reverend Lender had reverted to the tight grasp that characterised his early baptisms. He seemed determined not to allow the small matter of a dropped baby to interrupt the smooth flow of the service. He clung fiercely to Azaliah, and he attempted to avoid the lunging manoeuvre made by Marion Yves by taking a backward step. He was well into the next stanza of the service, which began: ‘Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is by Baptism regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church,’ when Marion’s voice rang out.

  ‘Give me back my baby,’ she demanded in tones that echoed around the fine acoustics of the Plantagenet church.

  The vicar contrived to appear hurt by this, and attempted to shush the overwrought mother. ‘We are quite near the end,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we just carry on?’

  ‘No bloody fear,’ said Marion Yves, making another lunge for the baby. One version of the story has Marion using somewhat stronger language, but this may be due to the exaggeration that often accompanies tales repeated frequently over time.

  Whatever words were used, the vicar was not to be easily diverted. In a thousand christenings he had never failed to reach the end of the service, despite the cries of some very vocal babies. ‘Please,’ he implored, ‘we are nearly at the end. The baby isn’t fully baptised yet.’ He struggled to keep hold of Azaliah in what was becoming a rather unseemly tug of war.

  The contretemps at the font was not the only unconventional feature of Azaliah’s christening; another was the exceptional number of godparents. The usual pattern, prescribed since Cranmer’s day, was for two godparents comprising one of each gender. But for this service, in a very uncharacteristic concession, the priest had agreed to Marion’s request to admit three godfathers and a single godmother. All three godfathers looked acutely discomfited by the dropping of the baby and the subsequent attempts by Marion to seize her child back. This was when John Hall, one of the new godfathers, intervened.

  Just moments before the fracas, we can presume that John Hall had been promising, in all solemnity, to renounce the Devil and all his works, to reject the vain pomp and glory of the world and equally (and highly improbably in John Hall’s case) to renounce the carnal desires of the flesh. Now, however, he lumbered into the fray and relieved the vicar of the baby. For an instant it looked as if he might also deliver an uppercut.

  ‘Please,’ protested the vicar weakly, ‘she isn’t baptised yet.’

  ‘She needs a bloody doctor, not a baptism,’ said Hall, passing Azaliah to her mother.

  ‘But we’ve so nearly finished.’

  ‘Stuff it,’ said Marion, taking the baby from Hall, ‘we’ve had enough.’

  ‘But my child,’ insisted the vicar, ‘in the eyes of the Church we have yet to . . .’

  ‘Stuff your bloody baptism,’ crowed Marion, ‘and stuff all this.’ She flung her Book of Common Prayer with all of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s finely crafted words at the vicar. The book bounced off him and landed in the cold water of the font with a splash.

  ‘Come on,’ Marion cried to the congregation. ‘We’re going.’ Whereupon she, and the three godfathers, and Azaliah Yves covered with her own blood and still only partially baptised, and a dozen or more of the assembled worshippers, stalked out of the church and into the secular world that lay beyond.

  4

  June 2012

  There is jeopardy, Thomas Post thinks, in cultivating a psychoanalyst as a friend. How much of the friendship is sincere? Can he ever escape her instinct to analyse? If he whiles away time in her company, is she, perhaps, still at work, surreptitiously psychoanalysing him?

  Dr Clementine Bielszowska may not be the most prepossessing of characters, sunk in her chair like a little weathered owl, peering through her half-moon spectacles, intemperately tapping her walking stick on the wooden floor; but as a psychoanalyst her reputation is exalted. No matter, as she would airily say to Thomas with a dismissive wave, that she hasn’t practised for almost thirty years; no matter that she engagingly disavows the discipline. ‘I don’t even believe most of it,’ she often says. Perhaps this is true; but she is nonetheless a disciple of Freud and Jung, and she does still tutor students in the dark arts. It isn’t hard to imagine her with a notebook and pen in a wing armchair, lips tightly pursed, while a patient on a couch agonises over buried infatuations, complexes and phobias. It isn’t difficult either, as she hunkers down in Thomas’s fifth-floor office, to imagine her agile mind at work on Thomas’s fragile psyche.

  Thomas has turned away from the window and is looking forlorn. His visitor gazes at him with calculating eyes. ‘Explain it to me,’ she says.

  ‘Explain what?’ Thomas strikes a faintly defensive pose.

  ‘A little while ago you said that you thought Azalea might be dead.’ She is tapping on the floorboards with the rubber end of her stick.

  ‘No I didn’t. I said . . . I said she isn’t dead yet.’

  ‘It’s the “yet” that I don’t understand. And you said that her coincidences were . . . what? Proof of something?’

  He is wide-eyed now. ‘Evidence,’ he says, ‘not necessarily proof. But compelling, all the same.’

  ‘Evidence of what? Destiny?’

  ‘It’s a good word, “destiny”. Yes. I do like destiny.’ He ponders this, tugging uncomfortably on his earlobe. ‘Or “kismet”, as the Turks say, which implies . . . I don’t know . . .’ he swings his arm around as if in search of a thesaurus, ‘predetermination.’

  ‘Predetermination?’

  ‘Or something like it.’ He gives a grin that radiates apprehension. He isn’t comfortable with this line of questioning. His limbs are twitching as if assailed by invisible needles. He turns his face away. ‘What if I don’t have an explanation?’

  ‘My dear boy,’ she says, ‘you always have an explanation.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You do.’

  He relaxes just a little. ‘The Japanese have a good word: “hitsuzen”.’

  ‘ “Hitsuzen”?’ She puckers her lips on the unfamiliar term.

  ‘Hitsuzen is an event that happens according to some preordained plan or design. Something that was always supposed to happen.’

  ‘A bit like Insha’Allâh?’

  ‘A bit. “Deo volente” is what the early Christians would have said. If God wishes. Hitsuzen is more a property of a past event. Something happened because it was hitsuzen. Because it was supposed to happen. The Japanese also have the word “guzen”, which is something that occurs by chance. A guzen doesn’t belong to any greater scheme of things. It’s just random, if you like. In Japanese philosophy, everything that happens is either guzen or hitsuzen.’

  Clementine Bielszowska exhales. ‘You’re losing the thread,’ she says. ‘Can we stick to English?’

  ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I do.’ She offers him a benign smile.

  ‘You need to promise me something.’

  ‘Usually when someone says that it’s a good time not to promise anything at all,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t want you to psychoanalyse me,’ he says. ‘This isn’t that kind of problem.’

  ‘In that case,’ she says, ‘it is a very easy promise to make.’

  ‘I’m serious, Clementine.’

  ‘So am I, dear boy.’ She is observing him with professional relish.

  ‘There is nothing in this story that you can help me with,’ he says. ‘There are no neuroses to resolve. There are no fixes. In six days it will all be over, one way or another. Azalea will be dead. Or she won’t be.’

  A shadow interrupts the stream of sunshine from the narrow window. A pigeon has landed on the windowsill. It bobs its head expect
antly, peering through the glass.

  ‘He comes for crumbs,’ Thomas says. He takes a biscuit from a tin, crumbles it in his hand and opens the window. The pigeon retreats a little way. Thomas scatters the fragments on the sill, and in moments the bird is back.

  Thomas settles himself again in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should tell you the story of the seagull,’ he says.

  5

  January 1978–January 1984

  Azalea Lewis, the girl who was almost christened Azaliah Yves, owed her life to a seagull. The situation arose because Marion Yves was all set to become an unmarried mother. We should remember that in 1978, in villages like the one where Marion was born and raised, single motherhood wasn’t the lifestyle choice it is today. Perhaps, in a city, Marion might have registered as just another statistic, and on city streets she might have pushed a pram unnoticed. But this wasn’t Dublin or London. It wasn’t even Douglas. This was the village of Port St Menfre, a clutch of whitewashed stone cottages that jostled down a precipitous hillside towards a small shallow harbour on the coast of the Isle of Man. Here, when Marion took to the street with baby and pram, heads would turn and tongues would wag, and this would be the only way that it ever could be, for her business was the business of the village, just as their business was hers. In Port St Menfre, every face was familiar. If a girl walked out with a man, people would know it from the top of Haven Hill to the far corner of the bay before the couple could even make it home. When Gideon Robertson, the fisherman, moved out of his dockside rooms in 1976 and moved into 4 Briny Hill Walk, where Marion had previously lived alone, this was the main subject of conversation for almost a week. When the community could bear it no longer, the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender was dispatched to seek assurances from the couple that their living arrangements were purely commercial; a case perhaps of landlady and tenant rather than a matter of sinful cohabitation. The Reverend emerged from the cottage looking grim. Had excommunication been an option, then perhaps he would have exercised it.

  But this, let us remember, was some years after the decade of free love, and now, even in Port St Menfre, a woman like Marion Yves could hold up a metaphorical finger to the world and do her own thing without fear of the ducking stool, even in the face of the disapprobation of the whole community. This, it seems, is exactly what she did.

  Gideon Robertson moved out of the cottage on Briny Hill Walk in December 1977, around the time when Marion’s periods stopped. He might well have been Azalea’s father. But then again, that honour might have belonged to the young English barman Peter, who walked Marion home from work on dark evenings when Gideon was at sea. And equally possibly, Azalea’s father might have been John Hall, a washed-up military man, retired from soldiering, now the landlord of the Bell Inn where Marion and Peter both worked; a man with a loud laugh, an overbearing manner and rather too much of a taste for his own ale.

  When Marion Yves discovered she was pregnant, she was immediately aware of the dilemma she would have to resolve with respect to the paternity of the child. She checked back through the calendar and tried to work out possible dates, the who and when and where, but no clear answer emerged. She had never written these things down, so might it have been four weeks ago . . . or five . . . when she and Peter, or when she and John, or when she and Gideon . . . ? Was that the Sunday when the tide was early, or the Sunday when the tide was late? There were no answers to these questions. She walked down to the bakery with her basket over her arm, and then she took the little cobbled street to the Parish Church of St Menfre and, alone at the back of the nave, she bowed her head and prayed to God for guidance.

  Despite what we may have learned about Marion from the story of the christening service, she was a pious soul, the product of a fiercely pious community. Those who didn’t visit the Anglican Parish Church of St Menfre could always attend the Hope and Faith Baptist Church in Port Erin, or the Elim Pentecostal Church, or the Isle of Man Methodist Church, or the Christadelphia Ecclesia in Dalby Patrick, or the Roman Catholic Church of St Columba in Port St Mary. The options for religious worship were wide and varied; it only really mattered that some level of observance should be seen to be made. The Anglican Communion was Marion’s destination of choice. She had visited this church twice every Sunday for most of her life, and it was natural that she would turn to God here for advice on her predicament. She asked Him, as plainly as she could, to help her out. Her options seemed reasonably clear. Should she take the bus into Douglas and buy a ticket for the Isle of Man Steam Packet ferry service? This would secure a four-hour crossing to Liverpool over the unpredictable waters of the Irish Sea. Once in England, she could consult with the British Pregnancy Advisory Service; an agency whose principal, and enlightened, purpose was to secure for young women the services now permitted by the 1967 Abortion Act. She would need to establish an English residential address to qualify for an English abortion, but this should present little difficulty. It could all be done without anyone from Port St Menfre learning that a baby had even been conceived, let alone aborted.

  Or should she, perhaps, confront Gideon when he next came ashore and tell him that the baby was his? It would probably lead to a resumption of their relationship, which was not something Marion particularly sought. But it was an outcome that might best suit the unborn child. It would at least provide him or her with a father and a household income somewhere above that of a barmaid.

  She could try the same approach with Peter, the barman but he was too young and too impecunious to be a sound candidate for long-term fatherhood. He was from England, and planned to return soon to his native Cumbria. He wanted to join the navy. He longed to see the world. What life would that be for the wife left behind? Worse, even, than being married to a fisherman; at least a fisherman comes home with the tide. Nonetheless, she presented God with the option. John Hall was wealthy enough, and old enough to accept the responsibility, but his wife might have objections; and besides, he had a tendency to turn cantankerous when drunk. Marion considered excluding this option, but concluded that God was probably already aware of it, so she placed it squarely before Him along with the other choices. Should she raise the baby alone with no father in the picture at all? That was a real option too. Or should she demand that all three candidates submit to a blood test? Then the real biological father could be identified and perhaps persuaded to marry her and help her raise the baby.

  There were altogether too many choices for Marion to make a decision herself, so she delivered the alternatives to God from her pew in St Menfre’s church on a January day in 1978.

  Little is known about Saint Menfre, who gave her name to the parish church and to the village in which it stood. She is believed to have been not Manx, but a Cornish saint – or perhaps even a Welsh saint, or possibly even Irish, depending on how far back you chose to go. She was one of the twenty-four children (by three wives) of the fifth-century Irish saint St Brychan, who married into the Welsh kingdom of Breckonshire. Unfulfilled by his life in Wales, and the county that now bears his name, Brychan travelled south into Cornwall to spread the Christian gospel. How, or why, or when his daughter came to the Isle of Man is not known. Menfre’s claim to fame, if we can call it that, came when she threw her comb at the Devil. He had come upon her while she was combing her long red hair – Irish hair, no doubt. The Devil’s intentions, it seems, were dishonourable. The throwing of the comb was a riposte that would have commended itself to Marion. From what we know of Marion Yves, we might well imagine her doing the same thing. She too was a redhead, as was her daughter Azalea.

  So Marion prayed, but neither God nor St Menfre was forthcoming with advice. Leaving the church, she came upon the vicar arriving through the churchyard gate. He eyed Marion with a hint of suspicion as if, perhaps, she had been stealing the silver. The relationship between the two, pastor and parishioner, had not recovered from the visit that he had made to her cottage a year or so earlier, after Gideon moved in. Neither could the vicar bring himself to forget the frank, even i
ntimate, revelations that Marion had felt obliged to share on that occasion. Nonetheless, because he was a holy man in a holy profession, he summoned a warm smile and wished her a good day.

  ‘I wish it was a good day, Father,’ Marion said.

  ‘Is something troubling you, my child? Would you like us to pray together?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘It isn’t what I want that matters,’ said the vicar. ‘What do you want?’

  They sat together on a small bench that overlooked a knot of graves. Beyond the churchyard lay the slate rooftops of the fishermen’s cottages on Menfre Hill, and beyond these the blue sweep of the bay flecked with the foam curlers of the incoming tide; and out on the bay, lost in the haze, were the lobster boats, and beyond them, smacks fishing for mackerel, and further still, beyond sight, the trawlermen and the pilchard ships. There you might find Gideon Robertson in his yellow rubbers and his striders, hauling on ropes until the salt burned his skin, slopping fish across the decks, packing down ice with his big hands, buried behind his beard, toiling against the waves and the wind like some creature who had been born upon the sea. For such men no other life existed; their brief spell on land, sleeping and waiting for the tide, were mere interludes in a life spent at sea. Could this big, silent man ever be a real father to her child?

  Marion told the whole story to the Reverend Lender, sparing him none of the details. She pointed out to the sharp rocks beyond Haven Point, where the mist and the horizon were one, where Gideon might be with his fish and his buckets, his ropes and his nets. ‘What if he’s out there when my baby is born?’ she asked. ‘What if he doesn’t come back?’