The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  I shout: “I’m not talking about my sex-life to any damned woman!” but as soon as the words are out of my mouth I know I’m up to my neck in hang-ups and I’m so furious that I bawl out: “Fucking hell!” and bucket back to my room at top speed. Disgusting! What am I going to do with myself? I’m in despair.

  Nicholas arrives. He puts his arm around me for a second, then sits down at my side and waits. This is where Nicholas is so gifted. He can communicate an immense amount just by being there—concern, support, empathy, fellowship, fraternal solidarity—everything. I’m so lucky to have Nicholas in my life. I don’t care any more about not having a son. I probably wouldn’t have got on with a son anyway, and he couldn’t possibly have done more for me than Nicholas has. Nicholas stands by me when I’m in a mess, looks after me when I’m lost, forgives me whenever I’ve been thoroughly stupid. I’m luckier than any grumpy old codger has a right to be.

  “It’s my hip,” I say at last. “It’s bad today.”

  He doesn’t tell me to get it replaced. He just nods and waits.

  “Okay,” I say, “it’s not my hip. I’m still very bothered by my new outbreak of anti-women fever, particularly as I can’t identify the incident that triggered it. It definitely wasn’t Cynthia’s engagement, and no matter what Simon may think, it’s got nothing to do with Alice either—although I do admit I’m still worried about importing her to the Rectory—”

  “Okay, stop right there and let’s just take another look at this particular anxiety of yours. If Simon’s facile psychological explanation is wrong, what exactly is it about Alice that makes you so anxious?”

  Encouraged by this critical comment on Simon’s diagnosis I say at once: “I’m sure she’ll quickly become much too bound up with you—and then all the pent-up emotion emanating from her will swirl around on the psychic level and infect the atmosphere. Alice is a splendid young woman, just as admirable as you say she is, but if her feelings for you aren’t dead neutral the Devil could use her as a Trojan horse to slither into St. Benet’s and destroy your ministry.”

  “That’s true.” Nicholas is keen to signal that he’s taking my objection very seriously now. He doesn’t bat an eyelid at my old-fashioned religious language which I always feel expresses reality so much more effectively than that namby-pamby, mealy-mouthed psycho-babble which is so popular with liberal churchmen nowadays. He pauses for a moment to let me absorb how seriously he’s behaving. Then he says very reasonably: “But do you think I hadn’t thought of that? Look, if I find she can’t handle the situation I’ll ease her into another job—for her own good as well as ours. And we’ll know soon enough if things don’t work out.”

  I start to feel better. In fact I feel so much better that I’m even able to say: “But if Alice has nothing to do with my latest outbreak of anti-women fever, what is it that’s triggered the relapse?”

  “Did Simon voice any other theories?”

  “No, he’s hopeless about sex, clueless, pathetic—no use at all.”

  “But presumably you’ve talked to him about sex before.”

  “Yes, but during the two years he’s been my spiritual director I’ve been on an even keel so I’ve never had to put him to the test.”

  “In that case, are you sure you’re right that he’s inadequate? It seems odd that an experienced spiritual director should be useless in such a very vital area—okay, I know he’s eighty and a bachelor, but—”

  “Believe me, Nicholas—”

  “—he’s useless. Right. I get the message.” Nicholas ponders on this. I sense he wants to take a risk and try to help me unravel myself an inch or two, but he’s on tricky ground because we both know we’re too close to counsel each other; Nicholas is well aware that he mustn’t usurp the role played by my spiritual director, but he’s still very tempted now to try a filial—or rather, fraternal—probe into my soul. Nicholas always thinks of me as a brother, not as a father. I like that. It keeps me in my place and checks any urge I may have to behave like a sentimental old man who’s never fathered a son. Great-Uncle Cuthbert got sentimental about me in the end, and it didn’t do. All those lectures about how I should follow in his footsteps and be a monk! No wonder I rushed out and married the first girl I groped in an air-raid shelter.

  “Maybe we ought to approach this mystery from a completely different angle,” says Nicholas cautiously at last. “When were you last conscious of saying to yourself: ‘I refuse to get my hip replaced’?”

  “You’re off your rocker!” I snarl. But I know he’s not. Feebly I bluster: “I’m not talking about my damned hip!”

  “Okay. But has Simon ever asked you about it?”

  “What’s there to ask?” I say, trying to calm down and present a nonchalant response. “The hip’s a nuisance, but I’m not having it replaced. Hospitals are where you pick up an infection and come out in a box.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Oh, sod off!” I say—very ungratefully, but I’m rattled. This is because my reason for keeping the hip is so pathetic for a Christian priest, so devoid of trust in God, that I’m thoroughly ashamed of it. “It’s no one’s business but mine!”

  “Okay,” says Nicholas equably again, “but I don’t like to see you in pain and I don’t like to see you being distracted from your work by a curable medical condition, and I’ve got a hunch—”

  “I bet. You’re a great one for hunches, some of them nutty as a fruitcake—”

  “—and some of them spot on target! Can’t you even bring yourself to tell me when you last said to yourself: ‘I refuse to replace my hip’?”

  “I’ve no memory of saying that to myself recently.”

  “Not even five—or six—weeks ago?”

  I stare at him. He gazes back blandly, disclosing nothing.

  “Well, maybe I said it to myself after Cynthia’s lunch-party,” I say crossly, “but so what? That doesn’t connect up with my malaise. We’ve already established I don’t want to bed Cynthia.”

  “I must be on the wrong track then, mustn’t I?” says Nicholas vaguely, and leaving me feeling more baffled than ever he slips out of my room into the hall.

  COMMENT: Nicholas certainly gave my soul a tweak there. I know very well that I have a religious duty to be as fit as I can in order to serve God to the best of my ability; I know very well that I should have that blank-blank hip replaced. Great-Uncle Cuthbert couldn’t have his arthritic hip replaced, poor old bugger, but I’m not living at his end of the twentieth century and I don’t have to be saddled with this problem. Nor do I have to be saddled with the reputation for cantankerousness which I’ve acquired as the pain has worsened. In fact if I had the hip replaced I might even become saintly, radiating sweetness and light! What an unnerving thought—but not half so unnerving as imagining what I might get up to if I were fully mobile, unfettered by pain and bounding around like a man ten years my junior.

  The unvarnished truth, which I’ve never been able to commit to paper until this moment, is that I’m using my current physical disability as a chastity belt. Instead of lining myself up with God, as a priest should, to the point where I can rely on his grace to keep me in order, happy and productive, I’m hiding behind my arthritis in a blue funk—as Nicholas has obviously realised. And do I seriously think that a successful celibate life has anything to do with repressing my problems in this way and winding up physically disabled, mentally ill-at-ease and spiritually up the creek? No. The successful celibate life isn’t about repression but about sublimation, which is a different kettle of fish altogether. Repression means refusing to think of sex, locking up one’s sex-drive and always feeling exhausted—not to mention neurotic—because it takes such an enormous amount of mental energy to convince yourself nobody has any genitals. Sublimation means facing up to sex, standing eyeball to eyeball with one’s sex-drive and, by the grace of God, figuring out how to expend all that energy creatively and productively in some way outside the bedroom.

&nb
sp; I know all this, but as I wrestle with the unvarnished truth here it helps to set down the basics in black and white. Let me add, to cheer myself up, that in the past I’ve had many successful years as a celibate, lined up fruitfully with God and enabled to accomplish effectively the work I was called to do. I certainly didn’t feel tormented by sex then—or even needled by it. I was pro-sex, benign but not tempted. Yet now I see so clearly that this ideal equilibrium has ebbed away and my sublimation is teetering into repression. Correction: has already teetered. Once the relationship with God drifts off course—once the integration of the personality is lost—then sex becomes a threat and women become the enemy.

  All very unedifying. To be fair to Simon, I must state that he has tried to get me to talk about the hip and my unacceptable reason for keeping it. But I just shut him up. Why can’t I ever find a spiritual director who’ll wipe the floor with me as Great-Uncle Cuthbert did? Because nowadays spiritual directors aren’t supposed to wipe floors with anyone is the answer, but what about a monster like me who goes on being monstrous until someone has the balls to use him as a floor-cloth?

  At least Nicholas has just had the balls to give me a metaphorical cuff. Quite right too! I needed a smart biff to make me face up to what’s wrong, but even though I’ve now confronted the fact that my celibate life is not merely ruffled but pathetically inadequate, I still have no idea what triggered this bout of anti-women fever.

  Monday, 22nd August, 1988: A bombshell’s exploded, rocking me to the foundations. I get a phone call from the police to ask if I’m the husband of Mrs. Diana Hall. I say ex-husband, but they don’t care about the “ex.” It turns out that Diana’s had a heart attack in the street (outside Harrods—typical) and has been rushed to hospital. My name and number were in the front of her diary in the space allocated to information about the next-of-kin requiring notification in the event of an accident.

  How sad that she had no close friends left who could tolerate her and no relations anxious to give her the time of day. How sad that there was no one else to name in that diary but me, the husband she despised and couldn’t wait to be rid of. Of course she could have put down Rachel’s name, but apparently she did have the decency to spare her only child from being rung up by the police if something went wrong. Or did she? It’s hard to imagine Diana being that unselfish, especially as she and Rachel haven’t got on for years.

  On second thoughts I can see it’s far more likely that Diana named me because she knew that as a priest I’d always pick up the pieces—and because she fancied giving me the hell of a shock, the silly bitch. No, no, I mustn’t say that, mustn’t write it! Poor Diana. How far I contributed to her rotten, wasted life I don’t like to think. When someone goes down the drain, those closest to them should always take a good hard look at the past to identify their part in the fiasco. Few people do, of course. Too painful. But everyone should try.

  I arrive at the hospital and find she’s dead. So I don’t get the chance to say “Sorry” for the final time. Just as well. She’d only have spat in my face. Funny how I always took it for granted she’d die of cirrhosis, and yet here she is, pegging out after a heart attack.

  I try to say a prayer as I stand by the bed, but nothing happens. Suppose I’m in shock. All I can think of is that amazing kiss in the air-raid shelter and then making love to her later after the all-clear on the kitchen floor of her parents’ empty house in Upper Grosvenor Street. Those wild, woolly days of the war … That was after Great-Uncle Cuthbert’s death in 1940, of course, and before I became a priest. When I think what I used to get up to before I became ordained …

  Easier to think of that than to think of my marriage. How Diana hated me becoming a priest! How she hated the psychic dimension to my personality too, never understanding how becoming a priest enabled me to harness this dangerous gift at last by using it to serve God by serving others. She never even understood what Christianity was all about. All my fault, I know that now. I completely failed to communicate to her the life-saving, life-enhancing nature of my spiritual beliefs. She just wanted me to go on being the raffish young soldier she’d met in the air-raid shelter. She couldn’t grasp that if I’d gone on being raffish my self-destructive tendencies and that potentially lethal psychic gift would have done for me in no time. Great-Uncle Cuthbert was around to save me when I was fifteen but he wasn’t around to save me later, when the war was over. God did that by calling me to the priesthood and giving me a framework and purpose which allowed me not just to survive but to flourish.

  Yet I could never talk properly about this great miracle to Diana. I could never talk properly to her about anything. I failed her as a husband and I failed her as a priest. I should never have married her. After a while she bored me in bed anyway. A disaster. Whenever I remember the humiliating failures of my marriage I want to bang my head against the wall in despair.

  Well, I get out of the hospital, drag myself home (hip giving me hell) and try to find Nicholas, but he’s away on business, I’d forgotten, and he won’t be back till tomorrow evening. Some bishop wants him to sort out a problem that the local diocesan exorcist has failed to solve. We seem to be getting a lot of these special requests at the moment to eradicate unsavoury phenomena. Nicholas is a consultant to several dioceses now and says the paranormal’s currently a growth area.

  No one’s at the Rectory. It’s six o’clock, too late to go back to work. I’m just about to mix myself the stiffest of whiskies when Stacy clatters into the kitchen with the Communion wine salesman and announces that they’re going to have a cup of tea. I growl: “Not today,” and the salesman beats a hasty retreat. Stacy demands annoyed: “What’s your problem now, for goodness’ sake?” and I want to biff him. Insolent young puppy! (I’m very worried about Stacy but I’m not putting my reasons down on paper at the moment.) I say: “My wife’s died.” He’s shocked, stammers apologies. He’s a good boy really, but I don’t think he’s right for the ministry of healing and I’m even beginning to wonder if he should have been ordained. “Get me a whisky,” I order, “and make it a double.” He does, very efficiently. Maybe he should have been a barman.

  After two double-whiskies I grit my teeth, go to my room and phone Rachel, far away in the north. She picks up the receiver. I break the news. I’m a priest, I’m trained to do this sort of thing, I work in the ministry of healing—I should be able to do this difficult but not unusual task standing on my head with my eyes shut. So what happens? I make a complete and utter balls-up. Rachel breaks down. Sobs ensue followed by wails of guilt-induced grief about Darling Mummy (whom she’s shunned for some time) and what a tragedy it all was and how everything was my fault.

  I long for another double-whisky and wait for her to hang up but she doesn’t. Instead my son-in-law intervenes in his usual masterful way by grabbing the phone and saying: “Thank you, Lewis, for exercising your usual talent for upsetting my wife,” and the receiver is slammed down before I can reply.

  Five minutes later when I’m on my next double-whisky he calls back. He’s a very able priest, he’s a very successful suffragan bishop and now and then he even manages to be a good Christian. “I apologize for being too abrupt earlier,” he says glibly. He’s always very smooth. Silver-tongued Charley. Very gifted. “I was worried by Rachel’s distress. That’s certainly sad news about Diana—it must have been a shock for you, and I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

  Just stay away, Charley. Just resist that perpetual temptation to play Mr. Bossy-Boots. Just muzzle the urge to muscle in on this particular scene.

  Aloud I say: “Look after Rachel.”

  “Naturally.” He’s at once ice-cool. I know he blames me for all Rachel’s problems. “That’s my job.” Then my worst fears are realised as he switches on the pastoral power again and radiates Evangelical efficiency. “Okay, leave everything to me—I’ll rejig my schedule and drive south tomorrow to organise the funeral. I’m sure you need to rest your hip.”

  Bastard! Usurping m
y role, treating me as if I were defrocked, incompetent riff-raff, harping on my hip and implying I’m over the hill … I’d like to slug him on the jaw.

  I’m so upset that I hang up on him and try to phone Nicholas, but the Bishop’s wife says she has no idea where he is.

  I sit in my room, write my journal and get silently, steadily drunk.

  COMMENT: Disgraceful! Quite apart from the fact that no priest should drink himself silly, I was actually conforming to Charley’s opinion of me as a useless clerical has-been—and that makes me all the more furious about my abysmal lack of self-discipline.

  Almighty God, please forgive me for all my terrible shortcomings as a husband and father and all the past pain I’ve caused my wife and daughter. Forgive me for not being more grateful that Rachel should have such a loyal and devoted husband. Forgive me for getting drunk and being such a stupid old fool. Please grant me the grace to do better in future. I ask all these things in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen.

  Tuesday, 23rd August, 1988: I dream of Churchill making the V-sign. Then I dream I’m drawing a big V—for Victory, I suppose—in the sand on a deserted beach. Odd. I presume that Diana’s death has triggered memories of our war-time romance. I wake up feeling like the inside of a tramp’s boot. Triple-hell.

  I get Stacy to celebrate the eight o’clock mass. He does it in the manner of Laurence Olivier playing Shakespearean drama—an attractive performance but frequently over the top. I know I should have a quiet word with him afterwards but I don’t trust myself to do it properly.

  During the morning I see a few of my people but I’m not much good. It’s a relief when I arrive in church for the lunch-time Eucharist—although my relief ebbs when some drunk turns up and bawls out a pervert’s blasphemy involving the Blessed Virgin Mary. Two of the Befrienders close in and steer him down to the crypt for soup and sandwiches. When I see him afterwards I find out that he’s fallen through the welfare net which our government, worshipping the principle of “every man for himself and the Devil take the hindermost,” has been busy destroying. I pass him on to Daisy and leave her ringing the Social Services to see what can be done.