The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  I consulted Lewis again, but we still couldn’t agree either on the nature of the problem or on the way forward. So I decided the only thing to do was to back off and wait. I didn’t like doing this. It felt too much like failure. Failure is one of the most difficult things for a healer to accept. I knew the difficulty, I recognised it, but still I found it hard to acknowledge my powerlessness and trust God to approach the problem in some other way. When I discussed the failure with Clare I admitted I felt angry with Stacy for refusing the help. It was good to admit this. But even though I tried not to be angry, I found I was steadily losing interest in him, and this made me feel so guilty that I worked harder than ever to conceal my emotional withdrawal.

  I was well aware that Stacy hero-worshipped me, but I’d always felt this was just a symptom of his continuing immaturity so it had never bothered me much. Yet now, aware of my changing feelings towards him, it began to bother me very much indeed. Guilt made me desperate not to behave in any way which he could have construed as a rejection, and because by this time I was so worried about the problem he presented, my failure to help him seemed all the more difficult to bear.

  Finally I decided I had to act. Merely to wait had become intolerable, and in the hope that another clerical opinion might be of use I confided in Gilbert Tucker, the vicar of St. Eadred’s Fleetside. I picked Gil because he fancied himself as an expert on the sexual problems of the clergy, but I should have realised that as a gay activist he would bring his own agenda to the discussion. He said at once that Stacy was obviously as gay as a pink daffodil and that he was only pretending to be straight in order to please me. I then realised I’d come full circle. The liberal-radical (Gil) and his conservative archenemy (Lewis) were united in seeing homosexuality as a black-and-white issue, while I, caught between these two extremists, had wound up being even more bemused than I was before.

  And now, to exacerbate my bemusement, the information had been presented to me by Lewis that last Monday night he and Stacy had been locked in a confidential discussion. What was going on? Stacy would normally come to me if he had a problem—unless, of course, I was the problem. Even so it was odd that he should confide in Lewis, whom he usually found intimidating. Could Stacy have finally sensed my ambivalent feelings towards him and confided in Lewis because he was so upset? Maybe. And if he was upset he might have exaggerated his hero-worship of me with the result that Lewis would have thought … Yes, I could see Lewis jumping to all the wrong conclusions, just as I could see Stacy blurting out a lot of passionate Irish nonsense about not wanting to let me down because he adored me so much. Lewis, blinkered as ever on the subject of homosexuality, would immediately think to himself: Stacy adores Nicholas; Nicholas is male; therefore Stacy is without doubt a homosexual. QED.

  I sighed heavily, and suddenly realised that I was staring at the perfect uncooked steak-and-kidney pie. During my prolonged meditation on Stacy Alice had finished preparing her masterpiece and was turning aside to light the oven.

  “Alice,” I said, tucking James’s tail closer to his back legs so that his body formed a perfect curve, “how do you think Stacy’s getting on with Tara?”

  “Oh, I think he quite likes her,” said Alice, beginning to assemble potatoes for peeling, “but of course she could never live up to his sister Aisling.”

  I sensed that Alice had no doubt of Stacy’s heterosexuality. But on the other hand Alice knew little about men and was hardly the world’s expert on complex sexual problems.

  “So you don’t think the friendship will come to anything?”

  “No, and that’s such a shame because Tara thinks he’s super! She’s so nice—I’d love things to work out for her.”

  There was nothing bitchy about Alice. I sensed no trace of jealousy, yet I was sure no man had ever taken her out, not even a clumsy redhead who was sexually retarded. Stacy had wanted to ask her for a date and I had forbidden it on the grounds that when people live together in community it’s best to avoid “particular friendships,” but I’d felt guilty afterwards that I’d deprived her of some well-deserved happiness.

  “I read once,” I remarked vaguely, “that many women don’t find redheads attractive.”

  “I believe Mills and Boon advise authors to make their heroes either blond or dark,” agreed Alice, “although the occasional gorgeous redhead has been known to slip past the censors.”

  “Could Stacy be rated gorgeous?”

  “No,” said Alice firmly, assuaging my guilt that I’d deprived her of a boyfriend. “He’s very nice-natured but he’s not grown up enough to qualify as a Mills and Boon hero.”

  It occurred to me that despite her inexperience Alice’s intuition enabled her to make some accurate observations. I made a mental note not to be so condescending in future about her lack of experience.

  “Do you read Mills and Boon novels, Alice?”

  “Not now, no. I did when I was younger but these days I read great big novels about amazing girls who start with nothing and end up with everything—or who start with everything and end up with nothing. Everyone spends lots of time jet-setting and shopping and having sex.”

  “I don’t think I could take all the shopping.”

  “Francie’s keen to take all the sex! She was very disapproving when she visited me the other day in the hell-hole and saw the book I was reading, but I noticed when I picked it up again later that it was open not at the end of the chapter but at one of the purple passages. She’d obviously been taking a peep when I was making the coffee.”

  I saw my chance and took it. “Have you heard from Francie this week, Alice?”

  “I rang her yesterday to ask if I could do any shopping for her, but she only wanted Weight Watchers baked beans and she said they could wait. I offered to go over with some low-cal raspberry ripple ice cream, but she said no, she was too depressed to see anyone. Then she said: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not suicidal, I’d never give Harry the satisfaction of dying before he did!’ She sounded kind of nutty.”

  “Hm.” I paused to stroke the cat before asking idly: “What do you think her basic problem is?”

  “She’s waking up to the fact that her dreams can never come true,” said Alice promptly. “She’d like to be twenty-nine again and have a wasp-waist and live in Monaco with a sugar-daddy husband and a blisteringly sexy Italian admirer, but instead she’s forty-five and living in Islington and battling with her weight and there’s not even the ghost of an admirer on the horizon.”

  “And not even a goldfish to play with in the bedroom,” I said smiling at her.

  Alice turned pink. “Don’t tell me you read those sort of novels!”

  “I read about them. So you think Francie’s life’s pretty drab at the moment?”

  “I’m afraid I do, especially as her husband’s away so much and her children are at boarding school for two-thirds of the year. Poor Francie!” said Alice sincerely, plopping a peeled potato in the saucepan.

  I thought how enraged Francie would have been if she’d overheard this response. “Poor Alice!” she had said to me more than once in the past. “Such a nice girl, but such problems! It really is too sad …”

  “You like Francie, don’t you, Alice?”

  “Yes, I’ll never forget how kind she was to me after Aunt died. But now that I know her better … Well, it seems to me that Francie isn’t quite the simple, friendly soul that everyone thinks she is, and to be honest I wasn’t surprised yesterday when I phoned and found her in a nutty state. She was obviously heading round the bend when she called here on Monday evening.”

  I was transfixed. “Monday evening?”

  “Oh, didn’t Lewis tell you? It was late—I was watching the ITV news and they’d just got to the weather. I don’t know what she said to Lewis and I didn’t like to ask him about it afterwards, but at one point he buzzed me and asked me to come up to the kitchen—he said Francie wanted a woman to be present, but I could see at once she didn’t and almost as soon as I walked in Lewis told me
I could go. The whole scene was very peculiar—she was only wearing a nightdress under her coat and she had no shoes on, only slippers. The coat was unbuttoned so I could see the nightdress clearly—it was cut very low and her bosom was practically falling out because she was so agitated.”

  There was a pause while I put two and two together and made the most unpalatable four.

  “Of course,” said Alice, carefully examining a potato for blemishes, “Francie didn’t know you were away from home that night. And I don’t somehow think it was Lewis she wanted to see.”

  I was still staring at her, still visualising this chilling scene, when Lewis himself stormed into the kitchen and demanded to know where Stacy was.

  12

  At this stage in grief, other symptoms, beside the lack of concentration that your friend has noticed, may include an inability to order [the] mind.

  GARETH TUCKWELL AND DAVID FLAGG

  A Question of Healing

  I

  Apparently Stacy should have arrived at the church some time ago to enable Lewis to return home and rest. Lewis hated being convalescent but knew he had to have regular rests to aid his recovery. Obliged to stay on duty for longer than he had anticipated he was both furious and exhausted.

  Rosalind sometimes behaved as if she thought Lewis’s job was a mere sinecure, invented by me in order to make him feel useful in his old age, but his work was vital to my ministry and how I managed before he arrived on my doorstep in 1983 I have no idea. He was the anchorman at the church, in charge of the services and the volunteers on duty there. He did do some counselling and spiritual direction at the Centre but his prime task was to keep the church ticking over briskly. In a healing ministry it’s essential to have a prayer-group which meets regularly to support the work, and although I took a special interest in the members it was Lewis who organised and directed them. In short, his work, supporting and underpinning my own, enabled me to focus more steadily on the healing. Without him I would have been pulled in many directions, my energies dissipated, my concentration impaired, and so I had a strong interest in ensuring that he didn’t wind up exhausted. I felt very annoyed with Stacy for not showing up on time.

  “There should always be a priest on duty at the church when people start leaving their offices!” Lewis was shouting. “Ye gods, when I get my hands on that red-headed nitwit I’ll scrag him! Where the deuce is he anyway? If he’s bowled off to that video shop again I’ll smash his television screen! That boy’s terminally addicted to TV and pop music, but that’s typical of the younger generation, isn’t it? Forever walling themselves off from reality with filthy noises and filthy pictures—”

  The phone rang, mercifully ending this tirade. Lewis reached sideways, grabbed the receiver before I could get to it and to my consternation snarled: “Rectory!” into the mouthpiece. This was hardly the way to greet a caller who might be in desperate straits, but a moment later my anxiety was relieved. Lewis’s whole manner changed. He straightened his back. His eyes glowed. He beamed from ear to ear.

  “Oh hullo, Venetia!” he said mellifluously. “No, no, I wasn’t just about to hit someone! Wait a minute—I’ll take this call in my room.” Laying the receiver on the dresser he turned to us and announced unnecessarily: “It’s Venetia. I’m taking the call in the bedsit.” He did his best to appear nonchalant but spoilt the effect by dropping one of his crutches as he tried to leave the room at top speed.

  The door finally banged. Alice and I looked at each other, but since all comment would have been superfluous Alice resumed her potato-peeling and I replaced the receiver.

  Resuming my seat at the table I then spent a moment brooding on Lewis’s fantasy that he was in love with Venetia. For some time I had lived in dread that he would mess up her recovery, and the more it seemed likely that she would be one of the Healing Centre’s successes the more worried I became about their potentially disastrous relationship.

  Venetia had made a considerable amount of progress in a relatively short time and was now preparing to start a new life in Cambridge. She would still need therapy there, but Robin was fixing that up for her with a distinguished friend of his. Meanwhile Lewis was supposed to have reconciled himself to the fact that she would soon be living sixty miles away and, for the time being, had no romantic plans of any description. It was true that I’d encouraged him to retain the hope that one day he might see her again—Lewis had needed a little hope at that stage—but I’d been working on the assumption that Venetia would disappear from his life for at least three months, an interval which would allow him to come to his senses and recognise that he had been infatuated. This unexpected phone call less than a week after their parting could therefore hardly be considered good news.

  The fact was that Lewis had too many unresolved problems with women to make remarriage a viable option. After his parting from Venetia he had achieved a valuable insight into a corner of his mind which was normally hidden from him, but this didn’t convince me he was in consequence destined to marry her and live happily ever after. It seemed to me clear enough that Venetia had been put across his path not to provide grand passion and/or matrimony, but to enlighten him. If he could now develop and build on that shaft of enlightenment he had received he might yet be able to beat his hang-ups, but meanwhile he was as muddled about women as ever and wallowing around in a dream which bore no relation to reality.

  Lewis’s dilemma was that he was attracted to sexual adventuresses but needed a very placid, conventional domestic existence in order to function properly. Volatile and eccentric, gifted but temperamental, he needed normality and predictability just as much as I did. The difference between us was that Lewis’s mother had chosen to abandon him when he was in his mid-teens and my mother hadn’t chosen to abandon me. In addition Lewis had been further damaged by the fact that his mother had wound up as a high-class tart, only making herself available to men who were prepared to lavish money on her. Lewis had sometimes behaved as if the only way he could guarantee himself female attention was to buy it. Secretly fearful of rejection, he found this fake-intimacy gained by the payment of money left him firmly in control and reduced the woman to a disposable facility. In this way he avoided emotional involvement, took his revenge unconsciously on the mother who had reneged on her emotional involvement with him and deluded himself that he didn’t want a decent woman because he was only capable of being sexually satisfied by tarts.

  Unhappy ending.

  To be fair to Lewis he was fully aware that this was hardly an ideal situation, and he remained determined to keep struggling against his hang-ups, but like many people with psychological blocks he was crucially blind about the basic problem, and in his case the basic problem was very simple: he yearned for love and security yet deep down he felt so unworthy of them, thanks to his mother’s rejection, that he was never able to recognise and accept them whenever they were on offer. For as long as I had known him, Lewis had never had any difficulty in attracting women, some of whom had had a great deal to offer, but always the relationships foundered because he felt inadequate. “She wouldn’t love me if she knew me better,” he had often said, and if a woman ever did try to know him better he made sure this prophecy was self-fulfilling by behaving badly, putting her love to the test to convince himself he was fundamentally unlovable. It was better, he obviously thought subconsciously, to take the initiative in ending a relationship than to put himself in a position where he could be rejected all over again.

  Once, long ago when I was much younger, I’d made the mistake of spelling all this out to him, but he’d just said: “You’re off your rocker. An inferiority complex with women? Me? That’s the one problem I’ve never had—quite the contrary!”

  As the poet wrote: “One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink.”

  I sighed deeply, and as Christina Rossetti’s line echoed again in my mind, I wondered what Lewis was now saying to Venetia, who also had a poor self-image in matters of the heart. With no troubl
e at all I could imagine them testing each other out by jangling their hang-ups at every opportunity. The romance would be shredded in no time. So would Venetia. And Lewis would walk off, more battered and bruised than ever but still managing to say: “It was lucky she found out how impossible I am before it was too late.”

  “Nicholas,” said Alice, mercifully interrupting this depressing vision, “while Lewis is busy with Venetia should I perhaps buzz Stacy to warn him he’s in trouble?”

  “Good thinking. But I’ll do it.” It was a relief to set aside my gloomy thoughts and move to the intercom, but there was no response when I buzzed the curate’s flat. “That’s odd,” I said. “Maybe he’s slipped out again.”

  “No, we’d have heard him, he always makes so much noise. Try your flat. Maybe Rosalind’s taken him there for a cup of tea.”

  I was just about to follow her advice when Stacy at last responded to the intercom. He sounded subdued, almost groggy. I wondered if I’d woken him from a nap, but this seemed unlikely. Stacy always had a surfeit of energy.

  “Are you all right?” I said sharply.

  “Um.”

  “Good, but you appear to be suffering from amnesia. Get over to the church right away and make sure you offer Lewis a grovelling apology later.” Leaving him gasping with dismay I finally tore myself away from Alice’s company and returned to my study where I tried to summon the will to organise my retreat. I got as far as picking up the receiver of my private line to call the headquarters of the Fordite monks, but then apathy overcame me and I couldn’t summon the energy to punch the numbers.