The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  Knowing I was within seconds of going under I could think only of self-preservation. I had to escape. And I had to escape immediately. No more conversation. No more delay. Even another second in her company could prove disastrous.

  Sprinting from the Abbey I jumped aboard a bus which was moving forward slowly after pausing at the traffic lights on Victoria Street, and the last thing I saw as I looked back was Francie gazing after me with an adoration undiminished by my desertion.

  Her mad eyes even seemed to be blazing in triumph.

  II

  I left the bus minutes later at Victoria, plunged across the station’s forecourt and was nearly run over by a taxi. That proved the final shock. I vomited into the gutter, and immediately every passerby shunned me as if I had the plague. No Samaritans in that particular crowd. Inside the station I lurched into a phone-booth.

  Lewis answered my call on the third ring. “Rectory.”

  “It’s me,” I said. “I’m ploughed under.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Victoria.”

  “I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “No, I’m still capable of grabbing a cab but I don’t want to go to the Rectory, I don’t want to see Stacy. Meet me at the Barbican—that window next to the Balcony Cafe.”

  “I’ll be there.” He hung up.

  Staggering outside I joined the rush-hour queue waiting for taxis.

  III

  The Arts Centre at the Barbican was crowded when I arrived at six-thirty. Visitors were having supper before the plays and the concert began. The multi-storeyed building, confusing as ever with its yawning chasms and acres of staircases, swallowed me the instant I was disgorged from the taxi. Unable to endure either the wait for a lift or the thought of being incarcerated in a small steel box, I fought my way up the stairs to the Balcony Cafe, which faced St. Giles Church and the artificial lake. The wall of glass nearest the cafe’s entrance usually had seating in front of it but when I arrived I found no sofa and no sign of Lewis. I was just wondering if, in my distraught state, I had named one of the other restaurants, when he called my name. He was occupying one of the tables which flanked the walkway spanning level six. Beyond the table was a drop to the floor below but fortunately I was too wiped out by that time to add vertigo to my list of discomforts.

  I had also been too wiped out to remember that Lewis was battling with a new hip. Immediately I saw the crutches I felt guilty that I had dragged him out of the Rectory, where he should have been spending a quiet evening. Lewis had been travelling far too much lately, attending that lecture at Sion College last Monday and bucketing around the Anglo-Catholic strongholds the day before. Even though he had done his travelling in taxis I was sure all this activity was hardly compatible with his surgeon’s idea of a sensible convalescence. Supposing the new hip was a failure? By hauling him out to the Barbican that night I’d be at least partly responsible.

  “You silly old sod, you should be at home! Why didn’t you refuse point-blank to meet me here?”

  “Cut the crap and just tell me what the hell’s going on. You look like death.”

  I slumped down opposite him. Then I said: “I know what’s happened to Stacy. I know why he’s on the edge of breakdown and I understand now why he can’t confide in me. He’s been to bed with Rosalind.”

  Lewis looked me straight in the eyes, paused as if silently counting to ten and finally said in his most neutral voice: “I see. Well, that’s certainly an interesting theory.”

  “It’s no theory.”

  “You’ve got proof?”

  “No, but it all makes sense—Rosalind—Francie—Stacy—everything. I’ll bet Francie put Rosalind up to it and Rosalind was too desperate and damaged to resist. Oh, and Francie’s psychotic. No question about that. She’s not possessed, but there’s a heavy demonic infestation and the Devil’s using the psychosis to infiltrate—”

  “Hold it. You need some sweet tea. You’re in shock.”

  “No, I’m all right. Listen, Lewis—”

  “Well, I’m not all right and I need some sweet tea, and if it wasn’t for these blank-blank crutches I’d play the waiter and bring us what we both need, but—”

  “Okay, I’ll get it.” After dragging him out of the Rectory the least I could do was humour the old boy.

  “On second thoughts,” said Lewis as I scrambled to my feet, “I’d rather have a brandy.” Now that the battle was won and I had agreed to take the anti-shock medicine, he could afford to change his mind and indulge himself.

  I hurried down the walkway to the catering outpost at the far end and bought the drinks. It was calming to go on such a mundane errand and I began to feel less severed from normality, but my heart was still banging away like a discombobulated metronome. I wondered vaguely if I was a candidate for a heart attack but thought not. Too little cholesterol, too few excess pounds, no cigarettes. On the other hand, if stress was the primary factor in inducing a coronary, I was ripe for a coffin.

  Back at the table again I collapsed into my chair and drank. I hate sweet tea but one shouldn’t expect to like medicine. Meanwhile the scene around me was beginning to look slightly different, resembling not a layered tower in hell after all but a futuristic railway station built by mistake in an area where there were no trains.

  “I’m better,” I said after tipping the last of the tea down my throat.

  Lewis knocked back the rest of his brandy. “Then let’s start at the beginning. How did you get this idea that Rosalind’s seduced Stacy?”

  “I saw Francie. She said—”

  “You saw Francie?” Lewis shouted, instantly losing his composure.

  “I know, I know—I’ve really screwed up—the disaster’s just escalating and escalating—”

  “Tell me that you didn’t go to Francie’s house. Nicholas, please, please tell me that you didn’t meet that woman on your own with no witnesses—”

  “I didn’t meet her on my own with no witnesses. I didn’t go to her house. I’m wrecked but I’m not certifiably insane. Not yet.”

  Lewis wiped the sweat from his forehead. “All right,” he said, reaching at last for his cigarettes. “I’m listening. Go on.”

  I told him everything.

  IV

  “The most likely explanation,” said Lewis at last, “is that this is Francie’s fantasy, drummed up at the end of the conversation to maintain your interest when you showed signs of wanting to leave. Remember you’ve no proof whatsoever that what she said was true.”

  “But it does explain Stacy’s recent behaviour.”

  “There’s another explanation for that and it doesn’t have anything to do with Rosalind.”

  “Yes, but once you admit he’s not a homosexual, the other explanation’s plainly wrong—”

  “Wait a moment, Nicholas, I haven’t finished outlining the most likely explanation. I want to show you how Francie could have whipped up this fantasy.”

  I forced myself to be patient. “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Because I stopped her doing any befriending she had more time to see what was going on at the Centre this morning. There was obviously something very wrong with Stacy, and she was present when I told him to go home and rest. By this time the news was also circulating on the grapevine that Rosalind had changed her plan to stay at the Rectory until the school holidays and had departed for Butterfold. Francie had access to both these unconnected facts, and during her conversation with you this evening she could have yoked them together in fantastic style to grab your attention. Obsessed people do this all the time—they fasten on a stray piece of information, infuse it with a meaning which serves their neurotic needs and then inflate the distorted truth into a dramatic lie.”

  I made a big effort to match his rational manner. “Okay,” I said, “okay, I concede it’s a plausible theory, but it doesn’t quite pan out. You forget that Francie herself didn’t know whether or not this disaster had happened. All she knew was that it was set to happen, but sur
ely if she’d been fantasising she would have claimed the event had definitely taken place? I think her uncertainty gives the story the ring of truth.”

  “That’s a valid point.” Lewis paused to rearrange his thoughts. “All right, I still don’t believe Francie’s statement, but let’s for a moment assume this event was set to happen. How do we know it’s already happened?”

  “Stacy’s behaviour.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Look, this is the sequence of events. Rosalind and Francie met for lunch yesterday. Francie put her up to this scheme in order to hammer home to me that the marriage was finished. Rosalind returned to the Rectory. A little later on I was looking for Rosalind and couldn’t find her. You were looking for Stacy and couldn’t find him either. Alice did suggest that Rosalind and Stacy were together in his flat, but you were diverted by Venetia’s phone call and I preferred to loaf around watching Alice cook. And when Stacy finally came downstairs—”

  “He looked traumatised. Yes, that’s true but Nicholas, there’s still a huge problem with this theory. Rosalind may well have declared in a fit of bravado over an alcoholic lunch that she’d seduce Stacy, but can you seriously imagine her ever going ahead and doing it? I know that where sex is concerned anything’s possible, but the sort of pathetic, self-destructive behaviour we’re talking about here would be so alien to Rosalind’s nature—”

  “I’d driven her to act out of character. All this is my fault, all of it. I see now I’ve been as obsessed as Francie.” I covered my face suddenly with my hands.

  Lewis was silent for a moment. All he said finally was: “That’s how it seems to you?”

  “Yes, but I can’t talk about it, not at the moment, it’s too difficult.” Letting my hands fall I stared down into my empty cup on the table.

  “Very well,” said Lewis after another pause, “let’s return to your theory. I admit I’m beginning to find it plausible, but I’m still not convinced it’s correct. I’ve queried the likelihood of Rosalind doing something so louche; let me now query the likelihood of Stacy getting into bed with his boss’s wife. Even if the boy’s not as queer as a coot, I can’t imagine—”

  “If he’s the insecure, ignorant heterosexual wannabe I think he is, I can imagine it all too well.”

  “You mean that if he’s in a state of chronic anxiety about his sexuality and desperate to prove to himself he’s not gay—”

  “I suspect only an experienced older woman could have dealt with all those fears which he’s consistently refused to talk through with a therapist.”

  “Yes, but this woman was your wife. Surely—”

  “This woman was Rosalind. She knew what she wanted and she would have set out to get it as efficiently as possible. And Stacy was Stacy—weak, muddled, little more than an overgrown child. His one previous affair was with someone much older. This present incident would have been just a repetition of the pattern.”

  “Maybe more of a repetition than you think. Maybe subconsciously he could have seen going to bed with Rosalind as a way of going to bed with you. The situation would have resembled those three-in-a-bed episodes where despite the presence of a woman the real action is between the two men.”

  “Okay, I admit that emotionally there could be a homosexual dimension to this episode, but I’ve never claimed that Stacy was a hundred per cent heterosexual. All I’ve claimed is that he’s heterosexual enough to feel happiest in a heterosexual way of life.” I leant forward on the table to drive my argument home. “Lewis, we can’t know exactly what happened between Stacy and Rosalind, but I think we can be sure that some sort of sexual incident took place. Why else would Stacy have been unable to confide in me? Why else would he have rushed out of the house and made his confession to Gil Tucker?”

  “We don’t know for a fact that he saw Tucker.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “You mean you did speak to Tucker last night? My dear Nicholas—”

  “Stacy told me he’d seen Gil, and Gil signalled to me that a confession had been made.”

  “Well, I knew Stacy must have made his confession, since he attended mass this morning and took the Sacrament, but I assumed he’d seen his spiritual director. Surely the fact that he chose to go instead to a gay activist means—”

  “All it means is that Stacy’s got a non-relationship with his spiritual director and that he chose to confide instead in a priest who’d been kind to him. By the way, Gil also signalled to me that this crisis hadn’t been triggered by Stacy coming out of the closet.”

  “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? According to bigots like Tucker, homosexuality never triggers anything except indescribable bliss!”

  “Lewis—”

  “All right, don’t let’s get hung up on Tucker. Maybe I should concede, though with considerable reluctance, that your appalling theory is probably correct. I suppose it just proves yet again what depths human beings can sink to when the Devil muscles in and starts cracking the whip. And talking of the Devil—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s start talking about possession.”

  V

  “At least we’re in agreement,” said Lewis as the conversation shifted gears, “that Francie’s not possessed.”

  “In the absence of symptoms there seems no other conclusion to draw, but …” I hesitated, remembering my psychic thump at the Abbey.

  “You’re uncertain?” said Lewis surprised. “But you seemed very sure of yourself at the start of this conversation! You said she was psychotic, with a heavy demonic infestation, but there was no possession.”

  “Yes, I did say that. And I think I still believe it. But I could be wrong.”

  This statement impressed Lewis. I wasn’t being a know-it-all wonder worker any more. The Christian healer had finally resurfaced. “Well, we need to get this right,” he said, “or we’ll bugger up the treatment and so will the psychiatrist.”

  This was all too true. It was no good attempting to treat by conventional medical means a person possessed by the Devil, and conversely it was worse than useless to exorcise a person who wasn’t possessed. But very few people were, in the classical sense, possessed and requiring a full exorcism with priests, psychiatrists and social workers in attendance. Much more common were the cases of infestation by demons. These cases required a short rite of deliverance from the priest in combination with psychiatric care for the underlying mental illness which had made the infestation possible. The psychiatrist who supported us in this particular aspect of our work at the Healing Centre told me he thought of demons as spiritual bacilli which could invade the soul just as physical bacilli could invade the body. I myself preferred a more holistic approach to the mystery; I saw body and soul as one entity which over the years formed a unique pattern: the personality. This could be undermined by illness. Physical illness affected spiritual health. Spiritual illness affected physical health. It was all a unity, all one. Bacilli, demons—they were just technical terms for different hazards to health. We were all flawed so no one had perfect health, but we could all strive to be healthier. It was a task, a mission, a journey, a pilgrimage. The healthier we were the happier we became. The healthier we were the more ably we could serve God by giving expression to that unique pattern of personality and contributing to his overall creative purpose.

  “Nicholas?”

  I refocused. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

  “Why have you now got your doubts that Francie’s not possessed?”

  I told him about my psychic thump and my off-beat speculation that Francie could be unconsciously escaping into her obsession to blot out the fear triggered by the suspicion that something was trying to take over her personality.

  “That’s not impossible,” said Lewis at last, “but I don’t think it’s likely. The point about the onset of possession is that the victims can’t blot it out—or at least that’s always been so in the cases I’ve encountered. I’m sure that if Francie had been succumbing to possession she would have
come to us in fear, convinced that something was very wrong.”

  “Well, she did, didn’t she?” I said. “She presented the fantasy about Harry beating her up. That could have been a coded cry for help. Do you remember how I once speculated that the wife-beating saga might have been concocted because she couldn’t bring herself to speak directly about what was wrong?”

  “Yes, I do remember that.” Lewis fell silent, taking time to consider this theory carefully, but in the end he said: “It would be irresponsible to diagnose possession when there are no classic symptoms present. I think we’ve got to act on the basis that she needs psychiatric help and the deliverance ministry but no exorcism.”

  “Well, an exorcism wouldn’t be possible anyway—she’s expressed no need for it.”

  “She’s expressed no need for anything apart from you, has she? We still haven’t solved the problem of how to get her to accept treatment.”

  “Maybe the illness is still evolving. Maybe she’ll soon break down. Maybe—”

  “Further speculation is pointless at this stage, Nicholas. The only two things that are absolutely clear are that you have to keep out of her way and I have to get her into treatment. I’ll phone Robin tomorrow at his home and try to work out how we can corral her when she shows up for work on Monday morning.”

  “Supposing she turns up at the Rectory again over the weekend?”

  “No, she won’t do that. Harry arrives back tonight from Hong Kong and like all the best unreconstructed males he’ll want to be waited on hand and foot.”

  I shifted restlessly in my chair. “Surely he’ll notice something’s wrong!”

  “Not necessarily. She may be perfectly normal with him.”

  “But she’s seriously nuts! My God, when I think of her egging Rosalind on—and I’m sure she did, I’m sure she came up with the whole demonic idea—”

  “Obviously there’s severe infestation. But we can’t ring up Harry and say—”

  I was barely listening. Despair had gripped me again. “Of course if Rosalind hadn’t been in such a mess as the result of what I did to her she’d never have listened to Francie. All this is my fault.”