The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  “Oh Alice!” he managed to say. “I do love you—you’re as good as a sister to me!” Then he collapsed in a heap on the sofa and sobbed. That was the moment when suddenly, in a blinding flash of insight, I understood him through and through. His central problem was that he always wanted a sister, never a girlfriend or a wife. If only he could have grown up sufficiently to let go of those three ravishing sirens, Siobhan, Sinead and Aisling! Then he could have married jolly Tara and lived happily ever after, but that was never going to happen because Stacy had got lost somewhere along the road to adult life and now he was perpetually in thrall to the desire for loving relationships where sex was utterly forbidden.

  “Dearest Stacy …” I put my arm around him comfortingly and held his hand in mine.

  Eventually he found he wanted to blow his nose but neither of us had a handkerchief. There ought to have been some Kleenex somewhere—that staple soft furnishing at the Rectory—but he couldn’t remember where the box was and the flat was such a mess that I could have searched for half an hour without success, so I went to the bathroom and grabbed the entire roll of toilet paper.

  At last when he was too exhausted to cry any more he whispered: “Alice, do you know much about AIDS?”

  “Well, I’m not living in a glass bubble down there in the hell-hole,” I said startled. “I’m not about to ask you what the word AIDS means.” My first thought was that a friend of his had been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

  “You know you can’t get it by holding hands with an infected person or by breathing his breath?”

  “Yes, I know all that,” I said, trying not to sound impatient. Then I realised I was holding his hand and breathing his breath. Horror gripped me. “My God, Stacy, are you trying to tell me—”

  “I think I may have HIV,” he said, and started sobbing again.

  I never slackened my grip on his hand and I never altered my position on the sofa beside him. I had to concentrate in order to achieve this immobility, but nevertheless I was aware of upsetting thoughts bolting around my brain, incredulous thoughts, questioning thoughts, all of which were hard to focus on. In the end I could only say: “Is that very likely?” I was trying to remember what I’d read about AIDS being contracted from a contaminated blood transfusion. I couldn’t recall Stacy telling me of a time when he had been so seriously ill that a blood transfusion had been required, but perhaps the illness had been a long time ago.

  “I want to believe it isn’t likely,” he said, “but I saw Gil Tucker tonight and he said I had to act on the assumption that it was possible—he’s arranging for me to have an AIDS test tomorrow at one.”

  “But Stacy, why on earth did you go to Gil Tucker? Why didn’t you go straight to Nicholas?”

  Stacy dissolved into tears again.

  “Oh Stacy …” I put both arms around him and gave him a hug. “I didn’t mean to sound cross, I just felt so confused—and I don’t want to be confused, I want to understand everything so that I can sympathise with you properly. How does Gil fit into all this? Forgive me if I’m being stupid but I can’t quite see—”

  “Gil knew an old friend of mine from Liverpool who used to come to London regularly to attend the Synod and who was interested in the Gay Christians. Gil told me tonight that this old friend of mine had died of AIDS. I didn’t know. We’d lost touch, although I think if he’d lived longer he would have made contact again and told me—but he died quickly, he got the pneumonia, the lethal sort that AIDS patients get, and—”

  “Wait a minute, when you say ‘old friend’—”

  “He was called Gordon. I said to Gil: ‘But surely he must have been HIV-positive for years, he must have known,’ but Gil said not necessarily, you pick up the virus, you have some flu-type symptoms, you get better, you don’t have the test, you go into denial—until you start to get very ill—”

  “But Stacy—”

  “He was much older than me but he was so interesting, so kind, so—”

  “You’re saying—no, you can’t be, I’m sorry, I know I must seem as thick as two planks but I’m not understanding any of this—” But I was. I felt vaguely revolted but above all else I was baffled. “Stacy, how could you have a homosexual affair when you’re not gay?”

  To my astonishment this proved to be exactly the right thing to say. Stacy sagged with relief, wiped the last tears from his eyes, clasped my hand tightly in gratitude and said: “You don’t think I’m gay do you, Alice?”

  “No, of course not. You’re in love with Aisling.”

  Stacy looked appalled. “But how could I be in love with my sister?”

  Instantly I realised that this subject couldn’t be pursued. “Well, never mind that,” I said rapidly. “Tell me why you wanted to have sex with Gordon.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t want to! It was all his idea, but I was never keen, I only did it because it seemed to mean so much to him and he’d been so good to me that I felt in his debt. He transformed my life, Alice. I was just a boy from the backstreets, I knew nothing, and he taught me about literature and music and art and religion and—oh, it was another world he introduced me to, it was such a miracle, such a gift—a gift from God, as I saw later—but of course the sex side of it was wrong and I’m not just saying that because of the Bible, I’m saying that because it felt wrong for me, I never really liked it, it was just a mechanical bore like shaving or brushing one’s teeth or going to the toilet, so although I was pleased to make Gordon happy after all he’d done for me, I just couldn’t wait to escape into the priesthood and switch him off. I had to have a good excuse to end it, you see, because I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him, but the priesthood gave me just the excuse I needed.”

  “So once you went to train at Mirfield—”

  “As soon as I was accepted for Mirfield I told him there had to be a clean break, told him I couldn’t see him again, told him not to write to me—but oh God, how guilty I felt, poor Gordon, I was so much in his debt, but I couldn’t help it, Alice, I couldn’t have gone on with that kind of sex any more, I’d had it, I wanted to move on—but when I did try and move on I seemed to be sort of paralysed, I’d never done it with a girl and I was afraid by that time I’d only be able to do it with men, I was afraid—oh, I was afraid of so many things, and the pretty girls all seemed to know so much and that made me more scared than ever because I knew so little, and the plain girls—well, I can’t really get interested, and sometimes I think I don’t want sex at all, with anyone, ever, but of course that’s not done in our society today, is it, one’s got to have sex or else one’s just a nerd, despised by everyone—”

  “Stacy, I’m sure things will work out—”

  “Not if I’ve got HIV they won’t,” he said, and slid back again into despair.

  VI

  “But Stacy,” I said, trying to focus on the medical facts in order to distract him from his tears, “surely it’s been ages since you had sex with Gordon?”

  “Yes, but they now think the virus can be around for a long time before the serious illnesses begin. The big question,” said Stacy, grabbing another wad of toilet paper to soak up the tears, “is whether Gordon contracted HIV before or after we parted. And that’s what we don’t know.”

  “But surely if he was so keen on you he wouldn’t have messed around with someone else?”

  “That’s what I said to Gil, but Gil said these things do happen. You see, I didn’t like doing some of the things Gordon liked, and when Gordon realised this he said okay, forget it, it doesn’t matter—but maybe it did matter, maybe when I wasn’t around he had one-night stands so that he could do exactly what he liked. He wouldn’t have seen it as infidelity, he’d think he was being kind, going elsewhere instead of bothering me.”

  “But if you were living with him surely you’d have known if—”

  “Oh, I never lived with him!” Stacy looked horrified. “He was a churchwarden and a pillar of the community! And anyway I had to keep it from my family, didn’t I? If m
y Mam and my sisters had ever found out it would have destroyed them utterly—in fact I’d have killed myself rather than have them find out, and that’s why, if I have HIV, I’ve got to do everything possible to make sure they never know.”

  “Honestly, Stacy, I still can’t believe it’s likely that you’re infected! If Gordon really loved you as much as you imply he did, he’d have passed up the peculiar stuff in order to be faithful to you!”

  “You can’t always tell who’s going to be unfaithful,” said Stacy, and suddenly looked so white that I thought he might faint.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded, heart beating much faster. “Why do you say that? Why are you looking as if—”

  “I’m just shit-scared. Dear God, if the test is positive—”

  “Stacy, I really think you ought to tell Nicholas about all this,” I said, by now baffled that this wasn’t as obvious to him as it was to me, but at once Stacy was plunged back into panic.

  “No, I can’t—I can’t—”

  I tried to calm him down. “Look, I know he’s your hero and you don’t want to upset him, but I’m sure he’d—”

  “I can’t tell him. I CAN’T. I can’t face him at all.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. By this time I was so baffled by Stacy’s refusal to do the obvious that I was beginning to suspect there was more to this horror-story than he wanted to admit. I wondered again why he had chosen to confide in Gil Tucker. The obvious answer was that Gil was an AIDS expert, but Stacy, I was almost sure, had implied earlier that before he had seen Gil that night he had had no idea that Gordon had died of AIDS. Dimly I realised that the chronology of the crisis wasn’t making sense.

  “Hang on a minute,” I said slowly, “I’m getting confused again. Stacy, you were actually upset and acting out of character before you went to see Gil Tucker this evening and heard about Gordon. Why did you want to see Gil in the first place? What was going on?”

  Stacy’s pallor increased. He closed his eyes and gripped my hand harder than ever and looked like death. My heart picked up speed again. Then a second after I realised how frightened I was, memory, reason and intuition all fused in my mind to produce the key I needed to unlock the mystery.

  “It’s all to do with Rosalind, isn’t it?” I said.

  Bull’s-eye.

  He stared at me in terror.

  VII

  “You were okay before you went up to see her this afternoon,” I said rapidly. “You came to the kitchen and asked me what was for dinner and you behaved exactly as you usually do. Then you said Rosalind had waved to you from the window of her flat and you were going up to see her. And off you went, still completely normal, but by the time dinner’s ready, Rosalind’s refusing to come downstairs and you’re a zombie. So what the hell happened?”

  Levering himself to his feet, Stacy blundered across the room to the bookshelves and dragged out a Bible. As he returned to me he said: “You’ve got to swear you’ll never tell Nick what I’m going to say.”

  “I swear I’ll never tell Nicholas what you’re going to say.” I removed my hand from the Bible and he slumped down beside me again. By this time I was so frightened that I felt sick. I was sure that Nicholas was somehow in danger—and perhaps too I sensed we were all in danger, all of us who lived at the Rectory, everyone who worked at the Healing Centre. I could almost see the darkness swirling around us and billowing to blot out the light.

  Stacy was speaking again. His eyes were swollen and bloodshot, his pale skin mottled as if bruised by grief. His voice was no more than a whisper. He said: “I took Rosalind up to my flat to show her the photos of Aisling’s wedding.” Then he exclaimed violently: “I never want to see those pictures again!” And he began to shudder from head to toe.

  I struggled to understand. “She polluted them in some way?”

  “She polluted everything. She asked me to go to bed with her.”

  I finally lost control over my revulsion.

  VII

  I had managed to cope with the possibility that he might have HIV. I had managed to cope with the information that he had once had a homosexual relationship with someone cultured and kind who had cared for him. But what I just couldn’t take was the fact that he had betrayed Nicholas. I knew Rosalind’s behaviour was far more revolting than his, but that made no difference; it came as no surprise to me that Rosalind should be capable of treachery. But Stacy’s behavior not only appalled me but left me feeling horribly disillusioned. I had always thought him so innocent, so nice-natured, so fundamentally good, dedicating himself to serving God among the sick. Now I felt I could only see him as a weak, pathetic creature of no integrity who should never have become a clergyman.

  But perhaps I had misunderstood him. Perhaps in my revulsion I had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “But you didn’t go to bed with her,” I said, making the sentence not a question but a statement. “You turned her down.”

  “I wanted to. But I found I couldn’t.”

  I lost my temper. “God, how feeble can you get! Why couldn’t you have just said no?”

  “Well, it was like the affair with Gordon all over again—I mean, there I was, just a boy from the backstreets of Liverpool, and Rosalind was so kind, taking such a special interest—”

  “But you bloody idiot, this had nothing to do with kindness! This was all about cruelty and betrayal!”

  “No, she really did want to be kind! She said she could see I needed a helping hand about how to get on with girls, and—”

  “But this is Nicholas’s wife we’re talking about—Nicholas’s wife! How could you possibly have—”

  “She said they weren’t sleeping together, she said it was all over, she said they were as good as divorced, she said Nick had been very cruel to her—”

  “And you believed that?” I could hardly get my words out.

  “Well, it did seem to explain why she felt free to be so kind to me—”

  “But you fool, don’t you see she was just spinning you a line to get what she wanted? Nicholas loves Rosalind—God knows why, but he does, he loves her. And now, just because that woman’s so bloody bored and so bloody decadent that she’d even seduce her husband’s curate for a cheap thrill, you go crashing around, smashing and bashing everything up—”

  “You don’t understand! I’m sure Rosalind was telling me the truth when she said—”

  “That woman wouldn’t recognise the truth even if it stepped up and slugged her on the jaw! She’s a lying bitch—and you’re just an overgrown child with no understanding of adult relationships at all!”

  “Alice—”

  “I think your behaviour’s been absolutely disgusting!”

  “But Alice, wait—once I was in bed with her, I—”

  “And how dare you try to tell me the sordid details of what you got up to! You ought to be telling me instead about what you’re going to say to Nicholas when he finds out!”

  Stacy panicked again. “But he’s never going to find out!”

  “He will if you’ve got HIV and infected Rosalind!”

  “But Alice, if you’d only let me explain—”

  “You seem to be totally adrift from reality. Even if you don’t have HIV, how can you go on working alongside Nicholas as if nothing’s happened? How can you live with such a deception? And do you seriously think that Rosalind’s going to keep her mouth shut? She’s the sort of bitch who would boast about her conquests—it’ll all get back to Nicholas in the end, you’ll see, and then he’ll kick you out and it’ll serve you bloody well right!”

  Stacy burst into tears again, but this time I had no strength to help him. I was emotionally drained, physically nauseated. Struggling to my feet I began to blunder from the room.

  “Alice!” cried Stacy in despair. “Alice!”

  But I never replied. We were severed from each other. It was as if a foul-smelling fog had swirled between us and choked our lungs.

  Stumbling all the way down the sta
irs to the basement flat, I threw up again and again into the lavatory.

  IX

  I dragged myself exhausted to bed but I slept badly, and during one of my waking moments I heard footsteps above me in the kitchen. Switching on the light I looked at my alarm clock. The time was a minute after three.

  Leaving the bed I pulled on my dressing-gown and crept cautiously upstairs in the hope that I would find Stacy raiding the fridge—I was already regretting my angry words earlier—but when I entered the kitchen I found Nicholas. He was wearing pyjamas and sitting bolt upright at the table. He had lit one of the rings of the gas stove but nothing was cooking on it, and his expression was baffled, as if he was having trouble working out where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. The whole scene was shot through and through with odd-ness, but when he confessed he’d been sleep-walking the mystery evaporated and I realised the oddness lay primarily in the random nature of the details: the circle of flames, the smart pyjamas, the absolute silence, the clock on the wall indicating a peculiar time, the sheen of Nicholas’s fingernails as he gripped the edge of the table. To restore normality I turned off the gas, plugged in the electric kettle and made tea. Meanwhile Nicholas was recovering. He fetched a coat to keep himself warm, and when he sat down again at the table he seemed to me once more so exceptionally elegant, so overwhelmingly masculine and so mesmerisingly watchable that I felt faint with my physical desire for him.

  That was when the truth dawned on me. I had ranted and raved at Stacy for going to bed with someone who was married, but deep down at the bottom of my mind this was exactly the sin I myself yearned to commit. Or in other words, I was no better than poor, pathetic, pitiable Stacy whom I had so brutally condemned in an orgy of self-righteousness. A horrified remorse replaced my niggling regret but I shut it out. I would deal later, I told myself, with the mess I had made of the scene with Stacy. At the moment Nicholas required my full attention.