The Wonder Worker

by Susan Howatch

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he couldn’t! Marriage just isn’t a possibility at all!”

  “I’m not talking about marriage. God only knows whom Nicholas will marry—that’s all in the remote future and may never happen anyway if he and Rosalind find long-term separation psychologically impossible.”

  “Are you trying to say—”

  “Yes, I am. Nicholas is a good man but he’s not a stainless steel saint incapable of sin. No one is. He’s a human being capable of making bad mistakes and getting into a lethal mess—as the events of the past few days have made only too clear.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now let me lay out the unvarnished truth for you, Alice, and this isn’t a prediction which may or may not come true. This is a fact. If Nicholas were to start sleeping with you his integrity as a spiritual leader would be shot. When any religious community goes to pieces the collapse almost always begins with a loss of integrity manifested in the form of sexual licence. The leader uses and abuses the women around him—or the men—and then the whole enterprise, fueled by an atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and anger, descends rapidly into chaos.”

  “But Nicholas must know all that!”

  “Of course he does, and so far he’s kept himself honest, but he’s now facing a prolonged period of emotional stress and he’s going to find it tough enough to maintain his moral equilibrium without having to deal with your feelings for him—or his for you. Do you see what I’m saying? I believe that what first attracted you to Nicholas was his great integrity. You’re now in a position where you could destroy it—and once it was gone and he was just another wonder worker willing to devalue others to satisfy his needs, would you still love him? Or want to marry him?”

  I said: “I can’t imagine not loving him.” Taking off my glasses I began to rub the clouded lenses. “But I can’t believe he’d ever want to marry me and if we did sleep together I can’t imagine that I’d ever satisfy him for long.” I replaced my glasses but they misted up again almost immediately. “I couldn’t bear him getting tired of me,” I said. “I couldn’t bear him becoming indifferent. I’d rather not sleep with him at all than leave myself open to that kind of pain.”

  I waited for him to speak but all I heard was silence. “Long ago,” I said, polishing my glasses over and over again, “when I was born and for a short time afterwards, there was a man who loved me. I have a photo of him holding me in his arms and he looks happy and proud. But that didn’t last long. He went away and never came back and I don’t know to this day whether he’s alive or dead. I’d never want to go through that sort of rejection again. Better not to love at all than risk people becoming tired of you and ceasing to care. But even so … despite all that … I can’t imagine not loving Nicholas.”

  There was another long pause before Lewis said: “It’s very hard to have a parent who rejects you.”

  “Both my parents rejected me. That’s why in the end I was glad to be ugly. The uglier you are the less likely people are to love you, and so long as there’s no love around then you can’t get hurt—or so I used to think—as I ate the ice cream—and all the other stuff which helped make me so ugly—”

  “My dearest Alice,” said Lewis. “My dearest Alice—”

  “Okay, I’ll shut up now, I’m sorry if I’ve been embarrassing.”

  “I’m not embarrassed. I just want to say—”

  “It’s all right, I’ll leave the Rectory. I see now it’s the only thing to do to keep Nicholas safe and me sane. You needn’t worry about him any more.”

  “—I just want to say this: you’re not ugly. I’ll never reject you. The offer of marriage still stands.”

  The front door closed in the distance as Nicholas returned from the hospital.

  IX

  He halted as soon as he crossed the threshold of the kitchen. I was scooping up the sodden tissues and heading for the swing-bin. Lewis was making a great business of washing up his coffee-mug while keeping his crutches under control. Both of us were in such a state that neither of us remembered to ask him how Francie was.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Nicholas. Of course it must have been obvious to him that a fraught scene had been taking place.

  Lewis said airily: “Oh, just a little speculation about the future!” and I mumbled: “Oh, just a little reminiscing about the past!” We both spoke at exactly the same moment.

  “How’s Francie?” added Lewis, finally remembering to ask the right question.

  Nicholas reluctantly allowed himself to be diverted. Francie, we were told, had recovered consciousness but she was very confused and had no memory of the violent scene at the Rectory. He himself had left the hospital when the doctors had taken Francie away for a battery of tests. Val was staying on to give Harry support and to meet the psychiatrist who had been summoned; she had wanted to gauge how likely he was to be helpful.

  “I felt it was better anyway to leave Val with Harry,” concluded Nicholas, slumping down at the kitchen table. “As a doctor she’ll find it easier to get him the hard information which he keeps optimistically asking for.”

  “Good decision,” said Lewis bluntly. “You look exhausted, and if you haven’t yet started to suffer from delayed shock you soon will. Go upstairs and rest.”

  “Later. How was Venetia?”

  “Extremely well.”

  “Thank God we occasionally get something right.” He picked up the box of Kleenex tissues which I hadn’t had time to hide. “Who’s been using these?”

  “Me,” I said, “but I’m okay now.”

  “Well, if you’re not going to rest,” said Lewis to Nicholas, “I certainly am. Would you excuse me please, Alice, if I take myself off to the bedsit for a while? We’ll talk again later.”

  “Yes, of course.” I was trying to work out how “okay” I really was. I felt as if all my emotions had haemorrhaged, leaving my mind bled white. Looking around for some simple task to perform I saw the kettle and filled it. Nicholas would want tea. In relief I plugged in the kettle and reached for the tea-caddy.

  As Lewis’s footsteps receded across the hall Nicholas said: “Was the old boy upsetting you?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” I found the teapot hadn’t been washed. I thought of us drinking sweet tea after the scene with Francie and how Harry had arrived before I had had the chance to clear up. Later I had simply forgotten the teapot. I had been too preoccupied with making that vile sandwich and brewing the coffee which Lewis had drunk later … I suddenly realised Nicholas was speaking again.

  “If you’re upset,” he said, “that matters to me.”

  I rinsed the teapot and dried it carefully. I was unable to look at him.

  “What happened, Alice?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, “Lewis proposed to me.”

  There was a peculiarly blank silence. I turned, expecting to see a profound astonishment, but his expression was more difficult to read than I’d anticipated. The surprise was certainly there, but there were other emotions too, emotions which at that moment lay beyond my power to identify.

  “It should have been humiliating,” I said, “but it wasn’t. In the end it was touching.”

  Nicholas finally said: “Why should it have been humiliating?”

  “Oh, he was playing the self-centred male chauvinist, talking about how he needed a middle-class slave to wait on him hand and foot as he sank into his dotage, but of course that wasn’t what was going on at all, I see that now. He was trying to kill two birds with one stone— trying to protect you while at the same time being generous and kind to me. He was very kind,” I said, “and very generous and I know he’s fond of me, but you’re the one he really loves, Nicholas. He’d do anything to ensure your safety.”

  “I’m quite capable of ensuring my own safety.”

  “Lewis doesn’t think so.”

  “That’s because in the past he couldn’t ensure his own safety; he’s projecting his past onto
my future, but my future isn’t his past and never will be … Are you going to marry him?”

  “No. I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love. I suppose in the end it’s all a question of integrity.”

  We were silent for a while. I had turned away from him again to watch the kettle coming to the boil, and even when Nicholas brought the milk-jug from the refrigerator to the counter I couldn’t look at him.

  At last I found myself compelled to say: “You still love Rosalind, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I can see now it’s not the kind of love that has anything to do with marriage. Rosalind was always more the sister I never had than the girlfriend I wanted to marry. No wonder I never understood poor Stacy’s problem! I was too busy repressing the knowledge of my own failure to move on from a childhood relationship.”

  “But now that you understand what was wrong—”

  “—I’ll be able to move on? Yes, I hope so, but I can’t move on with Rosalind. Brothers and sisters always in the end have to go their separate ways.”

  “But did you never realise—suspect—”

  “I was too obsessed with what she represented to me to see the relationship for what it was. Rosalind was the one who saw the truth and faced up to it. Not me.”

  “How are you going to explain all that to your boys?”

  “I don’t know, but I hope I’ll have the guts to be honest.” He hesitated before adding: “I realise now that they’ve been reflecting all the tensions of the marriage. I’d like to think that in the end—after the divorce—in time—I’ll be less of an alien figurehead to them and more of a genuine father.”

  The kettle boiled. I made the tea.

  “I hope that’ll be so,” said Nicholas. “I hope it will. I’ve got to hope, haven’t I? I’ve got to hope that Rosalind will find the happiness I’ve denied her for so long, I’ve got to hope we’ll each go on to a better life, I’ve got to hope that somehow all this mess and misery will be redeemed, but hope’s hard sometimes, particularly when you’re in pain. It’s hard when you’re enduring Good Friday to imagine the dawning of Easter Day.”

  “But the dawn came in the end, didn’t it?” While I waited for the tea to brew I took two mugs from the cupboard. “I suppose,” I said, thinking of the black interval which lay between Good Friday and Easter Day, “all this will have a bad effect on your ministry.”

  “There’ll be a downside. That’s inevitable. I must expect a lot of criticism and anger as people project their disappointed expectations onto me, but perhaps in the end …” He hesitated again.

  “In the end?”

  “Perhaps in the end I might compensate them by becoming a better priest. I have this unusual ministry among the sick and the broken, and now that I’ve been sick and I’ve been broken I should have a new solidarity with those I try to help. Wonder workers are never sick and broken, of course. Wonder workers never fail. But a Christian priest acquires strength through weakness and power through vulnerability, so perhaps … well, as I said a moment ago, I’ve got to hope.”

  We fell silent but as I began to pour the tea he said: “The real problem will come if—when—I remarry. Francie got that all wrong, thinking there’d be no problem so long as I married someone who didn’t have a husband living. There’ll always be a problem so long as I’m a divorcé and not a widower.”

  “You’d lose your job?”

  “No, I’m not in parish work where a remarried divorced priest is always an embarrassment. If the trustees at the Healing Centre back me, the Church authorities will just consider St. Benet’s a useful place to stow an awkward customer and they’ll turn a blind eye. If the trustees don’t back me … but I think they will in the end. I’ve got to hope, haven’t I? I’ve got to hope.”

  “I suppose the conservative ones will say marriage should be for ever.”

  “I think they’ll all say marriage should be for ever as far as a priest is concerned, but I know what I’m going to say to them in reply. I shall say I only wish I’d had a relationship with Rosalind which did allow my marriage to last for ever; I shall say that although I wanted above all else to heal the relationship and keep the marriage alive I had to recognise in the end that no healing—no cure, I should say—was possible; I shall remind them that cures don’t always happen, because God doesn’t operate by waving a magic wand. But what he does try to do constantly is to redeem what goes wrong, and in redemption is the healing. That’s why I’ve got to accept what’s happened and learn from it. It’s because the learning will in the end become part of the redemption. It’ll help me find healing by building a new life with someone else.”

  I recognised my cue and prepared to tell him of my decision to leave St. Benet’s.

  X

  I remember being so relieved that when the moment of truth finally came my voice was steady and my eyes were tearless. I kept thinking of Lewis saying I had the potential to destroy Nicholas’s integrity. Whatever happened I had to make sure Nicholas was safe.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” I said, and as I spoke I fixed my mind resolutely on the fact that as he would never marry me, no future with him of any kind was possible. “I entirely understand that you’ll want to remarry, and that’s why I’ve decided—”

  “It’s good of you to say that,” he interrupted, “but of course understanding is one thing and approval is quite another. You’d be justified in thinking, along with a lot of other people, that a priest has no business remarrying when his divorced wife’s still alive.”

  “But don’t you remember what I told you in the car on the way home from Butterfold? I said it was wrong to place the burden of unreal expectations on a clergyman!”

  “Yes, but nevertheless … the clergy are supposed to set an example. You must still be thinking I’d compromise my integrity if I remarried.”

  “Nicholas—”

  “Alice, I’ll tell you how I see it. You don’t have to agree with me, but I’ll tell you anyway.”

  “I assure you—”

  “No, hear me out. I think it would compromise my integrity if I were to pretend I’m called to celibacy. I think it would compromise my integrity if I pretended to be chaste but kept a mistress. I think it would compromise my integrity if I lived a lie by pretending that my dead marriage was still alive. Christianity’s about life, not death— it’s a gospel of hope and renewal, not despair and decline! I may be wiped out at the moment, I may be battered and shattered and thoroughly wrecked, but I’ve still got my faith and I’m going to go on in the belief that the best years of my life are still to come—I’m going to go on in the hope that in the end everything will be redeemed, healed and made new.”

  I waited till I was sure the words would come. Then I answered: “You’ve said what I hoped you’d say. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  “You really mean that? But I thought—”

  “You misunderstood.”

  There was another pause before Nicholas said: “Let there be an end to all misunderstandings.”

  An absolute silence fell. We stood side by side in front of the counter by the mugs of steaming tea and we listened to the silence as we held our breath. Then I heard Nicholas add casually: “Of course there’ll be difficult days ahead. It’ll be a long haul. But contrary to Lewis’s worst fears—which I can imagine all too clearly—we’ll survive, won’t we, Alice? We’ll manage.”

  Yet again I removed my glasses and yet again I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Only then did I allow myself to look at him. For a long moment we were motionless, wordlessly communicating everything that needed to be said. Then as I waited, hardly daring to believe such happiness was possible, Nicholas slipped his arms around my waist and stooped to kiss me lovingly on the mouth.

  Author’s Note

  Dr. Gareth Tuckwell and the Reverend David Flagg, whose book A Question of Healing provides the quotations at the start of each chapter, worked together from 1986 until 1994 at Burrswood, the Christian Centre for Me
dical and Spiritual Care (now the Christian Centre for Healthcare and Ministry), at Groombridge in Kent.

  The Reverend Christopher Hamel Cooke, whose writings are quoted at the beginning of each part, was Rector of St. Marylebone with Holy Trinity in London from 1979 until 1989, and the founder of the Marylebone Healing Centre where, as at Burrswood, doctors and priests work together to help the sick.

  Any resemblance between the above authors and any character in this book is coincidental. All the characters in this book are fictitious and are based on no one at either of the above locations.

  The Wonder Worker

  SUSAN HOWATCH

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Susan Howatch

  Q: You’ve previously written about Nicholas Darrow, Lewis Hall, and Venetia Hoffenberg in the Starbridge books, yet The Wonder Worker isn’t a sequel, exactly. What made you come back to these characters?

  SH: At the end of Mystical Paths (book 5 of the Starbridge series) there is a flash-forward to Nicholas Darrow’s ministry of healing at St. Benet’s church in London in 1988. After the Starbridge books, I wanted to write a novel about the ministry of healing set in modern London. It made sense to pick up Nicholas Darrow’s situation and use it, spinning off three or four Starbridge characters.

  Q: You often use the viewpoints of several different characters to tell a story. What are some of the difficulties in giving each character his or her own voice, and, particularly, in speaking so convincingly through different genders?

  SH: I do not find it difficult to give each character his or her own voice unless the character is very like me. Fortunately, this is a great rarity—although of course there is something of myself in each character. As for gender, it’s simply an aspect of personality, of varying degrees of interest or importance. My interest in people lies way beyond the stereotypical boundaries of gender. As Jung said, a man’s soul does not reside in his genitals.

  Q: You’ve described having multiple narrators as resembling “how it is after an accident: Everyone tells a different story—and none of them is entirely right.” Is there a story for you as an author that is truer than any of the individual characters’ stories?