A Talent For Destruction (15 page)

As Tuesday evening approached, that began to seem more and more unlikely. She set out for Yarchester School of Art – seen off by her husband with a short, huffed, ‘Mind how you go' – knowing that it was unrealistic to hope to acquire anything from the course apart from a plaster cast of the head she proposed to model. And for the first two weeks it seemed that she was wise not to be optimistic.

There were a number of women on the course, and they were friendly enough in the larky way that some adults automatically adopt when they return to a classroom environment, but she found it difficult to know how to become better acquainted. She had chafed at the pressures and expectations that were put on her because she was the wife of the Rector of Breckham Market, but once she got away from the town and lost that identity she felt as shy as she had been in adolescence. She had joined the course late, and this made her feel an outsider. When the man next to her on the bench, who had introduced himself as Alec Reynolds and had found some clean clay for her to use instead of the plaster-filled lump the instructor gave her, suggested after her third lesson that she might like to go with some members of the class for a drink at a nearby pub, she was so lacking in self-confidence that she almost refused.

Had she refused, and gone straight back home to her husband, Breckham Market cemetery would today be three graves emptier; possibly four.

It would have been impossible for anyone to warn Gillian Ainger of the likely consequence of her attempt to make friends, because she wouldn't have believed it.

She was a straightforward, rational woman; not without imagination or sensitivity, but with no significant depth of emotion. Love, to her, was something basic and enduring, and passion was no more than the occasional physical expression of love. She knew nothing of the terrors of insecurity, of the desperation of dependence, of possessiveness, of destructiveness, of black jealousy, of murderous hatred, of the darkness of the soul. As her husband had recognized from the first, Gillian was an innocent.

She had no idea how fiercely possessive Robin felt about her. When they exchanged their wedding vows, promising to forsake all other, Gillian had meant – and had assumed that Robin also meant – that she was forswearing extra-marital love affairs. It had never occurred to her that Robin took her promise literally, and that when he said, as he was accustomed to say when they made love, ‘You're mine, mine,' he meant that she belonged to him absolutely and that she must never give anything of herself to anyone else.

Gillian hadn't been a parson's wife for sixteen years without becoming aware of the depressing incidence in every parish of gossip, malice, slander, hypocrisy, fornication, and adultery, but she still preferred to think the best of everyone. She took the view that most of the crimes that were committed in Breckham Market, from vandalism to wife-battering, were attributable to a combination of underprivilege and inadequacy. She never had the time or interest to read newspaper accounts of criminal cases, and so to discover that what powers the foulest of crimes is very often love.

As a regular churchgoer at traditional services, she was well acquainted with the Litany. Some of it she found appropriate to the last quarter of the twentieth century, but other sections seemed to her to be completely outdated. In making the ancient supplication,
From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord deliver us
, Gillian Ainger was comfortably unaware of the ever-present existence of the power of evil.

But that was before she deliberately set out to make friends outside the parish, and took Alec Reynolds and Janey Rolph home to meet her husband. Reynolds had been a widower for three years. He had loved his late wife very dearly, and the reason he took an interest in Gillian was that she reminded him in many ways of Sylvia.

He was not looking for anything other than friendship, because he was now emotionally attached to a civil-service colleague whose career had recently taken her to live and work in London. She reserved most, though not all, of her weekends for Alec Reynolds, but during the week he was always a widower again.

‘I never have a dull moment,' he told Gillian as she drank the bitter lemon he had bought her. He spoke cheerfully, but his eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were bleak, still grieving for the happy home life that Sylvia had created. Now, with the children married, the house was empty and neglected; the only attraction there was the whisky bottle. Going out as much as possible during the Monday-to-Friday six-to-midnight wasteland helped to cut down the amount of time he had to spend trying to resist temptation.

His pastimes, though, were not chosen haphazardly. Alcohol, which had never had much appeal for him when his wife was alive, had, he discovered, a dangerous effect on him. The first two glasses were enjoyably anaesthetizing, but after that there would begin a slow-burning rage at the malignant fate that had taken Sylvia from him. Then violence was liable to erupt, because Alec Reynolds in drink was not the mild, urbane man that his appearance suggested. On more than one occasion he had swept his arm across the kitchen table, sending his unwashed dishes and the remains of his Bird's Eye pizza-for-one crashing to the floor. Once, he had flung an empty bottle through the television screen. And so he had wisely opted for pastimes that would not merely keep him occupied but challenge and tire him: Russian lessons mentally, squash and sculpture physically.

‘Don't you find sculpture tough going?' he asked Gillian.

‘It's rather like all-in wrestling,' she agreed, laughing. ‘All that twisting of metal to make the armature, and then pounding the clay about and slapping it on …' Her hands, he noticed, were square and blunt and not well cared-for. They didn't attract him, as Lesley's slim, manicured hands did, but they looked steady and capable; like Sylvia's.

He told her about Sylvia, and also about Lesley and her disinclination to abandon her career and settle down as the wife of a provincial senior civil servant. In return, Gillian told him something about her own life, with the doubts and all but the most superficial problems edited out.

She found Alec Reynolds pleasant and sympathetic, the kind of person she'd hoped for as a friend, someone with whom she might eventually be able to discuss her difficulties. She had assumed that any friends she made would be women, but she could see no objection to befriending a man as long as she was open about it, and invited him home as soon as possible so that her husband could get to know him too. Robin might protest about having his privacy disturbed, but she was sure that he would find it as liberating as she did to be able to talk to someone who had no connection with Breckham Market, or with clerical life.

For a woman who had been married for so long, Gillian Ainger knew dangerously little about her husband.

Minutes later, she made a second friend.

Reynolds had left her to make a promised telephone call to Lesley, and Gillian was about to talk to one of the other sculptors when a tall young man, with a voice as harsh as a kookaburra, lurched sideways and bumped against her, spilling beer on her coat.

He didn't seem to notice, but a vividly red-haired girl who was near him came immediately to Gillian's rescue, trying to brush off the wetness. ‘I'm
sorry
,' she said. Her accent was slighter and softer than the man's, but identifiably Australian. ‘I really am sorry.'

‘It wasn't your fault. Don't worry, the coat will take no harm.'

‘Can I get you a drink, to compensate?' The girl glanced disparagingly at the lanky, loose-jawed man who was regaling some Suffolk youths with an Antipodean dirty story. ‘I'll persuade Athol to pay, of course, but I'm afraid it's no use hoping he‘ll make the offer. What will you have?'

‘Thank you, but I won't. I really was just leaving.'

‘Oh,
please
.' The girl seemed distressed. Her eyes, set wide in her delicately boned face, were big with hurt. ‘Don't turn me down. I couldn't bear it if you went away thinking that
all
Australians are uncouth. Some of us are quite civilized, if only you'll give us a chance to show it. My name's Janey Rolph, by the way.'

Her striking looks had turned nearly every male head in the bar, but she seemed totally unconscious of the interest she created. All her attention was focused on Gillian who, too kind-hearted to snub her, introduced herself and accepted another bitter lemon.

‘I really mustn't stay long, though,' said Gillian. ‘I live in a market town half an hour's drive away, and I didn't tell my husband I'd be late.'

‘I was brought up in a small town too, not far – well, seventy miles – from Brisbane,' said Janey. ‘Would you believe Birmingham, population just over a thousand? It's Athol Garrity's home town as well. I've been over here eighteen months, post-grad at the U. Athol's backpacking round Europe, and he turned up in Yarchester a couple of weeks ago looking for floor space for his bedroll. I couldn't refuse, and now it's difficult to get rid of him. He's really embarrassing. Here am I trying to live down the crude Australian image, while he's doing his best to reinforce it.'

‘And are you enjoying the university?' asked Gillian. ‘How's the research going?'

The girl's mouth took a wry downturn. ‘Slowly. Working for an M. Phil. is an isolating experience. That's why I was quite glad to see Athol again, for the first fifteen minutes anyway. Apart from a discussion with my supervisor twice a term, I'm entirely on my own. That can be very depressing, especially in winter. I hate your winters. Low grey skies give me claustrophobia.'

Janey shuddered. For a moment she looked fragile with cold and loneliness and homesickness, but then she made an effort to be positive. ‘Now that winter's over, though, I'm beginning to feel better. You can't imagine what a revelation my first English spring, last year, was. Spring in Australia comes overnight, somewhere in the middle of October. Most of our trees are evergreen, you see. This slow unfolding of greenery and blossom in April and May is incredibly beautiful. I've been reading English literature all my life, but until last year I had no idea what your poets were going on about when they wrote in praise of spring.'

Gillian was surprised and touched to hear of such deprivation. She recommended the pastoral beauty of the Suffolk countryside round Breckham Market, adding, ‘My husband's the Rector there. If ever you come out that way, you must call.'

She had never seen anyone's face so much transformed by such a simple invitation. Janey was joyful. ‘
May
I? Do you really mean it? Oh, beaut! I live in one of the student residences, and I've never yet been in an English home.'

‘Good heavens, haven't you?' Gillian was shocked by the thought of the isolation the girl must have endured. Despite her disenchantment with the parish, she had not entirely lost the impulse to spread loving-kindness, and so she plunged on without hesitation: ‘Then of course you must come! Do ring me, and we'll arrange something.' She scribbled her address and telephone number on the notepad that she carried in her handbag, tore off the sheet and gave it to Janey.

Then she checked, hearing Athol Garrity's raucous voice behind her. She didn't move in circles where obscenities were accepted in conversation, and she had no intention of extending her hospitality to anyone who used them so freely.

The girl, watching her, understood. ‘Don't worry,' Janey reassured her. ‘I'd love to come and visit you, but I certainly won't bring Athol with me. He's the last person I'd want to have around.'

Gillian assumed that it was natural delicacy that made Janey want to keep Athol away from Breckham Market Rectory, but Janey's reasons were quite different.

For all his boorishness, there wasn't a scrap of harm in Athol Garrity. He behaved with overweening masculinity because that was the social norm in Birmingham, Queensland, but he was as predictable and as relatively innocuous as a can of Fosters. Too many beers, whether Fosters or Watneys, made him loutish; but he was never cunning or violent. He had no hidden depths.

But Janey Rolph had, and Athol knew it. He knew more about her background than Janey wanted anyone outside her home town to discover. Everyone in Birmingham, Queensland, knew that Janey's father, as a young man, had driven his car to the edge of the outback, abandoned it, disappeared for three weeks, and had then emerged, bearded and unrecognized, to join in the search for himself. Everyone knew that Janey, as a small child, had watched her paternal grandmother chase her grandfather round the yard with a carving-knife. Everyone knew that Janey's mother, before finally leaving her husband, had made more than one attempt to take her own life.

What no one could be sure of was the effect that this background had had on Janey. She was attractive, she was charming, she was brilliantly clever; she was also potentially dangerous. Everyone who met her liked her, but anyone who knew the instability on both sides of her family would be wary of becoming too closely involved with her. Athol Garrity was one of many men who were fascinated by her, but the only one outside Queensland who knew better than to trust her.

Alec Reynolds went to supper at Breckham Market Rectory on the following Monday evening. The occasion was not a success.

Robin had been stiff with hurt and rising panic when Gillian suggested it. He had suspected that something like this was in the air, from the moment when she returned from her class more than an hour late, looking happier and more animated than for a very long time. He had no doubt what had caused the change. She must have found someone else. He was going to lose her.

Fear and anger made him lash at her with his voice. ‘It isn't appropriate for a married woman – particularly for a clergyman's wife – to make friends with another man.'