Coincidence: A Novel (3 page)

3

October 1978

W
hile the case of the foundling girl – ‘Girl A' – had been quietly shelved by the Devon police as long ago as 1986, the case of the identity of ‘Ms C', the body found on the beach in North Devon, had never been closed. Murder has greater criminal longevity than child abandonment. Curiously, however, while the policeman from Cornwall had happily linked Ms C to Girl A, assuming that Ms C may have been Azalea's mother, no one in Devon had thought to make the reverse connection and to assign the name ‘Ives' to the dead woman. This oversight undoubtedly closed off several avenues of investigation that might have helped to identify her earlier. In the end it was a blind man, a decade later, who helped to solve the mystery. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The woman whose decomposed body had washed up on that Devon beach was a twenty-four-year-old barmaid called Marion Yves. She probably pronounced her surname ‘Ives'. You could forgive the police in the Azalea case for making such a simple mistake. Marion Yves was Azalea's mother. The Cornish policeman who wrote the report on the cold case had been right in that regard, and this without the corroborating evidence later provided by Carl Morse. Marion died when her head hit a rock on Millook Cliffs, and the reason her head hit the rock was because Morse had abducted her, had raped her and had thrown her from a clifftop. She had fallen, screaming perhaps, for one second, two seconds, until she reached the water and the rocks, and there she died. She may, of course, have been dead
before
she fell. Or she may have thrown herself from the cliff, just as her attacker had claimed. The sea has swept and cleansed the scene twice a day for thirty years; bladderwrack, barnacles and limpets have colonised the sharp and hostile stones. With virtually no forensic information available, we simply can't be sure. We don't even know which cliff she fell from, or which rock ended her life. All that Azalea would ever know of what happened to Marion in the days before her death she learned from a blind man, many years later.

Here is one thing that Azalea did eventually learn about her infancy. She learned the origin of the scar on her face.

At the christening service for Azalea, three years before Marion would meet her end on the rocks, the vicar accidentally dropped the baby into the font. The man responsible was the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender. We shouldn't blame him too much for this mistake. It happened towards the end of a career which had seen him baptise almost a thousand babies, none of whom he had dropped. Also, in mitigation, the Reverend Doctor was sixty years old, with arthritis in his hands, which made him just a little too old, and a little too infirm, to be handling babies in a cold and draughty place like the old Church of Port St Menfre where the baptism took place.
Azaliah Yves
, the church records show, would be the last baby that the Reverend Lender would ever baptise.

The problem with baptisms, the Reverend Lender would later tell Azalea, is that they always made him nervous. There would be strangers among the congregation, and they would huddle around him in a way that simply wouldn't happen during any other service. If this wasn't bad enough, the baby to be baptised nearly always screamed objection on being passed from mother to minister. This happened in the case of the girl then called Azaliah. The vicar had, in the past, clutched babies rather too tightly, out of a fear that he might drop one. With experience, he had learned that this habit could contribute to the screaming, and so he had gradually developed a lighter grip until, in time, he barely held the baby at all. In addition, Azaliah, the vicar would later explain, wore a christening gown made of a glossy material. A very glossy material. The baby simply slipped through his arms and fell, while he, the good Reverend Doctor, clawed helplessly at thin air. With a clunk and a splash the infant hit the fourteenth-century font and the screaming stopped.

The prayer book in use for the baptism of Azaliah Yves was the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer, a book that can trace its lineage back to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who edited it – and probably wrote most of it himself – in 1552. Azaliah Yves was christened on 1 October 1978, two years before the Anglican Church finally dispensed with Cranmer's elegant words and introduced their new Alternative Service Book. So the words that the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender was intoning when Azaliah slipped out of his grasp were the very same words that would have been spoken to generations of Anglican babies for the past three hundred years. ‘We receive this child into the congregation of Christ's flock,' he would have read, ‘and do sign her with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter she shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world and the Devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto her life's end. Amen.'

A thoughtful footnote to the 1815 edition of the Book of Common Prayer reads: ‘It is certain by God's Word, that children which are baptised, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved.' And for a moment or two after the dropping of Azaliah it seemed as if this amnesty might be needed to offer comfort to Ms Marion Yves. In the silence that followed the clunk and the splash there were, among the congregation, several who assumed the baby was dead. There was a gasp of almost theatrical proportions from the pews. The vicar snatched up the tiny body in its glossy wet christening gown, and all could see that Azaliah's little face was now awash with blood.

Then the baby gave a healthy enough wail, and the moment for the blessed absolution offered to the sinless passed.

What happened next was not especially edifying. Marion Yves tried to snatch her baby away from the vicar. She clearly felt that here was a man who could no longer be trusted to hold her precious offspring. By now the Reverend Lender had reverted to the tight grasp that characterised his early baptisms. He seemed determined not to allow the small matter of a dropped baby to interrupt the smooth flow of the service. He clung fiercely to Azaliah, and he attempted to avoid the lunging manoeuvre made by Marion Yves by taking a backward step. He was well into the next stanza of the service, which began: ‘Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is by Baptism regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's Church,' when Marion's voice rang out.

‘Give me back my baby,' she demanded in tones that echoed around the fine acoustics of the Plantagenet church.

The vicar contrived to appear hurt by this, and attempted to shush the overwrought mother. ‘We are quite near the end,' he said. ‘Shouldn't we just carry on?'

‘No bloody fear,' said Marion Yves, making another lunge for the baby. One version of the story has Marion using somewhat stronger language, but this may be due to the exaggeration that often accompanies tales repeated frequently over time.

Whatever words were used, the vicar was not to be easily diverted. In a thousand christenings he had never failed to reach the end of the service, despite the cries of some very vocal babies. ‘Please,' he implored, ‘we are nearly at the end. The baby isn't fully baptised yet.' He struggled to keep hold of Azaliah in what was becoming a rather unseemly tug of war.

The contretemps at the font was not the only unconventional feature of Azaliah's christening; another was the exceptional number of godparents. The usual pattern, prescribed since Cranmer's day, was for two godparents comprising one of each gender. But for this service, in a very uncharacteristic concession, the priest had agreed to Marion's request to admit three godfathers and a single godmother. All three godfathers looked acutely discomfited by the dropping of the baby and the subsequent attempts by Marion to seize her child back. This was when John Hall, one of the new godfathers, intervened.

Just moments before the fracas, we can presume that John Hall had been promising, in all solemnity, to renounce the Devil and all his works, to reject the vain pomp and glory of the world and equally (and highly improbably in John Hall's case) to renounce the carnal desires of the flesh. Now, however, he lumbered into the fray and relieved the vicar of the baby. For an instant it looked as if he might also deliver an uppercut.

‘Please,' protested the vicar weakly, ‘she isn't baptised yet.'

‘She needs a bloody doctor, not a baptism,' said Hall, passing Azaliah to her mother.

‘But we've so nearly finished.'

‘Stuff it,' said Marion, taking the baby from Hall, ‘we've had enough.'

‘But my child,' insisted the vicar, ‘in the eyes of the Church we have yet to . . .'

‘Stuff your bloody baptism,' crowed Marion, ‘and stuff all this.' She flung her Book of Common Prayer with all of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's finely crafted words at the vicar. The book bounced off him and landed in the cold water of the font with a splash.

‘Come on,' Marion cried to the congregation. ‘We're going.' Whereupon she, and the three godfathers, and Azaliah Yves covered with her own blood and still only partially baptised, and a dozen or more of the assembled worshippers, stalked out of the church and into the secular world that lay beyond.

4

June 2012

T
here is jeopardy, Thomas Post thinks, in cultivating a psychoanalyst as a friend. How much of the friendship is sincere? Can he ever escape her instinct to analyse? If he whiles away time in her company, is she, perhaps, still at work, surreptitiously psychoanalysing him?

Dr Clementine Bielszowska may not be the most prepossessing of characters, sunk in her chair like a little weathered owl, peering through her half-moon spectacles, intemperately tapping her walking stick on the wooden floor; but as a psychoanalyst her reputation is exalted. No matter, as she would airily say to Thomas with a dismissive wave, that she hasn't practised for almost thirty years; no matter that she engagingly disavows the discipline. ‘I don't even
believe
most of it,' she often says. Perhaps this is true; but she is nonetheless a disciple of Freud and Jung, and she does still tutor students in the dark arts. It isn't hard to imagine her with a notebook and pen in a wing armchair, lips tightly pursed, while a patient on a couch agonises over buried infatuations, complexes and phobias. It isn't difficult either, as she hunkers down in Thomas's fifth-floor office, to imagine her agile mind at work on Thomas's fragile psyche.

Thomas has turned away from the window and is looking forlorn. His visitor gazes at him with calculating eyes. ‘Explain it to me,' she says.

‘Explain what?' Thomas strikes a faintly defensive pose.

‘A little while ago you said that you thought Azalea might be dead.' She is tapping on the floorboards with the rubber end of her stick.

‘No I didn't. I said . . . I said she isn't dead
yet
.'

‘It's the “yet” that I don't understand. And you said that her coincidences were . . . what? Proof of something?'

He is wide-eyed now. ‘Evidence,' he says, ‘not necessarily proof. But compelling, all the same.'

‘Evidence of what? Destiny?'

‘It's a good word, “destiny”. Yes. I do like destiny.' He ponders this, tugging uncomfortably on his earlobe. ‘Or “kismet”, as the Turks say, which implies . . . I don't know . . .' he swings his arm around as if in search of a thesaurus, ‘predetermination.'

‘Predetermination?'

‘Or something like it.' He gives a grin that radiates apprehension. He isn't comfortable with this line of questioning. His limbs are twitching as if assailed by invisible needles. He turns his face away. ‘What if I don't have an explanation?'

‘My dear boy,' she says, ‘you
always
have an explanation.'

‘Do I?'

‘You do.'

He relaxes just a little. ‘The Japanese have a good word: “hitsuzen”.'

‘ “Hitsuzen”?' She puckers her lips on the unfamiliar term.

‘Hitsuzen is an event that happens according to some preordained plan or design. Something that was always
supposed
to happen.'

‘A bit like Insha'Allâh?'

‘A bit. “Deo volente” is what the early Christians would have said. If God wishes. Hitsuzen is more a property of a past event. Something happened because it
was
hitsuzen. Because it was supposed to happen. The Japanese also have the word “guzen”, which is something that occurs by chance. A guzen doesn't belong to any greater scheme of things. It's just random, if you like. In Japanese philosophy, everything that happens is either guzen or hitsuzen.'

Clementine Bielszowska exhales. ‘You're losing the thread,' she says. ‘Can we stick to English?'

‘If you insist.'

‘I do.' She offers him a benign smile.

‘You need to promise me something.'

‘Usually when someone says that it's a good time not to promise anything at all,' she says.

‘I don't want you to psychoanalyse me,' he says. ‘This isn't that kind of problem.'

‘In that case,' she says, ‘it is a very easy promise to make.'

‘I'm serious, Clementine.'

‘So am I, dear boy.' She is observing him with professional relish.

‘There is nothing in this story that you can help me with,' he says. ‘There are no neuroses to resolve. There are no fixes. In six days it will all be over, one way or another. Azalea will be dead. Or she won't be.'

A shadow interrupts the stream of sunshine from the narrow window. A pigeon has landed on the windowsill. It bobs its head expectantly, peering through the glass.

‘He comes for crumbs,' Thomas says. He takes a biscuit from a tin, crumbles it in his hand and opens the window. The pigeon retreats a little way. Thomas scatters the fragments on the sill, and in moments the bird is back.

Thomas settles himself again in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should tell you the story of the seagull,' he says.