Glittering Images (61 page)

‘Well, I weighed everything up – I’m horribly calculating, Charles, you’ll like me less and less as this narrative progresses, but I’ve had to be calculating, had to be tough – how else could I have survived after Daddy had gone off to die a hero’s death in the War? Bloody wars! Bloody heroes! Why the
hell
couldn’t he have come home instead of leaving me alone like that? He left me with nothing,
nothing
except a mother who wilted uselessly on a chaiselongue, and once she was gone I had to endure that ghastly hole in Norfolk with no money, no decent education, no real companionship, just cast-off clothes, boredom and despair – my God! I spent my youth feeling like a kitten flung into a rain-barrel to drown.

‘However there I was, paddling away and somehow keeping my head above water, and I thought I could use Thomas to crawl out of the rain-barrel. But as I was so afraid of
knowing all
I said to Thomas: “Before I can possibly decide whether or not to marry you I must know exactly what marriage entails.” Actually I thought it was a most sensible suggestion, but of course he was horrified. He was a respectable young man pursuing the respectable girl from the vicarage – only to find she’d turned into a trollop! He broke off the friendship in a fine flurry of self-righteousness, but he came crawling back later. Well, men usually do, don’t they? They can seldom bear to resist a good offer when it comes to sex …

‘Anyway I wound up in Thomas’s hay-loft
knowing all
, and naturally it wasn’t nearly as bad as the nightmare concocted by my imagination. I think what surprised me most about it was the sheer banality. I wasn’t revolted, just amazed that anyone could be bothered to do it more than once. I certainly knew
I
didn’t want to bother – no, thanks! – so I had to tell Thomas that marriage simply wasn’t on. Poor Thomas! But I don’t feel sorry for him, not now, because I know that if we’d married I’d have made him very miserable.

‘Well, then the blow fell, my great-uncle died and the Church served me notice to quit the vicarage. But I didn’t sink into despair. I was too angry. I thought: that damned bishop in Norwich ought to do something about me! So I went to see him and demanded a job. The Bishop fluttered around in a purple panic, but by coincidence one of his guests at the time was the Bishop of Radbury, and the Bishop of Radbury thought at once of his new Dean.

‘I went to Radbury for my interview. Do you know the Deanery there? A beautiful Georgian townhouse with ten bedrooms, much nicer than Thomas’s faded rural home – oh, as soon as I arrived I knew the situation had
tremendous
possibilities! I was nervous of meeting Mrs Jardine, but as soon as I saw her I recognized the type and was confident I could cope. Mrs Jardine was a much sweeter, much more lovable version of Mummy – the sort of female designed by God to decorate chaise-longues and drive husbands to drink – or to die a hero’s death in some hellish war. However I could see Carrie liked me so I knew the first hurdle had been overcome. But then I had to have my interview with the Dean.

‘Carrie took me to his study. I was expecting to meet a white-haired portly old buffer – have you ever noticed how many eminent clerics are white-haired portly old buffers? – so you can imagine how I felt when I first set eyes on Adam Alex Jardine.

‘He was forty-eight. I was twenty-five. I took one look and finally realized what
knowing all
was all about. I think I actually went weak at the knees – can you imagine it! One never expects a clergyman to have an effect like a matinée idol, yet it’s by no means a rare phenomenon – I remember reading once about a Victorian clergyman who inspired all the women in his congregation to faint in their pews, and I thought at once: that’s like Alex Jardine. Clergymen have extra allure too because they’re trying to lead a decent life, and every woman secretly dreams of a real stunner who can somehow stop himself rolling around in the mud like all the other swine – although of course she wants him to roll around in the mud with her. I’m sorry, Charles, are you absolutely appalled by my frankness? Maybe you’d better have some brandy too. But this is it, Charles, this is what I’m like behind my mask – cool, calculating and obsessed with sex. All that well-chilled propriety was just an act.

‘Well, if this were a D. H. Lawrence novel, Jardine and I would have straightaway leapt into bed together, but life isn’t quite so simple as either the modern novelists or the Victorian novelists seem to think it is. In real life people are much more shadowy, and life is much more uncertain, more unpredictable, more mysterious; people can be a lot worse than they are in novels, but they can be a lot better too.’ She paused. Then she said: ‘Alex –’ and paused again.

The two intimate syllables hung in the air between us. The curtain came down on the first act, the curtain went up on the second, but all I said as I added a dash of brandy to my sodawater was, ‘Go on.’

‘Alex was – and is – a good man,’ said Lyle, holding out her glass for a refill. That’s the point I want to make crystal clear because unless you understand that you’ll understand nothing. He’s good – and he’s devout. If it had been otherwise he couldn’t have survived, Charles; he wouldn’t be where he is today.

‘But I didn’t understand that when we first met. You see, although I’d spent so much time in a clerical household I knew next to nothing about either devout clergymen or a truly religious life. My great-uncle was so old and only interested in butterflies; he just regarded being a clergyman as having a safe roof over his head and a duty to be polite to his neighbours. As for religion I thought it was something people did on Sundays. I had rather a grudge against God, in fact, for allowing Daddy to be killed. Intellectually I knew about Christianity but spiritually I was illiterate so when I realized Alex found me attractive I just sat back and waited for him to make a pass. After all, other men always had. But the next thing I knew was that Alex was trying to get rid of me.

‘I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned. It made me realize how ignorant I was and how the world was so much more complicated than I’d imagined. I felt very cheap. It was as if someone fine had shone a spotlight on me and revealed this revolting heap of flesh and bones … Do you remember how St Augustine felt about himself when he realized how he looked in the eyes of God before his conversion? Well, I felt like St Augustine. And like him I hated myself and just wanted to be a good Christian. I can’t honestly say I was immediately transformed by the call of God because I wasn’t. I went on being much the same but I grew up a bit, became a little humbler, a little more aware of my own ignorance, a little more determined to find out what being a Christian was really all about.

‘Meanwhile I wasn’t sacked after all because Carrie had had hysterics at the thought of losing me, and suddenly I felt so sorry for Alex having not only this ghastly problem of his wife – of course I’d soon summed up the marital situation – but also this ghastly problem of me smouldering away under his nose that I thought: if I really love him I’ll help him out. So I told him I hadn’t come into his household to wreck his career but to make it possible for him to go all the way to the House of Lords. I was so nervous that I sounded rude and defiant, and at first I thought Alex would explode with rage but he didn’t. In the end he laughed. He laughed and said, “What a girl!”

‘Then he became businesslike. “You’ve been frank with me,” he said, “and that took courage. Now I’ll be frank with you. All I want is to serve God to the best of my ability but my problems keep getting in the way. If we can form a partnership in which you take care of my problems and leave me free to serve God, then I swear you need never be homeless again. But the only way we can form a partnership, Miss Christie, is for us both to forget about turning our life at the Deanery into some wild cross between
Barchester Towers
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Am I making myself absolutely clear?” I assured him that he was. “Very well, I’ll give you a new three-months’ trial,” he said, “and we’ll see how we both get on.” I said, “Splendid!” and we shook hands.

‘That was how it all began. Innocent, wasn’t it? And both of us only trying to be good and decent. The streets of hell aren’t paved with champagne, loose women and fast cars, as that old fool Bishop Winnington-Ingram said once. They really are paved with the very best intentions.

‘Of course Alex should have stuck to his guns and dismissed me. But Carrie … poor darling sweetest Carrie … If I hadn’t been there to run the Deanery and soothe her out of her nervous breakdown she’d have ruined his career. I couldn’t help being fond of Carrie – and it wasn’t just because she was so hard to dislike; it was because she really did love me as a daughter. Never having wanted children myself I had no idea until then what hell women go through when they want to have children and can’t, and Carrie had been through hell. Alex had suffered too but he was in a better position to cope; he had his work to occupy him and he always had plenty of chances to work off his frustrated fatherhood among the choirboys and ordinands who trooped past him continually, but Carrie had no one to mother until I came.

‘I asked her why they’d never adopted, but Alex had taken the line that one never quite knew what one was getting with a strange baby and he’d rather take an unofficial interest in people who were older. Well, that was all right for him, but it was tough on her. However she never argued with Alex, not by that time; she’d tried arguing with him in the early days of the marriage about his stepmother, but by the time I arrived at the Deanery Alex was God, in her eyes, and his word was law. Ironically that was part of the marital problem. Alex needs to be screamed at occasionally – he can’t stand it when Carrie disintegrates into floods of tears because it makes him feel so guilty that he can’t love her as he should. What a pathetic marriage! I felt so sorry for them both, locked together for life with nothing in common but their incompatibility and their double-bed …

‘I expect you want to know where my obsession with sex had got to by this time, and the answer is: coming along nicely. As usual there was always some man writing me sonnets, but I couldn’t look at anyone but Alex and I used to soak myself in fantasy; I’d lie in bed and have what the clerics call “impure thoughts”. You’re probably wondering how I stood the frustration, but in fact unrequited love can be great fun – ask any schoolgirl with a crush. One burns and one yearns in blissful comfort, and nasty brutal old reality never intrudes at all … The truth was I felt wonderful, doing a job I liked, seeing the man I loved every day, enjoying stunning sex every night in my imagination – and when all was said and done that was exactly where I wanted to enjoy it; despite my feelings for Alex I still couldn’t rid myself of the nasty suspicion that real sex, even with him, was bound to be a disappointment, so the situation which had evolved at the Deanery actually suited me very well. I must be honest and admit I had my moments of jealousy but they didn’t happen very often, and that was Carrie’s shining triumph. You see, she’s the most Christian of us all – she loves Alex, she loves me, she’s always so kind and good … In the end it wasn’t Alex who brought me to a full Christian belief. It was Carrie, poor stupid helpless Carrie, but she showed me how to live a Christian life, and in the end I found myself loving her far more than I’d ever loved my vain whining self-centred mother.

‘And so we came at last to Starbridge … But are you understanding what I’m trying to say? I think you have some idea that I’m the innocent heroine enslaved by the wicked Jardines, but you see, Charles, it isn’t like that at all. Alex and Carrie are both good and devout.
I’m
the villain of the Starbridge mystery, and here’s where my villainy really begins …’

I said as I lit her second cigarette: ‘Is it really a story of heroes and villains? Surely real life is never so simple as that!’

‘Yes, I did say earlier, didn’t I, that real life is so much less clear-cut than it is in novels …’ She was calmer now. Her fingers were no longer trembling and the clasp of her hand was firm. ‘I feel better,’ she said. ‘I wonder if that’s the brandy or the confessional? I suppose it must be the brandy because I haven’t confessed anything yet except what a sex-obsessed adventuress I am.’

I said mildly, ‘Do you realize that if you were a man your initiative in getting a good job, your ingenuity in keeping it, your desire to make a success of your work, your preoccupation with sex (a preoccupation which is hardly unusual among those not called to celibacy) – all these things would be considered either admirable or, at the very least, normal?’

Without warning her eyes filled with tears. ‘You mustn’t make excuses for me. I’m so rotten, so undeserving, so unworthy –’

‘Ah yes!’ I said. ‘I used to play this scene before Father Darrow stepped in and revised my script. Cheer up! You may be unworthy but I doubt if you’re more unworthy than I am and anyway maybe we can have an interesting time being unworthy together. But let’s get back to your story. You came at last to Starbridge –’

The interval was over and the curtain went up on the third act.

‘We came at last to Starbridge,’ said Lyle, drawing deeply on her cigarette, ‘and almost at once the crisis began. It had actually been brewing for some time. I was thirty, Alex was fifty-three and Carrie was forty-eight – and Carrie had begun the change of life. Physically this was nothing dramatic; she wasn’t prostrated by dire symptoms, but mentally she went to pieces because the hope of a baby had kept her going in a difficult marriage. Alex is
not
the easiest of men to live with, and although she adored him he’d often given her a rough time with his quick temper and sharp tongue. However the desire for children had given her the strength to be what Alex calls “dutiful” – what a sickening Victorian word that is! – and although sex had never meant much to her she’d more or less managed to meet her obligations whenever she wasn’t having a nervous breakdown. But how was she now going to face a childless future? That was the big question, and the problem was compounded by the fact that she was terrified of leaving Radbury where (thanks to me) she had her life in control, and moving to a whacking great palace with twelve servants at Starbridge. Of course she still had me to help her out, but I couldn’t save her from being put on display as “Mrs Bishop” throughout the diocese.