The Shape of Snakes (9 page)

The original vicarage was an impressive Victorian mansion, hidden behind high hedges, with a real estate agent's board outside, advertising a "desirable penthouse flat" for sale. The new vicarage was a cheaply constructed cube, across the road from the church, lacking both charm and character. As I parked outside at exactly two o'clock, I was beginning to wish I'd had the sense to spend the last hour in a pub. Dutch courage would have been better than no courage at all. A part of me thought about driving away with my tail between my legs, but I noticed a net curtain twitch in a downstairs window and knew I'd been seen. Pride is always a stronger motivator than courage.

The door was opened by a tall, cadaverous-looking woman with a beak of a nose, shoulder-length grey hair and the speed of delivery of a machine gun. "You must be Mrs. Ranelagh," she said, taking my hand and drawing me inside. "I'm Wendy Stanhope. Peter's running late. It's his morning at the shelter. Battered wives, poor souls. Come into the kitchen. He told me you were driving from Dorchester. Are you hungry? What about a drink? Chardonnay, do you?"

I followed her across the tiny hall. "Thank you." I looked around the white melamine kitchen which was mind-numbingly uniform and hardly big enough to swing a cat. "This is nice."

She thrust a glass into my hand with long, bony fingers. "Do you think so?" she asked in surprise. "I can't stand it myself. I much preferred the one we had in Richmond. The church doesn't give you much choice, you see. You have to make do with whatever pokey little kitchen they give you." She took a breath. "But there you go." she went on cheerfully, "I've only myself to blame. No one forced me to marry a vicar."

"Has it been a good life?"

She filled her own glass and tapped it against mine. "Oh, yes, I don't have many regrets. I wonder sometimes what it might have been like to be a lap dancer, but I try not to dwell on it." Her eyes twinkled mischievously. "What about you, my dear?"

"I don't think I've got the body for it," I said.

She laughed happily. "I meant, has life been good to you? You're looking well, so I assume it must have been."

"It has," I said.

She waited for me to go on and, when I didn't, she said brightly, "Peter tells me you've been living abroad. Was that exciting? And you've two boys, I believe?"

There was so much blatant curiosity in her over-thin face that I took pity on her-it wasn't her fault that her husband was late-and talked enthusiastically about our years abroad and our children. She studied me over the rim of her glass while I spoke, and there was a shrewd glint in her eyes that I didn't much like, I wasn't used to having people see straight through me, not after so many years of growing an impenetrable skin.

"We've been lucky." I finished lamely.

She looked amused. "You're almost as good a liar as I am," she said matter-of-factly. "Most of the time I can contain my frustration, but every so often I drive to a wide-open space, usually a cliff top, and scream my head off. Peter knows nothing about it, of course, because if he did he'd think I was mad and I simply couldn't bear to have him fussing round me." She shook her Lear-like locks in grotesque parody of a lap dancer. "It's quite absurd. We've been married forty years, we have three children and seven grandchildren, yet he has no idea how much I resent the utter futility of my existence. I'd have made an excellent vicar, but my only choice was to play second fiddle to a man."

"Is that why you scream?"

She refilled my glass. "It's more fun than having a hangover," she said.
 

Psychiatric report on
Mrs. M. Ranelagh-dated 1979

Queen Victoria Hospital

Hong Kong
Dept. of Psychiatry

A consultation was requested for Mrs. M. Ranelagh of 12 Greenhough Lane, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, by her general practitioner, Dr. J. Tang, querying postpartum depression after the birth of her son, Luke (DOB 20.10.79). According to her husband, she has been suffering from depression for some time. She refuses all medication. Mrs. Ranelagh had a two-hour consultation with Dr. Joseph Elias on December 19, 1979.

(The following extracts are taken from Dr. Elias's report, which was released to Mrs. Ranelagh in February 1999.)

...Mrs. Ranelagh was a difficult patient. She insisted on making it clear from the outset that her only reason for attending was to prove once and for all that she wasn't suffering from depression. She was uncooperative and angry. She expressed considerable hostility toward "men in authority" and "people who throw their weight about," and referred to "coercion," "bullying" and "intimidation" on a number of occasions. When I suggested to her that, far from persuading me to give her a clean bill of health, such statements were leading me to question the existence of a paranoid disorder, she agreed to cooperate.

...She admits to feelings of emotional turmoil following various events that happened at the end of last year and the beginning of this in London. She refused to discuss these in any detail for fear of confirming my suspicion of paranoia, however, she touched on three-two of a highly personal nature-to explain her "anger." She produced a number of newspaper clippings as evidence that the first incident had occurred-the death of a black woman-but was unable to support her other allegations. Without independent confirmation, I cannot say whether the subsequent incidents a) happened or b) are a construct to validate her sense of injustice re the black woman's death.

...The main focuses of her resentment are her husband (resident with her in Hong Kong) and mother (resident in England), whom, for various reasons, she feels betrayed her. This has resulted in a "coldness" toward them, which she "needs time to overcome." She describes her pregnancy as "ill-conceived"-(pun intentional?)-pointing to the difficulties of starting a new life abroad while carrying a baby to term. She talks lovingly about the child, calling it "my baby," while blaming her husband for "exposing her to an unplanned pregnancy." She retains a close bond with her father (resident in England), whom she contacts regularly by telephone and who is her only confidant. In addition, she listed a number of related problems: a dislike of being touched; feelings of insecurity when alone in her house; an obsession with hygiene; dislike of certain sounds-i.e. doorbells, London accents, rats scratching(?).

...I advised her against forging alliances-particularly with her father, who is "conducting some research" for her-which her husband will almost certainly see as betrayal if he finds out. I also pointed to the potential danger of making an ally of her son as he matures. She concurred on both counts, but remains adamant that her marriage will end tomorrow if she forces another confrontation with her husband. This is not what she wants. She rejected my offer of a joint session with herself and Mr. Ranelagh, as she believes that neither of them would be able to talk honestly without causing the immediate separation referred to above. Her feelings for her husband are confused. She seems to retain a close bond with him despite her resentment and believes her decision earlier this year to stay in the marriage was the right one. Nevertheless she is intent on punishing him for sins of "omission and commission."

...Mrs. Ranelagh presents herself as an intelligent, self-aware woman who is trying to come to terms with some extremely unpleasant, and as yet unresolved, issues in her life. Once satisfied that she had persuaded me she was not a "depressive"-a view I encouraged-she talked at length about her intention to seek "closure," although she is clearly ambivalent about what sort of closure she wants. In simple terms, she prefers the more anodyne description of "justice" for her black friend to the rather more accurate one of "revenge" for herself.

...When I warned her that prolonged internalized anger, be it well-founded or capricious, could lead to the sort of paranoid disorder-persecutory, delusional, phobic-that she was so determined to dissociate herself from, she said the damage had already been done. "I'm between a rock and a hard place, Dr. Elias. I'm a coward if I give in and a neurotic bitch if I fight back."

...In conclusion, I can find no evidence of depression in this patient. She is obsessive and extremely manipulative, but is also well in command of herself. I found her rather frightening...

*6*

In the end I exchanged less than twenty words with Peter Stanhope. He bustled in half an hour late, full of apologies for the delay, only to be sidetracked almost immediately by a telephone call. Pausing only to say it was important, he disappeared into his study and left his wife to murmur courtesies into the receiver until he picked up the extension. It hardly mattered. Wendy was a mine of information, and I was fairly sure they weren't the sort of facts I would ever have had from her husband since most of it was gossip, and some of it was scurrilous.

While waiting for Peter's return we had transferred to the sitting room, where Wendy had tried to relieve me of my small single-shoulder rucksack, not realizing that it was held by a buckle across my chest. She was surprised by how heavy it was and how reluctant I was to let it go. I relented enough to unbuckle the chest strap and lower it to the sofa beside me- but if she wondered why I needed to bring the kitchen sink on my travels she was too polite to say anything. I was clearly an enigma to her, for whatever picture she had in her rnind of a crusading zealot it certainly wasn't me.

She made a small moue as she replaced the receiver, and I wondered how often she was left to hold the fort and how accommodating Peter would be if their roles were reversed and she were the vicar and he the helpmeet. My expression must have been more revealing than I realized.

"Has he let you down, my dear?" she said into the silence.

"Not at all," I assured her. "I wanted to talk about Annie's neighbors on Graham Road and I think you probably know more about them anyway."

She fixed me with her all-seeing eyes. "I meant in the past," she said gently. "Did he let you down before?"

"In a way," I said, looking about the room to avoid looking at her. "He told me I was hysterical when I wasn't." Wendy was apparently a collector of porcelain figures because every surface seemed to have them. She had a fine array of white Dresden ladies along her mantelpiece and some tiny hand-painted birds in a small glass cabinet on the wall. Photographs were her other love, with pictures of her family everywhere, and a huge blown-up snapshot of seven laughing children on one wall. "Who are they?" I asked, nodding in their direction.

She accepted the change of tack without demur. "My grandchildren. It was one of those rare moments when they all looked their best." She gave a little chuckle. "Usually one of them can be relied on to scowl."

"Who took it?"

"I did."

"It's brilliant," I said truthfully. "Forget being a vicar, you should have been a professional photographer."

"I was for a time ... well, semiprofessional. I used to do the weddings at St. Mark's, particularly for the couples who didn't have much money to spend." She pulled open a drawer in a desk to one side of the fireplace and produced a bulging photograph album. "I think this might interest you. Most of Annie's neighbors are in here somewhere."

She passed it across to me and I flicked my way through a pictorial history of weddings, christenings, funerals and feast-day services at St. Mark's. The pictures from the '70s made me smile because the fashions were so dated-men in suits with flared trousers, frilly shirts and chunky identity bracelets; women with big hair, wearing empire-line dresses and sling-back shoes. There was even a picture of me at Annie's funeral, twenty-four years old and desperately self-conscious in a brand-new black maxi-overcoat which hadn't fitted properly and gave me the look of an orphan in someone else's cast-offs. I recognized very few of the faces because they weren't all from my era, but some I remembered.

"Why did you take so many?" I asked Wendy. "You can't have been paid for all of them."

"I thought it would be interesting for future generations," she said. "I wanted to leave copies with the parish register so that when people came looking for information about their families, there'd be a visual record as well as a written one." She laughed. "It wasn't a very good idea. There was so much time and paperwork involved in cross-referencing pictures with written entries that I got snowed under very quickly. After that I went on doing it for fun."

She does a lot of things for fun
, I thought, warming to her. I even began to wonder if I could excuse what I was doing in the same way. Would anyone accept that I was asking questions about Annie's death because I was bored? I touched a finger to a picture of a family group. "The Charleses," I said. "They lived next door to us at number 3."

Wendy moved across to sit next to me on the sofa. "Paul and Julia, plus two children whose names I can't remember. Peter christened one of them and it howled nonstop throughout the service. These were the christening photographs."

"Jennifer," I told her. "She used to cry all night. Sam went 'round once to read the riot act because we couldn't sleep for the row that was going on, but Julia was so exhausted she burst into tears on the doorstep and he couldn't bring himself to do it. After that we took to wearing ear plugs. Jennifer's about twenty-four now and working as a solicitor in Toronto. The whole family emigrated to Canada in 1980."

"Goodness me! You
are
well informed."

"I recognize this man's face," I said, pointing to another picture.