The Wonder Worker (70 page)

That was when the truth dawned on me. I had ranted and raved at Stacy for going to bed with someone who was married, but deep down at the bottom of my mind this was exactly the sin I myself yearned to commit. Or in other words, I was no better than poor, pathetic, pitiable Stacy whom I had so brutally condemned in an orgy of self-righteousness. A horrified remorse replaced my niggling regret but I shut it out. I would deal later, I told myself, with the mess I had made of the scene with Stacy. At the moment Nicholas required my full attention.

Repressing my desire for him by a massive act of the will, I tried to open up the channel of healing again by asking God to use whatever shreds of unselfish, non-possessive love remained in me to fill the vacuum created by Rosalind’s defection.

It was only then that I recalled Rosalind’s assurance to Stacy that the marriage was finished, and realised this explained Nicholas’s profound tension and unhappiness. It also occurred to me that only a marriage which was on the rocks in the worst possible way could begin to explain Rosalind’s bizarre behaviour. Much as I disliked her I had to admit that she normally gave the impression of being someone who was clever, well organised and in perfect control of her life. Yet Stacy’s seduction indicated a woman who was stupid, reckless and possibly even as nuts as Francie. Obviously I had been too cynical in jumping to the conclusion that Rosalind had been spinning lies to Stacy in order to get what she wanted. This conclusion was now looking just plain wrong. And maybe some of my other conclusions weren’t looking so right either.

All kinds of thoughts then started to crawl out of the woodwork of my mind. I was imagining a divorced Nicholas, free to marry someone much better suited to him, and the vision appalled me. I didn’t see how I could stay at the Rectory if he were to marry someone I
could like, someone who would live there with him and be a real wife instead of a mostly absent partner; the situation would be far too painful to bear. I still passionately wanted the best for him, but if God was going to answer my prayers and send him the best possible wife, I couldn’t stay around and watch him being happy with her. I wouldn’t be able to live up to my high ideal of a selfless non-possessive love. I’d be jealous as hell and wind up wanting to scratch her eyes out. And how genuine had my selfless, non-possessive love been anyway? I might honestly have wanted to attain the ideal, but reality, buried deep at the bottom of my mind, had lain quite elsewhere.

Acknowledging how much I desired Nicholas enabled me to see for the first time what had really lain behind my violent dislike of Rosalind. I hadn’t been just “a bit” jealous, as I had sunnily confessed to myself many times previously. I’d been very, very jealous indeed. The jealousy had been easy to suppress so long as she hadn’t been around to remind me she was the woman in possession, but as soon as she had arrived at the Rectory to stake a claim I’d promptly begun to seethe with loathing and resentment. And to think I had gone on kidding myself that my love for Nicholas was utterly pure! I felt humiliated by my pathetic romantic illusions.

But meanwhile, as all these searing revelations were roaring through my brain, I was still sitting with Nicholas at the kitchen table and Nicholas himself was still upset and I was still trying to help by enfolding him with all the love, selfish and unselfish, which I possessed. It’s amazing how even in extreme distress one’s capable of doing several things at once. Remorse for the scene with Stacy, shame about my own pathetic delusions and shortcomings, grief at the thought of losing the man I loved to someone else in the future—all these powerful emotions were streaming along side by side with the concern for Nicholas which made me long to be a healing presence in that room.

He was talking about the three-day retreat he was planning to make with the Fordite monks and saying that he didn’t want to go after all. I knew it couldn’t be because he wanted to stay with Rosalind; he had already announced at dinner that she would be leaving for Butterfold in the morning—well, of course she would be; I was sure her prime desire now would be to escape from the scene of the disgusting behaviour with Stacy. But I didn’t think Nicholas knew anything about that particular incident. She wouldn’t have told him. And Stacy hadn’t. And I couldn’t. All I could do, when he said he didn’t want to go on retreat, was to beg him to stay at the Rectory,
but he was still under the illusion that it would be helpful to shut himself up with a bunch of monks for seventy-two hours, and I knew I could say nothing to dissuade him. Of course he was wrong. He needed to be loved and looked after in his own home—or so it seemed to me, but then I didn’t really understand all that business about retreats and spiritual exercises. I just understood how it felt to be intolerably anxious about the future and desperately unhappy in consequence, but maybe the monks had some magic mystical cure which was far superior to anything I could offer to help him endure the pain.

“Thanks, Alice,” said Nicholas at the end of our conversation. “Thanks for everything.” And I realised not only that he knew how hard I’d been trying to help by enfolding him with love, but that he was sorry he could only exude his notorious detachment in response.

I went back to bed and wept at the thought of losing him to the perfect wife who would inevitably appear once he was free.

How self-centred I was being! And how pathetic I was too, loving this man who was never in a million years going to find me physically attractive! Wholly immersed in the most disgusting self-pity I prayed to God for the strength to behave with dignity once the new wife arrived.

It seems so terrible to me now in retrospect that I never once prayed for Stacy.

X

Nicholas
left early the next morning, well before the eight o’clock service, and Stacy never left the curate’s flat until the communal breakfast had finished. I did rush out into the hall to try to catch him before he left for work but he was too quick for me. By that time I was feeling so guilty about the hash I’d made of our conversation that I could hardly wait to apologise.

But I never saw him alive again. I was at the supermarket when Lewis decided Stacy was unwell and sent him home, but it seems likely now that Stacy went not to the Rectory but to Gil Tucker’s vicarage half a mile away. The appointment in Harley Street was kept but I never heard Stacy when he returned home afterwards; I think the dishwasher must have been going full blast in the kitchen as I cleared up after lunch. Normally I would always have heard Stacy shutting the front door with a crash and bounding up the stairs, but
we were all such a long way now from normality, and Stacy was drifting silently through the house like a ghost.

Later I went into the hall to answer the front doorbell—the caller was just a salesman who needed to be rerouted to the Healing Centre—and when I turned back towards the kitchen I saw there was a note for me on the hall table. It said: “Alice, I’m upstairs and I’ve got to be alone. No meals, please. Sorry I upset you so much, but don’t worry, I’m going to put everything right.
STACY.
”

I tried buzzing him on the intercom but he didn’t answer. I even went up to his flat and knocked on the door but there was no reply and the door itself, unusually, was locked. At last, realising I had to respect his wish to be alone, I reluctantly retreated downstairs.

As soon as Lewis returned from work I said I was very worried about Stacy, but Lewis, who had been overdoing it as usual, was too exhausted to pay much attention. He said: “I’ll talk to him later,” and then announced his intention of having a nap. He also said he was too tired to eat dinner—this was an unprecedented acknowledgement of his invalid status—and that I might as well take the evening off.

About half an hour later the phone rang, but just as I was on the point of answering it Lewis picked up the receiver of the extension in his room. I assumed he had forgotten to switch off the bell before passing out and I felt sorry his nap was being interrupted. I hoped he was still sufficiently exhausted to flop back into unconsciousness as soon as the call was finished.

But Lewis left the house ten minutes later. By that time I was downstairs in the basement and making some spaghetti bolognese for myself, so I didn’t have the chance to ask him what was going on. I merely assumed it was some emergency or other and went on cooking.

When I finished I buzzed Stacy’s flat again in the hope that he might now be hungry enough to share my meal with me, but still there was no answer and when I sat down with my plate of spaghetti I found myself quite unable to eat.

Just over an hour later Lewis returned to the house with Nicholas, and shortly afterwards Nicholas came downstairs to tell me Stacy had committed suicide.

The guilt I experienced was unbearable. The grief was devastating. And then, very slowly, as the full extent of the crisis dawned on me, I began to realise that I was terrified.

I

With Lewis
sitting beside me I tried hard to repeat every word of my last conversation with Stacy but my memory kept blacking out. At the end all I could whisper was: “I failed him. It was wrong of me to be so angry. I should have been so very much kinder.”

“Not necessarily,” said Lewis in his crispest voice before Nicholas could speak. “In my opinion it would have been a big mistake if you’d repressed your revulsion and simpered over him like some half-baked social worker—it would have been a betrayal of your integrity. The plain truth is that priests have a duty to preach that adultery’s wrong and a layperson has the right to expect priests to practise what they preach.”

Shedding another tear I was unable to reply.

As if realising this judgement might be too brutal, Lewis added in a gentler voice: “Since priests are only human there are going to be times when they can’t live up to their ideals, but if any layperson hears of a serious clerical lapse the priest concerned certainly shouldn’t be surprised by an angry reaction. Stacy would have known that, and
I’m sure he wouldn’t have blamed you for reacting as you did. He would have realised the fault was his for confiding in you.”

“What Lewis is saying,” interposed Nicholas the moment Lewis paused for breath, “is that Stacy should have confided in either his spiritual director or in some other priest. And he’s saying that not because lay people need to be protected like children; he’s saying it because a priest who gets in a moral mess needs expert counselling. Stacy’s situation was a nightmare. You couldn’t be expected to cope. In fact the scene you’ve described might well have floored even the most gifted spiritual director.”

“Exactly!” said Lewis the moment Nicholas’s sentence was finished. “Alice, the fact that you lost control of the scene doesn’t mean you were either wicked or insensitive. It just means you lacked the experience to make the correct pastoral moves.”

“And even if you’d made the right moves—whatever the right moves could possibly have been here—I believe Stacy would still have killed himself,” resumed Nicholas, speaking equally firmly. “He had deep-seated problems which had nothing to do with you at all, and you yourself weren’t in a position to solve any of them. You criticised yourself for not being kinder to him, Alice, but in fact to try to heal Stacy at that point by a display of kindness would have been as effective as trying to patch up a fatal knife-wound with a strip of sticking-plaster.”

“He’s right,” said Lewis to me before I could draw breath to speak. Their shared speech was seamless, delivered without faltering, the manifestation of a skill developed through years of working together. Then suddenly a jarring note marred the harmony. Leaning forward Nicholas, in a wordless gesture of comfort, clasped my hand, and as I caught my breath in surprise I was acutely aware of Lewis freezing with disapproval on the sofa beside me. At once he tried to gloss over this reaction by lighting a cigarette. The flame flared. The smoke curled upwards. Through the bluish haze I saw Nicholas look away as he casually withdrew his fingers.

“We mustn’t forget,” said Lewis, abruptly resuming the speech, “that it was Stacy’s decision to end his life, no one else’s. We may all feel to some degree responsible for what’s happened, but we’ve got to fight the urge to see this tragedy entirely through the distorting lense of our guilt.” He waited for Nicholas to speak but when the silence lengthened he added incisively: “All of that means, Alice my dear, that you shouldn’t assume a degree of guilt which is misplaced and
unjustified. That’s easy for me to say, of course, and not so easy for you to do. But for your own sake you should try.”

I was grateful to him for the advice and grateful to both of them for providing me with a clearer perspective on the tragedy, but I found I could no longer talk about my emotions. It was too painful, and besides … I was in a state of emotional chaos because Nicholas had abandoned his cast-iron detachment when he had reached out to take my hand.

Trying to focus solely on Stacy I heard myself ask: “How likely is it that he had HIV?”

“All that matters,” said Lewis, “is that it’s a possibility that can’t be ruled out.”

In the silence that followed I was sure we were all thinking of Rosalind.

“The trouble is that scientists seem to change their mind every five minutes about AIDS,” Lewis said when Nicholas remained silent. “In the beginning we were told any one-night stand could pass it on but if that’s so, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of cases among heterosexuals?”

“We’re just about to,” said Nicholas at once, finally driven to speak again. “That’s why there’s all this current talk about compulsory testing. It’s an attempt to control the future heterosexual epidemic.”