The Wonder Worker (72 page)

Lewis stepped forward, propped one crutch against the wall, scooped James from my arms, dumped him on the floor and hugged me. It was a very fast one-armed manoeuvre but it was quite definitely a hug. As he turned away he said to Nicholas: “Now it’s your turn to squirm at the sight of an excessive tactile gesture—and when you’ve finished squirming you can call the police.”

But Nicholas was barely listening. He was looking straight into my eyes and saying: “If the police ask about Rosalind you must tell them the truth.”

“Of course. I shall answer every question truthfully. But they don’t know there are any questions to ask about Rosalind, do they?”

Lewis said suddenly: “What Alice said just now chimes with the suicide note—it’s obviously what Stacy wanted us to say. So why couldn’t we have seen that from the start, Nicholas? Why have we been tying ourselves in knots like this?”

“Guilt. So long as we focused on the gay issue and the Rosalind disaster we could avoid admitting how thoroughly we mishandled him for so long.” Without warning he slumped down on the sofa before exclaiming with despair: “How are we ever going to come to terms with all this?”

“Shut up!” said Lewis savagely—so savagely that I knew he too was shattered. “Save all that for later. Now call the blank-blank emergency services before we’re all arrested for trying to conceal a corpse.”

Without another word Nicholas trudged back upstairs to make the call.

V

When
we were alone I said to Lewis: “Sorry I yelled at you about teeth-bashing.”

“I’m sure any woman would say I got what I deserved. Sit down, my dear, and rest for a moment. This is the kind of situation which can slice one to ribbons in less time than it takes to say ‘catastrophe.’ ”

We sat down together again on the sofa and I stared blankly at the
far wall, but eventually I dredged up the energy to remark: “I hate the thought that Francie might wind up in the witness-box at the inquest.”

“You couldn’t hate it more than I do.” Lewis started to give me the latest report on her nuttiness. Apparently she had met Nicholas at Westminster Abbey earlier that evening and Nicholas had only been able to escape by running away.

“But why on earth did Nicholas suggest a meeting in Westminster Abbey?”

“It’s a long story, but the short version is that he thought he could best defuse her there.”

“I can’t imagine how he came to that conclusion! Lewis, supposing she turns up at the Rectory tonight just as she did last Monday?”

“No, that won’t happen because Harry’s just come home from Hong Kong. The odds are we’ve got Francie on ice until Monday.”

“And then what happens?”

“Then we’ve got to defuse her, but how that’s going to be done I’ve no idea. I doubt if she’d ever consent to see a psychiatrist and so long as she can keep up an appearance of normality we’d never get her sectioned.”

“Sectioned?”

“Confined to a mental hospital under a certain section of the Mental Health Act.”

“But couldn’t she be heading for a complete nervous breakdown?”

“Possibly but not necessarily. The trouble is that without a diagnosis by a psychiatrist who’s spent time with her, we can’t be sure what’s going on. The whole situation’s a nightmare.”

“Nicholas should have left her well alone!”

“Of course he should! But Nicholas is at present as destabilised as Rosalind—which reminds me, I’d like to offer you a piece of advice. Don’t make the mistake of casting Rosalind as the villainess of the piece. When a marriage founders there are almost always faults on both sides—and that leads me to yet another piece of advice I’d like to give you: don’t assume that just because the marriage is in difficulties the Darrows are going to wind up divorced.”

“But surely only a marriage on the rocks would explain why Rosalind—”

“Marriages can be floated off the rocks. What you may not understand is that the Darrows’ marriage is very durable. If it wasn’t it would have collapsed long ago.”

I managed to say levelly: “I know he loves her,” but Lewis just shrugged his shoulders as if this fact were hardly relevant.

“They’re certainly very deeply connected,” he said, “and the connection is without doubt very real, but what that’s got to do with ‘love’ in the conventional romantic sense I’m not sure. Alice, the big question here isn’t: ‘Do they love each other?’ It’s: ‘Can they live permanently apart?’ And I have a suspicion that a permanent separation may prove far more difficult than Rosalind’s currently willing to believe.”

I heard myself say: “You’re warning me off, aren’t you?”

“I’m telling you the truth as I see it. What you do with that truth is up to you.”

“Tell me the truth about something else: why did you make such a fuss about Nicholas holding my hands?”

“It was the way he held them. We work in a ministry where certain boundaries are essential and tactile gestures should be governed by strict rules. Nicholas should take care.”

Glancing down I saw that my fists were clenched in my lap. Watching them I said: “I’m not another Francie.”

“No. You’re a very remarkable young woman, Alice, but you too should take care. Don’t get blinded by illusions just because Nicholas is so destabilised at present that he’s taken to throwing common sense to the winds.”

“Fat plain women like me don’t have illusions,” I found myself retorting in a high, rapid voice. “They get all their romantic dreams smashed to pieces at a very early age. I’ve no illusions about Nicholas—I can see he’s just a mixed-up mess at the moment, but so what? That means I love someone real and it’s not a crime for me to love someone, particularly when I’ve always realised that my love’s never going to be reciprocated. Fat plain women don’t expect any man to love them, least of all men who are very attractive, so they don’t have the same expectations as ordinary women. They don’t expect ever to sit down to a square meal. They’re just content if they’re lucky enough to gather up a few crumbs of comfort occasionally in the form of liking and respect. They know that’s far better than having no food at all and starving to death.”

I was breathing very hard by the time I had finished this speech. I was also feeling nauseous, as if someone had compelled me to strip off all my clothes in public. I had never before said such things to anyone. I had never revealed such deep and private wounds for in
spection by another. I thought how furious Aunt would have been by such embarrassing behaviour. Tears sprang to my eyes as I thought of her, and as I turned my head away sharply I realised I too had been destabilised by the succession of terrible events at the Rectory.

There was a pause before Lewis said in a studiedly neutral voice, as if he knew I would have interpreted any hint of kindness as pity and resented it: “My dear, you should distinguish between being obese and being plump. You’re no longer obese and I assure you there are plenty of men in the world who find plump women attractive. So there’s no reason why you should settle for anything less than a square meal.” Without giving me the chance to reply, he levered himself to his feet. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he was saying, “I must go and find out how the mixed-up mess is getting on.”

The door closed.

Screwing my eyes shut I clenched my fists again so tightly that they hurt and began to nerve myself to face the police.

I

The invasion
of the emergency services seemed to last for ages. The police spent ages at the top of the house; the Archdeacon, representing the Bishop, arrived in response to a phone call from Lewis and spent ages with Nicholas in the study; Lewis and I retreated to the kitchen (where he finally remembered to phone the Fordite monks to say Nicholas had abandoned his retreat) and spent ages drinking tea. Every incident resembled a nightmare in slow motion.

Eventually the mortuary van came and I wept again as Stacy’s body left the house. I had barely finished mopping myself up when Nicholas and the Archdeacon entered the kitchen with two policemen and I knew my ordeal was about to begin.

The policemen were polite in their professional way and not unkind. In response to their prompting we all pieced together Stacy’s movements that day and I was able to produce his note in which he had told me that he didn’t want to be disturbed. The note, of course, referred to our final conversation, and soon afterwards the police asked to see me on my own.

I was surprised how calm I felt. “I believe one should keep faith with the dead,” I had said earlier, and now I was keeping faith with Stacy, protecting his family and Nicholas, just as he would have
wanted—and just as any one of those sisters would have done if they had been standing in my shoes. I might have failed him at the end of his life but at least now I could redeem the mistakes I had made in that last agonising conversation, and care, on his behalf, for all those people he should never have left behind.

As I wondered if Stacy’s family would ever fully recover from the tragedy I felt very angry with him. The moment of anger passed almost instantly but I felt in that brief second that I had shared something of the rage which had driven him to lash out against the world as well as against himself when he had made his terrible act of rejection.

“… and how did the deceased seem to you last night, Miss Fletcher?”

“Very down. I hate to say it but I got angry with him and we had a row—as the note implies. (The do-not-disturb note, I mean, not the suicide note.) But I shouldn’t have got angry. Poor Stacy, he had so many problems.”

“What would you say his basic problems were?”

I listed the homesickness, the alienation, the concern about his job, the worry that he might be letting Nicholas down, the difficulty about finding a steady girlfriend.

“And this final conversation you had with him, Miss Fletcher—can you tell us a bit more about that?”

“Well, it really focused on relationships,” I said steadily. “We talked about someone he knew who had died a few months ago. We talked about Mr. and Mrs. Darrow—Stacy had always admired them both immensely. We talked about his sister Aisling, the one who recently married. Stacy did miss his sisters so much.” I hesitated before adding: “That was the problem. No girl ever measured up to them.” Immediately I wondered in fear if I had said too much, but the elder policeman was nodding his head as if recognising a problem he had encountered before.

“And there were problems getting a steady girlfriend, you said? What about this girl he was taking out?”

“Tara? I doubt if the relationship would have gone anywhere. He liked girls but he couldn’t seem to get his act together with any of them.”

The younger policeman said suddenly: “Preferred his mates, did he? Did he go off to the pub with them when he wasn’t wearing his dog-collar?”

“No, Stacy wasn’t keen on pubs and he only drank very moderately. That was because his father had been a heavy drinker who had died in a barroom brawl.”

“But he did have his male friends?”

“He did in Liverpool,” I said, “but down here he found it hard to make friends—that was yet another of his problems. Mr. Darrow wanted him to make more effort to get to know the other clergy in this part of London, but Stacy couldn’t really connect with southerners.”

“So what do you think the final trigger was, Miss Fletcher? The one that drove him over the edge?”

“I suppose we’ll never know that for sure if he didn’t explain it properly in the suicide note, but as I’ve already said, I do know he was chronically worried about his relationships with the opposite sex and terrified of letting Mr. Darrow down by botching his opportunities here. I’m afraid he wasn’t exactly a grade-A curate.”

“Is it possible that the girlfriend had broken off the relationship?”

“You’d have to ask her. I think not, though, because he didn’t mention it.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t gay?” said the younger policeman, finally ditching the euphemisms.

“Quite sure. He was just hung up and horribly depressed. I’m sorry, I wish I could provide a cut-and-dried answer to the question about what finally drove him over the edge—I wish I could round off my account of the scene neatly—but I can’t because the reality wasn’t neat at all, it was messy and upsetting. You must know how it is when people are vilely depressed—you reach the point where you feel fed up with them and can’t take the misery any more, and that’s the point I reached all too soon during that last conversation with Stacy. I cut him off, I went away, and now …” The tears which began to flow at that point were all too genuine, and my interrogators, deciding I had nothing further to offer them but evidence of remorse and grief, terminated the interview.

Retreating to the basement I collapsed exhausted on my bed and thanked God the police had probed no further, but of course, as I reminded myself, once they were satisfied that Stacy had committed suicide there was nothing further for them to investigate. The result of the brief enquiry into motive would supplement the pathologist’s report and then it would be the coroner’s responsibility to ask any questions which hadn’t been asked in order to wind up the case. But
I wasn’t afraid of the coroner. I knew now I could stage a rerun of my truthful statements. And I wasn’t afraid of the press either. After all, nobody could compel me to talk to them. The only person who still terrified me was Francie, the time-bomb ticking less than a mile away in Islington.

Shuddering with fear at the thought of the havoc she could wreak I mopped myself up yet again and toiled back upstairs to the kitchen.

II

The
police were just leaving, and Lewis, leaning heavily on his crutches as he watched the front door close, was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Come and have a drink,” he said when he saw me.

“Where are Nicholas and the Archdeacon?”

“The Archdeacon’s gone to see the Bishop. Nicholas is trying to get in touch with Stacy’s mother. He tried earlier but there was no reply.”