Glittering Images (51 page)

I was even more disturbed. I felt obliged to confess: ‘My father was thoroughly alarmed by the whole prospect and called it a Pandora’s Box, but I thought he spoke out of prejudice and jealousy. Of course he thinks that Romaine’s bound to send me straight to the dogs.’

‘Of course. I’m afraid we must expect your father to revert to his favourite nightmare when he’s under strain, but what assurance did you give him that you would approach your Pandora’s Box sensibly?’

‘I told him what I told you the other day: I just want to see the man once. Then I can sit back and say: “There! I’ve done it!” And that’ll be that.’

‘You make Dr Romaine sound like a sightseer’s landmark, Charles, but is he really on a par with Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London?’ And before I could answer he added, ‘Why are you so determined not to see Romaine more than once?’

‘It would be disloyal to my father, who I’ve now discovered didn’t reject me at all but tried hard year after year in his own muddled, well-meaning, pigheaded way to be the best of fathers to me. I don’t need another father in my life now, and I certainly don’t need a broken-down old quack who tried to murder me when I was an embryo.’

‘Then why go and see him at all?’

I was taken aback. ‘But I must!’ I exclaimed. ‘He’s the source of my life – I must just see –’

‘Yes, there’s a psychological need. So you’re in this awkward position, aren’t you? You want to be involved yet you don’t want to be involved.’

‘I don’t in the least want to be involved!’

‘If that were true you wouldn’t want to see him.’

‘All right,’ I said, becoming heated. ‘
All right.
I’m getting involved, but my involvement’s going to be minimal. After all, he rejected me – tried to kill me –’

‘That, I agree, is rejection. But do we actually know whether he would ever have performed the abortion? How much in earnest was he? It’s a question your father can’t answer because he wasn’t there.’

‘I concede that I’ve only heard my father’s side of the story –’

‘No, you’ve heard your mother’s side as well, and the two views of Romaine are very different, aren’t they?’

‘But that’s why I want to see him! I want to hear his own version of what happened!’

‘Exactly.’ Darrow sat back satisfied in his chair. ‘You’re searching for the truth; that’s why you want to interview Dr Romaine and that’s why, despite all your father says, the interview should take place. You need to establish a view of reality which will enable you to live comfortably with these difficult facts which you’ve uncovered this weekend.’

‘But all I need is one interview,’ I persisted. ‘Then I can turn my back on him and walk away.’

‘And may I ask,’ said Darrow, ‘exactly what you hope to achieve as a priest by rejecting him as you believe he once rejected you?’

There was a silence. The knot of tension expanded as my anger became infused with guilt. ‘Are you suggesting,’ I demanded at last, ‘that I turn him into a grotesque father-figure whom I keep locked up in a cupboard and inspect at regular intervals?’

‘I’m suggesting you try to keep an open mind in a very difficult situation. Although Romaine’s a stranger he did nonetheless strike the spark which put you in the world and this means that in a very real sense he’s with you as long as you live. So obviously you’ve got to learn to live with him now that he’s been identified, but how can one live successfully with a person if one remains in a state of anger at the thought of all his wrongdoing?’

After another painful pause I said: ‘What do I do?’

‘What do you think?’

I had to drag the words out of my conscience. ‘I must forgive him.’

‘Yes,’ said Darrow, ‘you must forgive him in order to be at peace with him – and that may well be very hard indeed. So don’t think of this visit to Starvale St James as a little holiday to see a bizarre landmark, Charles. Think of it as a large rack in your continuing ordeal – and then, I suspect, you’ll approach the meeting in something which resembles a realistic frame of mind.’

Silence fell as I considered my quest in this new light. Finally I said, ‘Supposing I can’t cope with him and wind up ruined, just as my father prophesies?’

‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Here comes that demon, your fear that you’re unfit and unworthy.’

‘Supposing I like him but he doesn’t like me?’

‘Here comes that demon, your fear of rejection.’

‘Supposing he doesn’t even remember I exist?’

‘Unless he’s suffering from amnesia I doubt if he’ll have forgotten the catastrophe at Epsom which destroyed his hopes of a Harley Street practice,’ said Darrow drily, but I was barely listening. I was finally peering into my mind with a clear eye and being horrified by what I saw. I heard myself say, ‘I want him to like me so that I can hurt him by rejecting him, and I want to hurt him not just to pay him back for my mother’s suffering but to prove to my father – and to myself – that I’m a loyal son … But just listen to me! What a muddle I’m in, I’m raving –’

‘Better to be honest. Then you’ll know exactly how hard you’ll have to work to achieve a genuine forgiveness.’

‘What an appalling situation!’ Feeling close to despair I asked him if I could stay at his house longer than we had planned so that I could spend the following day thinking and praying under his direction. ‘Then I’ll leave very early on Tuesday morning,’ I added, ‘and drive down to Starvale St James.’

‘So be it. Very well, Charles, get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll start arming you against the demons.’

Without making a huge detour I was unable to avoid Starbridge on my journey to Starvale St James, but as I descended from the hills shortly before noon on that Tuesday morning I saw that the Cathedral was no longer glittering like an opulent decoration on a wedding-cake but shrouded in a mist which was seeping through the watermeadows; here was no mystical sun-drenched city but merely a bedraggled county town in the rain. Winding my way into the market-place I took the short cut through Butchers’ Alley to avoid the shopping lanes around St Martin’s-in-Cripplegate. The main gates of the Cathedral Close flashed past me as I drove over the crossroads into Eternity Street, and then I was heading past the Staro Arms, across the West Bridge and into the open country beyond the river. In my driving mirror I watched the spire of the Cathedral recede and tried to imagine what everyone would be doing at the palace. I thought of Darrow saying, ‘You threw a big stone into that particular pond’, and at once in my imagination I saw the ripples still travelling inexorably to the edge.

These thoughts diverted me for ten miles, but when I saw the name of my destination on a signpost I spent the remainder of the journey trying to steady my nerves. I reached the village at twenty-one minutes past noon. The rain had stopped, the mist had dispersed and the sun was trying to shine. Halting the car I asked for directions and was told that Oaktree Cottage lay beyond the church at the far end of the street.

My destination proved to be a rambling house with a thatched roof; I guessed that the building had once been two cottages which some enterprising builder had knocked into one. A drive led from the lane through a well-kept garden where an ancient gnarled gardener was scratching peacefully at a border, and ignoring the sign which directed patients to the surgery at the side of the house I approached the front door. My fingers slipped on the bell. Automatically I wiped my hands on my jacket as I waited for a response, and after the inevitable eternity had appeared to pass the door was opened by an elderly parlourmaid. ‘Good morning,’ I said, handing her my card. ‘Is Dr Romaine at home?’ But before the parlourmaid could reply a woman’s voice called from the shadowed hall beyond, ‘Who is it, Withers?’

‘Dr – Mr – Dr Ashworth, M’m,’ said the parlourmaid who clearly believed any clergyman who wanted to be addressed as ‘doctor’ was behaving perversely, and handed my card to a plump golden-haired woman who now stepped forward into the light.

‘Dr Ashworth – I’m so sorry, have we met? Your face looks familiar, but I can’t quite –’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t met. Mrs Romaine?’

‘Yes … Thank you, Withers,’ she said abruptly, dismissing the parlourmaid. She spoke in a no-nonsense contralto with a faint North-Country accent. The golden hair was cunningly dyed. ‘Do come in, Dr Ashworth.’

‘I was hoping for a brief word with your husband,’ I said as the door closed behind me. Naturally I had prepared a speech to meet all possible permutations of the situation which would confront me on Dr Romaine’s doorstep but for a moment I feared I was going to forget my lines. By this time Mrs Romaine was giving me a very hard look indeed. ‘He knew my parents in the old days before the War,’ I heard myself say after an awkward hesitation, ‘and when I discovered he lived here I thought I’d look him up. The vicar of Starrington Magna is a friend of mine and I’m not unfamiliar with this part of the country.’

Mrs Romaine decided to replace the hard look with a hospitable smile. ‘How nice of you to call! My husband’s still out on his rounds, I’m afraid, but he should be back soon. If you have the time to wait –’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said, leading the way into the drawing-room, ‘but I’m just about to go out to lunch. I’ll leave your card in the hall for my husband and make sure Withers tells him you’re here – would you like a glass of sherry while you wait?’

I declined the glass of sherry. She told me not unsociably to make myself at home, gave me one last hard look and departed.

I glanced around the room. It was expensively furnished to accord with the oak-beamed ceiling and the inglenook fireplace, but all the furniture appeared to be modern reproductions of traditional styles. Various knick-knacks in questionable taste were scattered along the mantelshelf but there were no photographs. On the wall hung several bad prints set in heavy gold frames, of the famous Constable paintings of Starbridge Cathedral, and on the floor the carpet felt plush to the point of sponginess as I walked to the window. I was unable to resist the conclusion that my mother would have judged the room vulgar in its moneyed attempt to ape a lady’s drawing-room, and I knew she would have dismissed my hostess by that most damning of all middle-class epithets, ‘common’.

Turning my back on the window with its view of the picturesque cottage garden I paced up and down until at last, like a drowning man, I saw my life flicker past as if that part of my self which Darrow had called my beleaguered psyche were engaged in some complex attempt to trace how I had arrived in Starvale St James at this precise moment of my life. My memory was just recalling my installation service in Cambridge Cathedral with photographic clarity when far away across the hall the front door casually clicked open and equally casually banged shut.

I froze. There was a pause. I heard the parlourmaid’s voice followed by a man’s murmur, but after that there was a long, long silence. I knew at once – I needed neither to see nor to be told – that he was staring with incredulity at my card, but at last his footsteps crossed the hall, the drawing-room door slowly swung wide and in walked Dr Alan Romaine.

I at once experienced that sinister shock which follows a glimpse of oneself in a distorted mirror, and I knew then why Mrs Romaine had given me such a hard look once she had had the chance to register the details of my appearance. The man before me was a long way from being my double but nevertheless I felt I was being offered an uncanny glimpse of myself as I might appear in the unimaginable 1960s.

He was my height, six foot one, and far from being a ‘broken-down old quack’ he was in a moderately good state of preservation. I recognized my curly hair, transformed from brown to grey but still displaying unruly tendencies; since baldness runs in families I was relieved to see that although his hair was sparser than mine it was still plentiful. I recognized the dark eyes with the creases at the corners, the mouth with the humour lurking subtly at the edges, the deep cleft in the chin which in childhood would have been described as dimpled. He was far heavier than I was; with his athlete’s figure run to seed he must have weighed fifteen stone to my twelve and a half, but he carried himself well and in his unhurried graceful movements I glimpsed the charm which had enchanted Epsom in 1899.

I stood stock still in the middle of the room with my fists clenched at my sides and no doubt I looked the picture of extreme tension, deep distrust and appalled fascination. He paused by the door and looked the picture of relaxed amusement, his mouth curling humorously at the corners and his eyes bright with interest. I thought of my father saying as he fought his tears, ‘The bounders always seem to bounce their way to a happy ending’. I thought of my mother saying, ‘It was like some ghastly punishment’. I looked at this debonair stranger who was apparently unmarked by tragedy, and I loathed him.

He glanced down at my card, then looked up again with a quizzical smile and said, ‘Dr Ashworth!’

‘Yes. Good morning, Dr Romaine.’

Our voices were identical in timbre but different in inflection. Inflections are acquired by a child from those people who bring him up, and in my mind my voice was saying with Eric Ashworth’s fierce stresses: still caddish, still flashy, still gliding along the glamorous road –
disgusting.

Meanwhile his voice was saying with an admiration which repelled me, ‘A Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge! How proud your mother must be … And how is your mother, may I ask? I hope she’s well.’