The Bad Samaritan (11 page)

Meanwhile her children were coming up for the weekend of the fete and party.

It hadn't been planned like that. Or had it? Janet had certainly promised to bring her new boyfriend up during his half-term. Mark had said nothing about coming, but now suddenly he was
too. Had there been collusion between the two? Recently there seemed to have grown up a closeness between them, which somehow Rosemary didn't like. Stop being paranoid, she told herself. Still, there was the possibility that Mark's antennae had caught the new gossip and he was coming up to smell out the lie of the land and give her a thoughtful little lecture in the phraseology of a
Times
leader. A
Times
leader of the Rees-Mogg era. If so, he could expect an explosion. There is just so much lecturing that parents can take from their children, Rosemary said to herself.

They arrived on the Friday before the fete and party. Janet and Kevin arrived in Kevin's old banger. Kevin was a cheery, fresh-faced young man, very different from Janet's former boyfriends, who had tended to be saturnine, smouldery types who seemed to be auditioning for roles in prewar films set in Ruritania. Whether there was anything
to
Kevin, Rosemary couldn't decide. There certainly hadn't been anything to his predecessors.

Kevin was sleeping at friends'. Rosemary was sure this was to spare her and Paul embarrassment. She rather resented this sort of cossetting. She felt she could have coped with the idea that her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend were sleeping together.

Mark arrived by coach from Oxford with a prim little suitcase and a large bag of dirty washing. He was much as usual, only more so. He brought up Rosemary's loss of faith almost at once and at every subsequent opportunity thereafter. He was very dissatisfied with Rosemary's explanation that “it just went,” but he failed to get much more out of her. He clearly had ambitions to be a Torquemada without any of the necessary skills.

Paul and Rosemary had agreed that something had to be said about the recent rumour-mongering. The opportunity came up on Friday night at dinner, when Mark asked how things were going on in the parish.

“Buzzing,” said Rosemary, helping herself to more potatoes. “Someone has been spreading the rumour that I'm having an affair with a fast-food chef.”

“Mother! You're joking!” said Mark.

“How exciting,” said Janet. “I presume you're not.”

“I don't think I'm flattered that you should presume that, but no, I'm not.”

“How did the idea get around, though?” asked Mark, increasingly headmasterly.

“Let me see,” said Rosemary, pretending to think. “I got him his present job. He was a waiter at my guesthouse in Scarborough. He was seen coming out of my room there at around half past nine one evening.”

Mark puffed out his cheeks, already plump, and looked very concerned. Or looked, to be precise, like a turkey about to lay an egg.

“Mother, you haven't been silly, have you?”

“As a matter of fact I think I've been very responsible.”

“You do realise, don't you, that with your loss of your Christian belief, people in the parish will be on the lookout for falling standards in other matters as well? You will need to be very careful not to do anything that could give rise to scandal. You should think about that.”

“What does give me pause for thought, Mark, is the question of how it has come about that your father and I have somehow produced a pompous and sanctimonious little prat like you.”

There was a silence, Mark went tomato-red, and Paul stepped into the breach.

“Would anybody like some more carrots?”

Later that evening, when she was helping Rosemary with the washing up, Janet said, “That was glorious, Mother. Absolutely spot-on.”

But reaction had set in, and self-doubt.

“It was rather cruel, I'm afraid, and premeditated as well. I knew I was going to get a sermon from him.”

“Yes, that was easy enough to guess.”

“Anyway, why the congratulations? I thought you and he were rather close at the moment.”

“Close? Good heavens, no.”

“You just seem to be seeing more of each other.”

“Well actually . . .” Janet shuffled a little, then gave her mother a little grin. “Kevin, you see, writes these little plays, one-acters, for his kids to perform at the end of term. The first time he met Mark he started badgering me to invite him to this and that—hence
Carousel
. He's put this wonderful prat, to use your word, Mum, into his present play, and Mark keeps providing him with wonderful things to say.”

“Well, it's nice to know he has his uses. Good for Kevin,” said Rosemary, thinking that there must be more to him than to all those gigolo types who had preceded him. “Golly, I do hope this is just a dreadful passing phase with Mark. What I really worry about is the Church.”

“The Church?”

“Well, I
do
care about it, in spite of what's happened to me. It's been my life up to now. Mark will be the most terrible clergyman if he goes on the way he is going—the congregation will defect in droves. There's no chance of his leaving over the ordination of women, is there?”

“None at all. He thinks it provides the most wonderful opportunity for renewal and revival.”

“Oh dear. The Catholic Church does seem to be able to embrace awful people much more easily than the Anglican one. Look at all those dreadful politicians. Paul was talking about them only the other day. We seemed to give them a platform,
whereas now they're Catholics they keep wonderfully quiet . . . . Tell Kevin he'll have to come to the church party tomorrow night. We can introduce him to lots more terrible types for his plays.”

That night they all watched the ten o'clock news together. The peace processes in the former Yugoslavia were gathering momentum, and the guarded optimism of recent months was giving way to a sturdier hope. Rosemary was conscious that she was making an almost physical effort not to show more than a normal humanitarian interest. The truth of the lines about what a tangled web we weave was neatly illustrated in her case, though she told herself that her deceptions were quite selfless, designed only to benefit Stanko. Still, it didn't feel good to hold back such an important part of her recent life from her own children.

Fete days had an ordained pattern, an almost mechanical routine, like coronations or (for all Rosemary knew) bar mitzvahs. Who did what was known, and was varied only by illness, retirement or death. The fact that some members of the congregation were beginning to feel that they had done their bit would lead to changes in the Mothers' Union next year, but did not yet mean changes in the arrangements for the fete. The various ladies had their usual stalls, and the men understood their various backup functions without even being asked.

Rosemary, of course, had her allotted part in all this activity: fetching, carrying, filling in during tea breaks and pee breaks, getting change, transporting takings to the all-day safe at the bank, encouraging, exhorting and generally exhausting herself. The St Saviour's fete was genuinely popular, and people came in droves. It had a reputation for cheapness and quality, and Rosemary always saw people she did not recognise as residents of the area, let alone members of the congregation. Students came in large numbers too, in quest of cheap food. The hungry student was one of the phenomena of the nineties that Rosemary was
saddest about: one of those revivals of an old tradition, like the worn-out working-class woman, which the country could do without.

She did manage—again, this was by tradition—a brief rest back at home around about five o'clock. Then it was up, change into her vicar's-wife uniform (olive-green woollen dress, calf-length, with a chunky necklace) then off across the park to the parish hall, where the party was always held, and where the preparations were already under way.

“Florrie! How nice to see you!”

Social occasions, in Rosemary's experience, generally began with a lie.

“Rosemary, you are looking well. But we've all said so all along, ever since you—”

“Are you doing the soft drinks as usual?”

“That's right: soft drinks free with the price of the ticket; glass of wine seventy-five pee.” She paused, thrusting out her bosom. “Mr Mills has got some very good value Bulgarian and Rumanian wines, I believe. Are you going to supervise the food as usual?”

“Yes I am.”

“Pizza, I hear. So good that awkward little business is sorted out. I never believed it. Some people have terrible minds, don't they? Makes you ashamed to be human—”

Rosemary moved on mid-flow. The woman disgusted her, and she had the excuse of going about her business, which there was plenty of. Turning away she realised the encounter had been watched and overheard by Dark Satanic Mills.

“Good for you, Rosemary. I'm glad you stood up to them.”

“
Did
I stand up to them?”

“I heard rumours of a visit to Selena Meadowes.”

He nodded towards the centre of the hall, where the Meadowes family—Selena, Derek, and little Matthew and Flora—were
clustered with some of the other younger people, having all the smiling anonymity of a family in a TV commercial.

“You know everything, Stephen. Is Dorothy here?”

“I expect she will be later, if the cat turns up. It went missing this afternoon, and she insists she's staying at home until it reappears.”

“I know the feeling.”

“She worries more about that cat than she does about me. It's not having children . . . .”

He said it resentfully, blamingly. Coming to the defence of a woman she hardly knew, Rosemary said, “If she'd had children she would worry about them more than about you. And quite right too, though you're probably the sort of husband who would resent it. Excuse me—I must go and get the plates and cutlery ready.”

The long table had plates with serviettes at one end and knives and forks at the other. Rosemary had always resisted disposable plates and cutlery—the latter would have been even more than usually useless with pizza, and Rosemary expected that most people would use their fingers. She had three or four helpers already waiting behind the table, Violet Gumbold among them, and she chatted with them while observing how things were going in the hall. The party was filling up, with quite a lot of people paying at the door: as with the fete, the party had a reputation for offering good value. The congregation was actually outnumbered by nonworshippers, which suited Stephen Mills, who was standing by the table talking to local businessmen. Rosemary heard words like “cash flow,” “liquidity” and “reserves.” It occurred to her that she had only the vaguest idea what Stephen
did
, but she certainly associated him with expressions like “cash flow.” She noticed how much more at ease he was with men of his own kind: with women, and with men like Paul,
he tended to be actorish, conscious of being on display, with something of the difficult temperament of the peacock. With businessmen he shed all this and got down to brass tacks in a completely normal way. She decided he was a very old-fashioned kind of man.

Her nose twitched. Through the main door, where people were still strolling in and paying, Stanko had arrived, almost obscured by a great pile of large cartons from his hands to his chin. How good pizzas always smelt! Someone directed him to Rosemary's table, and he staggered over, smiling at her with his eyes. It was with relief that he lowered them on to the table.

“Thank you, Silvio,” said Rosemary. “Can you help for a bit with cutting and handing out?”

She summoned her helpers round, and they began opening boxes. She noticed Paul approaching for his display of friendliness to Stanko for the parishioners' benefit. Stanko had grinned at her, nodded, and started round to her side of the table. He was passing Stephen Mills and his group when he realised he was being watched, and stopped. Rosemary looked up from her work of slicing pizza and saw too. Mills had broken off from his conversation and had his eyes fixed on the new arrival.

“Hello, Stanko,” he said.

T
here were many accounts given subsequently of what happened next. There was no great disagreement about the facts, which were unexciting. What happened was that there was a moment or two's silence, in which Stanko seemed to be struggling to find something to say. Then he turned to Rosemary.

“I cannot stay to help. I sorry. Is many customers back at Pizza Pronto.”

And he turned and hurried out.

Rosemary told the police (conscious that she was on the very outer verges of the truth, but without any guilty feelings about it) that Stanko had delivered the pizzas and left because they were busy back at the takeaway. Others recounted the encounter between him and Stephen Mills; but there were various versions of what Mills actually said, and the descriptions of Stanko's demeanour varied enormously: dumbfounded, guilty, outraged,
angry, embarrassed were among the words used, and many suggested that Stanko was surprised to meet someone from his past whom he had betrayed or double-crossed, or by whom he himself had been betrayed or double-crossed. The encounter was so brief, it involved so few words, that there were as many accounts of it as there were witnesses. Rosemary, if she could have heard them, would have been surprised at the parish's holding so much imaginative energy.

She found it impossible to put the encounter out of her mind as she went through the mechanical business of slicing and distributing pizzas, but this did not prevent her from absorbing other things as well: how the party was going, how people were behaving. She noticed that her rebuke to her son had not significantly altered his manner: it was avuncular—avuncular at twenty-two!—and orotund. A certain tolerance was extended to him as the vicar's son, but she noticed that the people he talked at quickly found that there was something else it was imperative they do, or someone they simply had to talk to. Whereas her husband always had a crowd around him, her son mostly had a space.