The Anchoress of Shere, page 23
Marda was not emulating his archetype of the austere Christine, he thought, but his guest had endured a long preliminary penance. There had to be occasional rewards, even of meat and wine, before she could make her own decision to renounce such indulgences. And, after all, it was Christmas, a traditional time for feasting.
So Duval, with no apparent reluctance, poured her a second glass of port. He had not touched his first.
“Have you got me a Christmas present then?” she said jokingly.
He looked at her with raised eyebrows. “As a matter of fact I have,” he said, barely concealing the sense of his own largesse.
She was about to say, “I hope it’s not a bleeding Bible,” but she wasn’t that drunk.
“I have bought you a dress. I hope it’s the right size.”
Marda pretended to look cross. “You’re not supposed to tell me because it spoils the surprise. Please let me see it.”
As he pulled a gift-wrapped package out of a drawer in the pine kitchen dresser, she practically seized it from his hands and ripped it open. At any other time she would have opened it very carefully to save the paper to use again.
“Oh Michael, it’s lovely,” she cooed. “Blue is my favourite colour. But I thought you wanted me to wear a religious habit.”
“I want you to have a choice. That’s my point. I don’t often wear my clerical garb here in the house. Tonight is an occasion where you could wear a dress so you can go downstairs and try it on if you like.”
“May I use your bathroom to change? I don’t want to spoil the lovely meal by going down…down there…not just yet.”
“If you want to, but I shall wait by the door, if you don’t mind,” he said a little warily.
Under escort, she went to the bathroom to change, emerging with her new dress on and the habit over her arm.
Once back in the kitchen, she deposited the stale clothing on a chair. Marda turned to him and asked expectantly, “How do you like it?”
His face indicated obvious pleasure.
Encouraged, she gave a modest impression of a model’s twirl, then stood next to him.
He reached out with his hand to brush her cheek, ever so gently and momentarily, and then turned red with embarrassment.
“Oh, you’ve gone all shy, Michael. I just wanted to show how pleased I am with your present. Come on, do you like it?”
He looked lost for words, but managed to say quietly, “You look ethereal.”
“That’s the first time you’ve paid me that kind of compliment. Why, thank you, kind sir.” Disbelievingly, Marda heard her own words echoing in the room; suddenly a flash from Gone With The Wind intruded upon her mind: she was imitating Scarlett, and Rhett had not been fooled, had he? She knew she was no actress, but she was warm, clean, well-fed and rather tipsy. There might not be a better time. She understood that she was about to take the biggest risk of her short life. He was an apparently celibate priest who was also a deranged killer. Not an ideal choice. She would pretend, she would try to be the world’s greatest actress, to find a chance to escape, or to immobilise him, perhaps even to kill him. She was utterly desperate to seize what might be her only opportunity.
She sat on his lap.
He froze.
“Don’t, Michael,” she said almost crossly. “I won’t hurt you. Don’t be silly.”
Taking hold of his hands, she put them around her waist. Hesitantly he conceded, although he held her limply.
Marda heard herself say, “I know I don’t look very sexy in these boots and socks, but it’s a nice dress and-hey-it makes me feel like a woman again. And I don’t have any make-up on. Treat me like a woman, Michael, not a student. Don’t freeze me out.”
She pecked him lightly on the cheek, almost recoiling as the stubble rippled along her lips, but he did relax a little. She willed herself to recall her lover in France, trying to picture every fine feature of his face, then, as she squirmed a little on Duval’s lap, her dress rode up along her thighs.
“Don’t you find me attractive?” she asked provocatively. “You always avoid touching me.”
He closed his eyes.
“I know I’ve got a bit skinny and pale, but has being locked up made me so ugly? I haven’t looked in a mirror since I came here. Look at me, don’t you find me attractive?”
“Of course I do,” he said, almost stuttering.
“Please open your eyes. Am I so frightening?”
The traditional wood stove in the kitchen was pumping out heat. Marda, returning to her own seat, took off her shoes and socks, then skipped around on the bare linoleum, humming to herself. The drink had fortified her, while he seemed relaxed, trusting almost, she thought, and this might be her last chance. She swallowed hard and, as she twirled around, she pulled off her dress while grabbing a tea towel to cover her breasts.
“Look at me. Don’t you want me? Isn’t this what you really wanted me to be?”
She flicked the towel into the air, leaving herself naked except for her pants.
“Do you want to see me naked? Is that what you want? Then I’ll do it for you. Here.”
She tugged off her pants, covering herself with her hands as she walked towards him.
Panic swept his face, he stood up and retreated until his back was pressed against the main kitchen door.
She followed him, standing on tiptoes to put her arms around his neck, and whispered, “You can hold me if you like. Do what you like with me…as long as you don’t hurt me. Take me to your bedroom now if you want to. Anywhere, but not down there in the coal-hole.”
As she pressed her naked body against him, he uttered a half-suppressed croak.
“Go on, kiss me if you want,” she said aggressively.
Reluctantly, almost like an automaton, he leaned forward to kiss her on the lips lightly as she squeezed against him.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the large knife he had used to carve the turkey, and she desperately tried to estimate whether she could reach it. Marda pressed hard against him to move him towards the sideboard where the knife lay, tantalisingly close. She edged him towards it, keeping his back to the knife. Pressed against him, she felt the surprising roughness of his tweed jacket against her naked breasts.
She was sure he was not aware of the knife. Marda steeled herself to kill, but her most pressing fear was whether she could be quick enough to reach the knife before he reacted. She prayed that he would keep his eyes shut.
“Stop. Stop. Don’t kiss me any more, Christine,” he barked in a pained, almost strangled voice. He seized her hand and, with surprising strength, dragged her towards the trapdoor. “You’re the Whore of Babylon. The scarlet-coloured beast. Go to the pit where you belong.”
“No, please, please don’t put me back. Please,” she begged. “I’ll put my clothes on. No!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “Michael. Don’t.”
The last thing she heard on the radio as the trapdoor closed was the current hit song by the Spencer Davis Trio: “Somebody help me, yeah. Won’t somebody tell me what I’ve done wrong?”
XIII. The Officer
That night Mark Stewart was waiting for Irvine Gould in the White Horse bar, and he was one or two drinks ahead of the amiable professor.
“Hi, Mark, sorry I’m late,” the gangly American said in his watered-down southern drawl.
Mark gave him a half-hearted salute. “I take it that you’ll have your customary pint of best English ale. Can’t take the stuff any more myself after German lagers. Too flat, too warm…” He ordered a pint at the bar. “But if you’re determined on researching the habits of the locals, then you might as well understand the reason for their flatulence.”
Professor Gould realised that Mark was masking his fear for his sister with an external bluffness that was typical of the British officer class.
“Any news today about Marda?”
Mark shook his head slowly. “Bugger all, professor. I’ve spent a week ingratiating myself with a bunch of gypsies who’ve been camped near the common for about six months. The police suggested I try them out. Some of the locals have visited their Madame Rosa. I had my fortune told, but nobody had seen Marda. Anyway, I don’t think she’d get involved with them.”
“What did the crystal ball say? A tall dark stranger would change your life?”
“No, it’s a lot of balls, but I thought I needed to jolly them along. I didn’t find out anything. The police aren’t too helpful, except for that old so-and-so in Shere, Constable Ben McGregor. He keeps sniffing around, hasn’t come up with much, but at least he’s trying. As for the rest…I don’t know. Anyway, how’s your research? I still don’t understand you colonials being so keen on tracing family trees.”
The professor gulped down his pint. He had noticed how the locals tended to do just that. When in Rome…“As I think I told you,” he said, belching into his hand, “my interest in genealogy is only a sideline. Medieval church history is my bag, as the saying goes.” The professor sometimes liked to think he was “cool”; he believed he could “relate” to the flower-power movement, for example. “My bag, man,” he said self-mockingly, “my area of specialisation. They’ve got great church records in this area, especially in Guildford.”
The captain, joining in the self-parody, felt it was his duty to play up to the professor’s stereotypical image of the English gentleman. “Sounds a bit dull to me, old boy.”
“Not at all. Fourteenth-century England was as bloody and as lively as Vietnam. Your guys were fighting all over France, pacifying the Welsh and kicking the crap out of the Scots, although the Scots gave as good as they got. And the English were fighting each other. It’s no wonder that so many hooked up with the Church.”
Gould had already explained his interest in St. James’s church and its unique architectural heritage. “I’ve been working my butt off to finish a paper on the church and its anchoress.”
“Bit far from the sea for mermaids, aren’t we?”
“Everyone around here knows about the anchoress. You mean to say you don’t?”
“Only joking. English sense of humour.”
The academic ignored the jibe. “I can see your glass is empty. Let me get you another.”
Over the next round of drinks, Gould explained his work on female hermits, and Christine Carpenter in particular; as well as the possibility of an interesting French connection to Christine. The professor meant to keep his description short and sharp, but he was an academic, and his learning and enthusiasm resulted in a long monologue.
“Sorry, Mark, I must be boring you.”
“No, not at all, but I can’t understand why an eighteen-year-old bird would want to lock herself away in a bloody wall. Sounds a bit insane, not to mention insanitary, to me.”
“No, it’s a fascinating case, and I have some really interesting new material that I unearthed in Bordeaux. So few English-or American-scholars work on French medieval records. They were so bureaucratic then…”
“They still are, Irvine. They still are. I’m glad the Frogs are out of NATO, I can tell you…”
“Yep, can’t stand us Yanks running the show. The trouble with us is that we’re fixers, not preventers. We could have soothed de Gaulle’s feelings and prevented this cock-up. Same back home. I despair when a failed movie actor becomes governor of California. I know they’re weird out there but Reagan. How could they?”
Mark Stewart enjoyed teasing the professor, despite the fact that Gould’s lazy drawl made him suspect the man was falling asleep in mid-sentence.
“Politics and films are the same in the USA. Washington is one big B-movie, always looking for the happy ending.” Mark was trying to coax the anglophile into xenophobia.
“No, I guess you’re right. We could learn a lot from you Europeans, except how to stand up to the Russians. You guys are so weak the Russians could march to the Channel tomorrow.”
Mark let it go because he had learned from their earlier conversations that Gould was a passionate advocate of nuclear disarmament, who wanted to ditch the bomb and force the West Europeans to build up bigger conventional armies…until the Russians were ready to talk peace.
The professor continued, “But culture, that’s different. I wince when I see American tourists over here. Why do they all look fat and stupid? It’s better over there, honestly, but we still spend more on chewing gum than books. We can’t spell any more. All those fast-food signs, the letter ‘U’ for ‘you,’ and all that. America is becoming a monument to bad grammar and trivia. We measure our art in dollars, love in the number of orgasms, and churches have become supermarkets, or the other way around.”
Gould took another big swig of his beer.
“And the South! Heck, I regard myself as a loyal southerner, but it’s like Palestine before Christ; there are more prophets than rocks, and each one of them wants his own church. I just wish more architects would find God. If they do find a good design, in typical American fashion-if you’ve got a good thing, overdo it. I don’t know, Mark, all these prophets, all these lousy churches and yet God, the great architect, has died. God has expired and fifty thousand do-gooding social workers have sprung up in His place.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, buddy,” Mark said in an atrocious imitation of Gould. “Your films are great. That’s what’ll change the world. I think that the future will have a slight American accent, lots of Coca-Cola and bugger-all communists.”
The professor laughed. “I hate the Coca-Colaisation of the world. That’s where the Gaullists are right. We need individuality. That’s why Sergeant Pepper is British. That’s why I love you Brits, you have so many eccentrics. Here eccentricity is tolerated, even encouraged. Back home, so much of being an American is not to let your individuality become a social embarrassment, a nuisance in the commercially conformist drive for happy consumers.”
“You’re not a Marxist, are you, Irv?”
The professor ignored the dig. Despite his attempts to ape the current flamboyant vocabulary, he was a scholar and too deeply immersed in his period to pass convincingly for a member of the beat generation. He was not a political activist, despite his hostility to American involvement in Vietnam and his pro-disarmament views. His real world was the Middle Ages, and he could not help but return to it. “I’ve found some incredible material on the Anchoress of Shere-Christine Carpenter-in an abbey near Bordeaux. I should get a few more articles and a conference paper out of it at least.”
The army officer did not understand the world of academic papers and conferences, which seemed a waste of time to him. But he appreciated the professor’s passionate energy, so he put on his best intently listening face.
“The trouble is, the local historian-amateur historian-a Catholic priest who’s written one or two minor things about Christine and the traditions of anchorites-male anchoresses, that is-is rather elusive. I wrote to him from the States, and we’ve met once. He lives just outside Shere. Now he’s surely an English eccentric, a bit of a recluse, I guess. Harmless nut, but he knows his stuff. Bit cocky about his knowledge of the Shere anchoress; might be able to make him eat his words, though. I called him to say that I’ve almost finished my paper and he gave me the brush-off. Weird. You’d think a priest would be vaguely polite, especially if he’s an historian who’s in my field. I’ll try again before I leave. Maybe I caught him on a bad day.”
The Englishman looked pensive. “I don’t remember meeting a priest when I went round with the reward leaflets,” Mark said. “What’s his name?”
“Duval. Father Duval. He lives at Hillside, an old rectory about a mile or so from here. Kind of difficult to find. Have you come across it in your wanderings?”
“No. I’ve checked out nearly every house or farm around Shere, using the electoral roll. But perhaps a priest might not be on it. I could have missed a few people. I’ll find the house on the OS map I’m using,” said Mark, with a renewed interest in the conversation.
“Well, I hope he’s more polite to you than he was to me.”
“Anyway, have you eaten, Irv? No? OK, let’s see what grub is on offer.”
The next day Mark went to Guildford to see Jenny. He enjoyed her company, and not just because she was such a good friend of his sister and somebody who could guide him around the town. Under different circumstances, she could have been special to him. Jenny was obviously extremely distressed by the mystery of her friend’s disappearance, and she recognised Mark’s angst hidden beneath the officer’s bluster. Intuitively, they leaned on each other for mutual comfort. Mark opened up about his feelings in a way that he had never done before, and he learned much about himself and about his sister. He wanted so much to share his feelings with Marda, and was tempted to sublimate his emotional frustrations in a more practical way with Jenny.
One evening as he left her flat she held him, chastely, in an almost sisterly fashion, and said, “If you love Marda enough, and I think you do, and if you are determined enough, and I am sure you are, you will find her. I believe that with my whole heart.”
Mark thanked her and kissed her gently on the cheek. Jenny’s support meant a lot.
His search, however, was more important than his habitual philandering. Mark felt good about that-not much had come between him and his sex drive before. But his loneliness and fear about his sister were forgotten one evening when a quiet meal with Jenny was transformed into hours of gentle but intense sex. He had never needed to lose himself like this before. Previously, he had treated women in the same way he planned his military exercises: tactics, surprise, mobility, feints, and even aggression if necessary; women were prizes to be seized. Being with Jenny was so different that he almost cried after they made love. The loss of Marda, and Jenny’s empathy, accelerated his maturity: he understood consciously for the first time that tenderness had nothing to do with any kind of victory. Jenny’s comforting embrace and Professor Gould’s company in the pub were the few bright spots on a black landscape for Mark Stewart.
Two days after the chat with Gould, Mark decided to visit Hillside. There was a small cottage a quarter of a mile away which had been empty when he had last called. He went back there, and then walked over to the priest’s home.
