Bad Blood (9 page)

It's the day the clocks go back. He finds himself pausing for reflection and – for the first time – misgivings. Has he been
led down the garden path? ‘Thank thee O God for hearing my prayer to get a removal from Llwynypia. But I wish I could have removed to some other parish in S. Wales instead of coming up to the north.' Or perhaps he isn't as smitten as he first thought, for the entry ends enigmatically, ‘My heart is in the south.' But the very next day he goes to the Watsons after evensong, where he meets MB and ‘stays late'. There's a gratifyingly ‘huge crowd' at church for Harvest Festival a week later and he's able to rest on his laurels, since MB is going away for a short holiday. And then, suddenly, just as he relaxes, there comes a stroke of fate that whisks away the very means of his freedom.

In other words, he had an accident on the bike. He was speeding alone down the dark lanes between services when he came a cropper – ‘tore the cartilage of my leg. Laid up at Pritchards' farm. Dr McColl set my leg and brought me home,' he writes, staccato style with clenched teeth: immobilised, grounded, trapped in the vicarage. That dawns on him gradually. By Wednesday the leg ‘is far from getting right', on Thursday the doctor calls and tells him he won't be fit for his duties on Sunday and things start to look serious. Lady Kenyon sends a pair of crutches. And MB, who is after all the district nurse, returns from her holiday to find him in the new position of patient – flat on his back.

She knows just what to do. She bustles into the vicarage armed with her professional innocence. Now their assignations take place
in his bedroom
. On 1 November she calls and stays till midnight. ‘Am feeling very tired,' he tells the diary before falling asleep. MB is tenderly solicitous. She gives him a ‘dental pipe' as a present, plus tobacco, and a walking stick ‘for me to get about'. Except that she doesn't seem to be leaving him much time or energy for hobbling out of the house. The diary
is dominated by her home visits. After about ten days, when the level of intensive care must have been starting to look a bit excessive, a new and magical word turns up: massage. The leg is on the mend, but needs daily massage. Bliss, you might think, to be in her capable hands. The accident has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, now that the weather is foul and the nights are drawing in.

But reading between the lines – which are getting pretty repetitious, there's massage and more massage – he's not altogether enjoying this domesticated transgression. For instance, there is an interesting double-take in the entry for 16 November: ‘The nurse (MB) came in the morning and gave me another massage.' On the eighteenth he's ‘rather depressed . . . shall be glad when my leg is well enough to get about'. On the twenty-third the massage leads to ‘a long serious talk with MB all the morning'. On the twenty-fifth he strikes a querulous note: ‘
Have
to be massaged in the afternoon' (my italics, but his resentment, surely?). It's not just the nights that are closing in. Perhaps in some perverse way it's almost a relief when at last on 27 November Grandma, who has been distracted (presumably) by homesick dreams of the Rhondda, wakes up to what's going on.

There's a huge row. ‘Hilda in tantrums.' No more massage sessions with MB. He goes to see the bone-setter at Church Stretton and the leg is soon cured. Not so the ache of passion. There are more long, serious talks (‘It is a very miserable position for MB') and more rows with Hilda – ‘Heart-breaking in this country silence,' he says, suddenly, dazedly, missing the background hum of traffic, the life of noise in South Wales. Still, he's out and about again, and there has been a gratifying flurry of invitations, including one to the Hanmers' house, Bettisfield Park, for late supper (leading to a ‘thumping'
hangover the next morning). He keeps away from the vicarage as much as possible and sees MB at the Watsons', as he did before the accident. Things have changed, of course, the complications he dreaded have materialised. On 9 December he swears her a sinner's oath on the Bible – promising to stay faithfully unfaithful. Thick fog blankets Hanmer and some days he is stuck at home. ‘Had to sit in the kitchen through perpetual bothering and misery,' he writes on 19 December. ‘Don't know what is going to come of this.' Even when he contrives to stay out all hours, Grandma – already an insomniac – is quite capable of raging till dawn: ‘Spent a most awful night with Hilda again. Up the whole of this night and in deep misery about everything.' He notes grimly that the Watsons have called the vet to put their dog out of
its
misery. He was no animal lover, obviously he envied the brute.

This misery was of an altogether different order from the old dull depression, however. This was live, vivid,
mythic
misery that marked the festive season with its own secret significance: ‘So the most notable Christmas of all has commenced.' He was full of energy, absorbed and fascinated by the spectacle of his life. ‘How will all this end?' he asked himself, clutching the edge of his seat. His feelings were volatile and contradictory. Certainly there were moments when he wanted to be free of MB. She had become a liability, another burden. And yet she still represented the lure of adventure. On 27 December he sent her a ‘letter of renunciation' – ‘This is now the end.' But the very next evening, when he went to church to collect his robes, ‘MB followed with a scene . . . a pathetic pleading night. I do not know what to make of all this. What a situation is now developing. Hilda begins her tantrums again about MB. So it goes on endlessly. Did not go to bed but remained in study all night long . . .' As the year ends, and the diary too,
he's very attracted by the pull of an ending, but also by the opposite desire, for more intrigue, the plot to come. Rounding off 1933 he's keeping his options open: ‘So ends a most memorable year for me. I have had the move I wished for to a lovely country church. Here I have met many most kind people. But I fear that the work will be too much for me. I have met MB too and therein hangs all the tale of the future. What will that be I wonder?? God knows since it is His doing that all this has come about. So then I commit the future to God.' So MB was God's idea.

She was not the whole story, for he had other projects. In the new year private drama had to share space in the new diary with the public kind. The parish entertainments committee that started meeting back in the autumn had generated a real show, his first Hanmer pantomime – and suddenly all the world's a stage. He limbers up on New Year's Day by doing a ‘turn' himself in the parish hall, as part of a very amateur concert, a monologue as ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell'. But for the panto he's the prime mover – mostly from behind the scenes – recruiting the band, rehearsing the cast, and painting the scenery. The diary entries take on a surreal savour, when you remember the real-life drama he's escaping from. Armed with bolts of cloth and cans of paint, he is levitating out of the rows and scenes to create in their midst scenes from another world, the innocent, archetypal land of
Cinderella
: ‘Got up this morning to start painting the scenery. Commenced with the woodland glade and got on well with it until 4.30 . . . sat in study thinking out a scene for the kitchen . . . finished scene 1 this morning. Put it out to dry this afternoon.'

He's wonderfully well insulated from the raw real. Everything takes on an extra dimension of
theatre
, or to put it another way,
bad faith
. Thus he resolves to simplify his life and make
a moral choice – ‘I must make up my mind what to do' – but actually he is revelling in all the complications of indecision, the beauty of both/and: ‘So this is the end or is it the beginning of a new era for me.' The personal plot thickens – Mrs Watson talks to him about MB, MB and Hilda row face to face . . . The village is a carnival of gossip. He is defiant and grandly outrageous. These days he and MB are meeting in the church, God's safe house. It's not the emotional logic of adultery that shapes events, though, but pantomime preparations. The show must go on – ‘a long and serious talk' with MB gives way to ‘a good rehearsal'. He has finished the final ballroom backdrop (1 February) and is now hanging the whole sequence of scenes and painting the wings
in situ
in the parish hall. ‘Had a row with Hilda in the house during the day,' he notes on 3 February. ‘After that went to the Hall and continued painting. MB brought me a cup of tea.' He's cutting it fine, for the first matinée is only four days away, but it's a real labour of love. He is exercising his vocation to the full at last – the hard-working wizard making magic for the crowd.

Cinderella
in Hanmer parish hall, Grandpa centre front

He has started to turn into the Grandpa I remember – except that he has yet to taste the bitterness of being
really
found out. The pantomime was a triumph. He put on evening dress to conduct the orchestra, Sir Edward Hanmer publicly praised him from the stage and so – on the final night – did Lady Kenyon. So far, no one held his sin against him, MB was apparently a mere peccadillo compared with the major magic of
Cinderella
. Indeed, it looks as though people somehow felt it was all part of the show. He was having a love affair with the parish. No wonder he was suddenly forlorn and lonely when the curtain fell. His life was as much of a tangle as ever, but it struck him as banal. He remarked that time hung heavy on his hands – which is exactly the phrase he used just before he met MB. He
was restless, impatient to affront the next phase of his fate. This time the cast would involve my mother (she hadn't starred in the first panto, nor had he been paying her much attention) and this time things would go badly wrong, and he would fix the future.

The quiet of Hanmer gave Grandpa the willies whenever he slowed down sufficiently for it to invade his consciousness. He heard time passing, then. Depression lay in wait and he would see the prospect of a more vivid life,
the life his talents deserved
, dissolving away like a mirage. I think this is why scenery-painting for the pantomime absorbed him so blissfully. He could create the illusion of perspective without having anywhere to stand to check he'd got it right (mostly he painted with the canvas spread out on the floor of an attic) and this trick was a version of the moral trick he needed to play on himself constantly. The moral trick – or more truly the
morale
trick – was harder, however. The show he put on that first Hanmer winter gave him a taste of carnival freedom and yet its very success left him in post-coital gloom: ‘The village is very quiet tonight after all the excitement of this week. What a week!'

The affair with MB had developed along similarly perverse and disappointing lines, since she had not only become the theme of endless Hilda rants, but also a kind of wife number two, part of the furniture of his frustration. So it was horribly convenient that the village – or at least the influential people, like Lady Kenyon – seemed disposed to blame MB for the scandal. If he cast her off he'd be allowed to get away with it. And he was ready (for the wrong reasons) to do the right
thing. In short, he behaved like a complete cad towards MB.

He heard a whisper that she had another lover and longed to believe it – ‘This may be a way out, let it come quickly.' It didn't and after another ‘terrible week' of rows, he was feeling very sorry for himself as he took stock on a cold Saturday night in mid-February: ‘I hope to my God that it will all end now. Hanmer has brought me much misery. Got my thoughts in order for tomorrow but H— keeps on and on . . . I do think that MB is very greatly wronged and after all her only fault is that she has said that she thinks a lot of me. Well I only hope that everybody will shut up now and that the whole business will end.' He is the injured party, besieged by Hilda and Hanmer gossip. At the same time, however, he is magnanimous enough to spare a thought for poor MB, a fellow victim and all because she cares for
him
. . . He is afraid of scandal, but even more on his guard against self-contempt. He is quite ruthless when it comes to preserving his own good opinion – not above implying, for instance, that MB (now that he has rejected her) is to blame for making him feel ‘lonely', by which he means sexually starved, after all that autumn plenty. Then again, he wouldn't be feeling lonely if she hadn't existed in the first place, which was probably the Almighty's fault. Anyway, that it had all turned out such a mess was the cross Grandpa had to bear.

And with a kind of poetic justice, God's cause in Hanmer was being sold short as a result, for doing without MB was affecting his performance in the pulpit. ‘This loneliness is reacting upon my spirit. I cannot preach as I used to do.' That particular Sunday (25 February) there was a good congregation, but his sermon was ‘rotten'. ‘I must buck up if I want to keep the crowd,' he adds crudely, fearing the loss of his magic. MB (like Hilda) demoralises him, she's an incubus puncturing his
self-love, draining away his confidence and
spoiling the show
. ‘The loneliness of Hanmer is awful and MB is the cause.' Unlike Hilda, however, she can be got rid of.