Free Heartbreaker by Susan Howatch

most unlikely to do so afterwards, and the marriage would quickly become dislocated.
    “God, I’m so sick of you being neurotic about money!” I burst out. “If
you
were the one who had the cash, this problem wouldn’t exist!”
    “We’ve had this conversation before. If you’d only commit yourself by agreeing to marry me, I wouldn’t feel so like a kept man whenever you fling money at me!”
    “I never fling money at you!”
    “You flung Searcy’s at me just now when you know damn well I have to go back to office-work next week to pay for my research trip to Norway!”
    “Sometimes I think all you’re interested in is your writing and I’m just an accessory to keep you amused between chapters! If you feel like a kept man, I feel like a cheap sex-aid!”
    Eric plonked down the frozen fish pie. “Okay, let me try again. Marry me.”
    “What?”
    “MARRY ME! You say you’re over that first marriage, you say you’re fully healed from that terrible time you went through with Kim in 1990, but if you were truly recovered you wouldn’t have this paralysing fear of commitment. We’d get married and—”
    “How can I commit when we haven’t solved the money problem?”
    “But can’t you see? You’re using the money problem to avoid—”
    “No, I’m not,
no, I’m not,
NO, I’M NOT!”
    “Oh yeah? Think about it,” said Eric, and walked out, leaving me alone with my empty whisky glass and the frozen fish pie.
    V
    A minute later I was calling my best friend Alice Darrow, the Rector’s wife. There’s nothing so therapeutic as a good moan to one’s girlfriend when men are driving one up the wall—as Alice herself said to me before I could even confess I had a problem. I volunteered to be with her in ten minutes. Then I called Lewis Hall, the retired priest who lived with Alice and Nicholas at the Rectory.
    “I’m just about to drop in to see Alice,” I said to him. “Could I please look in on you afterwards? I’ve got mixed up in a weird way with a prostitute and I’ve had a row with Eric and I feel I could use a head transplant.”
    “My dear,” said Lewis, “my dull evening has been miraculously transformed.”
    I sighed with relief. Then I grabbed my bag, left the house and headed for the St. Benet’s Rectory, which stood in Egg Street less than quarter of a mile away.
    VI
    If I had stayed at home that evening I would have moped, wept and drunk too much in an orgy of anxiety and depression, but fortunately I had been saved from all this rubbishy behaviour because my friend Alice needed me. I had to shape up; I had to stop thinking me, me, me and start thinking you, you, you—always a startling philosophy for a former high flyer who had not so long ago thought of no one but herself.
    Alice and I were both in our mid-thirties, and although we were in many ways very different, we had one important thing in common: we had both encountered St. Benet’s by accident when we had been quite outside any formal religion and had had no interest in God. Alice’s encounter had taken place in 1988, mine in 1990 at the time of my disastrous marriage to Kim. Now, in 1992, I felt that although Alice’s journey and mine were continuing down different paths, they were still running parallel, still cementing our friendship, still making it not only possible but natural for us to reach out and help each other whenever the going got rough.
    Alice had married Nicholas last year after a lengthy engagement complicated by his dragged-out divorce, and she was now beginning to worry that she might have a fertility problem. The doctors refused to take her worries seriously, since she hadn’t been trying to conceive for long, but what disturbed her more was the question of whether Nicholas would have time to be an attentive father if a baby showed up. He enjoyed his work too much, and although with the help of his spiritual director he was always battling away not to be a workaholic, it seemed to be a never-ending