Free Heartbreaker by Susan Howatch Page A

war in which there were more defeats than victories.
    To complicate this stressful situation, Nicholas’s first wife Rosalind, who lived only thirty miles away, was always phoning him to talk about their two trouble-prone sons and conjuring up excuses (or so it seemed) to stay closely in touch. Nicholas and Rosalind had been friends since childhood; the marriage might have been dissolved but the friendship was apparently indestructible. Alice had reached the stage where she felt something should be said about Rosalind’s persistent intrusiveness, but couldn’t quite work out what that something should be.
    “. . . so Rosalind phones and says she simply has to talk to Nicholas about Benedict’s arrest for drunk-driving and would I mind if she and Nicholas met for lunch, and I say: ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t mind at all!’—why are the English so hopeless about complaining?—and of course that’s a lie and I’m seething. So I say: ‘The trouble is he’s so busy I doubt if he’s got time for lunch,’ and she says: ‘Oh no, he’s already told me he’s doing nothing on his next day off!’ And I think: that day off is supposed to be spent with
me,
and I feel so furious that I want to slap her—but of course I never will . . .”
    Alice was too nice, that was the problem. I said that if I were her I’d tell Rosalind to piss off and then I’d shake Nicholas till his teeth rattled.
    “Oh Carta, you do me so much good!” exclaimed Alice gratefully. “I don’t know what I’d do without your moral support. Have another piece of cake—or would you like a slice of deep-dish apple pie with cream?” A cordon bleu cook with a richly curving figure to bear witness to the irresistible food she produced, Alice was always generous in her hospitality.
    “But enough of
my
problems,” she was saying, refilling my plate. “Tell me about yours . . .”
    That’s the good thing about being part of a community. People care. People are interested. One never has to endure bad times alone. However, although I did talk to her about how Eric had driven me crazy, I never mentioned Gavin and I was careful not to moan about Eric for too long. That night I was clearly meant to be Alice’s listener, and besides, the confidentiality issues meant that Gavin was difficult to discuss.
    “. . . and when Eric’s working I hardly see him at all,” I said, concluding my brief whinge.
    “Welcome to the club!” sighed Alice.
    Eventually I left the Rector’s flat and went downstairs to the main hall on the ground floor. This was in the handsome Georgian section of the house where Nicholas had his study, I had my office and Lewis occupied a pair of interconnecting rooms known as “the bedsit,” a nicotine-stained, whisky-smelling, dust-laden retreat crammed with Victorian furniture, icons, books, records, tapes, CDs and bound volumes of The
Christian Parapsychologist.
There was no television. On his seventieth birthday Lewis’s daughter, who was married to one of the northern bishops, had given him a computer “to keep his brain active in old age,” but this white elephant was consigned to a corner and covered twenty-four hours a day with a disused altar cloth.
    Lewis was now seventy-one, a state of affairs which he claimed didn’t suit him even though we all knew it gave him an excuse to be as eccentric as he chose. He was chunky in build, neither tall nor short, and had silver hair, sharp black eyes and a foxy look. Apparently in his youth he had sailed close to the ecclesiastical wind, but in his old age he had become something of an elder statesman, respected for his traditionalist views.
    Nicholas and Alice had both invited him to stay on at the Rectory after their marriage, and although Lewis had said to me more than once that they should be “left alone to enjoy married life without some senile pensioner cluttering up the landscape,” he had so far made no attempt to move out. He and Nicholas went back a long way and were as