‘You take too much notice of them,’ protested Molly.

  ‘I must submit,’ he said. ‘I am still a priest.’

  ‘But you know the bureaucracy of the Church is venal. You have told me so often enough. They are politicians: you are divinely inspired, by God.’

  ‘My dear, I think you go a little too far.’ But he was pleased. All the same, he dropped the matter of the writers. He was beginning to feel quite soporific, almost lazy.

  Molly had lost one and three-quarter stone by the fifth month, and he had put on two. He could not have jogged to Bradwell Park had he tried, which of late he hadn’t. He’d had a notice up in the Mission saying that advice and counselling was available at the clinic, and only went there once a week, by taxi, but felt guilty about it.

  Molly had central heating installed in the house. He felt warmth pervading his bones: his mind no longer worked coolly and persistently but in rather agreeable sudden bursts. He was pleasantly and sensuously tired much of the time. The old oak furniture, the chests and bureaux and tables that had stood mellowing in dark corners for centuries split their seams and warped their frames in the new, hot, dry air. The ghostly visitors had gone for ever, driven out by warmth, and wine, and food and sex. They were never seen again.

  Molly declared in the sixth month that perhaps Father Ferguson was by nature an administrator, rather than a field-worker. Perhaps he could give up going to the Bradwell Park Mission altogether.

  ‘But that would mean the Mission closing!’

  ‘Your function, my dear, is to be a thorn in the side of the Church, for the Church’s sake. Remember the parable of the talents?’

  So the Mission closed and Father Ferguson was free of his guilt. He looked round for something to do.

  ‘What about your Theory of Literary Responsibility?’ said Molly.

  ‘Too thorny a matter.’

  ‘But, my dear, you are the King of Thorns!’

  He wrote persuasive letters to six leading writers of romantic fiction, from a list provided by Molly. Four replied, two did not. One of the latter was Mary Fisher.

  ‘I think you should visit her,’ said Molly. ‘I think such defiance should not be allowed to pass. To ignore a letter from a man of the cloth? What insolence! It is almost blasphemy. It is an offence not just against you, but against the Church!’

  ‘I love the way you’re always on my side,’ he said. ‘I am so used to people arguing with me that to have someone agreeing with me is quite enchanting.’

  Father Ferguson put on his cassock, got into his new car, and drove off to the High Tower. Molly waved him goodbye.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MARY FISHER LIVES IN the High Tower and considers the nature of guilt, and responsibility. She weeps a great deal. It is a long time since she has been to bed with a man. She loves God, since there is no one else to love, and attributes to Him such qualities as Father Ferguson maintains he has.

  She would love Father Ferguson too, but he is a priest and she assumes that he is celibate; it has not occurred to her that he has a sexual nature. She approaches God through him, and that is all.

  Old Mrs Fisher rises up from her bed from time to time and shrieks, ‘Get that black crow out of here. Priests bring bad luck.’

  As if bad luck had not been surging all around Mary Fisher like the waves of the sea around the tower ever since Bobbo left his wife to live with her.

  Father Ferguson says it is not bad luck but God’s punishment for her sins. She is one of the fortunate, he says, much blessed by God. He punishes his favourites, it seems, in this world and not the next.

  Father Ferguson has drunk his way through the best wines in Mary Fisher’s cellar. Not that there were many bottles there. Mary Fisher left wine-buying to men, and lately men have disappeared from her life.

  It is a sign of the times: this running down, not just of people, but of things. Everywhere she looks it is the same. Garcia’s baby by Joan was born with a hole in its heart. She cannot wish the baby spectacularly well, let alone its thieving mother, but she is upset by the spectacle of their distress. Father Ferguson soothes and explains the nature of God’s love which somehow — she can never quite remember how — makes pain and suffering desirable.

  Mary Fisher tells Father Ferguson about what she did to Bobbo’s wife, and to Bobbo’s children. She says she understands it was wicked. She says she knows that love is no justification for bad behaviour. She wants to know how to be good.

  ‘What you write is pernicious nonsense,’ says Father Ferguson bluntly. ‘You must stop. Then you will begin to be good.’

  This too! Father Ferguson explains how she has damaged the lives of a million readers: she has given them false expectations. She is personally responsible for much of the misery of the female multitude. Even the modern woman’s taste for Valium he lays at her door. Mary Fisher’s writing hand trembles and stops.

  Father Ferguson says God is all-merciful: He will forgive the truly repentant, if they truly believe. Mary Fisher is desperate for forgiveness. She wants to truly believe, to be converted to Catholicism, and is.

  Happy in her new faith, Mary Fisher grows plump and pretty again. She and Father Ferguson pray together, twice a week. He dines on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and stays over Thursday nights. She will use her name, her fame, her reputation, to save the world, and not add to its troubles. She starts a novel, The Pearly Gates of Love. It is about a nun and her struggle for heavenly love. Her publishers are delighted.

  Father Ferguson is less pleased. He explains to Mary Fisher that divine love and casual love are not mutually exclusive.

  ‘There is also a creative truth,’ says Mary Fisher, stronger in professional matters than in any other. ‘And that’s what this novel needs. And with the money I earn from it, who knows, perhaps I could build a chapel in the grounds.’

  That shocks him; at any rate he rebukes her. It is Thursday night. She goes to her room, and weeps, leaving him alone. Garcia listens for the sound of Father Ferguson’s following footsteps, climbing the stone stairs to Mary Fisher’s white and silver bedroom, but hears nothing. He is glad: he has been jealous. Mary Fisher is once again the object of his desire: he is disappointed in Joan, who steals and has produced an imperfect baby. He goes to Mary Fisher’s room himself.

  It is as if time, static for so long, hibernating, but now leaping and threshing, has swallowed its own tail, and she is back at the beginning. Perhaps she is cured of Bobbo, at last!

  And then Father Ferguson is in the room, and Garcia is scurrying out of sight, for a priest is a priest.

  Mary Fisher is appalled.

  ‘Be of good cheer,’ says Father Ferguson, sitting casually upon the bed. ‘This is a small and venial sin compared to the rest.’

  But she doesn’t believe him. She sees it all. She believes in love but practises lust: worships God but follows the Devil. She cannot even hold on to her love for Bobbo. She sees him as a merman, a man with a tail and legs and nothing between them.

  She is humiliated. She, to whom Father Ferguson credited a soul, discovered humping and grunting like an animal, no better than the Doberman bitch.

  Mary Fisher sees God disappearing from her life: becoming smaller and smaller, receding into infinity, leaving her with no forgiveness, only guilt.

  ‘We must declare a truce,’ is all he says, ‘between good and evil, soul and body, spirit and the flesh. We must incorporate the bad within the good. The new God comes not to cast out sin, but to welcome it. Only by knowing what we are can we achieve salvation.’

  And now he means to take away her guilt! It is all she has. It is the only order she can impose upon the chaos of her life.

  ‘All things must change,’ says Father Ferguson. ‘Sin itself must change.’ But he looks like Chaucer’s Pardoner, fleshy and greedy and happy; as if he has been there for ever, waiting to extract his price. He enfolds her little form in his large and powerful arms, wraps his brown wool gown around her. It is a fine silky fabric, not rough-weave at all. ‘We must not deny our negative impulses,’ he says. ‘We are God’s creation, every bit of us. We must glorify the flesh along with the soul.’

  Well, so much I’ve taught him. I wish the priest well and Mary Fisher bad. Garcia removes his eye from the keyhole: my vision of the scene is lost. All I know is that if she will with Garcia she will with him, and if he will with me, he will with her, and why not, except I grudge Mary Fisher even ten minutes’ happiness. That’s all he’ll give her.

  But I like to tease Mary Fisher too, to lob a little star of hope in front of her, in order to snatch it away. Why not? I remember making mushroom soup, and hoping for Bobbo’s smile, and chicken vol-au-vents, in the hope of his approval, and chocolate mousse so that he would leave her and return to me. And he didn’t. Let her take what’s coming to her and put up with it. She has no option, anyway.

  In the meantime, I have seen an insurance man pecking around the Rectory: the same one who came to the fire at Nightbird Drive, to pick over the ashes. It is unlikely that he will recognise me as the same soft, distraught, poisoned, lumbering woman who watched her home go up in flames: now I am lean and tough and swift. All the same prudence indicates that I should leave. Vultures have sharp eyes.

  The fact remains there is still another stone to lose. In flipping the coin of Father Ferguson’s life, changing him from ascetic to hedonist, I had to pay a price. It’s men who make women fat, that’s obvious.

  I must go where men don’t go. I don’t like it here anymore, anyway. Father Ferguson has sold out to the developers, of course: he is the darling of his bosses. Demolition men turn up from time to time to measure the house, as undertakers measure corpses for their coffins. I saw the house through its dying days, that’s all, having brought about its death. It doesn’t matter much. I dismissed its soul when I dismissed its ghosts.

  TWENTY-NINE

  RUTH JOINED A COMMUNE of separatist feminists. These women had no truck with the male world; they accepted her readily as one of themselves. She called herself Millie Mason. Like them, she wore jeans, T-shirt, boots and a duffle jacket: they did not ask for her credentials. She was female and had suffered for it, and that was enough. Her new companions did not eat animal meat or dairy products and found sexual satisfaction with each other. They had no desire to be attractive to men, although many clearly were. The Wimmin, as they called themselves, lived just outside the city, in a cluster of caravans around an old farmhouse. They worked a four-acre field, growing pulses, grain, comfrey and yarrow, which they harvested, treated and sold in health food shops throughout the land. They had daughters but no sons: the latter they disposed of in ways which to the outside world would seem sinister, but to them perfectly reasonable.

  Ruth was strong, competent, and without those affectations commonly called feminine. She did what she could to help the Wimmin but was glad her stay was temporary. She did not want to live in their world permanently. It lacked a glitter at the edges: it was denim-coloured and serviceable: sodden by the muddy flood of purgatory wastes, not flickering and dangerous with hell-fire.

  But the living was hard and the diet fibrous, and low in fat, and her jeans felt looser every week that passed, as she tilled and hoed and dug. There were no scales on which she could weigh herself, and she could not easily find a mirror.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like,’ they’d say. ‘What matters is what you feel like.’

  But she knew they were wrong. She wished to live in the giddy mainstream of the world, not tucked away in this muddy corner of integrity. But she did not say so. She might have found herself homeless. The Wimmin did not take easily to those who disagreed with them: they made them honorary un-women.

  When Ruth could find almost no difference between her waist and her hips she telephoned Mr Roche from a call box. There was no telephone on the commune: such instruments were controlling; a feature of a male technology. Besides the women had no need to communicate with the outside world.

  ‘You’ve lost three stone?’

  ‘Possibly more.’

  He made an appointment with Ruth to see Mr Ghengis the following week. The latter would fly over specially, he said, all the way from Los Angeles.

  ‘You’re an interesting case,’ said Mr Roche.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Such a challenge!’

  ‘I wish to look what I want to look like, not what he wants me to look like,’ she warned.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘That may be very expensive,’ said Mr Roche, eventually.

  Ruth transferred her money in Switzerland to a Los Angeles bank: the transaction went through smoothly enough.

  She went to a bookshop and bought a copy of The Pearly Gates of Love.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

  ‘Very badly,’ said the manageress, ‘load of religious twaddle!’ and she called out to an assistant, ‘Alice, move the Fisher books off the shelves. Remember, shelf space is profit space!’

  Ruth cut the picture of Mary Fisher from the book’s dust-jacket and dropped the book in the trash can. Mary Fisher stared up at the sky, in pretty, delicate profile, as if she had a hotline to God. She looked enchanting, and happy, and little. Ruth searched the bookshops for other novels by Mary Fisher, which might carry a full-length photograph, and was lucky enough to find one.

  ‘Well!’ said Mr Ghengis, when he looked at the photographs. ‘Wow, even! But that’s a facer!’

  ‘Why so?’ asked Ruth grimly.

  ‘The hair’s nothing, the face we can do — these are classic features we’re looking at. The mouth will be tricky, but possible. When your jaw’s trimmed the lipline will fall quite nicely into place. We work from the inside out as much as possible, of course. We can reshape the body quite dramatically — you have got thin, haven’t you! How did you do that?’

  ‘By keeping away from men,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Not a very popular remedy with most of my patients! They’d rather have large slices cut off them any day — but, my dear, the proportion is going to look odd. This lady is at least six inches shorter than you.’

  ‘Then you must make tucks in my legs,’ she said. ‘I know it can be done.’

  It was a little while before he replied.

  ‘Three inches from the femur is the most anyone has undertaken. It’s easy enough to remove bone — you simply chop. But muscles, sinews, arteries, tendons all have to be equivalently looped, or shortened. It is not simple and not totally safe.’

  ‘I will accept the responsibility,’ said Ruth. ‘You give new hearts, new kidneys, new livers and so forth: all I am asking you to do is take unnecessary stuff away.’

  ‘But in such quantity!’

  ‘Modern surgical techniques improve year by year. You can use chip technology, micro-surgery, lasers. Can’t you?’

  ‘A body remains a body,’ said Mr Ghengis, ‘and a body scars if you open it up. You can even get keloid scarring: puckering and wrinkling. A terrible mess! If it happens there is nothing we can do about it. And we can’t take more than three inches from your femur. That is final.’

  ‘Then take some out of the shin-bone.’

  ‘It’s never been done.’

  ‘Then be the first. Or would you prefer to remove some of my vertebrae?’

  ‘No!’ He sounded panicky.

  She smiled complacently. She felt she had won. So did he. He tried one last gambit:

  ‘The other thing that occurs to the cosmetic surgeon,’ he said, ‘is that though you can change the body you cannot change the person. And little by little — this may sound mystical, but it is our experience — the body reshapes itself to fit the personality.

  And the personality of those who have the courage and will to seek cosmetic surgery may be handsome, but isn’t pretty. You are asking to be made pretty: trivial, if you will forgive me.’

  He had gone too far. He did not go on.

  ‘I have an exceptionally adaptable personality,’ Ruth observed. ‘I have tried many ways of fitting myself to my original body, and the world into which I was born, and have failed. I am no revolutionary. Since I cannot change them, I will change myself. I am quite sure I will settle happily enough into my new body.’

  ‘It will cost you millions of dollars. It is worth it?’

  ‘I have them. Yes.’

  ‘It will take years.’

  ‘I have them.’

  ‘I can stop you looking old, but you will be old.’

  ‘No. Age is what the observer sees, not what the observed feels.’

  He gave up. He agreed to take her into his clinic for, as he put it, extensive renovation. His assistant would be a Dr Black. He would call in other specialists as required. He would be writing to her. In the meantime Ruth should go back to her normal life.

  Ruth returned to the commune and rotavated a half-acre plot. She felt the muscles of her strong legs work: she felt the sweat trickle down her powerful shoulders, beneath a man’s denim shirt. She saw a lark ascending higher and higher, a flimsy, delicate thing with a twittering song, into a small patch of blue sky through which the midday sun shone down. But then a lower layer of black clouds swirled in and closed the gap and the day grew suddenly dark and a fork of lightning pierced the sky where lately the lark had been.

  Ruth turned up her face to the big pelting drops that began to fall, and the earth turned to mud beneath her rubber-booted feet, and she dragged the heavy machine back to its shed.

  In the house the other women congregated, taking off capes and boots, laughing and exhilarated. They touched each other a great deal — to embrace was part of their policy. Ruth almost weakened, almost wanted to belong to them, for the sake of their good cheer. But she could not. She belonged to a different species. And she knew that by nightfall someone would be in tears; in these few muddy, laughing minutes someone would fall in love, someone out of it, and that the best looking would suffer least, and the worst looking most, here as anywhere.