The Bad Samaritan Read online

  Scarborough was mildly bustling in a watery, uncertain sunshine, and Rosemary congratulated herself on picking it. Bridlington would have been dull at this time of year. Brid was dull at any time of year. At Scarborough there was usually plenty going on.

  It was lunchtime when she arrived at the Cliff View Guesthouse, set in a commanding position on St Nicholas’s Cliff opposite the bricky horrors of the Grand Hotel. The proprietress welcomed her as someone she already knew, said she’d given her one of the bedrooms with a sea view, and asked if she would be taking lunch. Rosemary had had a tasteless sandwich on the train and shook her head.

  “I expect I’ll generally have dinner as my main meal,” she said, having booked half board. “It fits in better with my husband’s work to have the main meal in the evening, so that’s what I’ve got used to.”

  “Isn’t your husband a clergyman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Awfully demanding on their wives, I’ve always thought.”

  “Yes . . . . Yes, I’ve never thought about it, but I suppose it is. Restricting, certainly.”

  “Anyway, you can forget it for a bit and enjoy yourself, can’t you?”

  “Oh, I expect I’ll have a very quiet time.”

  Rosemary took her case up to her room, which did indeed have the most splendid view out to sea. That was the joy of coming out of season: you got the best rooms. She unpacked everything and set out things as if she had come for a long stay.

  Once she had freshened up she went out to the shops. She just browsed in the clothes shops, but in the bookshop she bought a biography of the Sitwells and a detective story set in ancient Rome. “I’m here to think, not to shop,” she chided herself. “No I’m not,” the other side of her mind said, “I’m here to get away from people.” No part of her said, “I’m here to regain my faith.” She took the funicular down to the beach and had a long walk along the headland. She must have been thinking as she walked but, oddly enough, when she got back to the Cliff View Guesthouse she had no idea what it was she had been thinking about.

  She took a book in to dinner that night. It was the sort of place where you could, and eating alone is never easy. You wait, try not to look around, and hope the other diners aren’t feeling sorry for you. She was just beginning to enjoy the manifest impossibility of the Sitwells’ father (as one does enjoy on the printed page people one would run a mile from in life) when she felt a shadow at her shoulder.

  “You like the meat or the fish? The meat is pork fillet and the fish is salmon. Is also a veg’tarian dish, but is not nice if you not veg’tarian.”

  “I can imagine,” said Rosemary. “Or even if you are one, probably. I’ll have pork.”

  He smiled, as if that was what he would have advised if he had been allowed to guide her choice. When he came with the meal Rosemary found it was indeed the sort of meal she might have cooked herself at home. She put aside her book and looked around her. The dining room was sparsely peopled: two middle-aged couples and three elderly ones, three other single ladies and one single man. The waiter was managing to cope on his own, banging happily in and out of the swing doors leading to the kitchen.

  After she had enjoyed the pork, Rosemary took up her book again and managed to continue reading while eating a remarkably boring fruit salad. She congratulated herself on choosing a place where you could do the kind of thing that you did when you were at home without disapproving eyes being fixed on you. Rosemary was just finishing her coffee when the waiter darted up to her from the foyer, a question in his dark eyes.

  “You Meesa Sheffield? There phone call for you. Thees way.”

  Rosemary followed him, thinking it must be Paul, then realised he would be at a Parochial Church Council meeting. When she picked up the phone in the foyer it was her daughter’s voice she heard.

  “Hello Mum. We wondered how you were.”

  That medical metaphor again, as if spiritual and physical health were inextricably muddled in everyone’s mind but her own. How much did Janet know?

  “Hello Janet. Lovely to hear from you. Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Kevin and I, of course. And Mark is here as well.”

  “Good Lord.” Her daughter and her son Mark never fought, but they had never seemed to have much in common and seldom got together except at home. “What are you two cooking up?”

  “Just got tickets for Carousel, that’s all. Mum—Dad says you’re going through some kind of crisis.”

  “I’m sure he told you exactly what kind of crisis, dear, so there’s no point in beating about the bush. Actually I’m not sure I regard it as a crisis at all.”

  “Well, it’s your life, Mum. I hope you manage to think things through. We wanted you to know we’re right behind you.”

  “That’s good of you, dear.”

  “Mark wants a word.”

  Why did her heart sink?

  “Mum?”

  “Hello, Mark dear. I do hope you all enjoy Carousel.”

  “I’m sure we will. Mum—you’ve really got to work at this thing, you know.”

  Rosemary was conscious of a sharp but not unexpected twinge of irritation. It wasn’t just being told what to do by her son. It was the quality and tone of her son’s voice: the quality was plummy and the tone was—what? Condescending? Forbearing of human frailty? Parsonical in the worst sense?

  “Oh?” she said coldly.

  “You mustn’t think your faith will just return, you know. You’ve got to work at it—pray hard, think things through, try to work out where you’ve gone wrong to make God leave you in this terrible way.”

  “Thank you, Mark. I think I have things under control. I should have thought even you would have realised that it’s not easy to pray when you have no one and nothing to pray to. Don’t let me keep you from Carousel.”

  And she put the phone down, feeling angrier than she had done in years. What had she and Paul done to produce a sermonising prat like Mark, and him only twenty-two years old? She retrieved her book from the empty dining room and wandered into the lounge. The Bill was on, watched by a bored and uncomprehending elderly guest. She sat down, but found the television did nothing to soothe her fuming mind. Drug trafficking on a run-down and violent Council estate was not a restful subject. There was a bookcase in the corner with a lot of old Companion Bookclub books in it, and a few standard classics. She didn’t feel like starting a new detective story—she always read fiction before she went to bed—so she went over, inspected the stock, and took out A Tale of Two Cities. She hadn’t read it, to her recollection, since she was at college. It wasn’t as soothing as a Jane Austen, but she felt she wasn’t cool enough for sly Jane.

  On the landing she was caught up with by the slim waiter, bounding up the stairs.

  “You have nice telephone call?”

  “Yes thank you,” she lied. “It was my son and daughter.”

  “Very nice.” He paused, and then said: “I have a little girl—back in Bosnia.”

  “Oh dear—how awful for you. Are you Bosnian?”

  He shrugged.

  “Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian—what does it matter? I thought I was Yugoslavian.”

  “Do you get news from your wife?”

  “I not talk to her for many weeks—months. Is no lines. Sometimes I have letter from my wife, but not often.” He patted the breast pocket of his jacket. “I not talk about my problems no more. You here on holiday.”

  “I’m very interested, er—sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  “They call me Stan here.”

  Rosemary was about to say that didn’t sound very romantic, but she thought she might give the wrong impression, so she simply said, “Good night, Stan,” and watched him open an unmarked door and bound up the poky stairs to his room in the attic.

  The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast in which she admired Stan’s dexterity with five or six plates and his excellent memory for orders of great complexity, Rosemary walked down to the lower part of th
e town. Here she could see the other Scarborough: whelk stalls, fortune-tellers, amusement arcades and streets littered with takeaway cartons. Come the summer holidays and there would be people in funny hats with slogans on them, fat women in skimpy cheap dresses, screaming children with snotty noses. “There is nothing for me here,” Rosemary said to herself and walked on to the beach and down to the sea’s edge.

  The sea should have put her in mind of eternal things, but it did not. She was niggling away at her previous thought: why had the lower town nothing for her? It was a loud, vulgar, happy kind of place in its way, yet she shrank from it, hated the harsh music with the heavy bass issuing from the arcades, hated the misspelt and mispunctuated hand-painted advertisements and shop signs. Here am I, a vicar’s wife, she thought, someone who ought to be in touch with all sorts of people. But the sort of people who come on day trips here in summer are totally alien to me—or if not alien at least foreign. There are no people like that at St Saviour’s—there are in the parish, but they don’t come to church. Of Paul’s parishioners the people I like and the people I dislike—Dark Satanic Mills and Mrs Harridance, for example—are all middle-class. Am I simply a snob? And if so have I always been one, or have I been made one by Paul’s congregation?

  She was struck by a horrible thought: people seeing me here, standing by the water’s edge, could probably guess that I am a vicar’s wife. I dress like a vicar’s wife: sensible jumper and skirt, with flat or low-heeled shoes. I have my hair done like a vicar’s wife: sensibly tied back so as not to need too much attention. I make up like a vicar’s wife: very discreetly. I am a vicar’s wife type. I can be pigeonholed.

  Disturbed, she turned and walked in the direction of St Nicholas’s Cliff.

  She walked very slowly, keeping close to the sea, stopping now and then to look at the boats. How much more activity, she thought, there would have been out to sea in Anne Brontë’s time. And when the Sitwells used to spend their summers here as children. She reached the bottom of the funicular railway and was just wondering whether it was warm enough to sit and read for a bit before finding somewhere for a sandwich and a cup of coffee when she saw the figure of Stan, sitting on an anorak spread out on the sand, gazing abstractedly out to sea.

  He looked slight, sad and very vulnerable. Her heart was touched by pity for him, and she felt maternal in a way she could no longer feel for her own son. He was so far from home and so terribly separated from his loved ones. How could one explain what was going on in Yugoslavia? How could European, educated, civilized people do such things to each other? What did it feel like to be one of these people and to have loved ones caught up in the conflict? She found she could not stop herself going over and sitting beside him.

  “Hello,” she said. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”

  He looked up at her and smiled shyly.

  “Yes, lovely. For England.”

  “Would you rather be home in Bosnia?”

  “No!” He said it violently, and there was fear in his voice too. “How could I want to be there when things are as they are now? But I would like very much my family here with me.”

  “Of course.”

  “I would even like to know where they are.”

  “You don’t know that?”

  “No. The last I hear, they are in a camp, my wife and little girl. But that was nearly three months ago. And it was not very far from the fighting. You see why I am so worried?” He shrugged. “What people we are.”

  “How can that kind of thing happen today?” asked Rosemary passionately. He shrugged again.

  “It go back to the war. More back, to when we became Yugoslavia. More back, to the Austrian Empire. More back, more back. Too much history, too many people, too much religions. We all have—what is the word?—things we want revenges for.”

  “Grudges.”

  “Grudges, yes. We have so many. We want to pay back things our fathers suffered, things our grandfathers suffered. Too many peoples, too much history.”

  Rosemary thought it all sounded much like Scottish history in Stuart times. Or Irish history at any time since the Settlements. To change the subject she said, “Have you got a picture of your little girl?”

  He nodded, dived into the pocket of his threadbare jacket and shuffled through a pile of snapshots in his bulging wallet. He handed a picture to her. It was a baby in white at its christening, a crucifix in the background.

  “She looks lovely . . . . Are you a Christian?”

  “Oh yes. But my grandmother is Moslem. We are a bit of everything in my family. Is true of many families in Bosnia. That is what is so mad, you see: when we fight each other we also fight part of ourselves.”

  He put the snapshot tenderly back in the pile of memories and stood up.

  “I must go and get ready for lunch. I have one hour free only in morning.”

  “They work you hard.”

  He shook his head.

  “Is good. I not complain. It stop me thinking.”

  “Thank you for talking to me, Stan . . . . Do I have to call you Stan? It’s a slightly ridiculous name. No young man is called Stan these days.”

  “I am Stanko. Call me Stanko.”

  “That’s better. I’m Rosemary.”

  “You not come to lunch, Rosemary?”

  “No, I’m on half board. I prefer dinner.”

  “Is sensible. Lunch is often offle!”

  He raised his hand and disappeared into the tiny station just above the beach. Rosemary stayed on the rock, looking out to sea. She did not take out her book, but for some reason her thoughts strayed to her reading of the night before: to Dr Manette reverting at moments of crisis to the shoemaking he had done for years during his long incarceration. This had reminded her of things learnt at teachers college: of Dickens’s own obsessive returning, over and over in the books, to his months in the blacking warehouse. We are all prisoners of the most terrible times in our past, she thought. The child victims of sex abuse, the adult victims of rape, seem never able to put it behind them. What chance was there for Yugoslavs of all races in the future? What chance of Stanko’s little girl ever managing to put the experiences of civil war behind her?

  That night she decided she ought to ring her husband. She left it till after ten, when she knew he would be back home, and since she preferred to be entirely private she went out into the street and used the nearest phone box.

  “Fine,” she said, in answer to her husband’s first questions. “Lots of fresh sea air, not too many people, food perfectly acceptable . . . . I had a phone call from the children last night.”

  “Oh dear, I rather thought you might,” said Paul, sounding terribly guilty. “Both of them?”

  “Yes, they were apparently off to see Carousel together. I suspect Mark had mainly gone to London to make sure the new boyfriend, Kevin, is totally acceptable.”

  “I’m sorry about saying anything to them, but Janet rang, and was curious, and . . .”

  “That’s perfectly all right. Janet I love and can cope with. I did object, though, to being given good advice by Mark. How did we manage to produce a son with such a plummy voice and such a smug manner?”

  “He has blotted his copybook! You sound very out of love with him.”

  “Of course I love him . . . . Oh dear, I sound like so many parents I’ve heard saying of course they love their children but they don’t actually like them very much. Do you think it’s possible to love someone without liking them?”

  “I’m sure it is. A lot of married couples feel that way about their partners.”

  “It sounds very uncomfortable. I’m glad I don’t feel that way about you.”

  “That’s a lovely thing to say. Thank you.” Paul hesitated. “Mark’s coming up on Friday.”

  “Is he? I hope you told him not to bring his washing.”

  “He’s welcome to bring it and do it himself in our machine . . . . I rather think he wants to have a serious talk about you.”

  “You
don’t surprise me one little bit.”

  “Shall I tell him you’re working at the problem?”

  “No, tell him to get lost . . . . Oh, I am thinking about it on and off, Paul. But I won’t have either of you, and especially him, acting as my spiritual physiotherapist. Prescribing spiritual exercises and suchlike.”

  “Have I?”

  “No. But if I hadn’t taken a strong line from the beginning you might have.”

  She finished her phone call as she saw Stanko wandering down the street. She left the phone booth, smiled at him, and together they walked back to the guesthouse.

  “I walk about a bit at night,” Stanko told her. “Is nice—quiet and nice fresh air. You been phoning someone?”

  “My husband. I’ve been off-loading my irritation at my son. Children—who’d have them?” She saw his face and immediately began apologising. “Oh Stanko—I am sorry. How thoughtless of me. I wouldn’t for the world . . .”

  “Don’t you worry, Meesa Rosemary. Don’t you think about it again. You have a nice day today?”

  And they went upstairs talking naturally and normally, as if, Rosemary thought afterwards, they had known each other for years.

  CHAPTER THREE

  People Talking

  In the next few days Rosemary settled into a comfortable routine, varied by special treats. The treats included a visit to the theatre (an Ayckbourn, of course) and the first film she had seen in a cinema in years (she found she had simply lost the habit). She visited the art gallery and took some trips out of town by bus, sometimes walking back to the guesthouse.

  Otherwise she read, relaxed on the beach or the cliffs, had long afternoon naps if the weather was rainy or windy, and watched some television.

  She found she liked to be down in the lounge either for the twenty to six news or the six o’clock one on the BBC. This often meant exposure to Australian soaps in the minutes before. She decided that the appeal of the soaps was that everyone seemed healthy, good-looking and clean—they depicted a sort of hygienic Elysian fields. All the young people had rather nice manners too: she actually saw one ask to get up from table at the end of a meal. Did young people in Australia, she wondered, really ask to get up from table? Did they still sit down at table for meals?