The confession was met by silence.
“I knocked and when no one answered the door I went around to the back. I thought you might be working in the garden.”
“You thought I might be working in the garden – on a Thursday at midday?”
He had not heard that tone from Randall before.
“Incidentally I happened to meet one of your patients. He was walking up to the lookout.”
Again silence.
“May I discuss this as a pastoral matter?”
The silence continued.
“I was wondering if you would allow me to be part of your ministry in his case. The chaplain at Carrington Hospital has a good arrangement with me and I provide prayer support for him.”
“Why are you so interested in this patient?”
He hesitated. “I just felt sorry for him.”
“You just felt sorry for him.”
The conversation was becoming increasingly strained. “Perhaps you would like to think it over and let me know if there is any way in which I can help in my capacity as a priest?”
The reply was courteous but cold. “I’m rather surprised, Vicar, that you should visit my hospital and speak to my patients without asking my permission. I am even more surprised at your request, especially in view of the professional confidentiality involved.”
It troubled the vicar that the relationship with his warden had broken down. He had made a mistake. He had disobeyed instructions about visiting. He had not respected Randall’s professional confidentiality. It was true that he had apologised. Yet his apology had not been accepted. His call had not mitigated the offence but added to it. He had wanted to discuss something pastorally important with Randall about the visit, but he had not been able to. Instead he had been treated like a child caught in a misdemeanour.
Randall was a dependable churchwarden, a faithful communicant. He had been at the church a long time and Harry’s warden for twelve years. Everybody in the parish respected him and trusted him. Yet Harry at this time found himself reflecting on how well he really knew his warden. Though he provided good advice and counsel to him as a warden, Randall never shared anything with him at a deeper level. In fact he never shared very much about himself at all. This was not unusual with the men of the parish who tended to keep their professional lives separate from their church lives. However, in the case of his own churchwarden whom he knew to be a man deeply concerned about society and its problems, it was a sadness to him that their conversations never got beyond the minutiae of church administration. Surely the closeness of their pastoral relationship deserved better.
I know I make mistakes, but I am still his parish priest.
Interfering simpleton!
Randall Richardson sat in his study in his Epsom home studying the file of the patient under discussion.
What right had Mountjoy got to go sneaking around his property and talking to his patients, then to ring him up and ask if he could help with the treatment? And just because he felt sorry for that person! It was getting to the point that he would have to go to another church. Harry Mountjoy was a good man, but simple, one who was always bludging on his parishioners for cups of tea, a person practised at holding babies at christenings and standing at bedsides and gravesides, but a man totally lacking in knowledge of the ways of the world. A gullible man whom people could twist just by making him feel sorry for them.
There was a time when he had wondered whether he should speak to the vicar about his own problem. He had decided against it. He was used to keeping his own counsel, and to do otherwise would show a lack of confidence in himself. He also suspected the vicar’s rather narrow theological outlook and his naive political views. How could this unworldly man understand his wrestling about the whole direction of society and the anger which grew in him as a result? The Anglican Church regrettably was no longer the bulwark of society it once had been and, if it was made up of people like Harry Mountjoy, it would never face the present threats. In fact it sometimes even supported them. He recalled with disgust a vestry meeting where a motion supporting the Maori terrorists had been put forward by Stan McTaggart.
He thought about the phone call again. The thing that concerned him was not the vicar’s naivety or his failure to obey instructions, but the fact that he was not telling the truth.
His vicar was a very poor liar.
He knew which patient it was. This person had been his individual and particular responsibility. By a mixture of personal bonding and drug dependency, he had established a relationship which had kept this patient at the hospital for nearly two and a half years without using locks or bars.
Fortunately, the problem had been neurotic and not psychotic and there had not been difficulties with violence or criminal conviction. If so, the patient would have been under a different system requiring stringent team supervision. Fortunately too, the patient’s parents had both died, and with no immediate family Randall had more freedom to develop his own treatment. Moreover, being a private concern, the hospital was not visited by patient advocates who could be an administrative complication.
The patient’s problem was associated with guilt, and this guilt produced nightmares during which he would wake up screaming. The relief which he prescribed was a particular drug which deadened all nervous reactions. It was not the only form of treatment, nor was it the orthodox treatment recommended by his professional body, but it was the one which in the circumstances was the most effective.
The long face lengthened and the slender fingers came together in an attitude of prayer. It was his habit every day to remember each one of his patients.
CHAPTER 25
I wish I’d never touched it!
On Thursday evening after her visits to the library and to Susan McAndrew, Kate had been excited as the results of her detective work had started to come together on the table at her flat. But when the final pattern emerged late that night, she was filled with apprehension. It was as if she had caught some loathsome disease and needed to make an appointment with the doctor yet hesitated because of what the treatment might be. The whole thing was so improbable that she wondered if she would ever find someone who wouldn’t laugh at her or say “Whatever.” She longed to find someone who would listen sympathetically, then tell her there was nothing in it. This way she could stop worrying and rip it all up. After all, her holidays were almost finished, and then she would get back to normality.
But everyone she thought of had his or her own problems. Sergeant Piriaka was cautious about commenting on racial issues and didn’t seem to want to offend his superiors. Her pastor might have started preaching. John McTaggart didn’t have enough imagination. Her bird friends would be too busy on field expeditions. As for her bosses or colleagues at work, their little world of finance was too neat and structured to admit even the existence of such a problem.
It took her till Friday at noon to decide to make a phone call to the Department of Geology at the University. Like her relationships with her male colleagues at work, she would keep this relationship on a strictly professional basis.
“May I speak to David?” She realised that she did not know his surname and wondered if there were more than one David on the staff.
“Are you looking for Dr Corbishley?” The receptionist seemed to hesitate. “He’s not here.” Sensing Kate’s disappointment, she asked in a changed tone. “Are you a friend of his?”
“No,” she said emphatically, “but we have an interest in the same project.”