Wonder Worker Part II

Rosalind, Nicholas' wife, tries to tell him she wants a divorce but he pressurises her and even uses hypnosis on her to push her to stay in the marriage. He gets her to have sex under hypnosis. When she realises this, she feels sick and wretched. Rosalind, under pressure from her husband, agrees to come to London to live, at first, to try and mend the marriage. But she hates it. She does not like the shabby rectory or the "lame ducks" (Lewis, Stacy and Alice) who live there and who are now intruding on her married life. She decides she cannot stand it, and begins to act even more wildly. She thinks that if she has an blatant affair, it will force Nicholas to understand that she wants out of the marriage. In the end, Nicholas while feeling very guilty, reaises that he and Ros have never had much in common and that the marriage is over. Stacy, who has had doubts about his sexual orientation, ends up in a dreadful tangle and commits suicide. He tries to have sex with Rosalind and can't do it. Alice realises that she idealised Nick too much but she still loves him. She can see that he has made serious terrible mistakes in his marriage. He has acted very badly towards Rosalind. She still loves him and wants to marry him. But she feels he must get his act together as regards his obligations to his former wife and his sons. The next novel moves from a story about the Healing Centre staff to more of an adventure story. It is set 2 years later and Nicholas is still married to Ros, but getting a divorce. Alice works as a freelance chef, preparing dinners for wealthy clients who live in fancy flats in the City, in places like the Barbican. She gets a job doing a dinner for a successful corporate lawyer. The lawyer, a young woman called Carter (Catriona) Graham, is recently married to a German born man who is also a successful lawyer in a city firm. Soon after the dinner party, Carter finds that her husband's first marriage broke up because he was, as his ex puts it, dabbling in the occult. Carter refuses to believe in this at first. She is militantly against religion and thinks that talk about the occult is nonsense. However, she meets Mrs Mayfield, who runs sex and occult groups. Mayfield tells her that she is the one who cured Kim, Carter's husband of sexual problems. Now, she realises that he has been lying to her in a big way. He had an affair with Mrs Mayfield, and used lots of women in the sex groups. She begins to understand that she knows very little about religion and that she has made a very bad choice of a husband. Sophie, Kim's ex wife, has tried to talk to her, but Carter has always refused. Now, she goes to visit Sophie and finds her dead in her house. It turns out to be an accident, she had a fall, but it frightens Carter and drives her to seek help from the Healing centre's staff. Kim has a breakdown, and ends up in hospital and when he comes out, he confesses to Carter that he used to have homosexual flings, that he liked women - but he had anger issues which he took out by having sex with men. One of the men he slept with blackmailed him, so he killed him.