Mystical Paths
Susan Howatch
The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.1968, with the swinging sixties sliding into decadence, finds Nicholas Darrow wrestling with overwhelming personal problems: How can he bring himself to marry his fiancée, Rosalind, when he is unable to avoid promiscuity? How can he become a priest when he finds it so difficult to live as one? And how can he break his dangerous dependence on his father Jon, whose psychic gifts he shares? It is at this crucial moment in his life that Nick becomes involved in the mystery surrounding his friend, Christian Aysgarth. Gradually, he realises that discovering the truth about this enigmatic and complex man will unlock the answers to his own baffling problems. However, his journey through darkness into the light reverses all the old certainties and, in his experiments with the psychic powers, Nick risks even his own life and sanity.
Susan Howatch
MYSTICAL PATHS
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_139192a6-3308-583c-b274-d83ecff73497)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Extracts from The River Within and Jung and the Christian Way by Christopher Bryant published and copyright 1978 and 1983 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. Extracts from Canterbury Pilgrim and Canterbury Essays and Addresses by Michael Ramsay published by SPCK. All reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992, then by Fontana 1993 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1992
The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006496878
Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007396405
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PRAISE (#ulink_86bf8ad3-3873-566a-b966-59f51da3e43e)
From the reviews:
‘Arguably no one writing today can equal Howatch’s ability to write compelling novels that combine theology and psychology in a complex, fast-moving plot offering beautifully delineated characters and the suspense of a mystery thriller’
Publishers Weekly
‘A fascinating, mind-bending exposition … Howatch wins out’
Sunday Times
‘Taking on the style of a psychological thriller … Mystical Paths covers in a profound and theologically thoughtful way the powers of light and powers of darkness … Her success should not go unrewarded’
Catholic Herald
‘Howatch writes thrillers of the heart and mind … everything in a Howatch novel cuts close to the bone and is of vital concern’
New Woman
‘Susan Howatch … is writing for anyone who can recognise that mysterious gift of the true storyteller’
Daily Telegraph
‘One of the most original novelists writing today’
Cosmopolitan
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_9abc6d0d-3ce3-5647-90a7-32db3d96a314)
Mystical Paths is the fifth in a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. Each book is designed to be read independently of the others, but the more books are read the wider will be the view of the multi-sided reality which is being presented.
The first novel, Glittering Images, was set in 1937. Glamorous Powers, narrated by Jon Darrow, opened in 1940, Ultimate Prizes was narrated by Neville Aysgarth after the war, and Scandalous Risks viewed the Church in 1963 through the eyes of Venetia Flaxton. The sixth and final novel, Absolute Truths, will take place in 1965, three years before the main events described by Nicholas Darrow in Mystical Paths, and Charles Ashworth, the narrator who opened the series, will narrate the novel which brings the series to a close.
The ecclesiastical era of Nicholas Darrow’s youth was dominated by ARTHUR MICHAEL RICHARD RAMSEY, who was born in 1904. While still in his thirties he became the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham and a Canon of Durham Cathedral. Two years later he married. A short period as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge preceded his appointment as Bishop of Durham at the age of forty-seven, and his ascent to the top of the Church’s hierarchy continued to be rapid: by 1956 he was Archbishop of York, and in 1961 he became the one hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury.
Ramsey combined a first-class intellect with a striking appearance and a considerable degree of eccentricity and originality in his speech, manner and dress; a member of the Catholic wing of the Church, he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to adopt the uniform of a purple cassock instead of the traditional frock-coat and gaiters. The combination of eccentricity and a deep personal holiness made him seem a remote figure to some in the turbulent days of the 1960s, but others appreciated his traditionalism at a time when all traditions were coming under attack. Hostile at first to the outbreak of radical theology he later adopted a more flexible approach, recognising that the widespread questioning of both Christianity and the Church needed careful answering, not instant condemnation.
‘It may be the will of God that our church should have its heart broken,’ Ramsey said before his enthronement at Canterbury, and this proved a prophetic statement. During the secular triumphalism of the 1960s, the Church suffered a loss of confidence and a numerical decline, but Ramsey provided the spiritual leadership needed to sustain it during the dark days of demoralisation, and to lead it towards more fruitful times.
Having retired from Canterbury in 1974, he died in 1988 in the midst of an era very changed from the one over which he had presided twenty years before.
The thought of Jon and Nicholas Darrow reflects the work of CHRISTOPHER BRYANT, who was born in 1905 and ordained not long after he had graduated, like Michael Ramsey, from Cambridge University. In 1935 he became a professed member of the Society of St John the Evangelist, known as the Cowley Fathers, which is the oldest religious community for men in the Church of England. For almost all of the next twenty-five years he was based at the Society’s house in Oxford; he became first novice guardian, then assistant superior, and it was here that he began to make a special study of psychology.
In 1955 he was put in charge of St Edward’s House, the Society’s London home, and he became increasingly famous as a spiritual director. As he approached seventy his writing career began: he embarked on committing to paper the insights into religious belief which he had obtained from studying Jung’s psychology. The book failed to find a publisher, but another religious community came to the rescue and published it under their own imprint as Depth Psychology and Religious Belief. His other books, however, found favour with a well-known religious publisher and all his work came to have a wide readership. The River Within, The Heart in Pilgrimage and Jung and the Christum Way were published before his death. Journey to the Centre was published posthumously. He died in 1985
CONTENTS
COVER (#u5443c8b9-299f-5333-adf5-9fdb355a77a4)
TITLE PAGE (#u2f21e0ee-213f-57fb-affb-e1e50fdea51c)
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_13f3acd1-fd56-5f63-a31b-32abd3a4249e)
PRAISE (#ulink_746060a9-23db-58f4-a8b8-06a929b7316e)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_4a1a0e76-f4b8-5b1e-869d-c85b728a2c22)
PART ONE THE JOURNEY AROUND THE CIRCLE (#ulink_fff3a275-ec91-51f3-ab58-12137b607805)
ONE (#ulink_7521eaa5-8f5e-5640-99e3-3be13b486837)
TWO (#ulink_45ba8ead-0601-5f80-8899-fdf156cd20bd)
THREE (#ulink_0ca09f27-c7c8-5536-97af-135d0db104c7)
FOUR (#ulink_506278e1-5e16-5d67-9f19-2924e27684fc)
FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO THE JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE SELF-REALISATION/ETERNAL LIFE (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
BY SUSAN HOWATCH (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_b2235898-c0a6-5c03-9ead-fccac270e681)
THE JOURNEY AROUND THE CIRCLE (#ulink_b2235898-c0a6-5c03-9ead-fccac270e681)
‘Amidst the pressures and strains of life there is the longing of the self to realize itself by escaping from the dominance of the environment. There are many cults which offer such an escape, with an experience of a heightening of the faculties and a realization of the self in greater power of its own or of something beyond the self. But it is important to ask what is the reality which is experienced, and what is the effect not only upon the sensations but upon the life and character of the person who has had the experience. There is an old story of a man who was had up for being drunk. The magistrate asked, “Why do you get drunk like this?” and the man replied, “You see, your worship, it’s the shortest way out of Manchester.” Alcohol, drugs, the mystical techniques of various religions, may be the shortest way out of Manchester … But it matters very much where you get to, and what you are like when you come back.’
MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974
Canterbury Pilgrim
‘God acts upon us inescapably through the people who touch and influence our lives.’
CHRISTOPHER BRYANT
Member of the Society of St John the Evangelist 1935–1985
The River Within
ONE (#ulink_fb86dc4c-aa41-5699-8792-c9e2da159a0d)
‘More than in the past, the young are striking out into intellectual independence and revolt against tradition.’
MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974
Canterbury Pilgrim
I
I had just returned from an exorcism and was flinging some shirts into the washing machine when my colleague entered the kitchen. He was wearing his cassock and carrying a bottle of whisky. Beyond the window caked in city grime, sunlight blazed upon the battered dustbins in the back-yard.
‘How was the Gothic mansion haunted by the ravishing young ghost?’
‘Non-existent. The trouble was in a council house where the previous occupant had overdosed on heroin in the lavatory.’
‘Ah well, that’s 1988 for you … Drink?’
I declined but passed him a glass from the draining-board rack before I set the dials on the washing-machine. Meanwhile the electric kettle was coming to the boil. Absent-mindedly I reached for the teapot. ‘What’s new?’
‘Absolutely nothing. A drunk disrupted the lunch-time Eucharist, the Gay Christians demanded that we stock their literature on AIDS, and some neurotic female from the Movement for the Ordination of Women threatened to picket the church unless you sacked me – oh, and talking of neurotic women someone called Venetia telephoned twice to say she had to talk to you. She sounded like a nymphomaniac.’ He drank deeply from his whisky before adding: ‘Now why should the name Venetia remind me of the 1960s?’
There was a silence broken only by the click of the kettle as it switched itself off. Then I said: ‘She was a friend of Christian Aysgarth’s.’
‘Ah yes,’ said my colleague, suddenly motionless. ‘The Christian Aysgarth affair. 1968. Crisis, chaos and the Devil on the loose.’
The phone rang. Moving to the extension, which hung on the wall by the dresser, I unhooked the receiver and said neutrally: ‘St Bent’s Rectory.’
‘Darling!’ It was Venetia. ‘I thought I’d never get past that crusty old curate you keep!’
‘He’s not my curate. He’s my colleague at the Healing Centre.’
‘Well, chain him up somewhere, I can’t bear misogynists. Now darling, I know you were terribly sweet and madly keen that I should visit you for a little professional chat, but –’
‘– you’ve got cold feet.’
‘Slightly shivery, yes. When I awoke this morning I began to wonder if a Healing Centre was really quite my scene, and –’
‘Nobody’s asking you to fall in love with it. Just think of it as a back-drop. I’m the scene.’
‘Oh yes, lovely, simply too thrilling – but I can’t bear that word “counselling” – quite ruined by the 1980s – all those wild-eyed social workers descending like vultures on disaster-victims –’
‘I’m neither wild-eyed, nor a social worker, nor a vulture, and I’m not going to counsel. I’m going to listen.’
‘Oh, but I shall make a mess of talking – I make a mess of everything – I shall wind up totally speechless –’
‘Fine. Then we can sit in silence and soak up the vibes.’
‘Soak up the vibes! Oh Nick, how that phrase takes me back! Do you know it’s twenty years now – twenty years – since you came to see me about Christian? That mysterious quest of yours! You never did tell me the whole story, did you?’
‘“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”’
‘No, don’t try and wriggle off the hook by quoting Wittgenstein! Look, let’s forget my visit to the Healing Centre – come and dine with me instead and tell me exactly what happened in 1968. I always found that official version curiously unsatisfactory.’
I realised it was time to take a firm line. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t dine out during the week and I’ve no intention of forgetting your promise to visit the Healing Centre. I’ll see you on Thursday at eleven as we arranged yesterday in Starbridge.’
‘My dear, how masterful! Why is it I always find you so utterly impossible to resist?’ said Venetia crossly, and hung up.
Turning my back on the phone I found that my colleague had made the tea for me. ‘That’s the only woman I’ve ever met,’ I said, sitting down opposite him at the kitchen table, ‘who can recognise a quotation from Wittgenstein.’
‘She sounds extremely dangerous. Do be careful, Nicholas.’
I smiled at him. Then I drank my tea, stared into space and mentally turned back the clock to 1968, that demonic year when I had become so obsessed by Christian Aysgarth.
II
For most of 1968 I was twenty-five; my twenty-sixth birthday fell on Christmas Eve. Buried in that first quarter-century of my life were the time-bombs which exploded in 1968 – or perhaps it would be more accurate, though less colourful, to write: weaving through those first twenty-five years were the paths which eventually converged to lead me into the Christian Aysgarth mystery. The first path followed my convoluted relationship with my father. The second path followed my disastrous career as a psychic. And the third path followed my friendship with Marina Markhampton. By 1968 all three paths were running side by side – in fact they had become a three-lane motorway where the words ‘TO HELL’ came up on all the signboards – but in the beginning hell was a long way off and Path Number One led through the idyllic landscape of my childhood.
I was brought up in the country near the city of Starbridge where my father worked at the Theological College in the Cathedral Close. When I was still in the nursery he had been appointed Principal, but he had not been required to live on the premises and I can remember watching him ride off on his bicycle to the station where he would take the train to Starbridge, twelve miles away. If the weather was wet my mother insisted on giving him a lift in the Rolls, but he preferred to be independent. Born in the last century he had never learnt to drive and he regarded travelling by Rolls-Royce as an inexcusable luxury for a priest. But then he became busier as the College Principal; soon the inexcusable luxury transformed itself into a time-saving necessity, and he stopped talking about the corrupting influence of the motor car.
I can just remember my mother’s old chauffeur, who died in 1946. The Rolls, which I can remember clearly, died – or rather, was retired with honour – in 1947. Those were the days of the Labour Government when the rich had to tighten their belts, so my mother economised by replacing the Rolls with a Bentley and not replacing the chauffeur at all.
My mother worked. That was very unusual in those days for someone of her class. She ran the Home Farm which formed part of her estate at Starrington Magna, and every morning she would drive away to her office. I would stand on the doorstep of our manor house with Nanny and wave goodbye. Naturally I had no idea what a privileged childhood I was having, and naturally I took my doting parents and my beautiful home for granted. Nanny tried to bring me up sensibly but I soon mastered Nanny. By the time I was five I had evolved into a miniature tyrant.
This unpleasant phase of my development was brought to an end when I was nearly expelled from kindergarten for fighting over a boiled sweet. I remember it as the first time my father actively intervened in my life. Before that he had merely appeared at intervals and enfolded me in unqualified approval. But now the approval was withdrawn.
All he said was: ‘This won’t do, Nicholas,’ and when he looked me straight in the eyes I suddenly realised that no, it wouldn’t do at all because nothing was more important than that he should remain pleased with me. This insight in turn enabled me to articulate a truth which it seemed I had always known but had never been able to put into words. I said: ‘You’re magic. You keep the bad things away,’ and as I spoke I knew that if he withdrew the protection of his magic anything might happen, anything, hobgoblins could haunt me, a witch could kidnap me, a monster could come down the nursery chimney and swallow me up. So I clutched the pectoral cross which my father always wore and I cried: ‘Save me from the Dark!’ – a plea bizarre enough to alarm my mother, but my father merely wrapped his mind around mine to keep me safe, patted me on the head and said: ‘The word you want isn’t “magic”. It’s “psychic”.’
I liked this word but my mother didn’t. She said sharply to my father: ‘Don’t put ideas into his head!’ but my father answered: ‘They’re already there.’
‘Nonsense!’ said my mother, and when she abruptly walked out of the room I realised that ‘psychic’ could be a dangerous word, risky, not acceptable by some people, definitely not a word to be used with no thought for the consequences.
I tried the word out on Nanny and received the firm response: ‘That’s not a nice word, dear, that’s peculiar and we don’t have peculiar things in this nursery.’
At kindergarten we were asked to write a sentence about our parents, and burning with curiosity to test my teacher I wrote: ‘Mummy is a farmer and Father is a sykick who saves me from the Dark.’ My teacher was appalled. In fact she was so disturbed that she even sent the composition to my mother, but my mother only commented briskly to me: ‘Silly woman! She might at least have taught you to spell “psychic” correctly before she had hysterics.’ And to my father she said: ‘I refuse to let Nicholas go peculiar. What’s all this rubbish about the Dark?’
‘It’s his way of referring to malign psychic forces.’
‘Well, I won’t have it, it’s bad for him, it’ll give him nightmares.’
‘But my dear Anne, you can’t alter the way he sees and senses the world!’
A flash of intuition lit up my juvenile brain. ‘I’m psychic too,’ I said triumphantly. ‘I’m just like Father!’
‘Oh no, you’re not!’ said my mother, magnificently normal, superbly sane. ‘One Jon Darrow is all I can cope with. Two would finish me off altogether!’ Then before we could get upset she kissed him, hugged me and declared: ‘You’re Nicholas. You’re not “just like” anyone. You’re you, your special self.’ And to my father she concluded sternly: ‘No replicas.’
I asked what a replica was, and after he had given me the definition my father said: ‘But of course your mother’s quite right and you must become not my replica but the special person God’s designed you to be.’
‘Supposing God’s designed me to be exactly like you?’
‘Impossible!’ said my mother robustly. ‘That would be very boring for God – much more fun for him to create someone different. And Nicholas, while we’re talking of peculiar ideas, I think it would be very clever of you and much more grown up if you kept all psychic talk specially for your father, who understands such things. Other people don’t understand, you see, with the result that they become uncomfortable, and a true gentleman must always do everything he can to lessen the discomfort of others.’
I resolved to be a true gentleman.
And that was the beginning of my tortuous relationship with my father.
III
‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father said to me years later before I went up to Cambridge. ‘Those psychic powers which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!’
This warning I wrote off as an exaggeration, a typically Victorian piece of melodramatic tub-thumping. More fool me. Having noted the psychic affinity which formed the bedrock of my relationship with my father, I must now sketch my disastrous career as a psychic.
I followed in his footsteps by reading divinity up at Cambridge, but after my finals I decided not to proceed immediately to theological college to train for the priesthood. This decision arose out of a conversation I had with Christian and I shall describe it fully later, but at present it’s sufficient to say that at twenty-one I was tired of living in all-male ghettos and hankered to experience what I called ‘The Real World’. In consequence I wound up doing voluntary work in Africa, but within months I got in a mess with a witch-doctor and had to be flown home.
My father begged me to proceed without further delay to theological college, but I was determined to complete the two years I’d set aside for voluntary work; I felt the need to wipe out the failure by being a success. Accordingly I took a job at the Mission for Seamen, fifty miles from home on the South Coast, but again disaster struck: two sailors got in a fight over me and wrecked the canteen. In vain I protested to my supervisor that I wasn’t a homosexual and had given neither sailor encouragement. I was judged a disruptive influence and asked to leave.
Despite my father’s renewed pleadings I still refused to abandon my two-year plan but my third job also ended chaotically. I started work as an orderly at the Starbridge Mental Hospital, but before long a schizophrenic girl fell in love with me and slashed her wrists when I explained to her (kindly) that I was unavailable for a grand passion. She survived the slashing, but I was very upset, particularly when I realised the doctors were looking at me askance. Worse was to follow. Plates began to be smashed mysteriously in the empty kitchens at night, and when the senior psychiatrist asked with interest if I had ever been involved in the phenomenon popularly known as poltergeist activity, I decided it would be smart to resign before I was sacked.
At that stage I realised I had to do something drastic before my father expired with worry, so I headed for Starwater Abbey where I had been a pupil at the famous public school. Standing in the Starbridge diocese not far from my home at Starrington Magna, the Abbey was run by Anglican-Benedictine monks from the Fordite Order of St Benedict and St Bernard. My father had been a Fordite monk once, and as the result of his special knowledge of the Order he had arranged for Starwater’s resident expert on the paranormal to keep an eye on me during my schooldays. It was to this man that I now turned.
Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.
At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’
‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’
‘Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’
‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’
I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.
Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an over-strained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.
But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.
‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.
‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.
‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’
‘Nicholas –’
‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’
Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.
Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.
Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.
‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside ‘– that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the abuse of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’
This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities – and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket – he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called ‘wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.
‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of –’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century ‘-psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’
We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’
‘Hm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.
‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong …’
Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.
After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.
It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.
Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?
In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.
By that time she had stopped talking and evolved into a zombie, eyes open, responsive to my commands but unable to communicate. I panicked, terrified by the thought that I had produced permanent mental impairment. Having manoeuvred her into my car I headed for the emergency department of Starbridge General Hospital, but then I suffered a second bout of panic. Supposing they thought she was traumatised as the result of a sexual assault? Supposing a scandal aborted my career as a priest before it had even begun? Bathed in the coldest of cold sweats I drove past the hospital and fled home with the zombie to my father.
He asked me only one question. It was: ‘What’s her name?’ and when I told him he took her hand in his and said: ‘Debbie, in the name of JESUS CHRIST I command you to return to your body and reclaim it.’ The cure was instant. There was no permanent mental impairment. But I never went to bed with her again. She wanted me to; she cried, she pleaded, but I couldn’t. I’d seen the Dark. I’d felt the Force. It had been shown to me very clearly how vulnerable my psychic powers made me to demonic infiltration, and in my revulsion Debbie now seemed fatally contaminated.
‘You used that child,’ said my father, hammering home the truth with a fury which failed to conceal his terror that I should be so vulnerable. ‘You exploited her in order to satisfy your curiosity about a psychological mystery which has been adopted by those who believe in the heretical doctrine of reincarnation. You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully and I’m ashamed of you.’
Strong words. I hated myself. Worse still, the temporary withdrawal of his love made me more aware of my vulnerability than ever. I saw that even though I was now a grown man of twenty-three I still had to have his powerful psyche enfolding mine in order to keep the Dark at bay.
‘I shan’t comment on the sexual relationship which you’ve obviously had with the girl,’ said my father. ‘You know exactly what I think of young men who are too selfish and immature to do anything with women but exploit them. Please don’t attend mass until you’ve made a full confession to Aelred Peters.’
This was the final horror. I couldn’t bear the thought of Father Peters knowing how I’d behaved. ‘You hear my confession,’ I begged my father, but he refused.
‘Confessing to Aelred would be a real penance,’ he said. ‘Confessing to me would be a soft option. Off you go to Starwater.’
Away I sloped to the Abbey, but cowardice overwhelmed me as soon as I crossed the threshold, and although I told Father Peters about the psychic disaster I was unable to speak of the sexual relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.
‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’
‘Well, my theory is …’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.
This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. Anglo-Catholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.
‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.
‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’
There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.
God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.
IV
I must now say something more about my father in order to flesh out this lethal relationship which was developing between us as my psychic career went from bad to worse. This particular path which led to the crisis of 1968 needs to be examined in more detail.
By the time of the Debbie débâcle my father was very old. Born in 1880 he had been sixty-two when I had arrived in the world, and so every year of the 1960s was bringing him closer to his ninetieth birthday. By the time the Christian Aysgarth affair began in the spring of 1968, two years after the mess with Debbie, he was nearly eighty-eight.
Being over eighty was very difficult for my father because he finally had to face up to the fact that he was old. Previously, having excellent health and a strong will, he had avoided this truth by cantering around like a man twenty years his junior, but at eighty he was felled by a prostate operation and although the physical problem was successfully treated the psychological consequences lingered on. Old age now stared him in the face. My father was livid, then deeply depressed, then livid all over again. With his strong will unimpaired and his brain untouched by senility he regarded his body’s enfeeblement as nothing short of traitorous. Looking back I can see he was secretly frightened – not of death, which in his faith he could face with courage, but of dying without dignity. My father was a proud man. He always used to say that his pride was his biggest weakness. The thought of his body decaying in a humiliating fashion while his mind remained sharp enough to suffer every indignity to the full was intolerable to him.
I could sense all these secret fears and hidden rages, but I was too young then to understand the full dimensions of his psychological ordeal. All I could do was make renewed efforts to keep him happy. I had already realised that nothing should be allowed to worry him and impair his health; in consequence as he had wrapped his psyche around mine, keeping the Dark at bay, I had wrapped my psyche around his, keeping the Light alive, and gradually a sinister interlocking had taken place until we were like Siamese twins joined at the psyche. No wonder I now felt I would be unable to survive without him.
I suspected my mother had always feared my father and I might wind up in a muddle, and that this dread had stimulated her robust attitude to our psychic gifts. She was quite prepared to believe they existed, but she was determined that they should never be allowed to triumph over her resolute common sense. Early in their marriage my father had embarked on a short but disastrous ministry of healing, and I think this experience had made her nervous about any exercise of the ‘glamorous powers’, those gifts from God which were so susceptible to corruption.
She had been my father’s second wife, his first marriage having begun and ended before he had embarked on his career as a Fordite monk. This first marriage had been unsatisfactory, but my father’s big love affair with the monastic life had lasted for seventeen years before he had been called back into the world at the age of sixty. My father had been at first ambivalent about this return, but since the call had been judged genuine by his superior there had been no alternative but to obey it. Two muddled years had followed during which he had married my mother. She had eventually sorted him out, and before he had embarked on a successful career in theological education they had produced a son, Gerald, who had died at birth. I had arrived on the scene seventeen months later.
I could never make up my mind whether little Gerald would have been a bigger bore alive than he was dead, but I had no doubt that I resented the effect his memory had on my parents. They were shockingly sentimental about him. There was a grave in the churchyard which had to be visited. His birthday was never forgotten. As a child I thought this behaviour was all quite idiotic and I was very rude about it to Nanny. I liked being an only child. It was bad enough having to share my father with the two children of his first marriage, both of whom were well over thirty years my senior and lived many miles away. To share him with a sibling close to me in age and on the spot would have been intolerable.
Fortunately my parents had no more children after I was born, and by 1945 my father was running the Starbridge Theological College. To cope with the huge influx of ex-servicemen who felt called to train for the priesthood once the war was over, he opened an extension of the College at our manor house in Starrington Magna. I can clearly remember the students – the ordinands, as I soon learnt to call them – pounding across the lawn on the way to our private chapel in the woods. I became their mascot. Some of them even gave me their sweet ration. No wonder I wound up spoilt rotten by the time I was five.
However, all good things come to an end, even life as a pampered mascot. In 1950 when I was seven – eight at Christmas – the last of the exceptionally large intakes of theological students achieved ordination, the College extension at our home was closed and my father, now seventy, retired from his position as Principal. My mother had looked forward to this day because she had cherished the belief that he would then sink into a quiet life and she would see more of him, but she soon discovered that he was becoming busier than ever. As a monk he had won a reputation as a spiritual director, and now that he had fulfilled his call from God to steer the College through the difficult post-war years, spiritual direction reclaimed him full-time. Hordes of people turned up for consultations. He led retreats, wrote copious letters, made himself constantly available to those seeking counsel. My mother and I became somewhat overlooked but we never doubted that he loved us. The problem was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day.
Then in 1957 when I was fourteen, my mother suddenly died. My father was almost killed by guilt. For a long time he could barely speak. His longest silence was: ‘I didn’t make enough time for her,’ and I knew, reading his mind, that in his grief and remorse he wanted to die too.
He promised me that he would never commit the sin of taking his own life but I remained terrified that his health had been fatally undermined. He became a recluse. He did eventually resume his spiritual counselling on a modest scale but he conducted the work almost entirely by letter. Meanwhile I had become what Matron at school called ‘strange’ and my father had to drag himself out of seclusion to make special arrangements for my care. That was when Aelred Peters had been recruited to sort me out. Eventually plates stopped smashing themselves in the Abbey kitchens and inkpots stopped overturning themselves in unlikely places. Staggering home for the school holidays I hoped for further help from my father but instead found myself obliged to grapple with his continuing bereavement.
I would sit with him for short periods of complete silence. Sometimes we stroked the cat together. My father always had a cat and the cat was always a tabby. After the death of my mother’s cat William (annexed by my father after his marriage), he acquired Whitby the Second (died young of a kidney complaint), Whitby the Third (run over aged ten) and Whitby the Fourth. Whitby the First, a companion of my father’s monastic years, had left a potent memory behind him and had been the hero of countless bedtime stories narrated to me by my father in the nursery.
When my father began to talk again it was the cat he spoke about. ‘Whitby’s very fond of you,’ he said suddenly in the midst of one of our long silences. ‘That’s because you’re like me, good with cats.’ Then he paused before adding: ‘You’re really very like me, Nicholas. Very like me indeed.’
Unsure what to say I at first remained silent, but gradually it dawned on me that he was wrestling with some profound temptation. In an effort to be sympathetic and encouraging I then said: ‘Great. So what are you worried about?’
The invisible wrestling-match continued. My father pursed his lips and rubbed his nose and fondled the scruff of Whitby’s neck before he at last managed to say: ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you but Francis always said it would be better for you not to know.’ Francis Ingram, a Fordite monk, had been his confessor.
I never hesitated. ‘But Francis is dead,’ I said, ‘and everything’s changed. You do exactly what you want, Father. You do whatever makes you happy.’
And then he told me the most extraordinary story.
V
He had seen me in a vision well over a year before I was born. He had seen me, aged three or four, in the garden of the Manor and had realised at once that I looked exactly as he had looked at the same age. Afterwards, during his struggle to interpret the vision, he had been tempted to believe God had given him the promise of a replica-son in order to cheer him up for the difficult times he had endured since leaving the Order, but Francis Ingram had later disputed this self-indulgent interpretation, and in fact my father had firmly believed that no parent should expect or desire his child to be a replica.
‘But nevertheless …’
Nevertheless my father, longing for a son who shared his interests, had been unable to stop himself finding the vision irresistibly attractive.
‘And then, Nicholas …’
Then, when I was three and a half the vision had been enacted in reality and my father had fallen in love with it all over again.
‘It was in 1946,’ he said. ‘Neville Aysgarth was visiting the Manor – Archdeacon Aysgarth, as he was in those days. As he crossed the lawn to join us, Nanny called your name from the terrace and you ran away to meet her – and I realised my vision had been replayed. I was so stunned that at first I could hardly hear a word Aysgarth said. I could only think: it’s all come true. I have this son who’s exactly like me and it’s all according to God’s plan. Although of course,’ said my father quickly, ‘I did realise you weren’t a replica. Not exactly. Not quite. But nevertheless … It’s extraordinary how like me you are! I’ve been telling myself I’ve nothing to look forward to now Anne’s dead, but that’s not true, is it? I’ve got you to look forward to, Nicholas. I shall so enjoy watching you live my life for me all over again – that’s to say, I shall so enjoy watching you develop into the man that God obviously wants you to be. You won’t be a replica, of course – never think that I want a replica, but –’
But he did want a replica. I could see he longed for a replica. And what was more I could see the thought revived him, entranced him, gave him not only a new interest but the will to live which would ensure his survival.
‘– but one can’t deny the very exceptional likeness between us,’ he was saying, ‘and why shouldn’t that be a comfort to me in my old age? Francis said I should never tell you about the vision because you might start believing you had to be a replica, but you wouldn’t think that, would you, Nicholas? Francis was wrong. On this point I know best – I know you’ll reverence my cherished vision as a gift from God, just as I do, and so therefore it can’t possibly have a malign effect. I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right. I know it.’
Proud, arrogant, ancient, miserable and misguided, he glared at me in a pathetic plea for reassurance.
Taking his hand in mine I said: ‘Of course you’re right, Father. You always are.’
No doubt my mother would have made some very robust comment at that point.
But my mother was no longer there.
VI
The next holidays I returned from school to find that a cottage was being built for my father in the grounds by the chapel. He said it would make it easier for him to be secluded. Then he said I could visit him whenever I wished because I was quite different from everyone else and he didn’t find my presence a strain. As an afterthought he added that he couldn’t bear to go on living at the main house now that my mother was no longer there; he’d never liked living there much anyway; his middle-class upbringing as a schoolmaster’s son had ensured he had never felt at ease in my mother’s county setting.
I was stunned. My father, educated on scholarships at public school and university, had appeared to fit neatly into my mother’s world. I had had no idea he had such a chip on his shoulder about class. I knew, of course, that his mother had been a parlourmaid, but my own mother had said how interesting that was and what a remarkable woman my unknown grandmother must have been to succeed in marrying ‘above her station’, so I had accepted my grandparents’ mésalliance as merely an unusual piece of family history. Now for the first time I saw that my father also had married ‘above his station’ and it occurred to me that my parents’ marriage too had been, in a less obvious way, a mésalliance which had caused problems.
I was still recovering from the shock that my father had never felt at ease in the home I loved when he began to explain to me his plan for ensuring that my inheritance was properly looked after: he intended to let the Home Farm and found a small religious community which would run the house and tend the grounds.
I disliked this scheme – though I said nothing for fear of upsetting him – but as time passed I realised how clever the plan was. Not only did I never have to worry about the property but I never had to worry that my father was failing to take care of himself when I was away. The members of the Community tended the garden, looked after the house and worshipped my father whenever they weren’t busy worshipping God. Their devotion was my passport to a normal life unburdened by abnormal anxieties.
I finished school, went up to Laud’s, my father’s old college at Cambridge, came down with my degree, dabbled disastrously with voluntary work and dabbled disastrously with Debbie. My father was still living as a recluse in his cottage, but now in 1966, nine years after my mother’s death, he had come to terms with his loss and his biggest problem was the old age he hated so much. But I could see he was looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.
I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin of pride to think I could flirt with the Gnostic heresy and get away with it. In vain I told my tutor that the Light and the Dark were code-names which I used to describe a reality which for me was as true as any reality acknowledged by a logical positivist. My tutor said I should beware of mysticism as mystics so often got into trouble with the Church.
The Church was exalted as a sort of idol. Enormous emphasis was put on teaching what was liturgically correct. Church history was taught in stupefying detail. A heavy-handed, outdated biblical theology still ruled the roost, the academic successor of the neo-orthodox thunderings of Karl Barth. Radical theology was ignored – and this was 1966, three years after John Robinson’s Church-shattering blockbuster Honest to God! But the College refused to admit any shattering had taken place; the idol was not allowed to be chipped or cracked – or even renovated. Robinson was dismissed as ‘misguided’ and ‘no theologian’. There was certainly a case for propounding criticisms such as these, but I thought Robinson’s ideas, misguided or not, should at least have been debated. And I didn’t like this rampant ecclesiastical idolatry. What’s the Church anyway? Just a man-made institution. It’s God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that are important. I’m not saying we don’t need a man-made institution to deal with worldly matters. Obviously we do. And I’m not saying (in defiance of Anglo-Catholic ideology) that the Church has no numinous value and that holy traditions are unimportant. Obviously it has and they are. All I’m saying is that setting the Church up on a pedestal and worshipping it is wrong.
I also took a dim view of the way the College staff played down mysticism as they converted theology into just another academic subject such as history or English literature. Theology ought to be alive, vivid, related to real life, not a system debated by intellectuals. Did the mystic Julian of Norwich have a theology degree? Of course she didn’t. But she knew God. She had ‘gnosis’, special knowledge. She saw visions and she KNEW. But if she’d been unfortunate enough to attend that Theological College in the 1960s, the only vision she would have had would have been a vision of the bliss which marked the end of term.
Of course I couldn’t tell my father what a travesty the College was. Having run the place so successfully in the ‘forties he would have been deeply upset to know how far it had gone downhill. I learnt to keep quiet at College too because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was ‘unsuitable’ and trying to boot me out. One ordinand did say: ‘I think we should have courses on pastoral work and discuss things like sex,’ but he didn’t last long. Sex was the great unmentionable among the College staff because no one had the guts to discuss ethical issues realistically. As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the twentieth century when one of its most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past.
My boredom eventually produced the inevitable result: my interest in sex, damped down by the Debbie débâcle, began to revive.
I may have given the impression that I was formidably promiscuous but in fact by the standards of the mid –’sixties I was almost staid. My habit of going steady with one girl at a time – and usually only seeing her once a week – was my way of paying lip-service to my father’s belief that men should try to be more than mindless animals, so before the affair with Debbie I had changed girlfriends no more than once a year. However now, goaded on by the mind-blowing boredom of College life, I traded them in every six months. Doreen was a waitress at The Copper Kettle, Angie was a salesgirl at Boots and Tracy, like Debbie, was a little dolly-bird typist.
Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.
At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.)
On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.
This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?
Why indeed.
But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.
If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.
I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.
There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double life no longer. The second was that I had begun to suspect my father had intuited what was going on with the result that he was becoming ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant.’ This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.
So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?
The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower-arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.
‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’
Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.
‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’
I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in The Times yet.’
Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.
A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.
At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.
I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.
VII
Bishop Ashworth was the main reason why the Theological College was a dead loss, but in my hour of need I didn’t let that prejudice me against him. In his pre-episcopal days he had been a distinguished professor of divinity at Cambridge. That was the problem. It’s dangerous to let divinity professors out of their ivory towers to roam unfettered through the Church of England; the temptation to convert theological colleges into minor outposts of major universities is apparently irresistible, but theological colleges are supposed to train priests for the priesthood, not intellectuals for the groves of Academe.
To be fair to Uncle Charles I have to admit he was a good bishop, and I have to acknowledge that at least he had had the guts to come out of his ivory tower and shoulder a top executive position in the real world. It wasn’t his fault that he got his kicks out of an academic approach to religion. That was just the way he had been designed by God. The important thing was that this intellectual kink hadn’t prevented him from being a devout Christian who had no hesitation in standing up for what he believed in. I wasn’t sure I believed all he believed in – he was an ultra-conservative wedded to what he called the ‘absolute truths’ – but I respected his courage and I admired him as a good man who had always been kind to me.
He was an old friend of my father’s; my father had been his spiritual director since 1937. There were very few people my father saw any more, but the Bishop was one of them. Uncle Charles kept an eye on my father. He had also kept an eye on me since my mother’s death, and he regularly invited me to the South Canonry, the bishop’s official residence in the Cathedral Close.
During his Cambridge days the undergraduates had nicknamed him Anti-Sex Ashworth because of the hard line he always took against sexual transgression, but I had long since sensed, by that mysterious process so difficult for any psychic to describe, that he wasn’t anti-sex at all but a man of the world who, somewhere along the line, had encountered a sexual catastrophe which had made him feel called to hammer out repeated warnings about how dangerous immorality could be. Seeking help from a conservative bishop tough on sexual sin – the bishop who would shortly be ordaining me – might seem as suicidal as putting my head in a lion’s mouth, but I felt I needed someone morally tough to beat me into shape, just as I needed a priest who could tackle a sex-mess without flinching. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him – obviously the minimum, but how minimal was the minimum? – and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell him anything, but all I knew was that I had to try.
I called him ‘Uncle Charles’ because my father belonged to the generation who thought children should address their parents’ close friends by courtesy titles. When I reached twenty-one the Bishop had invited me to drop the title, but this had proved impossible. He was so formidably elegant and distinguished, and his date of birth in 1900 was so very far removed from mine.
‘Well, Nicholas!’ he said, giving me his best smile as we settled ourselves in his study after the ritual exchange of small-talk. Uncle Charles’s best smile always reminded me of a toothpaste advertisement. It flashed with great effect on television whenever he was hauled on to discussion programmes to oppose the permissive society.
‘Well, Uncle Charles!’ I responded warily, trying to beat back a burst of fright.
‘How are things going?’ enquired the Bishop, laying on the charm with a shovel in an effort to put me at ease.
‘Great!’ I said, feeling more nervous than ever.
‘Splendid!’ exclaimed the Bishop with enthusiasm.
We eyed each other in silence for some seconds while the Bishop kept his smile nailed in place and I struggled to master my panic, but at last I managed to say: ‘Uncle Charles, I wanted to see you because, well, I thought, that’s to say, wondered if you might possibly, sort of, well, you know, help me.’
‘My dear Nicholas, of course!’ said the Bishop, still oozing the charm which was such a famous feature of his public persona, but beyond this routine response I could sense his real self unfolding in a spontaneous surge of concern. The Bishop had an interesting psyche where sensitivity and an idealistic nature were kept under ruthless control by his first-class intellect and his considerable sophistication. Yet this complex personality, which could have produced a divided man, was seamlessly integrated. The glittering public persona was the servant, not the master of his true self beyond; its job was not to impress people but to create a shield behind which his true self had the privacy to flourish.
I hadn’t the experience in 1968 to put this judgement into words, but I did know by instinct that I had to ignore that toothpaste smile and the oozy charm in order to address myself to the genuinely sympathetic man beyond.
‘I’m sort of bothered,’ I said, ploughing on in the incoherent way fashionable among the under-thirties, but then found myself unable to express what bothered me most. With renewed panic I grabbed the next most bothersome subject on my list. ‘I mean, the Theological College seems to be useless to me at the moment, and … well, the truth is I don’t honestly think, to put the matter in a nutshell, it can help me in –’ I hesitated but forced myself to add ‘– in this muddle.’
‘My dear Nicholas!’ said the Bishop again, professional charm still well to the fore but his genuine concern now so strong that he quite overlooked the signpost provided by my last three words. ‘But how can the College be useless? It’s the most splendid place – I’ve entirely preserved it from the decadent spirit of the age!’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles. Excuse me, sir, but I think that could be the problem: it’s so well-preserved it’s dead. Of course I’m not suggesting it should go all trendy and liberal like some of the other theological colleges –’
‘I should think not indeed!’
‘– but I do wish the staff were allowed to talk about relevant things sometimes, I mean things that are relevant to Real Life – like, in a manner of speaking, sex. It seems sort of, well, weird to go on and on about Church history and dogmatics yet never once mention –’
‘Dear me, you young men of today with your passion for “relevance”! But tell me this: what makes you so sure that what you think is relevant isn’t instead just a passing fashion? Who makes the judgement on what’s relevant, and how is that judgement made? Subjective judgements made under the influence of passing fashion are dangerous, Nicholas. One must keep one’s gaze fixed on absolute truths, not relative values.’
‘Sex looks like a pretty absolute truth from where I’m standing, Uncle Charles.’
“Well, of course it does!’ said the Bishop, shifting ground quickly in order to extricate us from the theological quicksands. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young!’ Suddenly he got down to business. ‘Okay, I get the message,’ he said, very trendily for a conservative prelate. ‘Girl-trouble, isn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re strongly attracted to a girl and you want to go to bed with her.’
‘Um.’ The situation was now so delicate that I could only hold my breath and pray for courage.
This is a very, very difficult problem,’ said the Bishop, finally casting aside the glittering public persona and speaking straight from the heart with profound sympathy. ‘Far be it from me to underestimate it. As you know, I wholly disapprove of fornication, but I’m also wholly aware how tempting it is to indulge in it. I shan’t regale you with all the familiar arguments because you’ll have encountered them numerous times before – you’ve read Austin Farrer on continence, I assume?’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’
‘And Archbishop Ramsey on sex and society?’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’
Then since Farrer and Ramsey are better priests than I am I can hardly hope to improve on what they say as they spell out the Christian point of view. So let me take a purely pragmatic – one might almost say worldly – approach. I’ve never been called to celibacy. At various times during my life this has created severe problems for me, but let me now attempt to share the fruits of my experience with you.’
Clever old Uncle Charles, knowing perfectly well that the ruminations, no matter how truthful, of two saints like Farrer and Ramsey were of little practical use to someone battling away against maxi-erections. With bated breath I waited to sample the fruits of his experience.
‘Fornication,’ said the Bishop with superb self-confidence and a total lack of embarrassment, ‘is like Russian roulette – by which I mean it can be tremendously exciting. It gives you all sorts of thrilling delusions about how dashing and masculine you are, but unfortunately the reality is that you may wind up destroyed. Now, that’s not thrilling, that’s not dashing, that’s not even a boost to the masculine ego. It’s just very silly and a tragic waste. Of course you may get away with your adventure; it’s always possible to survive Russian roulette. But why be immature enough to take such a mindless risk once you’re grown up? There’s more to life than getting hooked on adrenalin –’ the Bishop certainly knew how to turn on the trendy vocabulary; moving in the world of television had evidently taught him a thing or two ‘– and smashing up your future for the sake of a night of pleasure just doesn’t make sense, not if you’ve got anything that resembles a brain.’
This was fine but he was only telling me what I already knew. What I really wanted him to tell me was how to muzzle the maxi-erection so that it only occurred with the right girl; or in other words, I wanted to know how I could stop being hooked on Tracy and start being hooked on Rosalind.
‘… and I need hardly point out to a young man of your intelligence,’ he was adding, ‘that fornication is worse than Russian roulette because a person other than yourself is also involved in this potentially suicidal gamble. Don’t risk it, Nicholas. Wait for marriage. It may be the toughest exercise in self-restraint that you’re ever called to make, but very often the most worthwhile things in life can only be achieved with considerable effort by people who have the strength and wisdom to act as mature human beings, not selfish children.’
I nearly tied my tongue in a knot in my haste to say: ‘Right. Actually I’m getting married. In fact I’m unofficially engaged.’
‘You are? But that’s wonderful – how very exciting!’ said the Bishop, sagging with relief. ‘Who is she? Do I know her?’
‘Rosalind Maitland.’
‘Oh, an excellent girl – what a splendid choice! And how pleased your father must be!’
‘Um.’
Wait a minute – you’re signalling there’s a fly in the ointment – ah yes! Now I see what you were driving at: you’re strongly tempted to try a spot of premarital sex.’
‘Well –’
‘No, hang on, I’m on the wrong track again, aren’t I? I’m talking too much – time for me to shut up and listen. Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s bothering you?’
This was the moment I had been dreading. ‘Well …’ But disclosure was now impossible. After his resounding approval of Rosalind I could hardly admit I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been about marrying her. And I certainly couldn’t admit that it was not Rosalind Maitland of Starrington Magna whom I found sexually irresistible but Tracy Dodds of Langley Bottom. A long and desperate silence ensued.
‘I’ve got it!’ said the Bishop suddenly. ‘You’ve sown a few wild oats and your conscience is troubling you. Well, of course young men do sow wild oats, even young men who want to be ordained; we’re all liable to succumb to temptation, even the best of us. You’ll remember St Paul’s words, of course. “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’
What you have to do now, Nicholas, if you repent – and I’m sure you do or you wouldn’t be here seeking my help – is to put the wild oats firmly behind you, set yourself a high standard of conduct for the future and ask God’s grace to enable you to be a first-class husband to Rosalind. Getting married to an excellent girl who loves you is without doubt the best possible course you can take.’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’
‘Meanwhile I do see you still have the problem of abstaining from sex, even though chastity does become easier when there’s a definite end to it in sight. Of course it would be easy for an old buffer like me to say to a young man like you: “The solution is to take cold showers and work hard.” It would be easy – but it would be wrong. It would imply a view of man based on the Pelagian heresy, the view that man can improve himself by his own efforts without God’s grace. But grace is all. And prayer is vital. I presume the Theological College has at least given you some useful teaching about prayer even if it hasn’t been busy lecturing about sex?’
I seized the chance to race away from the subject of my sex-life. ‘Well, to be honest, Uncle Charles, I’ve found the College’s teaching on prayer a dead loss. It doesn’t connect with anything I do at all.’
The Bishop, who had been so commendably open, now began to close up. He loved that College as a child loves a favourite toy. He had rescued it from the slough of sloth into which it had slumped during the years following my father’s retirement. He had nurtured it, poured his precious time into it, attended every governors’ meeting he could, redesigned its syllabus, basked in the glow of its rising reputation. To hear this cherished fiefdom repeatedly criticised by a mere ordinand was to experience the trial of his Christian patience to its limit. ‘And what, may I ask,’ he said dryly, ‘do you “do” when you pray?’
‘Flip a switch in my head and tune in.’
There was a pause. Then Uncle Charles said: ‘Have you discussed this with your father?’
‘Don’t need to.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s one of the subjects we don’t have to talk about in words.’
‘I think most discussions are more profitable when conducted in words,’ said the Bishop, now speaking very dryly indeed, ‘and since your father’s such a distinguished spiritual director –’
‘He says he can’t be my spiritual director because he’s too emotionally involved.’
‘Ah well, yes, I’m sure that’s right, but nonetheless I’d have thought that on such an important subject as prayer he … well, never mind. Remind me: who’s your personal tutor at the College?’
‘Dr Hallet, but he’s hopeless.’
‘Dr Hallet is the most Christian man!’
‘Yeah, but he’s hopeless. Doesn’t dig the mystics.’
After another pause Dr Ashworth said: ‘Do you still see Father Peters at Starwater?’
‘Yes, but I wouldn’t discuss prayer with him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s too tied up in Anglican-Benedictine convention, sort of old-fashioned, you know, square. I did try talking in my code-language once, but –’
‘What code-language?’
‘The symbols I use for ultimate reality – for you know, kind of, God. But Father Peters just said what Dr Hallet said – warned me that I was talking like a Gnostic and ought to watch it. Well, so what if I do talk like a Gnostic if that’s the best way I can put my experiences into words – experiences which can’t actually be put into words anyway? Some of those Christian Gnostics in the old days were very good, holy men and I don’t see why we should write them off just because they didn’t quite conform to the Church’s idea of orthodoxy.’
‘The Gnostic heresy,’ said the Bishop, who had written a book on the subject, ‘Very nearly destroyed the Early Church.’
I felt like saying: ‘Too bad it didn’t succeed,’ but fortunately I resisted this temptation to take a swipe at that man-made idol THE CHURCH, and made a mighty effort to rein myself in before Uncle Charles had apoplexy. I knew what had happened. After the conversation about sex, when I had been obliged to remain buttoned up, I was now lashing out in an unbuttoned frenzy at the Theological College and the Church in order to let off steam. Normally I would never have divulged my sympathy with the Gnostics to anyone who wore a clerical collar.
‘Sorry, Uncle Charles, I know you must be thinking I’m a heretic, but –’
‘No, no – just a trifle unusual,’ said the Bishop courteously as he prepared to play the champion of orthodoxy and bring me to heel. ‘Of course,’ he remarked, ‘it’s an axiom of spiritual direction that each soul is different and that each soul must therefore pray in the method best suited to it, but I think you should always bear in mind, Nicholas –’ Here the full episcopal power was switched on ‘– that psychic gifts can be a danger to those following the spiritual way. For example, they tend to foster arrogance. Instead of writing off Dr Hallet as hopeless and Father Peters as old-fashioned, you should approach them with more humility and consider the possibility that they might well have something important to teach you. You should also remember that undisciplined contemplative prayer can be dangerous and should never be undertaken without the guidance of a spiritual director.’
‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’ Abandoning the incoherent patois of the under-thirties I adopted a crisp, formal tone.
Satisfied that his chilly reproof had had a sobering effect, the Bishop changed gears. The toothpaste smile flashed. Charm started to ooze again. No wonder he was such a success on television. ‘Well, so much for serious matters,’ he said lightly. ‘Now let’s turn back to the very pleasant subject of your engagement – you must bring your fiancée to dinner soon! I’ll ask my wife to get in touch with you about a date.’
‘Thanks – that would be very nice,’ I said, immaculately well-behaved, and parted from him in amity with all my problems quite unsolved.
The next day Marina Markhampton came to see me and the Christian Aysgarth affair began.
TWO (#ulink_57f16d83-def2-50bb-83c9-4647aeb288ea)
‘Mysticism in the proper sense is an intense realization of God within the self and the self embraced within God in vivid nearness. It is a phenomenon known in a number of religions, and in those religions very similar language is used in describing the experience … Now through the centuries Christian teaching has emphasised that the significant thing is not just the mystic experience but its place and its context within the whole life of a Christian.’
MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1074
Canterbury Pilgrim
I
I now come to the third path which led me to the crisis of 1968. Running parallel to my increasingly convoluted relationship with my father and my increasingly chaotic career as a psychic was my friendship with Marina Markhampton.
Since Marina was the fiancee of the Bishop’s younger son it was hardly surprising that I knew her; what was surprising was that I had become friends with her well before her engagement to Michael. She was a year my senior, one of those flashy debutantes who are forever having their photographs plastered all over the society magazines, and while still a teenager she had won herself the title of the biggest cock-tease in town. This was not the sort of woman who normally interested me and so there was no obvious reason why we should have continued to wander in and out of each other’s lives, but ever since Marina had decided I should be a member of her famous Coterie I had never quite managed to disentangle myself from her.
Since my mother had come from an old county family I had been automatically granted access to the debutantes’ social events in the diocese of Starbridge, but I had quickly fought my way out of this boring maelstrom and rejected all invitations to similar parties in London. This early antipathy of mine towards conventional socialising explains why I never met Marina until she turned up at my Cambridge College’s May ball in the summer of 1962, six years before my unprofitable interview with Bishop Ashworth and the onset of the Christian Aysgarth affair.
The May ball was one of those rare events which I condescended to attend; as everyone acquainted with Cambridge knows, the May balls are a very big deal indeed and not even an oddball loner dares to miss them. In 1962 I invited Rosalind to accompany me, but unfortunately she was struck down by appendicitis so I wound up going on my own. The ball marked the end of my first year up at Cambridge. I was nineteen. Apart from Rosalind – who in those days was no more than my former childhood playmate – I had no girlfriend of any kind. Naturally, since I was nineteen, I was obsessed with sex, but naturally, given my background, I hadn’t yet succeeded in working out what I could do about it. Alone and innocent I drifted along with mixed emotions (distaste ploughed under by an overpowering sexual curiosity) to the event which all my contemporaries considered to be the last word in undergraduate chic.
By the time I met Marina the evening was far advanced. I had been whiling away the hours by watching and listening and occasionally summoning the nerve to dance with girls who looked nice enough not to reject a very plain teenager who felt like a goldfish marooned a long way from his bowl. These girls all bored me very much. Eventually I confined myself to observing the sultry sirens and wishing I had the guts to whip them away from their preening partners. While all this was going on I drank much more than usual out of sheer absent-mindedness; I was fantasising so hard about the sirens that I forgot to notice what I was pouring down my throat. Finally, unable to stand the frustration any longer, I staggered outside to sample the moonlight, and as soon as I began to cross the lawn to the river I saw Marina lying semi-naked in a punt.
The sight stopped me dead in my tracks. Then it dawned on me that two would-be gondolieri were fighting on the jetty for the honour of wielding the pole which would propel the punt downstream.
Drunk but by no means dead drunk I said to myself: ‘He who dares wins,’ and circumventing the brawling gondolieri I said politely to Marina: ‘May I help you?’
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ and stepping into the punt I picked up the pole.
The gondolieri shouted: ‘I say, hang on!’ and ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ but Marina and I were already gliding away from the jetty. At that moment more opposition appeared: a small wiry figure raced down to the bank and began to bounce up and down in an ecstasy of disapproval. ‘Marina, nudity is not allowed – pull up your dress this instant!’ it thundered, and as I heard that familiar voice I realised this curious creature was none other than the Bishop’s son, not Michael but the older one, Charley. He was at a theological college in Cambridge, but as a graduate of Laud’s he would have had no trouble obtaining a ticket for the May ball.
‘Do you know this girl, Charley?’ I called with interest, sinking the pole much too deep in the mud. My lack of interest in the debutante world and my lack of acquaintance with glossy society magazines had ensured my failure to recognise her.
‘Of course I know her! She’s the grand-daughter of Lady Markhampton who lives in the Close at Starbridge. Marina, for God’s sake –’
Take not the name of the Lord thy God in vain!’ trilled Marina richly. ‘Remember your manners, Charley darling, and introduce me to this divine mystery-man!’
At that moment the divine mystery-man was trying to pull the pole out of the mud. For one agonising second I thought I was about to be dragged into the water, but the pole parted from the river-bed in the nick of time and I regained my balance. Meanwhile the gondolieri had stripped off their clothes and with cries of ‘Whoopee, Marina – we’re coming!’ they plunged into the river.
This is disgraceful!’ shouted Charley, outraged at the sight of more nudity. ‘Absolutely disgraceful!’
‘Oh, buzz off before I order them to drown you!’ exclaimed Marina crossly, and purred to the oncoming swimmers: ‘Darlings, you’re terribly sweet but you’ve missed – quite literally – the boat. Punt on, mystery-man.’
I shot the boat forward. Charley and the swimmers were left behind as I furiously propelled the punt towards the moonlit silhouette of Clare bridge.
‘Stop!’ commanded Marina as we sped beneath the arch. ‘I want to feast my eyes on King’s College Chapel.’
I braked as dexterously as I could and tried to concentrate on drawing alongside the bank without a bump, but I was distracted by the sight of Marina’s unsuccessful attempts to pull up her dress. Something had broken at the low neckline and her breasts kept falling out.
‘I can’t get my bosom to behave itself,’ she said, ‘but you don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not in the least.’
Introduce yourself. You fascinate me.’
‘Nick Darrow.’
‘What’s your connection with that ghastly prig Charley Ashworth?’
‘Our fathers are pals.’
‘Oh God, how awkward for you – I inevitably loathe all the offspring of my parents’ friends. Where do you come from?’
‘A village near Starbridge.’
‘Good heavens – in that case why haven’t we met? I thought I knew absolutely everyone in the Starbridge area as the result of my visits to Granny in the Cathedral Close. Darrow, Darrow, Darrow … No, I don’t know that name. Now extraordinary.’
‘Your grandmother knew my mother. My mother’s maiden name was Barton-Woods.’
‘Ah well, of course I’ve heard that name before – isn’t there a rather heavenly manor house at Starrington Magna? And – gosh, wait a minute! Is your father the holy man who lives on communion wafers in a wood?’
‘He’s a priest who lives quietly in retirement.’
‘Exactly! Granny’s told me all about him. Are you reading divinity in order to follow in his footsteps?’
‘Yep.’
‘How sad – another good man lost to the Church!’
‘Don’t knock the Church too hard,’ I said, trying to work out where I could park the pole so that I could have both hands free to grab her breasts. ‘It could be in your future.’
Instantly she was enthralled. ‘You sound as if you tell fortunes!’
‘Of course I tell fortunes!’ I said, and as I spoke a vision of how I could succeed with the sirens unfolded before my eyes. But still I couldn’t work out where to park the pole.
Meanwhile Marina was stretching out her right hand and demanding: ‘Read my palm!’ as her breasts appeared to float magically towards me in the moonlight.
‘I don’t go in for palmistry,’ I said. ‘I just tune into the vibrations.’ And still clutching the pole with one hand I grasped her proffered fingers with the other. By this time my erection was so uncomfortable that I thought I might have to jump into the river to get my genitals under control.
‘Go on – spill the beans!’ said Marina impatiently. ‘How’s the Church going to be in my future?’
I had no idea but I remembered the grandmother who lived in the Cathedral Close.
‘I see you living in the shadow of a great cathedral,’ I invented, taking care to speak in portentous tones.
‘Impossible! I never stay with Granny nowadays, there’s no time, I simply drop in occasionally.’
‘Nevertheless I see that long shadow cast by the cathedral – and I see a man in your life there.’
‘There are always men in my life everywhere!’ she said fractiously, and as she spoke I detected a touch of boredom with the male sex, perhaps even a trace of disappointment.
‘This’ll be a special man,’ I said, clued in by her tone of voice and deducing that the average panting male left her cold. Really, fortune-telling’s so easy that I can’t think why more people don’t do it. All you have to do is put up a mental aerial to receive the unspoken signals and then wait for the subject to give herself away.
‘The only special man I know,’ said Marina with a sigh, ‘is quite unobtainable.’ And as she disclosed this piece of information the alcoholic fog cleared in my psyche, my metaphorical aerial began to pick up strong signals and I understood that an unobtainable man was, in some mysterious way, exactly what she wanted. I was too young at the time to make the obvious deduction: that a desire for an unobtainable man coupled with a distaste for the men available hinted at a sexual hang-up. I just thought – and when I say ‘I thought’ I mean I knew, it was the special knowledge I called ‘gnosis’: she doesn’t do it. I’m wasting my time.
‘The funny thing is,’ Marina was musing, ‘this man does actually have a connection with the Cathedral Close at Starbridge. But I don’t see how I could ever wind up there living with him.’
‘I didn’t say you would. I said you’d be living – or perhaps just temporarily staying – in the shadow of a great cathedral, and this man would at last be significantly present in your life.’
‘Will I get anywhere with him?’
‘Yes, but not in the conventional sense,’ I said, inventing the answer I knew she wanted to hear, but then without warning I received the print-out that circumvents the ordinary processes of thought, the message that’s hammered directly into the brain from some unknown source and appears instantly on the screen of the psyche. Without stopping to think – because thinking had been by-passed – I said: ‘You’ll be very close to his wife. In fact she’s already a friend of yours.’
‘Glory!’ said Marina astounded. ‘You really are amazing! How could you possibly have known about my new friendship with Katie?’
And that was the moment when I elided the Cathedral Close connection with the wife called Katie and realised that the man we were talking about was Christian Aysgarth.
II
Since I had promised my father not to behave like a shady charlatan by performing psychic parlour-tricks, I felt guilty enough about the punt episode to try to avoid Marina afterwards, but she was like a child with a shrimping-net who had seen an exotic creature swimming in a rock-pool; she found herself compelled to kidnap me for her very own private aquarium.
I was netted, compulsorily enrolled in her Coterie and treated not as a fish but as a very expensive poodle. Marina called me the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence. I hated all this rubbishy behaviour but of course I was flattered to have been singled out by the dazzling Marina Markhampton. Having been unsure how much sex-appeal I had (if any), I liked the way Marina made me feel like Errol Flynn and Elvis Presley rolled into one. No wonder I retained a soft spot in my heart for her afterwards and could never quite bear to sever myself completely from her boring old Coterie.
Ironically, sex was no longer a serious ingredient in our friendship once I’d sobered up. Marina’s persistent pampering was based on the kind of attraction a smart woman feels towards a supremely original fashion accessory; it was covetousness, not lust, which lay at the root of her liking for me, and it was a flattered ego, not a libido in overdrive, which lay at the root of my liking for her. In fact once I was no longer drunk enough to feel like laying every woman in sight, I was surprised to discover how resistible I found her. The Venus de Milo type of torso has never been to my taste, and I happen to be one of those gentlemen who don’t prefer blondes. I like steamy brunettes with large breasts, slim hips and legs that go on for ever. Marina was supposed to be a flawless example of feminine beauty, but I thought she looked like an intelligent sheep, all light, blazing eyes and angular facial bones.
In the May of 1963, less than a year after our first meeting, she went to live temporarily in the Cathedral Close at Starbridge. (This reflects no credit on my fortune-telling skill, of course. My invented prophecy had merely given her an idea about how she could best further her friendship with Christian, and if I’d kept quiet in the punt it would never have occurred to her to offer to house-sit for her grandmother while Lady Markhampton was away in the south of France.)
Inevitably Marina threw a party and inevitably I was invited and inevitably I was afflicted by my usual ambivalence: I felt satisfaction that I should have been included, curiosity to see how the jeunesse dorée lived and annoyance that I was to be trotted out once more as Marina’s psychic poodle. My friend Venetia seemed to think that the Starbridge party was the first occasion that Marina had displayed me as a fashion accessory, but there had been previous occasions in London when to my disgust I had been unable to resist being exhibited.
I now made a new resolution to waste no more time in this idiotic fashion, so I turned down the invitation to Lady Markhampton’s house by saying I was too busy swotting for my second-year exams. Unfortunately Marina refused to take no for an answer. Discovering that I was planning to slip back to Starrington that weekend for my father’s birthday she bludgeoned me again with her invitation and almost before I could say ‘parlour-trick’ I found myself mutinously turning up at the party – the ‘orgy’ as Marina chose to call her parties in those days.
As a gesture of rebellion I arrived late and left early. In fact I behaved very badly, but then so did Marina, introducing me to her current gang as the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence and fawning over me until I wanted to puke. There were about sixteen people present; Marina either gave small parties where couples continually formed and re-formed as everyone tried out everyone else, or she gave big bashes where couples tended to stick together in order to survive. On this select occasion it just so happened that I knew few of the guests, but there was nothing particularly surprising about this. Marina had a vast circle of acquaintances and liked to shuffle them around her guest-lists to keep everyone wondering whom they were going to meet next. The privileged inner circle, which she insisted on calling her Coterie, also varied, depending on who was in favour, and the only people I knew that night were her two closest girlfriends (Emma-Louise and Holly), my friend Venetia and Michael Ashworth, the younger son of the Bishop and the brother of Charley-the-Prig.
Anyway there I was, arriving hours late at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close, and there was Marina, not just introducing me as the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence but even declaiming that I was the brother of Martin Darrow the actor (I’ll get to that creep Martin later). If there was one thing I hated even more than being paraded as a psychic, it was being paraded as the brother of the famous Martin Darrow – who was only my half-brother anyway, the son of my father’s first marriage, and so much older than I was that I felt he should be keeping little Gerald company in the hereafter.
It was before the drug era, so although everyone was stoned out of their minds the culprit was merely vintage Veuve Clicquot. I drank half a glass and asked for a Coke, just to be nasty. Marina gave a little tinkling laugh and said how original I was. Fortunately I discovered some excellent sausage rolls at the buffet. They kept me quiet for a bit. The nicest person in the room was my friend Venetia – Venetia Flaxton she was in those days. I’d met her a month earlier through Charley-the-Prig. It was curious how Charley Ashworth was present when I met both Marina and Venetia. The most unlikely people can turn up at crucial moments in one’s life.
Venetia seemed a lot older than I was then because in 1963 she was twenty-six and I was only twenty, but I always liked her. I specially liked her at Marina’s orgy that night. I could see she knew I hated being paraded as a soothsayer and the brother of Martin Darrow. ‘Give the poor child a chance to merge with the crowd!’ I heard her mutter exasperated to Marina, and the next moment she had swooped to my rescue by leading me to the most striking couple in the room.
The woman was dark, not one of my steamy brunettes but a romantic heroine who looked as if she had stepped out of some Victorian novel where women were idealised as angels – or perhaps out of some Victorian painting where the female figure was supposed to represent Purity in its endless battles against Lust. She had delicate features, pale skin and fine-boned, well-bred hands. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t want to go to bed with a woman like that because I’d be too afraid of breaking her.
The man who had apparently found this purity-on-a-pedestal fragility irresistible was lounging elegantly against the mantelshelf as if he owned not only the room but the house and the entire Cathedral Close. Tall, slim and dark, he coruscated with a glamour enhanced by an air of total self-confidence, the poise of a brilliant, sophisticated man who was well accustomed to the world grovelling at his feet. This aura of extreme worldly success fascinated me. I was also intrigued by the way the sensitivity of his face was marred by a thin, brutal mouth which had already, as if foreshadowing his middle age, begun to turn down slightly at the corners. I was surprised later when women sighed how handsome he was. That mouth ruined the film-star looks, but women, being women, obviously found it so sexy that they were incapable of seeing it as a blemish.
‘… and do you know the Aysgarths?’ Venetia was saying to me. ‘This is Christian – and this is his wife Katie …’
I had heard much about this couple over the years, but I had never before managed to meet them. Christian’s father was the Dean of Starbridge, the priest who ran the Cathedral. A self-made man, he had a considerable reputation as an administrator and no inhibitions about flaunting his powerful personality. My father disliked him but the Dean had many devoted friends and admirers not only in Starbridge itself but throughout the diocese. It was widely noted that the Bishop, like my father, was not among them.
In the early 1940s when my father had first met him, the Dean had been the Archdeacon of Starbridge, but in 1946 he had moved to London to become a canon of Westminster Abbey and an interval of eleven years had followed before he had returned to the diocese to take charge of the Cathedral. His eccentric second wife, Christian’s stepmother, invited me to a few parties at the Deanery because I happened to be only eighteen months younger than Christian’s brother Sandy, but when after one boring visit I consistently refused these invitations she at last gave up issuing them. I didn’t care for Sandy, whose idea of fun consisted of reading Greek poetry – in Greek – and the Dean’s other children were all either much older than I was or much younger.
Christian was fifteen years my senior, a fact which helps to explain why I had never met him before Marina’s Starbridge orgy; by the time his father returned to the diocese in 1957, Christian was a don up at Oxford, and once I had rejected his stepmother’s attempts to draw me into the Deanery’s junior social set, there was no reason why he should ever have encountered me. I did go to the Cathedral Close regularly to see the Ashworths, but since the Bishop and the Dean were constantly at loggerheads, contact between the Deanery and the South Canonry was minimal. Certainly on my visits to the Bishop’s house there was never an Aysgarth in sight.
Christian was the eldest child of the Dean’s first marriage. The second son, Norman, was a barrister who lectured in law; he was also at Marina’s orgy that night. There was a third son, James, whom at that time I had never met, a daughter, Primrose, whom I had glimpsed when Mrs Aysgarth had initially succeeded in dragging me to the Deanery, and finally my contemporary, Sandy-the-Greek-Freak, whose real name was Alexander. Elizabeth and Pip, Dean Aysgarth’s two offspring by his weird second wife, were still children at the time of Marina’s Starbridge party, and I knew little about them except that Pip was a pupil at the Cathedral Choir School and Elizabeth had been nicknamed Lolita by various ordinands at the Theological College.
‘Your father was the Principal of the Theological College back in the ’forties, wasn’t he?’ said Christian to me when we finally met that night. ‘I can remember him visiting us just before Father left Starbridge to take up the canonry at Westminster.’
‘Ah,’ I said, very young, very gauche.
‘And I remember Sandy telling me about you,’ pursued Christian. ‘“What’s the point of reading Homer,” you said to him, “when you could read Shakespeare instead?” Very shocking that was to Sandy! But I thought: there goes a man after my own xenophobic heart – a rampant chauvinist who goes to bed wrapped in the Union Jack every night!’
Everyone laughed as I tried to assemble a sentence which would prove I was no mental defective, but before I could speak, my friend Venetia exclaimed: ‘Stop teasing him, Christian! You don’t have to be xenophobic to prefer Shakespeare to Homer!’
‘No, but it helps.’ Suddenly he smiled at me and at once became the Oxford don who was well accustomed to socially inept undergraduates. ‘I seem to remember you’re reading divinity at the Other Place,’ he said kindly. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Okay.’
‘I read theology up at Oxford, although my special subject is now medieval philosophy. Going to be ordained?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good for you. You’re a braver man than I ever was.’
‘Darling!’ said his wife reproachfully. ‘You can’t imply you’re lacking in courage just because you weren’t called to be a clergyman!’
‘The Devil only knows what I was called to be,’ said Christian, turning his back on her, and at once I was aware of tension, of darkness, of a tingling on the spine.
Marina surged past me into the middle of the group. ‘Christian, did I ever tell you I met Nicky when I was lying semi-nude in a punt on the Cam?’
‘I should think you met a lot of people, my love, if you lay around semi-nude in a punt on the Cam.’ He raised his voice to address a man who had begun to drift towards us from a group by the window. ‘Perry, come and meet the bravest man in this room – Marina’s soothsayer’s heading for a cassock and dog-collar!’ And to me he added: ‘Nick, this is Peregrine Palmer, a very old friend of mine.’
‘Hullo, Nick,’ said Palmer. ‘Nice to meet someone under twenty-five who’s committed to Jesus Christ instead of that crashing bore Elvis Presley.’
‘I’m mad about Elvis!’ cried my friend Venetia hotly.
‘I’m mad about you,’ said Palmer, ‘and how you could enjoy that kind of moronic music is quite beyond my power to imagine …’
An argument followed about whether rock –’n’-roll had replaced religion as the opium of the masses. I wanted to talk to Christian but still I was unable to devise a remark worthy of his attention. Meanwhile Christian himself continued to lounge against the chimney-piece, his glass of champagne in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and his wife continued to gaze at him adoringly. So did Marina. That was when I realised that the secret hero-worship of last summer had blossomed into a passion which I had no doubt was platonic. Katie obviously had no doubt either. She was quite at ease, and when Marina offered her a cigarette she accepted it with a smile. By this time the debate had progressed from a disagreement about Marx’s ‘opium of the masses’ to a slanging match about Sartre’s brand of existentialism, and I couldn’t help admiring Venetia. Refusing to conform to the conventional pattern of feminine behaviour, she spoke up to both men, remained unintimidated when Palmer tried to undermine her argument and finally won the debate by shouting out a quotation in Latin.
‘Phew!’ gasped Palmer pie-eyed.
I couldn’t make up my mind whether he liked Venetia as much as he appeared to like her, or whether the friendly admiration was just an act, part of an adroit social manner which could be switched on and off without effort. There was something unreadable about Palmer. He had brown hair, neatly cut and parted, bland blue eyes and a square, unremarkable face which any poker-player would have envied; he economised constantly in his use of facial muscles. He was shorter than Christian. I remember noticing, as I glanced in the glass above the fireplace, that Christian and I were the same height: six feet exactly.
The party blazed on. Having reviewed my limited knowledge of Christian’s special subject, I finally managed to compose a sentence suitable for opening a conversation with him (‘Could the work of Joachim of Flora be considered a forerunner of the Marxian view of history?’) but unfortunately I never managed to ask this mind-bending question because I was collared by Michael Ashworth. He wasn’t engaged to Marina in those days and was busy being girl-mad, reacting against his father, the strait-laced bishop, and his brother, Charley-the-Prig. I had been watching him as I devised my question about Joachim of Flora. He had been sprawled on the sofa with two girls, his right arm squeezing the waist of the blonde (Emma-Louise) while his left hand squeezed the breast of the brunette. This unknown brunette interested me deeply. She was an ultra-steamy concoction of heaving cleavage, lissom legs and smouldering dark eyes.
‘This is Dinkie,’ said Michael, having nobly abandoned his squeezing in order to look after me. Although nearly three years my senior he always took a benevolent interest in my welfare.
‘Hiya, gorgeous,’ said the steamy brunette in a show-stopping American drawl.
‘Hi.’ Of course I could think of nothing else to say. What hell it is to be young.
‘I just love to make passes,’ said this fabulous creature, ‘at guys who wear glasses.’
This indeed was an education. I had lost my virginity a month after my encounter with Marina the previous summer, but I still knew very little about girls and I still thought my reflection in the mirror fell far short of the masculine ideal which would be demanded by any discerning steamy brunette. I was glad to be tall but I hated being so lanky and angular. I was glad not to be blind but I hated having to wear glasses. I was glad to be white, since life in England was such hell for blacks, but I hated the unusual pallor of my skin. I was glad not to be a hermaphrodite but I hated being so unremarkable below the waist. Since the loss of my virginity I had accepted that average-sized genitals were quite sufficient to see me through life, but nevertheless I remained discontented because I had hoped to be compensated for my plain looks by being supremely well-endowed sexually. (What hell it is to be young.) No wonder I was so tempted to rely for sex-appeal not on my physique but on my psyche. It was all very well for my father to drone on about those ‘glamorous powers’ which could be so easily purloined by the Devil, but at the insecure age of twenty it was hard to resist parading all the glamour at my disposal once a steamy brunette appeared on the horizon.
‘A soothsayer, huh?’ purred Dinkie Kauffman at Marina’s party that night. Tell my fortune, Wonder-Cat, and be sure you make it cool!’
But before I could begin to produce the usual intuitive rubbish, Christian clapped his hands to gain everyone’s attention and I realised that the climax of the party had been reached. The lights were switched off, the curtains pulled back and as the floodlit Cathedral was revealed beyond the window, Christian proposed a toast to Starbridge. I had long since finished my Coke but I thought I might eat, rather than drink, the toast so I sidled to the buffet under cover of darkness and grabbed another of the sausage rolls. As I did so Dinkie suggested that we should all dance on the Cathedral roof and for some reason everyone seemed to think this was a brilliant idea. Funny the whims people get when they’re drunk. But maybe the concept of polluting a numinous place by idiotic behaviour just has no meaning for non-psychics. For me it would have been like throwing paint at the Mona Lisa.
Deciding it was time to leave I stuffed the last two sausage rolls into my pocket to keep me happy on the journey home, but unfortunately the lights were turned on again before I could complete this manoeuvre and my friend Venetia saw the second roll vanish. Immediately I felt embarrassed by my brazen greed, but almost before I had time to register her smile of sympathy my embarrassment was wiped out as the horror began.
The power was switched on in my psyche.
Knowledge began to be hammered directly into my brain, but this wasn’t just a brief rattle of the computer keyboard followed by a quick flash on the blank screen. This was the long slam which seemed as if it would never end, this was the keyboard pounding so fast that the keys were no more than a blur to the psychic eye, this was the big print-out which cascaded all over my mind.
The shock was so profound that I almost lost consciousness. I could neither move nor speak. I could barely breathe.
The Dark began to pour into the room.
III
Sometimes foreknowledge is known as ‘second sight’, but when I suffered such attacks they were never visual. In that respect I was less gifted than my father. As a psychic I experienced two kinds of special knowledge: one was the quick flash which could sometimes be written off as intuition; the other, much rarer, was the long slam which bore no more resemblance to intuition than an elephant bears to a mouse. Such episodes had a peculiarly vile, lucid quality which, unlike intuition, seemed to leave no room for ambiguity. This instant, uncontrollable destruction of all the shadows we depend on to shield us from searing truths was horrific. No wonder I nearly passed out with shock. It was as if I’d been sitting in an armchair by a cosy fireside and had been brutally blasted into Belsen.
Many people think it must be fun to be a psychic. Fun! When as a small child I first experienced the long slam I screamed non-stop until my father arrived to stitch up my shredded little psyche. Fortunately my mother was out at the estate office, but poor Nanny thought I’d gone mad. My father held me in his arms for a long time but eventually he slipped his pectoral cross into my hand and told me I was safe.
‘No demon can withstand the power of Christ,’ he said, and when he spoke the name of the greatest exorcist who had ever lived, the image of the Light captured my brain and the Dark was conquered.
Much later in my life I read about autistic children. What interested me was that some doctors believed these children could be helped by being held tightly for long periods by a loving adult. I was never autistic; nor were all my profound psychic experiences equally terrifying. But they could be horrific enough to produce a reaction akin to mental illness, and never, by any stretch of the imagination, could they be described as ‘fun’.
As soon as the Dark began to pour into the room that night at Marina’s party, I was not only physically immobilised but mentally booted on to a plane not normally accessible to the conscious mind. I looked around the room and all the objects in it seemed to be hammering out messages to me, they were all speaking, although of course there were no words, no sounds, but I stood in that room, Lady Markhampton’s drawing-room it was, the drawing-room of that house called the Chantry which stood in the Cathedral Close, and because all the objects there were vibrating with information I experienced her essence quite clearly; the image was slapped on the computer screen of my psychic eye. That meant I could ‘see’ her – but psychically, not visually – and at once I thought: nice old girl, sharp tongue, kind heart, well read, cleverer than her husband – and then I experienced the husband’s essence too: old buffer, drank too much, liked cricket and Havana cigars, stupid old bore, forget him, and anyway the love of Lady Markhampton’s life hadn’t been her husband, it had been a slim, striking, middle-aged man with golden eyes – golden eyes just like Charley Ashworth’s, how odd – and he was wearing a frock-coat and gaiters, a fact which was odder still, but no, he wasn’t an actor in a costume melodrama, he was a twentieth-century bishop in full episcopal gear, interesting, fancy Lady Markhampton being in love with a bishop, but of course she’d kept her secret, and neither the bishop nor the silly old husband had ever guessed.
Then time suddenly went way out of alignment, and I knew that in that drawing-room, so civilised and elegant, a priest had been killed during the Civil War when the Roundheads had smashed up Royalist Starbridge. There was wall-to-wall blood, I couldn’t see it, but it was there, I was wading in it, and all at once the Force – the psychic force – roared into top gear, like a gale it was, no, a hurricane, no, a nuclear wind, and it nearly deafened me, although of course there was no sound, just print-out, print-out, print-out, slam, slam, slam on the computer keyboard, and the word which kept flashing on the screen was DEATH, DEATH, DEATH, DEATH, DEATH.
Then I looked at my companions, that jeunesse dorée, those glamorous friends of Marina Markhampton all glittering in the Light, and I knew the Dark was closing in on them, I knew the Coterie was doomed. But Michael Ashworth was going to survive – odd how sure I was of that when popular opinion wrote him off as a rake who could only go from bad to worse, but no, Michael was going to live and someone else was going to live too, one of the girls – was it Marina, surviving with Michael? – but I couldn’t quite read the name in the print-out – oh God, let it be my friend Venetia! – and meanwhile the keys were slamming on and the horrors were coming up brilliantly lit upon the screen.
I looked at Dinkie, the steamy brunette, and knew she’d become a walking corpse. I looked at Christian’s brother Norman and knew his body would rot long before he died. I looked at Norman’s wife Cynthia and heard her screaming in a locked room. I looked at Marina’s friend Holly Carr and felt the pain as she slashed her wrists. I looked at Katie Aysgarth’s brother Simon and knew the waters would close over his head. I looked at my friend Venetia and the word that roared through my brain was DANGER, DANGER, DANGER – and I thought: I’ve got to save her, got to act, got to speak –
But when I stepped forward Marina intercepted me. ‘Nicky – Nicky! You’re not listening – what’s the matter, have you gone deaf? I want you to tell all our fortunes once we get up to the Cathedral roof …’
I said something, don’t know what, anything to brush her off, and then, thank God, Venetia saw me. She was on the other side of the room. I began to stagger towards her, and I think she realised I had a message to deliver because she came to meet me, but when we were face to face at last I was tongue-tied. I found I had no way of imparting my psychic knowledge; the ‘gnosis’ wasn’t transmissible to that part of the brain which controls speech, and when I finally opened my mouth the only words that came out were: ‘Don’t go to the Cathedral.’
Venetia’s expression changed from curiosity to an amused indulgence. What a dear little psychic poodle, she was thinking, a nonsensical warning delivered with such an earnest expression, he really is rather adorable.
Overcome by an embarrassed fury I bolted into the hall.
Someone – something – the cosmic equivalent of a hand – switched off the Force.
I just managed to reach the cloakroom basin before I threw up. Then I dashed cold water on my face and willed myself to stop shaking. I was wearing no cross but I tried to roll back the Dark by silently reciting the old Orthodox prayer which I used as a mantra. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God –
Someone rattled the cloakroom door. ‘Yoo-hoo! Who’s monopolising the lavatory? Hurry up!’
Struggling out I found Marina giggling with her girlfriends, Holly and Emma-Louise.
‘Nicky, do change your mind about coming to the Cathedral!’
Incapable of speech I merely shook my head, hurtled across the hall to the dining-room, which had been set aside for the guests’ coats, and began to rummage around for my leather jacket.
‘Ah, there you are!’ said Christian, walking into the room a second later. ‘I was afraid you’d already gone. This hasn’t been much fun for you, has it? Marina’s very bold in bringing together widely differing age-groups, but it’s a risky strategy for a hostess to adopt.’
‘I didn’t mind.’ I pawed at a mink stole and finally found my jacket. ‘It was okay.’
‘Was it? You look a bit green.’
Too many sausage rolls –’
‘– and not enough champagne!’ he said laughing. To my surprise he added: ‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t have much chance to talk to you – I think you were probably the most original person in the room and I always admire originality. Come to Oxford to see me if ever you can tear yourself away from the Other Place!’
And then as he smiled straight into my eyes, the Force blasted back across my psyche and I thought: you’ll die young.
THREE (#ulink_3f844f7e-6015-5d91-a832-3beaae4d8ae9)
‘We sin because we are part of a sinful situation …’
MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974
Canterbury Pilgrim
I
He died two years later in the summer of 1965. I met him only three times after that first encounter, but those meetings ensured I became involved in the mystery of 1968. They all took place within weeks of Marina’s party.
I was anxious to respond to his invitation to Oxford, so as soon as my second-year exams were finished I wrote him a note which read: ‘Dear Dr Aysgarth, If you have a moment to spare I’d like to ask you how far Joachim of Flora’s philosophy predates Karl Marx’s theory of history. I could come up to Oxford any time now. Yours sincerely, N. DARROW.’
In reply he wrote back: ‘Dear Nick, How nice to hear from you! Now that term’s ended and my undergraduates have finished having nervous breakdowns, I’m free as air. Come up for the weekend and we’ll pull Joachim to pieces! Yours, CHRISTIAN.’
I went up for the weekend. He had an unexpectedly large house in North Oxford, a fact which reminded me that Katie came from a wealthy family. There was a tousled garden with a bumpy tennis court in the middle of it. The house was comfortable, but its youngest inhabitants, two little Aysgarths aged five and two, ensured that it was not oppressively tidy. I knew little about children in those days, but these girls seemed unusually bright and well-behaved. An au pair female pitter-pattered in the background but Katie did most of the cooking herself. The food was Frenchified but plentiful. I ate voraciously and remembered to offer to help with the washing up. Katie said no, no, but was pleased I had volunteered. Christian said no, no, and bore me off to his study for mind-stretching conversations about Joachim of Flora, but since people kept dropping in and the phone kept ringing, our discussions tended to be fragmentary.
I was impressed by the Aysgarths’ popularity and even more impressed by their ability to remain unflurried by the numerous interruptions. A successful partnership, I thought, a well-suited couple. I forgot that obscure moment of tension between them at Marina’s party.
On the Sunday of my visit Christian showed me around his College and we attended matins in Christ Church Cathedral. It was after this that I felt sufficiently self-assured in his company to say: ‘Since you’re a church-goer, I suppose your decision not to be ordained had nothing to do with a loss of faith.’
‘I don’t usually go to church. But I happen to be fond of that Purcell anthem they sang this morning.’
I was so startled by this confession that I was glad he gave me no chance to comment. To tell the truth,’ he added, ‘I never intended to be ordained. I read theology just to please my father.’
Automatically I heard myself say: ‘But how on earth did you break the news to him that you weren’t going on to theological college?’
‘I said something like: “Brace yourself – tough news – I’m not going to be ordained.” And he said: “Oh dear. Never mind, we can’t all be Archbishop of Canterbury. Have a drink and tell me what you intend to do instead.”’
‘What a fabulous father!’ I exclaimed impressed, but Christian merely said: ‘I doubt if he was surprised. I think he’d already worked out that my decision to read theology was my way of discharging any filial obligation I had to follow in his footsteps.’
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘he took it very well. If I decided not to be ordained, I believe my father would sink into a depression and die.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She –’
‘Oh God, no, I’m sorry, she’s dead, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she died when I was fourteen.’
‘I was fifteen when my mother died,’ said Christian. ‘It was absolute bloody hell. However, at least your father never remarried. Count your blessings.’ And when I heard the edge to his voice I knew he hated his stepmother.
I heard from her three weeks later. I was at home, trying to work out how I could trade in Lynda (my first girl, acquired in a frenzy the previous summer after my encounter with Marina in the punt) and take on something with longer legs. I was just fantasising for the umpteenth time about Dinkie when Morgan, one of the Community, banged on the door of my private sitting-room and said: ‘The intercom’s not working and that crazy wife of the Dean of Starbridge is on the phone screeching for you. Are you in or out?’
I opened the door. Morgan was an ex-pop-singer who was now trying to write an opera about God in order to justify the free meals which he received as a member of the Community, but I didn’t mind him. He was harmless. The members of the Community who drove me up the wall were Rowena and Agnes, the wives of the ex-monks, Mark and Luke. I detest bossy old bitches who think priggishness is part of the Christian way of life.
‘Okay, I’ll take the call,’ I said, intrigued by Morgan’s news, and moved to the bedroom, where I kept the phone.
‘Nicholas my dear,’ said Mrs Dean the instant I announced my presence, ‘this is Dido Aysgarth – as that peculiar man who answered the phone may or may not have told you, and really, I can’t think why your father has to surround you with a bunch of cranks instead of engaging some motherly soul who would be a proper housekeeper, but then there’s the problem of the garden, isn’t there, and gardeners are almost impossible to obtain nowadays as I well know. Nevertheless it seems unwise to rely on religious maniacs, such a tragedy your mother died young, although she worked so hard running that estate that it’s hardly surprising she had a massive stroke and personally I think women should stick to being wives and mothers and leave the masculine work in this world to men – and talking of men, my dear, Christian’s coming down next weekend with his family and since he’s taken a fancy to you he’s insisting that I invite you over for Sunday lunch, and I thought what a good idea because it’s years since you’ve seen Elizabeth and although she’s only fourteen she’s very mature – and in my opinion quite ravishing as well as utterly brilliant – but of course I’m prejudiced as I’m her mother, and talking of parents, I almost hesitate to ask for fear of hearing bad news, but how is that poor old father of yours?’
‘Very well.’
‘So sad your mother’s death unhinged him. All right, Nicholas, we’ll look forward to your visit, Christian will be so –’ And she hung up, cutting herself off. Probably she continued to talk even after the receiver had been replaced.
It says much for my desire to see Christian that I turned up at the Deanery despite the outrageous style of the invitation. Unfortunately I at first had no chance to talk to him. Mrs Aysgarth was ruthless in clamping down on my efforts to escape from Nymphet-Elizabeth, Starbridge’s very own version of Lolita, and when I did succeed in heading for the seclusion of the lavatory, Sandy-the-Greek-Freak waylaid me in the hall. I was just wishing I were a hundred miles away when Christian came to the rescue and bore me off for a stroll around the Close.
As we passed the South Canonry where the Ashworths lived he said: ‘Are you really psychic or is that just a fantasy of Marina’s?’
‘I get a bit of foreknowledge occasionally.’
Hearing my guarded tone he realised I was nervous of ridicule and at once he sought to reassure me. ‘I ask purely out of friendly curiosity,’ he said, ‘not hostile scepticism.’
‘I’m not good at talking about it. In fact my father says I shouldn’t talk about it, because in his opinion there are many futures and not all of them come true. You’ve got to allow for man’s free will, you see, so when I do experience foreknowledge –’ I repressed a shudder at the memory of Marina’s party ‘-I always have to remind myself that the disclosed future may never happen.’
‘But presumably it does sometimes happen, and that’s extraordinary in its implications, isn’t it? It would seem to support Plato – to suggest that the world we know is only the shadow of another world, the real world where all time is eternally present. How can one see the future unless time, as it’s popularly understood, is an illusion? What a kick in the teeth for modern philosophy, refusing to acknowledge any reality other than the one we perceive with our senses!’
‘My father says modern philosophy is wholly unreal, just the spirit of the Enlightenment reaching its inevitable dead end. My father says the logical positivists prove only one thing: that it’s possible to have a brilliant intellect and still wind up a spiritual ignoramus out of touch with ultimate reality.’
‘I’d like to talk to your father,’ said Christian, ‘but I hear he doesn’t see anyone new nowadays.’
‘Oh, he’d see you, I’m sure,’ I said at once, ‘if I were to ask him.’
Would he? Then if you could mention my name I’d really be most grateful. Like the spirit of the Enlightenment, I seem to have reached a dead end.’
I stared at him in astonishment, and when he saw my expression he said rapidly: ‘I’ve got everything a man could wish for, of course. But I feel I need a wise man like your father to give my life a new direction for the future.’
This statement at least I could understand. Anyone could benefit from skilled spiritual direction, even those whose lives were successful and happy. My father had never confined himself merely to counselling the troubled in order to help them to pray; a considerable part of his ministry had consisted of advising those who were doing well in their journey along the spiritual way and wanted to sustain their progress. So I didn’t automatically assume that Christian had severe personal problems. In fact I thought it far more likely that he had reached a point where his secession from the Church bothered him and he was keen to re-examine whatever beliefs he still retained.
‘I’ll speak to my father as soon as I get home,’ I promised, pleased by the opportunity Christian had given me to repay his kindness, but to my dismay my father refused to see him.
‘I’m not interested in Aysgarth’s over-educated sons who are now finally realising that intellectual prowess is no substitute for spiritual growth.’
‘But Father –’
‘I’m over eighty,’ said my father crossly, ‘I’m retired and nowadays I see only the people I want to see. However –’ Realising that he was behaving like a very stubborn, tiresome old codger he made a big effort ‘– I’ll write Christian a letter referring him to the Fordites at Grantchester. Since they’re so close to Cambridge the monks there are well accustomed to helping clever men who have lost touch with their souls.’
‘I don’t think he’s lost touch with his soul. He just wants advice on shaping his future.’
‘When someone talks about reaching a dead end you can be certain his soul’s well out of reach of his fingertips,’ said my father tartly, and pottered off to his little kitchen to prepare Whitby’s evening fish.
I was so embarrassed by my failure to secure Christian an audience that I made no attempt to contact him, but in September, just as I was preparing to return to Cambridge for my final year, I received a phone call from his friend Perry Palmer in London.
‘I’m throwing a party on the Saturday after next,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Any chance you’ll be able to come? Marina and the gang will be there so you won’t be entirely marooned among old fogeys in their mid-thirties like me.’
I felt sure Christian had prompted the invitation. ‘Thanks, Perry,’ I said. ‘Great.’ As an afterthought I added warily: ‘Elizabeth Aysgarth won’t be there, will she?’ but Perry answered with a laugh: ‘No, I don’t go in for nymphets!’
I then had to work out where I could stay the night. On previous visits to London I had stayed with the Fordite monks in the guest-wing of their headquarters near Marble Arch, but I knew from past experience that the guest-master became stroppy if I stayed out late. I decided I was tired of stroppy guest-masters, tired of my father behaving as if London were one big moral cesspit, tired of being treated as anything less than a fully-grown adult male.
‘I’ll stay with one of my friends,’ I said to my father.
‘That’s not acceptable to me, Nicholas. If you’ve got to go to London, you must stay with the monks.’
‘But that’s such a pain in the neck!’
We eyed each other balefully. This was the danger zone where the generation gap yawned and my desire to be independent in the manner of the 1960s clashed with my father’s antiquated ideas about what was proper for a young man of twenty.
‘If you refuse to stay with the Fordites,’ said my father, ‘then you must stay with Martin. He’ll look after you.’
‘I don’t need looking after! Maybe I’ll cadge a corner in Michael Ashworth’s pad – surely you can’t object if I stay with a bishop’s son!’
‘You may stay with Charley but not with Michael,’ said my father, who had somehow found out that Michael had been chucked out of medical school for laying every nurse in sight. ‘However, I must say that I don’t approve of this modern habit of scrounging hospitality, and in my opinion you should always wait to be invited before you turn up on a friend’s doorstep and put him to a certain amount of inconvenience. With members of one’s family, of course, it’s different. They have a duty to provide for you, but even so, a thoughtful, unselfish man will be scrupulous in trying not to impose himself on any household merely in order to make his life easier.’
Hopeless old Victorian. ‘People are more casual nowadays, Father.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed the decline in good manners over the last half-century. Now, Nicholas, why don’t you approach Martin before you approach Charley? I’d really feel much happier if –’
‘The last thing I’m going to do is stay with that old creep!’
Bad move, Nicholas. Bad, bad move. But the old man was driving me up the wall. Taking a deep breath I tried to grab some patience out of thin air. Mustn’t upset the old boy. If he had a stroke and died –
‘Father, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so rude, the words just sort of slipped out, but you see, Martin and I … well, I mean … okay, I know we’ve got you in common and I know he’s a good son, coming down here regularly and gushing all over you, and I’m sure you’re right when you say he has many fine qualities, but … he’s so old, you see, and not quite my sort of person, and –’ I stopped before saying the words ‘I can’t stand him’ but my father heard them anyway as they flashed across my mind.
‘I’m extremely disappointed by that speech,’ he said in the kind of voice priests use for funerals. ‘You’ve upset me very, very much.’
I wanted to smash something. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’ But I knew as I spoke that there was only one way of putting things right. Off I sloped to telephone my half-brother.
‘Don’t worry, Martin, I’m sure it’s quite impossible – I know how busy you are –’
‘Not too busy to help you out.’
‘I’ve refused to stay with the Fordites because they don’t understand about late-night parties, and Father said I had to stay at your flat, but since I wouldn’t dream of foisting myself on you –’
‘Foist away.’
‘– there’s no need for you to issue an invitation. I just have to tell Father, you see, that I’ve approached you but you can’t help. Okay, Martin, sorry to have troubled you, ’bye.’
I then phoned Charley-the-Prig Ashworth, who had been ordained that summer and was now working at St Mary’s church in Mayfair.
‘I hate to make demands on your Christian charity, Charley,’ I said, ‘but can I sleep on your floor on Saturday week?’
‘Of course you can! I admit it is a little tricky because we’ll have four student Christians from Africa staying in the curates’ flat then, but I’m sure we can find you a quiet corner somewhere –’
I didn’t fancy student Christians from anywhere. ‘It’s okay, Charley, I’ll try Michael.’ I could always insist to my father that Michael had turned over a new leaf.
‘I don’t think you’d be terribly welcome there, old chap. He’s got a new girlfriend who always seems to be around to answer the phone. Talks with an American accent and sounds as if she can’t wait to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain.’
‘Gosh, not Dinkie!’
‘You know her?’ Charley was suddenly very cool.
‘She’s a friend of Marina Markhampton’s.’
‘Honestly, Nick, I think you ought to watch it – that’s a very fast crowd. Look, come and stay at the flat – you can have my bed. I’ll kip down with the Africans in the living-room.’
The thought of being ‘saved’ by this evangelical crusader of unimpeachable virtue was enough to make me want to puke.
‘No, don’t worry, Charley, I’ll go to the Fordites.’ I phoned Martin again. ‘Sorry to keep bothering you, but –’
‘– but the old man’s putting on his crucified look and you’re at your wits’ end.’
‘Don’t you speak of my father like that!’ I yelled, finally driven to the luxury of venting my rage.
‘He’s my father too, you know! Look, sonny, I don’t know what your problem is, but –’
‘Stop talking to me as if I was six!’
‘Then stop behaving as if you were two! I’ll see you on Saturday week – let me know what time you’ll be arriving,’ said Martin, and hung up.
I decided I loathed everyone over thirty. Then I remembered Christian and amended thirty to forty. After that decision I found myself wondering how Michael had managed to convert Dinkie into his live-in telephone receptionist. Did his father know? And what could the Bishop have said once he had recovered from his apoplectic fit? Was it possible that Michael could pass Dinkie off as a ‘nice girl’ and take her home to the South Canonry for visits? But no, Dinkie couldn’t be passed off as anything but a siren, and Uncle Charles, being a man of the world, would recognise her type even at a distance of fifty paces. Surely Michael wouldn’t dare tell his father! But how could he be sure Charley-the-Prig wouldn’t split on him? And I thought I had problems, scrabbling around once a week with Lynda! It was consoling to know that some sons of priests lived even more dangerously than I did.
For a second I remembered my premonition that Dinkie would wind up as a walking corpse, but I blotted that memory right out by repeating my father’s familiar words of comfort: ‘There are many futures and not all of them come true.’ I had long since decided that Christian wasn’t going to die young. That particular premonition had been just a false blip on the screen, a stress reaction after the exceptionally gruesome psychic experience I had suffered minutes earlier.
I began to look forward to seeing him again at Perry’s party.
II
My father said I had to take Martin a small present to signal my thanks for his hospitality so I bought some oranges from a barrow-boy at Waterloo station. Martin, a reformed alcoholic, regarded freshly-squeezed orange juice as a big treat. When I arrived at his flat in Chelsea he had just returned from a rehearsal at the theatre. A revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter was due to open in the West End shortly after a successful trial run in the provinces. My father and I had seen the production at the Starbridge Playhouse.
‘Oranges!’ exclaimed Martin as I mutely shoved the bag at him. ‘How clever of you!’
I tramped along behind him into the spare bedroom where the wallpaper, curtains and bedspread all matched. The whole flat had this same manicured, expensive look, conjuring up images of a high-class tart. In the living-room middle-brow books sat on white shelves. Nasty examples of modern art leered from the walls. Signed photographs of show-business luminaries, all professing undying love, were positioned at various strategic points so that it was impossible to look anywhere without seeing a famous face who allegedly adored Martin. Below the middle-brow books were the middle-brow records where the noises of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peggy Lee were lavishly represented. The current copy of Variety lay open on the coffee table. On the desk were scattered provincial press cuttings, all proclaiming how wonderful Martin was in Present Laughter. I wandered around feeling like a creature from another planet and tried to work out how I could stay in my bedroom till it was time to go to the party.
‘Can I have a bath?’ I said in a moment of inspiration.
I soaked and I soaked and I soaked. Eventually Martin called: ‘You haven’t drowned, have you?’ and I had to get out. When I finally reappeared, dressed in my best jeans and my favourite blue shirt, Martin said: ‘A casual party, is it? Whereabouts do you have to go?’
‘Albany.’
This impressed him. Martin, whose mother had been working-class, was a snob. ‘You mean the Albany? Off Piccadilly?’
‘You don’t say “the” Albany. That’s not done. You just say “Albany”,’ I said, very much the son of Anne Darrow, née Barton-Woods, of Starrington Manor.
‘What’s good enough for Oscar Wilde is good enough for me, you little snob – look up the reference in The Importance of being Earnest! Who’s your host?’
‘A guy called Perry Palmer.’
‘Perry Palmer?’ Martin’s face, trained to express every conceivable emotion to every conceivable degree, now registered a profound astonishment. ‘What are you doing going to one of Perry’s parties?’
I was equally astonished. ‘You know him?’
‘Not well, no, but we’ve friends in common – friends in the theatre. How on earth did the two of you meet?’
‘He’s a friend of Christian Aysgarth’s.’
‘Ah yes, the Starbridge connection – all is explained. But nevertheless, how extraordinary! If I were on stage I’d declare in my best sinister voice: “It’s a small world!” and a shiver would sweep through the audience!’
I experienced a moment of amnesia, as so often happens when one’s confused. ‘Have you met any of the Aysgarths?’
‘Almost the whole damned lot, yes – don’t you remember me telling you? When Present Laughter played in Starbridge recently Dean Aysgarth and that fantastically bizarre wife of his gave a party for the cast.’
‘So they did, I remember now. And Christian was there, wasn’t he – he came down specially from Oxford –’
‘And Perry came down specially from London. Tell me, who else is going to this party of his tonight?’
‘Oh, various people I know.’
‘Girls?’
‘You bet.’
‘Thank God!’ said Martin. ‘For one ghastly moment I thought I’d have to come to Albany to chaperone you, and all I want to do after that rehearsal is put my feet up and watch the box.’
‘Are you trying to tell me –’
‘Perry moves in certain circles, yes. God, what a relief it is to live like a monk! I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but when one gets to the advanced age of fifty-eight, the thought of performing in bed as well as on the stage is simply too exhausting to contemplate, and now I find I’m hopelessly hooked on the delights of living alone.’ He laughed before adding: ‘Getting like Dad, aren’t I? No wonder he’s decided I’m a fit person to keep an eye on you when you come trundling up to London! I’ve even started to go to church. They do a first-class show at St Mary’s Bourne Street – brilliant stagecraft enhanced by the English lust for ceremonial! I’m wild about the whole gorgeous circus.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That type of Anglo-Catholic ritualism has always appealed to people like you.’ I stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Well, watch yourself with Perry Palmer,’ said Martin smoothly as the conversation degenerated into a verbal punch-up. ‘Psychics are usually attractive to both sexes. I bet Dad’s had plenty of men in love with him in his time.’
‘The most irritating thing about homosexuals,’ I said, heading for the door, ‘is that they believe everyone’s secretly homosexual. A true triumph of hope over statistics.’
‘That’s a great exit line!’ cried Martin, genuinely amused, but I walked out without looking back.
III
I took the tube to Green Park and wandered down Piccadilly to Albany, that fabulous ex-palace where the waiting-list is about twenty years long and no one gets a ‘set’ of rooms unless they have a personal hotline to a bunch of nobs who appear to be less well-known than the Queen but more influential. How Perry had acquired this flat of his I had no idea. His grandmother was supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress, but a lot of women were supposed to have been Edward VII’s mistress and presumably not all their grandsons had ended up in Albany. Anyway, there Perry lived in a ground-floor set that faced the Rope Walk, and there was I in the September of 1963 padding past the uniformed flunkey in the grand entrance hall.
Perry was a spy. Now that I had been informed that he was also a homosexual I thought: how typical! Apparently the Foreign Office had learnt nothing from the Burgess and Maclean affair. Then I remembered that it was only rumoured he was a spy; all that was known for certain was that he spoke fluent Russian and held some Foreign Office post which he refused to discuss. Possibly he just translated incoming mail from the Kremlin.
I had been bothered by Martin’s revelations about Perry, but during my journey to Albany I became less bothered and more sceptical. Martin had denied knowing Perry well. It seemed obvious in retrospect that he’d rushed to judgement after seeing Perry carousing with a certain bunch of actors, but just because Perry dabbled in the social side of the acting profession in order to give himself a break from the tight-lipped job at the FO I didn’t have to conclude he had a sex-life, lawful or unlawful. In fact Marina always said Perry was a eunuch. Perhaps he was just undersexed. Certainly I couldn’t see Christian being close friends with an active homosexual. That didn’t add up.
I rang the bell and seconds later Perry was flinging open the door. ‘Nick!’ he exclaimed, very crisp in a grey suit, white shirt and old Wykehamist tie. ‘Welcome to my orgy!’
I smiled at him warily and prowled across the threshold.
IV
There were far more people present than at Marina’s Starbridge party in May. The large drawing-room was filled with cigarette-smoke and screeching voices and raucous laughter and overdressed bodies and (from the record-player) the muffled blaring of a big band, very ’forties, very square. Funny how the vast majority of the human race has to generate a repulsive amount of noise before it can convince itself it’s having a good time.
Some sort of sea-green cocktail was circulating but I didn’t like the look of it so I asked for a Coke. No luck. I settled for a glass of Rose’s lime juice which Perry produced for me from his kitchen. The trouble with alcohol is that it tastes so disgusting, and if you start mixing lime juice with, for example, gin, the result always seems to me to be an affront to the taste-buds. Someone offered me a cigarette but I waved it away. I’ve never been able to see the point of smoking. It smells vile and all that ash makes such a mess. If you’ve got to do something with your mouth and hands between meals, why not sip Coke and chew gum? American civilisation could be pretty weird – all those obese cars – but some of the basic innovations, such as Coke and gum, were genuinely useful … Or so it seemed to me at the age of twenty.
Marina pounced on me within seconds. (‘Nicky darling, heavenly to see you!’) She was wearing a silvery cylinder squashed in the right places to show off her Venus de Milo figure. Her friends Emma-Louise and Holly also pounced. (‘Nicky – super? one shrieked, and: ‘We’ve won our bet that you’d be wearing jeans – even to an orgy at Albany!’ screamed the other.) But there was no sign of my friend Venetia. I was told she was too busy preparing for her wedding. I was just sighing with regret when Dinkie undulated by, entwined with Michael, and gave me a wink as she passed. This enthralled me. I spent some time wondering whether I should have winked back, but I wouldn’t have wanted to offend Michael. Finally Perry ended my reverie by musing to me: ‘Christian and Katie are late – stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, I suppose,’ and I heard myself utter the non sequitur: ‘You never mentioned that you knew my brother Martin.’
‘Something told me,’ said Perry, ‘that you got very, very tired of people droning on about your brother,’ and suddenly I decided to like him.
I said: ‘Do you go to the theatre a lot?’
‘All the time, yes, I’m an addict. Look, come and meet some of my thespian friends …’
I met his thespian friends of both sexes. Perry never mentioned my connection with Martin, but Katie’s brother Simon, a pea-brained product of Eton, eventually let the cat out of the bag and then all the thespians started to gush over me with the result that the party became tedious. I took refuge in the lavatory. Venturing out at last with reluctance I found myself overpowered by the desire for more lime juice but before retiring to the kitchen to find the bottle I moseyed around, putting my nose in the dining-room where a buffet was laid out, casting an eye on Perry’s bedroom where a single bed added weight to the theory that he was undersexed, and taking a peek at the adjoining bathroom where I found a peculiar Picasso-style drawing of a mermaid.
Having noted the complete absence of any item which would have indicated homosexual leanings, I beetled down some stairs into the basement kitchen and came to a halt, mouth gaping and eyes wide, at the splendid sight which confronted me. The kitchen was a historical masterpiece, untouched by the mid-twentieth-century mania for making kitchens look like poor relations of the morgue. I saw a large wooden table, very handsome, a gas stove which could only have been pre-war, and a distinguished porcelain sink. The old range had been left in place for its ornamental value, and beside it there was even a set of brass fire-irons: poker, tongs, shovel and soot-brush. Amazing! Anyone who lived in 1963 and kept fire-irons in his kitchen had to be exceptional, and I saw clearly then that Perry was no run-of-the-mill theatrical hanger-on with homosexual leanings but a highly original celibate who spoke Russian, lived in a palace, devoted his free time to civilised cultural pursuits – and kept Rose’s lime juice in some corner I now had to find.
I opened the door of a gas – gas! – refrigerator that had to be at least thirty years old but no bottle of lime juice stood keeping cool on the shelves. Instead I found caviar from Fortnum’s, a bottle of champagne, half a Melton Mowbray pie and a jar of olives. By this time I was beginning to think that all the kitchen lacked was one of the old-style butlers, complete with white hair, a stoop and corns.
I prowled on, pausing at an antique cupboard which housed some very grand china, and reached a door set in the wall near the back entrance – the tradesmen’s entrance, as it would have been in the old days. Opening the door I discovered a coal-cellar – a coal-cellar! Within spitting distance of Piccadilly! – and inside this astonishing relic of a vanished past was a large load of coal. Surreal. What kind of man kept a cellar full of coal in a designated smokeless zone? A man of infinite wit and style. I decided Perry was probably the one man in England who was worthy of being Christian’s best friend.
But still no Rose’s lime juice. Abandoning the coal-cellar I opened yet another mysterious door and found a larder complete with a cooked pheasant sitting on a plate and a tub of Stilton exuding its famous pong. Nearby I spotted pâté de foie gras, Gentleman’s Relish and – yes, Rose’s lime juice. Grabbing the bottle I helped myself to a spare sliver of Stilton before moving to the table to replenish my glass.
Perry clattered down the stairs just as I was diluting the juice with water. He had an empty jug in his hands and Christian at his heels. ‘… playing with fire,’ he was saying as I tuned in to the conversation in mid-sentence. ‘Marina may be all talk and no action, but –’ He saw me and broke off.
‘Nick!’ exclaimed Christian in delight.
‘Hi!’ I said pleased.
‘Sorry, Nick – I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Perry, setting down the jug on the table and extracting some ice from the bag in the refrigerator. ‘Glad you found the lime juice. Would you like to see my coal-cellar?’
‘It’s a land-mark,’ said Christian, preparing to exhibit it to me. ‘The last full coal-cellar left in London. He shows it to everyone.’
‘Groovy,’ I said, feigning ignorance of the phenomenon and taking a peek. ‘But why all the coal?’
‘I made a mistake with the coal-merchant just before the smokeless zone was declared. Pass that bottle of gin, would you, Christian?’
The doorbell rang in the distance.
‘You answer that,’ said Christian to him. ‘I’ll mix the jungle juice.’
‘It’s probably my neighbours complaining about the noise …’ He clattered back upstairs.
‘How are things going?’ said Christian agreeably to me as he poured a huge slug of gin into the jug.
‘Okay.’ Awkwardly I edged closer to him. ‘Sorry about my father,’ I said, ‘I really busted a gut trying to get him to see you. I hope you didn’t feel I’d let you down.’
‘Of course I didn’t!’ He gave me his warmest smile. ‘He wrote a most helpful letter, so you needn’t think you pleaded my cause in vain … All set for your final year at Cambridge?’
‘Yep.’ I watched with amazement as he added liquid from three other bottles to the gin in the jug and then topped off the poison with Schweppes bitter lemon.
‘I suppose you haven’t been seduced since I last saw you by the current fashion among undergraduates for travelling around America once their finals are finished? I’m told that travel on a Greyhound bus is guaranteed to broaden the mind.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Sounds a bit tame, if you ask me, but then I speak as someone who did two years’ National Service in the army. Now, there was an experience that broadened the mind! I enjoyed that escape into a different world.’
I had never before thought of National Service in a positive light. I had just assumed it would be boring and I had heaved a sigh of relief when it had been abolished, but the word ‘escape’ in Christian’s last sentence was now reverberating compellingly in my mind. I heard myself say: ‘I wouldn’t mind getting away for a while. But my father would worry about me if I went off into the blue on my own, and I’d worry if I knew he was worrying.’
‘Obviously in that case the travel would need to be structured in some way which would win his approval and enable him to relax. How about doing voluntary work overseas for a Christian organisation? You’d be in the company of responsible people, and he’d recognise the work as useful experience for someone who planned to be a clergyman.’
This struck me as such a brilliant suggestion that for a moment I was speechless with excitement. A vision of change blazed through my psyche. No more living with the Community and enduring their prim piety. No more feeling tethered to Starrington Manor. I could take two years off, just as if I were doing National Service, and work for a Christian organisation in … The word ‘Africa’ floated across my mind. Exotic, exciting Africa which I had longed to visit ever since I had seen Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines. Distant Africa, where no one would have heard of Jonathan Darrow, the famous spiritual director, and Martin Darrow, the famous actor. Africa, Africa, Africa … I could almost hear the drums beating to lure me on my way.
‘That’s cool,’ I said to Christian. ‘A great suggestion. Thanks.’
He finished stirring the new batch of sea-green poison and smiled at me. Then he said idly: ‘Beware of getting too tied up with that father of yours. Are you sure you really want to be a clergyman?’
Instantly the Dark began to creep into the room. It appeared stealthily, eerily, billowing around Christian so that he became a shadowed figure, sinister and subversive, a skeleton cloaked in black, a nightmare from some medieval vision in which ‘The Dark’ appeared not as a poisonous cloud but as a horned creature bent on destruction. I saw no horned creature but I felt that poisonous cloud, and as soon as I felt it I knew what it was, I just knew, I experienced ‘gnosis’, the knowledge that was special.
I stood facing Christian across the kitchen table while the party roared above us, and as the moment of ‘gnosis’ hit me I knew there was something very wrong with him, I knew that his psyche was far out of alignment, utterly dislocated, and that the Dark was streaming into him through every fissure of his personality. Yet never had Christian seemed kinder to the man so many years his junior, and never had his words seemed more charming and benign.
The Dark was now a huge pressure on my psyche and I knew I had to blast myself free. ‘Yes, I do want to be a priest,’ I said. ‘I want to serve Jesus Christ –’ Instantly the pressure eased as I opened up the scene to the Light ‘– and nothing on this earth is going to stop me.’
‘Well done!’ said Christian at once without a trace of condescension. Moving away from me with the jug of poison in his hands, he began to mount the stairs. ‘In that case I can only wish you the best of luck and every success in the Church.’
In silence I followed him upstairs, the glass of lime juice still clutched in my sweating palm.
V
‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right,’ said my father when I returned home and confided in him. Any manifestation of the Dark was always so horrifying, reeking as it did of death and disintegration, that my strongest instinct was still to seek sanctuary in his cottage, and as usual in such circumstances my father moved to reassure me by speaking very calmly. ‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right …’ He often said that, but now I found the words not soothing but irritating. I didn’t want my judgement queried. I knew what had happened. Having recognised that the Devil was infiltrating Christian I wanted to know how to deal with this knowledge. How could I get Christian to an exorcist? How could I dare to face him in future? How could I be sure that the Devil wouldn’t send a demon to infest me as the result of the scene in the kitchen when I’d defied him by declaiming the name – and thus invoking the power – of Christ? (I should perhaps apologise at this point for using old-fashioned picture-language, but some realities are almost impossible to express verbally without the liberal use of symbols.) All these questions seemed to me to be very urgent, yet as far as I could see my father was far from brimming over with the desire to answer them.
‘Father, it’s no use you saying: “I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right.” I know I’ve got it right, I know I have –’
‘You “know” no such thing! You’ve just jumped to a conclusion. Do please try not to be so arrogant, Nicholas!’
‘I’m not being arrogant!’
The generation gap began to yawn between us again.
‘Can we both make an effort to keep calm?’ said my father. ‘If we start upsetting each other we’ll get nowhere. Now let’s review your story carefully. You say that the Devil was infiltrating Christian – or perhaps you would be using the traditional language more accurately if you said that Christian was being attacked by demons who were paving the way for their master to take possession of his soul. Very well. But this is a big claim to make and it would be wise to proceed with considerable caution before reaching such a diagnosis. Remember that the gift for recognising the presence of either God or the Devil – the charism of the discernment of spirits – is seldom granted to someone of limited spiritual experience.’
Obstinate old fogey. I tried to be patient. ‘But I can pick up the vibes in my psyche and then I know, it’s “gnosis”.’
My father began to get upset again. ‘That’s a delusion. That’s the Gnostic heresy in its most insidious form – the belief that you’re one of an elite which has special access to God and special knowledge of spiritual mysteries. You’re confusing psychic power with spiritual power, Nicholas, but it’s quite possible to be psychically strong yet spiritually weak. Psychic powers must always be the servant of the personality, never the master, and all such powers should be offered with humility to God, not flaunted to boost one’s self-esteem.’
‘I know all that, Father –’
‘You’re not behaving as if you know. You’re being very proud and wilful, Nicholas.’
Wilful! Another of those awful Victorian adjectives. I wanted to bang my head against the wall in exasperation. ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ Mustn’t upset the old boy. He might die. Taking a deep breath I grasped my knees so tightly that my knuckles ached and said in my most soothing voice: ‘You tell me what really happened during that scene with Christian.’
My father sulked for a moment but then said evenly enough: ‘First of all I would survey the background, and the first fact I notice is that he’s taking an interest in you. Why? Possibly it’s because as an Oxford don he deals with many young men of your age and he’s intrigued because you’re unusual. This is the most obvious explanation, although one could be more cynical and theorise that he wanted to see me and realised that cultivating you was the best way of getting what he wanted. Perhaps originally both explanations were true. Now, this second reason for his interest might be classified as self-centred, even ruthless, but I certainly wouldn’t call it demonic, and since he’s still willing to be friendly to you even though I’ve refused to see him, his interest at present would appear to be wholly benign.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Wait. Let’s take this one step at a time. The next thing I notice is that he makes a most interesting suggestion: he proposes that you should do the Christian equivalent of National Service before you proceed to theological college. If you did want to do this, I must tell you that I certainly shouldn’t oppose it. I firmly believe that the more experience young priests have of the world the better, and I often think, looking back, that I was ordained too young. Of course I should miss you dreadfully if you were away for a long time, but that’s irrelevant. It would be very wrong indeed if I selfishly kept you hanging around here with the result that your growth to maturity was impeded. You’re got your own life to live. You must live it.
‘Very well – where have we got to? We seem to have concluded that Christian’s behaviour towards you has been not only genuinely friendly but unexpectedly helpful. But then we come to his final question: “Are you sure you really want to be a clergyman?” and immediately your psyche soars on to a very odd plane indeed. But why? This is a good question of Christian’s and one which you should, in fact, be periodically asked.’
‘But Father –’
‘Sometimes when a young man chooses to follow in his father’s footsteps, it’s a way of evading the difficult task of deciding what he’s really called to do, and I for one don’t want you falling into that particular trap. We’re not all called to serve God as priests and I fully accept the possibility that He may wish you to serve Him in some other way.’
‘But if I’ve been designed by God to be specially like you –’
‘He may still call you to serve Him in a different field. Of course it’s very gratifying to me that you want to be ordained but you don’t exist to ensure my selfish desire for gratification. You’re here to serve God, not your father.’
Nowadays my father regularly felt compelled to deny his desire for a replica, but since I had long since decided this denial was a mere formula to soothe his conscience, I never took the slightest notice. ‘So what you’re really saying,’ I said after he had finished his new attempt to brainwash himself, ‘is that Christian was sanity personified and I reacted like a lunatic.’
‘Not like a lunatic – that seems a little harsh! – but I see no sign of the demonic in this conversation, and I’m wondering if you projected on to Christian a particularly oppressive anxiety which you normally keep buried deep in your unconscious mind. Maybe you should interpret the scene not as a demonic manifestation – and certainly not as a sign that Christian was being infiltrated by the Devil – but as a hint from God that you should re-examine your call to be a priest.’
‘But that’s all –’ I bit back the word ‘balls’. If there was one certainty in my life, it was my call to the priesthood. I had wanted to be a priest ever since I had learnt in my early childhood about Jesus the healer and the exorcist, the hero who always triumphed over the Dark.
Making a new effort to hold on to my patience I said to my father: ‘Your explanation’s so far from what I actually experienced. I know the Dark was there, billowing around Christian and seeping into him through all the cracks in his personality, so your whole interpretation of the scene falls as flat as a pancake.’
My father then became very angry. ‘You understand nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing. And what’s worse, you don’t want to understand, you refuse to be taught, your pride’s convinced you that you know everything there is to know. But I tell you, Nicholas, that if Father Darcy were present in this room –’
I somehow managed to stifle a groan. It really was awful how old people repeated themselves. Cuthbert Darcy, who had once been the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks, was my father’s hero. In fact I had been brought up on the extraordinary memories Father Darcy had left behind him. My father would reminisce about this peculiar old cove at the drop of a hat. Sometimes I felt I had heard each Darcy story at least twenty times.
‘But Father Darcy isn’t present in this room,’ I said. ‘Father Darcy’s been dead for over twenty years.’
‘More’s the pity – if only he could be here to train you as he trained me! Psychics have to be trained. When I think of the appalling messes I got into before I met him – and I didn’t meet him until I became a monk at the age of forty-three –’
‘I know, Father, I know, you’ve told me a million times –’
‘Then you’ll understand why I pray constantly that you’ll meet your own version of Father Darcy very soon – and sometimes when I pray I feel he’s quite close – or is it that he will be quite close? I’m not sure, but what I know for certain is that Aelred Peters is no longer right for you and you’ve got to have someone much tougher.’
‘But I like Father Peters! We get on.’
‘You mean you’ve reached the age when you can manipulate him. You need someone very strong, Nicholas, strong psychically and strong spiritually. Father Darcy …’
The reminiscences began. I stifled another groan.
‘… and he had the toughest psyche I ever encountered, strong as steel yet so extraordinarily flexible – like a magic rope his psyche was, I can see it quite distinctly in my mind’s eye even now after all these years – forty years it is since I met him, imagine that! What a priest he was, so perfectly trained and disciplined, his psychic powers so striking yet so wholly under control, so entirely devoted to God’s service – oh, I can see that first meeting of ours in 1923 as clearly as if it were yesterday …’
I picked up Whitby who had wandered over as if to sympathise with me. Lucky old cat, unable to understand my father’s monologues.
‘… and there I was, six foot three, and there was he, no more than five foot nine, but within seconds I felt like a dwarf and he seemed seven foot tall. And all he did was look at me. He had very dark eyes, rather sunken, set in shadowed sockets …’
My father droned on but I switched off. The truth was that Cuthbert Darcy had been a monastic thug. Their first meeting had resulted in the thug beating him up. I never pretended to understand any of it. After that they had enjoyed a love-hate, father-son relationship for seventeen years even though they had never lived beneath the same roof. (My father denied any father-son relationship, of course, since this type of attachment was forbidden in the cloister, but it was obvious to me that Darcy had had all the spiritual glamour and psychic understanding which my Grandfather Darrow had lacked.) My father had spent some years at Ruydale, the Fordites’ estate in Yorkshire, before he was appointed Abbot of the Grantchester house near Cambridge, and throughout this time Father Darcy had remained at the Fordite headquarters in London, the tarantula at the centre of the web. In consequence the two men had seldom seen each other. Initially they had met once a year, when the Abbot-General made his annual visitation. Later they had met twice a year, once during the visitation and once six months afterwards when my father was summoned to London for what was described as a ‘spiritual spring-cleaning’. But despite the rarity of the meetings there had been copious correspondence. Apparently the strong psychic affinity between the two men had generated an interest powerful enough to overcome their temperamental incompatibility.
This exceedingly weird relationship should have served as a text-book example of how not to conduct an association arising from spiritual direction, but my father always said that Darcy had been the one spiritual director who had succeeded in keeping him on the rails. Indeed my father in old age was lyrical on the subject, and the saga of how the renegade psychic had been rescued, dusted down, shaken up, taught, trained and saved had now acquired the golden sheen of heroic legend. The darker side of this off-beat monastic pas de deux – all the bouts of unChristian dislike, anger and truly scandalous violence – had long since faded away, obliterated by the rosy glow of my father’s unflagging nostalgia.
‘… so Father Darcy said to Francis …’ My father was still deep in his Fordite reminiscences. ‘… and then Cyril said to Aidan …’
I decided it was time to haul him back to 1963. ‘Can we return to Christian for a moment?’
My father recalled himself with an effort and said politely: ‘Of course.’
‘Are you saying I was completely deluded?’
‘No. I’m not doubting for one moment that you experienced a dark force that frightened you. All I’m saying is that you may not only have misinterpreted this force but mislocated it as well. You’re so young, you see, Nicholas, and you’re not trained. If only we could find you your Father Darcy –’
Off he went again. Hopeless. I gave up, muttered some excuse and slipped away.
VI
I came down from Cambridge in the summer of 1964. I hadn’t seen Christian again. Eventually I came to accept my father’s opinion that Christian’s attitude to me had been wholly benign, but I couldn’t forget my impression that something was far out of alignment in his psyche, and this dislocation, hinting at a personality being eroded by the Dark, made me unwilling to seek him out by attending Marina’s parties. Declaring that I was wholly preoccupied with swotting for my finals I refused every Coterie invitation that came my way.
However the Dark seemed to be waiting for me wherever I went in those days. It was certainly waiting for me when I blazed off to Africa to work for the Christian Trail Scheme which encouraged young people to bring the skills of the advanced countries to small rural villages in the Third World.
I was in such a bad state after I got in my mess with the witch-doctor that I had to be sent home. I thought I could handle the bastard by performing a simple exorcism, but I was far, far out of my depth. He put a curse on me. I began to feel ill. I knew the illness was psychosomatic and idiotic, but that made no difference. I wilted. Then I panicked. I flew home thinking the plane would crash. My father had been driven to Heathrow airport to meet me by Martin, who was in the midst of making a new series of his TV comedy ‘Down at the Surgery’, but I barely saw Martin. I just staggered into my father’s arms and stuck there, once more transformed into the little boy, temporarily autistic, who had screamed in terror until his father had turned up to put things right.
As soon as I was alone with my father I said: ‘I’m never leaving you again, I can’t live without you being nearby to save me,’ and I began to sob. Total regression. Pathetic. I’m almost too ashamed to admit it, but I was so frightened that I couldn’t sleep at the house and had to camp at his cottage. Apart from the bathroom and the kitchen there was only one room but I slept in a sleeping-bag on the hearth with the cat. Whitby the Fourth, all furry warmth, exuded comfort. Funny how well animals can relate to humans. I stroked and stroked that cat so often that it was a wonder all his fur didn’t fall out. My father talked to me, prayed with me, helped me to be calm. Eventually the nightmares stopped and I no longer felt the Dark was trying to press through the huge cracks in my psyche. The cracks healed up, welded together by the Light which exuded steadily from my father.
‘No demon can withstand the power of Christ,’ said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality.
‘Maybe you should forget about doing further voluntary work and go to the Theological College this autumn,’ said my father when I was better. I think he believed I’d meet my Father Darcy at the Theological College, but at that point my pride staged a resurrection and I said no, that would mean the witchdoctor had won some sort of victory, and no one, least of all an old bugger of a witch-doctor, was going to deflect me from my chosen course.
But I didn’t go far away again. The Mission for Seamen, scene of my next attempt at voluntary work, was fifty miles away in the port of Starmouth, but I had a car which enabled me to bolt for home on my days off. After that job too ended in chaos I moved even closer to my father, but I didn’t start work at the Starbridge Mental Hospital until 1966. It was in the summer of 1965, when I was at the Mission for Seamen, that Christian drowned in the English Channel off the Isle of Wight.
He had been sailing with Perry Palmer. Perry kept a boat at Bosham, near Chichester, and they had formed the habit that summer of sailing every weekend. The catastrophe was caused by a freak wave which had flung Christian overboard; the theory was that he had hit his head and lost consciousness before he had even entered the water, for he had apparently made no attempt to swim for survival. The incident was reported in the national press not because it was an unusual sailing accident but because any event touching the life of Marina Markhampton was judged to be fodder for the gossip columns.
The story ran its course. Eventually the tragedy was allowed to fade from the public consciousness and the newspapers stopped photographing Marina and Katie weeping into black handkerchiefs.
The body was never found.
VII
Life lurched on. I staggered from mess to mess until I was so unnerved that I did take a premature retirement from voluntary work after all. Then I promptly fell into that other mess when I performed the Bridey Murphy experiment on Debbie and couldn’t wake her from the trance. After that came the dead terms at Theological College culminating in the events of 1968 when I got engaged to Rosalind, found myself unable to stop bedding Tracy and sought help frantically but unsuccessfully from my formidable ‘Uncle’ Charles Ashworth, the Bishop of Starbridge. And finally, in that same spring of 1968, nearly three years after Christian’s death and five years after the Starbridge party where I had first met him, Marina arrived at Starrington Manor in a white Jaguar and asked to see me.
I was at home for the Easter vacation. That year Easter Sunday was not until the fourteenth of April, so even though March had finished there were still several days of Lent remaining. The Theological College at Starbridge aligned its terms with those of Oxford and Cambridge except in the summer; then the College slipped in a fourth term, but those who were due to be ordained on Trinity Sunday were allowed to skip this extra spell of labour and leave directly after ordination. I was heading for ordination and the third and final term of my second year.
On the morning of Marina’s arrival I was trying to follow the Bishop’s advice by praying for grace – the grace to be chaste while I waited for my trip to the altar – but praying in a conventional fashion (with words) didn’t seem to be getting me very far. Praying in words hardly ever did. Finally I decided to pray my way, which meant I lit a candle, sat cross-legged on the floor, stared into the flame, flipped the switch in my head and tuned in.
Sometimes when I prayed I began by reciting the mantra but usually it wasn’t necessary; other people might need a mantra in order to tune in, but I just flipped the switch. I tended to save the mantra for those times when I was overwrought and needed to calm myself down. Father Peters had originally taught me this technique after my mother died, and he favoured no one mantra but used various key phrases from the Bible. It was my father who always used the famous Orthodox prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, and nowadays I followed his example. It’s pathetic that so many people turn to the East for meditative techniques nowadays, and one of the greatest failures of the Church in this century lies in the fact that the strong tradition of meditation in Christianity is so little known.
I never thought of reciting the mantra as praying, although it is. For me the real prayer came afterwards when the mantra had done its work and the conscious mind was relaxed, beyond words, in touch with the centre, soaking luxuriously in the Light. Father Peters had told me that if I was in an overstrained state I should stop after the recitation of the mantra had been completed because otherwise I ran the risk that dark forces in my unconscious mind might elbow aside the benign effects of the mantra and rise to the surface with unpleasant results. I was quite prepared to follow this advice but I couldn’t resist telling him that usually I didn’t need the mantra and could achieve the same effect just by flipping the switch in my head.
That was when Father Peters had warned me against Gnosticism which claimed, among other things, that only a spiritual élite with esoteric knowledge could attain salvation. He classed my act of flipping the switch as esoteric knowledge and said it was a psychic snare, fostered by the Devil, to make me think I was special. He said one must approach God through Christ; in this form of prayer saying a mantra which invoked Christ was the correct approach; with all my talk of the Light and the Dark I wasn’t sufficiently Christ-centred, but it was Christ in his humility who kept psychics like me on the rails, not Gnostic code-words, Gnostic élitism and that fatal Gnostic pride.
‘Well, of course as an Anglican-Benedictine monk he had to say that, no choice; he had to toe the orthodox line. But in my opinion I was quite sufficiently Christ-centred in my belief, and if God had given me a switch to flip in order to tune in to Him, why shouldn’t I flip it? And what was wrong with using code-words? Father Peters used code-words himself when he resorted to old-fashioned picture-language and talked of the Devil. One used code-words and symbols all the time when dealing with spiritual reality; it was the equivalent of the way scientists used mathematics to express the truths of physics. Flipping the switch given by God to tune in to the Light – to switch on the current of Ultimate Reality – to merge with the Ground of One’s Being – to touch the transcendent Creator who sustained the universe – whatever words one chose to describe the indescribable – was GOOD. And I knew that, I just knew; it was ‘gnosis’.
I did accept that when one was in a state of altered consciousness one had to be careful about warding off the dark forces in the unconscious mind, but I’d never found that a problem. Flipping the switch short-circuited them and the Light just blotted them out. I might suffer an attack by the Dark in other circumstances, but not when I was flipping the switch which Father Peters had so stuffily dismissed as a psychic snare.
‘Oh, bugger Father Peters!’ I said crossly to myself that morning as I lit the candle, stared into the flame and flipped the switch.
The candle went out.
I was so startled that I just stared open-mouthed at the smoking wick. Then I realised I’d left the window open and there was a draught. Closing the window I relit the candle, resumed my cross-legged position on the floor and switched on again, but now something had gone wrong with the switch. The Light was marred by a sort of cloud, or maybe it was mud – I mean, it was nothing I could see, but ‘cloud’ and ‘mud’ were the words which came closest to describing it. I felt as if I were driving a car with a dirty windscreen through thick fog.
Nasty. This psychic pollution meant I was overstrained and that in turn meant it was one of those occasions when I was unable to dispense with the mantra. I needed to have my conscious mind calmed by the constant repetition of words. Off I started. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’ I kept that up with no problem for several minutes but then realised I was thinking of Tracy’s breasts. I kept on reciting – that’s very important with the mantra, one should never stop before the allotted time has finished – but I found myself wondering if I needed to do some special breathing exercises. In the end I broke off the mantra – bad practice but I was getting nowhere – and lay full length on the floor so that I could relax all my muscles in turn. My quest for a direct experience of God – a quest which should have resulted in the automatic elimination of all distracting images, even the sexual ones – looked now as if it might fail completely. I couldn’t understand it. The switch in my head never let me down unless I was in a bad state, the sort of state I had been in as the result of the witch-doctor mess, but at that moment I was normal and well-balanced.
Or so I thought.
I was just taking my third deep breath and trying to kill the suspicion that what I really wanted to do was masturbate, when the intercom buzzed.
I sat up and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yep?’
‘Marina Markhampton’s here to see you, Nicholas,’ said Agnes, the bossiest member of the Community.
I can still remember the exact quality of my relief as I realised I was being diverted from my attempt to pray. ‘Okay, I’ll come down.’
When I saw Marina she called me Nick instead of Nicky. That made me realise how far we had travelled since that innocent night six years ago in 1962 when I had commandeered her punt on the Cam. I was now twenty-five; she was twenty-six and had been engaged to Michael Ashworth since the previous autumn. When she called at the Manor that day to see me she was wearing a powder-blue mini-skirt, a clinging black sweater and a silver zodiac medallion. Her legs were encased in black stockings and her face was smothered in trendy make-up: white lipstick, black eyeliner and so much mascara that her eyelashes seemed to droop. Her natural blonde hair was very long and looked as if it had just been ironed.
We got on better now that we were older and could regard each other as people rather than accessories. When I started seeing her again after Christian’s death it occurred to me that our friendship had endured because of a certain ineradicable compatibility, even though we had at first been too immature to do more than strike poses in each other’s presence. I found her intelligent and pragmatic; beneath all the society gush there was something tough about Marina, the toughness of someone determined to survive no matter how adverse the circumstances. From a material point of view survival was hardly difficult for her. She was rich. But not all deprivation is financial.
I think she liked me because … well, why was it? Perhaps I represented reality amidst the phoniness of her society life. Or perhaps I represented safety in a world where most men were panting to bed her. Or perhaps I represented nothing at all but appeared to her as someone who (on his good days) could be just as intelligent and pragmatic as she was, one of those rare people in whose presence she could cast aside her affectations and be herself.
‘Nick, I’m terribly worried about Katie,’ she said as we sat down with our mugs of coffee. ‘She’s gone so peculiar.’
Automatically I murmured: ‘The effects of a bad bereavement –’ but Marina interrupted me.
‘It’ll be three years this summer since Christian died and she’s not getting better, she’s getting worse. She’s started dabbling in spiritualism.’
This did indeed sound tricky. ‘Dabbling?’
‘Buying books about it. Seeking out people who go for it in a big way. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not particularly anti-spiritualism, there may well be something in it, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it’s a field stuffed with con-men who’d think nothing of exploiting a young widow who’s slowly going crazy with grief.’
‘Obviously she needs professional help. Perhaps her doctor could recommend –’
‘My dear, we’re well past doctors, she’s turned against anything orthodox, she’s way out there on the nutty fringes. Now look, Nick. She’s determined to try to contact Christian at a séance – and don’t tell me I’ve got to stop her because I know damn well I can’t. That’s why I’ve come to you for help.’
My heart sank. ‘But Marina –’
‘You’ve got to be the medium, Nick, got to be. You’re the only psychic I trust.’
I opened my mouth to say: ‘I don’t mess around with my psychic powers any more, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous, it’s asking for trouble,’ but the words which came out were: ‘Okay, where and when?’
I needed to be shaken till my teeth rattled.
The Christian Aysgarth affair had begun.
FOUR (#ulink_c17a1464-bbb2-5cec-84c2-d14b73dae870)
‘[Man’s] failing has been the pride and egoism with which he aggrandizes himself, using his powers with aggressive or complacent self-assertion instead of using them in humble dependence.’
MICHAEL RAMSEY
Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974
Canterbury Pilgrim
I
I should never have involved myself in Marina’s plan, but I felt so sure that for once I could use my powers with benign effect. After all, I was no longer an undergraduate messing around with ouija boards – or even an innocent abroad locking horns with a witch-doctor. At twenty-five I thought I could give myself credit for some degree of maturity, but what I could never acknowledge was that in psychic matters I was no better than a precocious child who could recite the alphabet but who had never been taught to read and write.
There are basically two problems with séances. First, most dead people can be assumed to be at peace with God, in which case efforts to contact them are futile, and second, if the dead people aren’t at peace with God, the most sensible thing one can do is to leave them well alone because lingering shreds of discarnate spirits, as my father had often told me, are either trivial or demonic. I had no doubt that Christian was now at peace with God. It was true he had died ‘unhousel’d’ and ‘unanel’d’, cut off from life by a violent death when he was possibly not in a state of grace, but during his life he had been a good man – or as good as most men can hope to be – and I had no doubt that since his death various people had prayed that he might rest in peace. Why shouldn’t God have responded by exercising a loving forgiveness, healing those deep fissures which I had been so sure existed in Christian’s personality, and finally enfolding his soul? It seemed a reasonable assumption to make in the circumstances.
From that reasonable assumption it followed that the chances of making contact with Christian were nil. What was much more likely to happen in the séance was that Katie’s acute emotional distress would be projected from her psyche and cause havoc. That was why I planned not a séance but a pseudo-séance, a rite which might appear designed to contact Christian but which was in fact merely designed to help Katie. I thought that provided I kept my mind closed against any discarnate shreds of former personalities that happened to be floating around, I would be dealing not with the dead but with the living because what was really required of me in this situation was to be not a medium but a healer.
This attracted me, and was almost certainly why I had agreed against my better judgement to take part in Marina’s plan. Even now, when my head was stuffed so full of theology that I could have written a thesis about the transformation of the historical Jesus into the Eternal Christ of the Church, I felt irresistibly compelled to look straight past that multi-symbol image to the charismatic Galilean wonder-worker who had healed the sick and raised the dead.
‘I want to be a healer-priest when I grow up,’ I had announced at the age of eight after an enthralling game in which I had resurrected my tin soldiers, but my father had replied firmly that if I wanted to heal the sick I should train to be a doctor.
‘It’s true all priests are involved in the healing of souls,’ he had said, ‘but a ministry which centres on healing the physically and mentally sick is so extremely difficult and so fraught with danger that only priests with the strongest possible call to heal should attempt it.’
It was not until later that I found out about his brief, unsuccessful attempt to be a healer. Naturally he had assumed, since I was so like him, that if I tried to be a healer I would fail too.
But the fascination with healing had persisted, and now, years later, I found myself seduced by the challenge of restoring Katie Aysgarth to full mental health. The result was that I planned the pseudo-séance in a haze of euphoria.
Disgusting. No wonder my father prayed daily for another religious thug like Cuthbert Darcy to knock the hell out of me. I was like one of those typhoid carriers who bounce through kitchen after kitchen and leave a trail of disaster in their wake.
God knows how anyone I met ever survived.
II
The girls came down from Oxford the next morning. It was a showery April day, cool and fresh. Marina was wearing a white coat which matched the Jaguar, and a scarlet mini-dress. Katie, seven years her senior, was dressed more conventionally in a mustard-coloured suit. She looked pale, drawn, fragile.
Starrington Manor was a large house, but since I shared it with the Community I had been obliged to take measures to ensure my privacy: I had designated certain areas for my use only and I had devised stringent rules to restrict intrusion to a minimum. The library, a long room lined with unreadable books and cases of stuffed fish, was part of my territory, although Rowena and Agnes were allowed in to clean it. Here I received visitors. I liked the library better than the drawing-room, which always reminded me too painfully of my mother.
The entire area upstairs in the main section of the house was also my domain. I slept in the room which had once been my father’s study – his ‘cell’ he had called it in memory of his monastic years – and I spent my leisure hours nearby in the room which had once been my parents’ bedroom. Curiously, this area didn’t remind me of my mother; my father had imprinted his personality too strongly there. Rowena and Agnes were never allowed to clean in this upstairs domain. Once a week I changed the sheets on my bed and showed the Hoover to the carpet. I seldom dusted, but the bathroom fittings received my regular attention. I rather liked muscling around with the Vim. That was a masculine art. Dusting’s just for women.
Meanwhile, as I kept my domain utterly private and tolerably clean, the Community milled around on the ground floor (excluding the library) and slept in the wing which had been converted for the Theological College ordinands after the war. My father sometimes came up to the house for meals but usually he stayed in his cottage. In the chapel the Community said matins and evensong each day and my father celebrated mass. I always went to mass when I was at home, but except on Sundays I tended to avoid matins and evensong. I found that a little of the Community went a very long way.
When Marina and Katie arrived that morning I showed them into the library and brought them coffee to revive them after their journey. I could have held the pseudo-séance there, but I thought Rowena and Agnes might be tempted to listen at the door, so as soon as the coffee had disappeared I took the visitors to my sitting-room. None of the Community would have dared trespass on my upstairs domain without a valid reason. My father, who supported my quest for privacy, would have been too angry.
‘I feel it ought to be night-time,’ said Marina as she sat down at the round table which I had pulled to the centre of the room. ‘Doesn’t one get better results in the dark?’
‘One gets better fakes. People can be more gullible and the mediums more fraudulent.’ I moved around the room at a measured pace in order to exude the right air of authority; in any ritual it’s important to create a calm, dignified atmosphere which will not only impress the participants but put them at ease. I felt vaguely priest-like, pleasingly powerful. Having flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the table, I placed a heavy dictionary on top of the stack of Private Eye magazines by the bookcase, put away a couple of stray pencils in the top drawer of my desk and readjusted the engraving of Starbridge Cathedral which hung over the mantelshelf. Everything had to be securely in place. Although I was avoiding a traditional séance there was still the danger that Katie’s psyche could create a disturbance, and I didn’t want the magazines whooshing across the floor or the picture plunging off its hook. Such manifestations of kinetic energy can provoke hysteria.
Finally I drew the curtains. There was still plenty of light in the room afterwards and we could see one another clearly, but the fractional dimming was another device aimed at helping the girls relax.
‘Okay,’ I said, sitting down with them at the table, ‘let me explain what I intend to do. Forget all the junk you may have read in books. I’m not going to grunt and groan and speak in a strange voice and say I’m the spirit of Tutankhamen, specially sent with a message from the astral plane. Nor am I going to conjure up mysterious tappings which spell out the letters of the alphabet. We’re going to keep this very straight, very orthodox – no frills, no fancy touches, no Mumbo Jumbo.’
I paused. They were enrapt. So far so good.
‘First of all,’ I resumed, ‘we’ll all hold hands while I say a prayer. After that we’ll keep holding hands as we remember Christian in silence; we’ll picture him as clearly as possible and pray that we may share with him the peace which he now experiences as a departed soul enfolded by the love of God. We’ll be silent for approximately five minutes. That’ll probably seem a long time to you, but keep picturing and keep praying. Then I’ll end the silence with another spoken prayer which will reinforce our silent prayers by asking for God’s love to flow into us so that we may be at one with Christian’s spirit. You’ll know then,’ I said directly to Katie as I put the full force of my personality into my eyes, ‘that you’re with Christian and he’s with you because you’ll feel this great peace and love … peace and love … peace and love.’
I saw her eyes film over as her will knuckled under to mine. Easy. Emotional, romantic, very feminine women are never a problem to hypnotise. They like to be dominated by men. I glanced at Marina. Her blue eyes were round as saucers. I wondered whether to put her under too but decided against it. No need. Katie was the one who required healing. Marina, a far tougher personality, had survived her bereavement with her psyche scarred but unsplit.
‘Are we ready?’ I said. We were. I took Katie’s right hand in my left and Marina’s left hand in my right while the girls’ spare hands touched and clasped. Then I said in my best priestly voice: ‘Almighty and Most Merciful Father, have pity, we beseech Thee, on Thy servant Katherine in her grief. Grant that she may accept her severance from her husband in this life so that she may now experience through Thy Grace the peace and love in which Thou enfoldest him. Help her to understand that this peace and love is eternal and that when we share in it, no matter how briefly, we are united with those who have gone before us into that world beyond time, beyond space, beyond the scope of our minds to conceive. Almighty Father, we make these requests in the name of Thy Only Son, Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who healed the sick and gave peace to those in torment. Lord, have mercy upon us and hear our prayer. Amen.’ I paused before saying with great care and clarity: ‘And now let us remember Christian in silence and pray again that we may share with him the peace he experiences as a departed soul enfolded by the love of God.’
When I stopped speaking they started picturing Christian and exuding the silent yearnings which approximately reflected my suggestions to them, but I embarked on a mental recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. I did this to keep at bay any discarnate shreds of former personalities who might have been attracted to the psychic activity and tempted to participate in it. I didn’t want any uninvited guests muscling in on the action – or, to put the problem in modern terms instead of old-fashioned picture-language, I didn’t want any irrelevant clutter stirring in the inaccessible realms of our unconscious minds and rising to the surface with bathetic results. This invasion from an unknown world would have corresponded to the point in a traditional séance where King Tutankhamen can drop in to say he’s frightfully worried about the papyrus which fell in the Nile and he’d simply adore a spot of tea to soothe his fractured nerves.
‘Our Father,’ I recited silently, ‘Which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us; lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from –’
Katie moaned just as the word ‘evil’ was projected from my brain, and at once my concentration snapped. It was an odd moan, not right, by which I mean off-key, not the kind of moan you would expect from a contralto like Katie. It was high-pitched, soul-less, abnormal.
‘Lead us not into temptation,’ I repeated aloud, automatically trying to will her back on course, ‘but deliver us from evil –’
Above the mantelshelf the engraving of Starbridge Cathedral fell with a crash to the floor.
As Marina screamed I thought: bloody hell! Not the best of expletives for an ordinand, but I was very rattled. However I knew what was happening. It wasn’t King Tut muscling in on the action. It wasn’t even an anonymous discarnate shred. It was Katie’s disturbed psyche generating a level of energy that I hadn’t anticipated. I’d been prepared for the odd breeze or two, but only a hurricane could have driven that carefully-adjusted picture clean off the wall. Obviously she was too far under and I had to yank her upwards in order to put her back in control of her mind.
‘It’s okay,’ I said swiftly to Marina, ‘nothing to worry about, just a bit of energy on the loose.’ And to Katie I said: ‘Up – you’re coming up – you’re waking up – up – up –’ I paused but nothing happened. She merely moaned again and her eyes remained closed. Instantly I thought of Debbie sunk in that trance I had been unable to break. But that had been in my younger days. Flexing my will, I steeled my psyche and tried again, doing my best to ignore the fright that was now crawling around the pit of my stomach.
‘Katie, open your eyes. Wake up. Katie, I say to you in the name of Jesus Christ, open your eyes and –’ She opened them. Thank God. ‘Katie, you’re all right, you’re fine, you just got diverted. Now think hard of Christian again –’
‘Christian,’ she whispered. ‘Christian.’ Her lips were almost bloodless and her skin had a greyish tinge.
‘Yes, that’s it, think of Christian and I’ll say the next prayer,’ I said, curtailing the allotted five minutes of contemplative silence, but then I found myself distracted by the wall where the fallen engraving had been hanging. The picture-nail, though still attached to the wall, was pointing downwards. Maybe the incident had had nothing to do with an explosion of kinetic energy but had been caused instead by the collapse of the nail, an event which would have happened anyway, no matter what was going on in the room. Glancing at the engraving on the floor I was astounded to see that the glass in the frame was intact, and at once this survival seemed far more freakish than the fall of the picture.
‘Let us pray,’ I said, recalling my attention with an effort, but then Katie started to weep and immediately I broke off the prayer because I knew I had to put her under again. If I didn’t she’d never experience peace and then the whole healing session would have been a failure.
‘It’s all right, Katie,’ I said. ‘You’re all right now, Christian’s at peace, you’re at peace, you’re both at peace, both of you …’ She was under. Instantly I wrapped my psyche around hers to stop it sinking too far through her subconscious mind, but this was a mistake. I should have been concentrating on the prayer to God, not taking time out to play the hypnotist, and the result was we had now reached a stage where no one was praying; I was channelling my power in another direction, Katie was too unbalanced to focus and Marina was too worried about Katie to remember what she was supposed to be doing. Then the inevitable happened. I suddenly became aware of a discarnate shred elbowing its way into our circle, and it certainly wasn’t King Tut turning up for tea. I experienced the shred as a strong, sinister pressure on the psyche.
Automatically I said: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
The pressure eased, but I had relaxed my psychic grip on Katie and she was giving that eerie moan again. Hell. Had to control Katie, had to control the shred, had to control Marina who was now on the brink of panic, had to control, control, control –
The table started to rock.
Marina screamed again.
Bloody hell, what was happening – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God – ‘It’s okay, Marina!’ – have mercy on me, a – yes, that was better, I’d got the table back on its four legs and now all I had to do was calm down. Katie had been shooting off a gale-force blast of energy again, that was all, it was just an inconvenience, no reason for panic, but why couldn’t I imprint the words PEACE and LOVE on her mind, why could I now make no contact with her whatsoever? It was as if during that moment of chaos someone had bolted and barred her psyche against mine – as if the sinister discarnate shred, repelled from my mind by the Jesus prayer, had slid sideways into hers and –
I suddenly realised the shred was closing in on me for another attack.
I could feel the pressure mounting, I could feel the power behind the pressure, and the next moment I knew that beyond the power, blasting it forward, was –
I leapt to my feet, my chair flew backwards and simultaneously the glass shattered to pieces in the frame of the fallen engraving. I had a fleeting glimpse of Marina’s terrified face, and then as I slammed my psyche shut against the Dark by a colossal act of will I heard myself shout out: ‘IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, SATAN, BE GONE FROM THIS ROOM!’
The curtains billowed violently by the open window and Katie slumped forward across the table in a dead faint.
III
‘Marina, get some water – bathroom across the passage – tooth-mug by the basin –’
She obeyed me instantly. No idiotic questions. Admirable. Gathering Katie in my arms I tried to revive her by patting her cheeks and calling her name, but I was so frightened that I might have driven her over the edge of the abyss into insanity that I hardly knew what I was doing.
Marina rushed back with the mug of water. I pressed it to Katie’s lips but she was still unconscious. ‘Throw it over her,’ said Marina tersely. That too was admirable. Nothing’s more helpful than a strong dose of common sense when one’s scared out of one’s wits. I threw the water. Katie moaned and her eyelashes fluttered. Thank God.
‘Wake up, Katie,’ I repeated, trying to wipe out both the hypnosis and the mental disturbance. ‘You’re all right now. Wake up.’
She murmured our names.
‘Yes, I’m here, darling,’ said Marina, grabbing her hand. ‘It’s all right – it’s over.’
‘What happened?’ Her voice was louder, clearer, almost normal. I felt sick with relief.
‘We made contact with a hostile force,’ I said glibly, ‘but that had nothing to do with Christian. He’s at peace with God, Katie, I promise you, and now that you know he’s at peace you’re at peace too.’
‘I don’t feel at peace,’ she whispered.
That disturbed me very much. She was supposed to wind up calm, serene and strengthened, not shattered, shocked and more tormented than ever. My attempt at healing by hypnosis coupled with prayer seemed to have been a complete failure, but the hypnosis should at least have had a temporary calming effect even if the prayer had failed to produce a permanent improvement. ‘Marina, fetch some more water,’ I said, trying not to sound as baffled as I felt, ‘and bring a towel from the bathroom so that she can mop herself up. Katie, you must lie down on my bed in the next room. No, don’t try and get up – I’ll carry you.’
She was as light as a famine-victim, and when I became aware of the weight-loss which the cut of her suit had concealed I realised her mental disturbance had affected her physical health. I knew then I should never have meddled with her. She needed a doctor, not an ordinand playing the wonder-worker, and as this stark truth ploughed through my mind I felt overpowered by my guilt and my shame.
‘Couldn’t find a towel,’ said Marina, reappearing with the refilled tooth-mug. ‘There was nothing on the rail.’
Laundry day. I’d forgotten. I’d turned in my towel after breakfast. ‘I’ll get one from the airing cupboard – hang on, Katie – this way, Marina,’ I muttered, grabbing her wrist and drawing her out of the room. In the corridor I said rapidly: ‘Listen, I’ve got to talk to you, got to explain what happened so that you can understand what’s got to be done. All those disturbances were caused by her. When a psyche’s under extreme stress it can generate the paranormal happenings we witnessed just now when objects appear to move by themselves. The phenomenon’s sometimes called poltergeist activity – it comes out of the unconscious, out of something we don’t understand and don’t normally have access to. When I said just now that we’d made contact with a hostile force, that was just old-fashioned picture-language – like talking about poltergeists. What we actually encountered was a violent emanation of psychic energy from Katie’s unconscious mind.’
‘Then why did you yell out that command to Satan?’
‘Oh, forget that, it was just a safety precaution. What I was really doing was gaining control over the emanations.’
‘But –’
‘Look, just concentrate on the facts: Katie’s disturbed. It’s not the kind of disturbance that can be put right by prayer and meditation. She’s got to see a psychiatrist.’
Marina was shocked but remained well in control of herself. My admiration for her deepened. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll wheel on the big guns of Harley Street, but meanwhile how on earth do I get her home?’
‘I’ll fix her up, no need to worry, just give me an hour. Go for a drive.’
‘But what are you going to do?”
‘Talk to her, make her some tea, try anything that’ll get her back on her feet, but it’s better if you’re out of the way. Then I can focus on her without distraction.’
‘Okay, I understand.’
‘And as soon as you get her home call a doctor.’
‘Right.’ She glanced at her watch and walked briskly off down the corridor towards the main staircase.
I waited till I heard the front door close far away in the hall. Then I took a clean towel from the airing cupboard and returned to Katie.
IV
She was crying. She lay face down on the bed like a discarded doll and her body shook with sobs. As I came in she raised her head from the pillow and turned over to lie on her back. Her eyes were swollen, her skin looked like parchment, her hair was matted. I barely recognised her.
‘I feel so guilty,’ she whispered.
I made what I prayed was the right response: wordless sympathy. Sitting down on the bed beside her I took her hand comfortingly in mine.
‘I failed him somehow,’ she said. ‘I loved him so much but it wasn’t enough.’
She was putting us both in the confessional – which meant I was being given the chance to behave like a priest instead of a psychic maverick. Desperate to redeem my catastrophic error I said earnestly: ‘I know you loved him,’ and I clasped her other hand so that a symbolic double-lifeline was established. Then I tried to concentrate on supporting her damaged psyche. The image of the discarded doll was helpful; I pictured an imaginary china doll, very beautiful but chipped and cracked; then I visualised myself sealing up the cracks, painting over the chips and attending to each detail with immense care.
‘In books love conquers everything,’ she said, ‘but it’s not like that in reality. My love didn’t conquer everything. My love ended in failure.’
I had to be very cautious here. Some kind of reply was required but I was afraid of uttering a sentence which might be either a banality or simply untrue. I raised a metaphorical aerial to improve my reception of her thoughts but sensed nothing I could readily interpret. It was her guilt that interested me. I knew a surviving spouse could feel overpoweringly guilty – my father had been a classic example of that syndrome – but why Katie should be so full of guilt when she had done her best to be a model wife was not easy to perceive.
‘I know he was disappointed when Grace and Helen were born,’ she said, sparing me the need to reply as she spoke of her daughters, ‘but I did put everything right in 1965 when John arrived and Christian had the son he’d always wanted. I was so happy. But then it began all over again.’
‘What began all over again, Katie?’
‘It. I don’t know what it was. But something had happened to Christian. Something had gone terribly wrong.’
After a pause I said: ‘When did this begin?’
‘Oh, ages ago, but it didn’t become chronic until about six months before he died. I think it started in 1961 when Helen was born. “You name it,” he said as if he couldn’t have cared less. Oh, how I cried! But then he recovered and was nice again … for a while. By 1963 I was in despair – but then the miracle happened and Marina joined us.’ She withdrew one of her hands from mine in order to wipe her eyes, but the tears had stopped and I knew that by listening I was helping her.
I made a small noise indicating intense sympathy and deep interest. Then I reclasped her hand.
‘I love Marina,’ she said. ‘She’s such a wonderful friend. Christian loved her too because she was so bright and amusing and she never bored him. “If Katie were as bright and amusing as you are,” he said to her in 1963, “she wouldn’t be driving me up the wall.” “You absolute pig!” said Marina. “How dare you be so beastly about darling Katie!” I was terrified when she said that, but do you know what happened? He laughed. He actually laughed – and then he apologised to me and said sorry, he knew he’d been a bastard but he was going to reform. Of course that was when I realised we had to have Marina in our marriage.’
‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound as if she had made an unremarkable observation. On an impulse I added: ‘How very perceptive of you.’
‘Well, she had such a wonderfully benign effect on him, you see, and she was so devoted to both of us. We’d known her for a long time – that grandmother of hers living almost next door to my in-laws – but because she was so much younger than we were we didn’t start to meet her at social occasions until about 1962. And then in the May of 1963 she gave that wonderful party at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close … you were there, weren’t you? I can remember you dressed in jeans and eating a sausage roll –’
‘– and I can remember Christian being on edge with you.’
‘Yes, he was – and that was when Marina made her stunning intervention and I realised we had to have her in our marriage … Of course sex didn’t come into it at all.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, Marina finds sex repulsive, but Christian quite accepted that it wasn’t on offer – in fact he liked that, found it original. Women were always throwing themselves at him, just as men were always throwing themselves at Marina.’
‘Sounds as if they were made for each other.’
‘Oh, we were all made for each other! It was quite perfect … for a while. But in the end, in 1965, not even Marina could stop him going off every weekend with Perry to that bloody boat at Bosham.’
‘How did you feel about Perry Palmer?’
‘Jealous. Funny, wasn’t it? You’d think I’d have been jealous of the woman and tolerant of the man, but it was quite the other way round.’
‘Was Christian as close to Perry as he was to Marina?’
‘Oh, closer, because of their long shared past. But the relationship was certainly similar. Of course sex never came into it at all.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, Perry’s no more interested in sex than Marina is, and anyway Christian was never drawn sexually to other men. My brother Simon used to say that Christian was very middle-class about sex,’ Katie added, unintentionally revealing her upbringing in an aristocratic world where sexual permutations failed to raise eyebrows, ‘but that was just because Christian found smutty jokes boring and immorality an unintelligent waste of time and energy. Christian was actually a very moral man. It was the clerical background.’
As I knew so well, a clerical background was no guarantee of moral behaviour but I understood what she was trying to say: a clerical upbringing at least makes one acutely aware of morality even if one fails to wind up as a replica of Sir Galahad.
‘What’s Perry’s background?’ I said, more to keep the therapeutic conversation going than to satisfy my curiosity.
‘His father was some military VIP in India. Wealthy family but new money,’ said Katie, again offering a glimpse of a background where respectable fortunes had to be at least three hundred years old. ‘His grandfather manufactured something in Lancashire, a sort of hip-bath it was. Perry has a picture of the original drawing in his lavatory at Albany.’
‘I think I remember it. When exactly did Perry meet Christian?’
‘On their first day at Winchester when they were both thirteen. I didn’t meet Christian till much later, and we didn’t marry till he was nearly thirty. Sometimes I feel I never caught up with Perry … oh, how baffling it all seems in retrospect! The truth is that at the end it was Perry he turned to, but why the marriage was disintegrating I don’t know. I just feel increasingly sure that it was all my fault, and I’ve reached the stage where I don’t know how to bear either my guilt or my ignorance.’
‘I understand,’ I said at once. But did I? One could say that she was being haunted to an abnormal degree by her unhappy memories, but beyond this dramatic symbolic language it seemed to me that a very commonplace situation was being described: a man had fallen out of love with a woman, got bored and hadn’t quite been able to figure out how to extricate himself from the relationship. Love affairs disintegrated in that way every day, and so did marriages – although of course the disintegration of a marriage would usually be a more complex matter. It would be rarer too because in marriage friendship was supposed to take over when the sexual excitement had expired, but supposing one woke up one morning and realised that not only was desire dead but that even the possibility of friendship had fizzled? Inevitably one would toy with the idea of divorce, but divorce might be undesirable for a number of social, professional and financial reasons. In such a jam what could be more natural than to escape from home as often as possible in order to relax with one’s best friend? That all made sense. But it also made sense to note that none of this marital distress was necessarily the wife’s fault. She could have been a model wife and still have induced boredom. The real difficulty almost certainly lay in the fact that the marriage had been based on illusions which time had mercilessly exposed.
I said with care: ‘It certainly seems that Christian had a problem which was putting a strain on the marriage, but that problem needn’t have been connected with you.’
‘If he had a problem,’ she said at once, ‘I should have been told about it. The fact that he couldn’t confide in me just underlines how deeply I failed him.’ And she added in a rush: ‘You do see now, don’t you, why I wanted to contact him at the séance? I wanted to tell him I was sorry for whatever it was I did wrong, and I wanted to hear him say: “I forgive you.”’
The words ‘repentance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘absolution’ and ‘salvation’ flashed across my mind in an automatic clerical reaction to the pastoral challenge which now confronted me. I had been about to draw the conversation around to the subject of seeking help – I had already phrased my opening remark on the prolonged physical stress which could result from the mental torment of guilt – but now I suddenly thought: maybe I can still fix this. And I felt driven to wipe out not just the fiasco of the séance but my guilt that I had only exacerbated her grief.
‘Katie,’ I said, looking straight into her eyes and putting considerable emotion into my voice, ‘you did your best to be a good wife and we can never do more than our best. Set aside these bad feelings about yourself. If you did do something wrong, it’s obvious you repent with all your heart and that means you’re forgiven.’
‘But –’
I piled on the emotional pressure by leaning forward and tightening my grip on her hands. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m not Christian. I can’t be him saying: “I forgive you.” But I can be me saying: “You’re forgivable.” That’s because you loved him and love generates forgiveness, it’s automatic, it’s assured, it’s built into the system.’
‘But I feel my love was such a failure – I feel I’m such a failure –’
‘Absolutely not. You loved him devotedly, with your whole heart – and that makes you a success, a great success, the greatest success you could possibly be.’
‘Oh Nick, you’re being so kind, so –’
‘A beautiful woman capable of a deep, unselfish love – of course Christian would forgive you if he were with us now! Any man would forgive you. I forgive you.’
The next thing I knew I was kissing her and her arms were sliding around my neck. This was hardly what I had intended to happen, but I knew how important it was to restore her self-esteem. Christian had destroyed her sense of her own worth, I could see that now, but if I could give her back her faith in herself and in the power of love … I was dimly aware of my feet leaving the floor as my body arranged itself on the bed beside her.
She said in a low voice: ‘You’re standing in for Christian, aren’t you? Maybe the séance worked after all and he’s speaking to me through you.’
I couldn’t answer. I just thought: a couple more kisses, then I stop, no harm done, total cure.
‘Tell me again you forgive me.’
‘I forgive you, Katie,’ I said, saying Christian’s lines for him. ‘I promise.’
Immediately she clung to me with great passion.
Funny how difficult it was not to be passionate in return. No, it wasn’t funny at all. And it wasn’t just difficult either. It was quite impossible not to return that passion, especially when her fingers encountered the zip of my jeans. Her fingers? My fingers? The terrible part is I don’t remember. No, they were her fingers, must have been. Mine were already unbuttoning her blouse.
Her last words before we copulated were: ‘I feel forgiven now.’
Pathetic.
I can hardly bring myself to admit this, but I still honestly believed I was healing her.
Game, set and match to the Devil.
What a catastrophe.
V
In my rational moments, as I’ve already noted, I wasn’t attracted to underweight women who looked fragile enough to break during intercourse. But this was not one of my rational moments. The obsession to achieve a healing had unplugged my brain.
She didn’t break during intercourse. It was afterwards that she went to pieces.
As soon as she could speak she said in a shaking voice: ‘You’re not standing in for Christian at all. You couldn’t. You’re quite different.’
‘It’s okay, Katie, it’s okay –’
But of course it wasn’t.
‘I never realised how different it could be – I thought all men made love in the same way.’
‘Look, don’t be upset, I –’
‘I’ve betrayed him. And you’ve betrayed me!’
‘No, no – honestly – just think of it as a kind of therapy –’
‘Therapy? My God, how utterly revolting!’
‘But Katie, I didn’t mean –’
‘You’ve deliberately taken advantage of my grief – you’ve cold-bloodedly exploited me –’
‘But all I wanted to do was help you!’
‘You think that could help? You deceived me into thinking you could stand in for Christian and then raped me when I was in no fit state to fight you off!’
‘It couldn’t have been rape. Raped women don’t have orgasms.’
She hit me. I gasped. ‘Katie, for God’s sake –’ She hit me again. ‘Get away from me!’ she said revolted. ‘Never come near me again! I hate you, I hate you, I HATE YOU –’
I grabbed my clothes and fled.
In my sitting-room I found I couldn’t recite the Jesus prayer to calm me down, couldn’t even remember it. I buttoned my shirt wrong, nearly fell over as I pulled on my jeans, and all the while I was becoming aware that the room was a shambles, the fallen chairs and smashed glass creating the impression of a violated space. The chilly air had a peculiarly desolate quality, and as I shuddered I at last remembered the mantra.
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’
Never had the prayer seemed more appropriate.
In the bedroom Katie began to scream for Marina.
I shuddered again and knew I was in hell.
VI
Marina returned ten minutes later. As soon as I saw the car I went to the bathroom, where Katie had barricaded herself, and told her the good news. She ran downstairs sobbing. Outside the two women embraced before Marina guided Katie into the car and drove away.
Leaving the landing window I stumbled downstairs. Sounds in the dining-room indicated that the members of the Community were having lunch. No conversation was permitted at meal-times but Dorothy the ex-missionary was reading aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress. Silently I slunk into the kitchen and swiped the brandy bottle, which was kept in the house for medicinal purposes. It lived under the sink next to the spare bottles of lavatory-cleaner, a home reflecting the contempt with which the Community regarded alcohol. I had a swig straight from the bottle. My tastebuds felt as if they’d been mugged but within a minute I felt steadier. Burying the bottle in the cupboard again I rinsed out my mouth with water and set off rapidly through the back garden to my father’s cottage in the woods.
VII
I knew I could tell my father only a highly censored version of what had happened, but nonetheless I knew I had to see him. Whenever I was in pieces there was only one person who could weld me together again.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said my father as I entered his cottage. ‘Thank goodness. I had the feeling you were troubled in some way, perhaps even a little frightened.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you switch off sometimes? I’m sick and tired of you invading my privacy with your ESP!’ Of course I was terrified how much he had intuited.
My father’s grey eyes filled with tears. He was very, very old now, almost eighty-eight, and he moved slowly. His great height had been reduced by a stoop. He was still compos mentis but his body was wearing out. Eight years after his successful prostate operation he was suffering from bladder problems again, and although tests had revealed there was no cancer the pain and difficulty continued. His digestion, which had always been excellent, had begun to cause trouble. He vomited, suffered headaches. The doctor continued to prove there was no cancer and in despair prescribed some tranquillisers which my father, much insulted, flushed down the lavatory. Now something had gone wrong with his hands and he refused to see the doctor at all. He made his own diagnosis, eczema, and rejecting all offers of help from Rowena, Agnes and Dorothy, he somehow managed to bandage the hands himself. Mark and Luke, the ex-monks, and Bob, the ex-naval-chaplain, spent hours arguing about the dermatitis entry in the medical dictionary but came to no conclusion. Morgan, the ex-pop-star, had left the Community long ago after abandoning his attempt to write an opera about God, and Theo, the ex-ordinand who thought he was being persecuted by Buddha, was now in a mental home. The Community had been reduced to six.
‘Oh Father, I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to yell at you like that …’ I couldn’t stand it when his eyes filled with tears. This tendency to weepiness was new, another result of extreme old age. He couldn’t control his emotions as well as he used to, and his psychic powers, once so formidably disciplined, were now more erratic. I was sure he hadn’t deliberately tried to tune in to my activities; the tuning in would have been a mere reflex, triggered by his anxiety.
Hating myself for losing patience with him I said: ‘As a matter of fact you were right in sensing that I’ve been having an awkward time.’ Picking up Whitby, who was skulking around my ankles, I dumped him in my father’s lap. I did this not just to give myself a chance to review the censored story I had prepared but because I thought it was once more time Whitby earned his keep by having a tranquillising effect on those nearest and dearest to him.
I stroked the striped fur. So did my father. Whitby tried to knead my father’s knees but collapsed in ecstasy seconds later. The sonorous rise and fall of his purring thrummed around the room.
Having reviewed my story I took a deep breath and said: ‘I’ve just had a very disturbing visit from Marina and Katie. They wanted me to hold a séance but of course I told them that was out of the question. However, when I realised Katie wanted to make contact with Christian in order to obtain his forgiveness, it occurred to me that this was a pastoral situation where I could be of use. I thought that if we all prayed together … the grace of God … love and peace … well, I might have been able to alleviate this mysterious burden of guilt, mightn’t I? It really did seem as if I could be of use.’
‘Nicholas, you’re not yet a priest. And you’re certainly not a doctor. If Mrs Aysgarth was in such a troubled state, you should have advised her to seek professional help.’
‘Yes, of course. However –’
‘Very well, tell me the worst. What happened?’
I prepared to skate on thin ice. ‘We sat down at the table in my sitting-room and I led them in prayer. I wanted to convey that Christian was at peace with God, so I prayed that we might be allowed to experience that peace. I didn’t pray for his soul – I thought non-church-going Protestants might have balked at prayers for the dead – but I thought that if we simply remembered him before God … well, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’
‘No, but what exactly was your motive here, Nicholas? Did you act solely out of a desire to help Mrs Aysgarth or were you perhaps attracted by the chance to adopt a powerful role in the presence of two beautiful and charming young women?’
‘I most strongly deny –’
‘Yes, of course you do. But Nicholas, even if your motive was as pure as driven snow, this apparently harmless attempt at prayer could still have been dangerous. If someone’s emotionally disturbed – and in particular if they’re haunted by guilt – any psychic activity, even prayer, can trigger an unpleasant reaction.’
‘But this was worse than just an unpleasant reaction from Katie! There was an interruption by a discarnate shred.’
‘Are you quite sure you weren’t conducting a séance?’
‘Oh no, Father! That was why I was so surprised when –’
‘I too find it surprising. An emotional disturbance from Mrs Aysgarth is easy to explain: the psychic activity of prayer might have caused her to break down as she sensed the opportunity to express her grief and guilt – she could easily have had hysterics or possibly even a psychotic episode if the channel of prayer wasn’t wide enough to contain her emotions. But I wouldn’t have expected an infiltration of the scene by a discarnate shred unless you were actively trying to align yourself with the dead.’
‘Father, it wasn’t a séance. Honestly. It was just a pseudo-séance. I –’
‘You appal me.’
‘But Father, listen –’
‘Did you all hold hands and deliberately try to align yourselves with the spirit of a dead man?’
‘Yes, but since Christian’s at peace with God, surely an alignment could only be beneficial?’
‘How do you know he’s at peace with God?’
‘Well, I –’ I stared at him. Then as my scalp prickled I stammered: ‘I assumed – I felt sure – I mean, I just knew, it was “gnosis” –’
‘Don’t you dare use that word to me!’
‘I’m not using it as a Gnostic – I’m using it as a Christian who needs a code-word for psychic certainties –’
‘There are no psychic certainties.’
‘But Father –’
‘Be quiet. Now listen to me. Never try to communicate with the dead, even those likely to be at peace with God, because even a seemingly harmless attempt to align yourself with a departed soul can have a profoundly disturbing effect on the living.’
‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why what happened did happen. The discarnate shred was malign – I mean, it was very malign, it was driven by the most tremendous power, and in the end I realised that this power could only have been generated by –’
‘I should think it most unlikely that the Devil could have been bothered to drop in on your shoddy little séance. It’s much more probable that you lost your nerve and began to fantasise once the energy disturbances spiralled out of control. I assume that there were, in fact, energy disturbances?’
‘Yes, and Katie was in a sort of coma, moaning and groaning as if she were possessed –’
‘Rubbish, of course she wasn’t possessed! She was merely manifesting her deep psychological troubles. Did you hypnotise her?’
‘No, Father, certainly not.’
‘It would explain the appearance of coma. How on earth did you regain control of the scene?’
‘I shouted to the Devil: “In the name of Jesus Christ, Satan, be gone from this room!” and all the glass in the picture-frame shattered as he went out of the window.’
‘Nothing went out of the window, Nicholas, except the vibrations of your guilt and your panic’
‘But Father, that force I experienced – okay, maybe it wasn’t the Devil himself, maybe it was just a malign shred acting alone – well, whatever it was, it came from without. It wasn’t welling up from within.’
‘How did you experience it?’
‘As a mounting pressure on the psyche.’
‘Exactly. It was a pressure exerted by your unconscious mind – which in your panic would have seemed quite external to your ego.’
‘But Father –’
‘All right, Nicholas, calm down. I think our disagreement is an illusion created by the fact that we’re mixing up two different languages, the religious language employing symbols such as “the Devil”, and the scientific language which employs concepts such as “the unconscious mind”. Why don’t we try to produce a version of your story in each language so that we can see we’re talking about a single truth? Then perhaps we won’t get so cross with each other.’
I was hooked, just as I always was when religion and psychology were seen not as mortal enemies – the grand illusion of so many people – but as complementary approaches to a multi-sided truth. I gave Whitby another long, lingering stroke. Then I said to my father: ‘Okay, go on.’
VIII
‘Whichever language we adopt,’ said my father, ‘it’s safe to say that some very unpleasant forces were on the loose in that room. It’s also safe to say that Mrs Aysgarth was in a highly disturbed state and that you too became disturbed when you found the scene was moving beyond your control.
‘Very well, let’s express ourselves in religious language first. We can say that something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth; we can describe it by a symbol and call it the demon of guilt. When you finally saw how horrific that demon was, your psyche was opened up by your understanding with the result that the demon was tempted to move from Mrs Aysgarth to you. You experienced this demon as a strong pressure on the psyche. However, you then repelled this demonic invasion by calling on the greatest exorcist who ever lived and who we believe is living still; by invoking his name you aligned yourself with his power and succeeded in expelling the demon from the room.
‘So much for the religious language. By the liberal use of important symbols we’ve created a true description of what happened, but there’s another way of expressing the truth and it doesn’t diminish the religious description; it merely complements and confirms it. Let’s now turn to the verbal symbols of psychology.
‘Something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth, we said. We can express that in the other language by saying that she was suffering from a neurosis – obsessed by a sense of guilt. This neurotic guilt is rooted in her unconscious, but has recently begun to break into her conscious mind and lead to an impairment of her health. When you interfered, conducting this séance and subjecting her to psychic manipulation, the control normally exercised by her conscious mind was removed with the result that the darkest and most chaotic emotions began to rise out of the unconscious and manifest themselves in a variety of frightening ways.
‘Mrs Aysgarth may not, medically speaking, have been experiencing a psychotic episode, but I suspect her behaviour had the same effect on you as if you’d been witnessing the behaviour of a violent schizophrenic: you were terrified of what was going to happen next and your terror combined with your guilt that you’d induced such an appalling state of affairs. This made you unusually receptive to the guilt now spewing out of Mrs Aysgarth’s unconscious mind, and when her guilt merged with yours the merger appeared to you as a highly dangerous invasive force. In an instinctive gesture to repel the invasion you invoked the name of Our Lord – which is the point where the two languages meet. The invocation gave you the confidence to regain control; or in other words, the invocation resulted in an outpouring of grace which enabled you to triumph over the evil.’
My father paused for a moment before concluding: ‘So the disaster can be accurately described in both languages and there would appear to be no mystery at all about what happened, but I confess there’s one feature which still puzzles me: Mrs Aysgarth’s guilt. It must have been very extreme to create such a disturbance. Indeed it hints at something grossly abnormal.’
I said cautiously: ‘Afterwards she revealed to me that even though she’d tried her hardest to be a good wife the marriage had been in bad shape.’
‘That would explain the existence of some degree of guilt on her part, certainly, but I’d suspect there was more she wasn’t revealing to you – much more. Tell me, was she difficult to hypnotise?’
‘No, she –’ I stopped. He’d caught me. Clever, cunning old –
‘So you did use hypnosis. I’m outraged, Nicholas, absolutely outraged. I’ve told you time and time again –’
‘I know, I know, I’m sorry –’
‘And how dare you lie to me about it earlier! Did you seriously think you’d take me in? As Father Darcy used to say –’
Here we went again. I knew what was coming. Father Darcy had said to anyone who he judged was making an unsatisfactory confession –
‘– “You’re saying the words you want me to hear but I hear the words you can’t bring yourself to say,”’ quoted my father, and added: ‘You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully, and when I think that in a few weeks’ time you’ll be ordained I feel quite ill with despair.’
‘I’ll drive over to Starwater straight away – see Father Peters – make my confession –’
‘Yes, do all those things – and in future stay away from poor Mrs Aysgarth, who quite obviously needs medical help as soon as possible. Which reminds me, how did you deal with her once you’d brought her out of the hypnotic state?’
‘Oh, I just talked to her, held her hand for a bit, calmed her down –’ By this time I was on my feet and hurtling from the room.
‘If Father Darcy were here,’ said my father, intuitive powers now working full blast, ‘I think he’d demand a somewhat fuller explanation. In fact if Father Darcy were here –’
But he wasn’t.
I flung open the door and fled.
IX
I staggered across to the chapel, which stood near my father’s cottage on the floor of the dell. A hundred yards away I could see the wall which surrounded the grounds of the Manor, and I could also see the door there which the members of the Community used when they brought provisions to my father. It was easier to park the car beyond the wall and walk the few yards up the track to the cottage than to carry the shopping-bags for ten minutes along the meandering path from the main house, and in those days, before crime became a problem even in rural areas, my father kept the door in the wall unlocked during the daylight hours.
I was in such a state that I nearly bolted straight down the track to the road and hared to the village pub for another shot of brandy, but the chapel exerted its familiar magnetism and I headed across the floor of the dell instead. The chapel was young, about a hundred and twenty years old, and had been built in the style of Inigo Jones with such panache that it never seemed like a pastiche of his Palladian designs. It was small but perfectly proportioned, austere when viewed from the outside but fussier when viewed from within. This fussiness arose from the fact that my father had been unable to resist decorating the interior with various sumptuous Anglo-Catholic aids to worship. They formed a bizarre contrast with the plain, stark beauty of the altar’s oak cross, made by him before he had left the Order.
There were candles everywhere – my father was mad on candles – candles on the altar, candles to the side of the altar, prickets for the burning of votive candles at the back behind the pews. There was a holy water stoup by the door. Another candle (no electricity; that would have been cheating) burned before the Blessed Sacrament which was reserved (of course) in a pyx. The whole place reeked of incense but I didn’t mind that; I’d grown up with it, and a strong whiff of the Fordite Special always made me feel relaxed and at home. What I minded were the pictures, florid representations of biblical scenes which in turn represented my father’s uncertain taste in art. This uncertainty found its most embarrassing expression in a sentimental plaster statue of the Virgin and Child, vulgarly coloured and placed to the right of the altar on a fake-jewelled plinth. This had been installed after my mother’s death. My mother, a Protestant who had loved my father not because of his Anglo-Catholicism but in spite of it, would have booted that statue out of her ancestors’ chapel in no time flat.
It interested me that my father, who was extremely ascetic in so many of his habits, should choose to worship in this particular way. Ritualism does tend to be attractive to mystics because it’s designed to express those mysteries which are beyond the power of words to describe, and indeed I believed my father when he said a rich liturgy infallibly created for him a deep sense of the numinous and a consciousness of the presence of Christ in the mass. Yet now that I was older I thought there was also a psychological reason for his attraction to this lavish, extravagant classical ritualism which had been such a daring liturgical fashion in his youth. He had had a sedate upbringing in a little Victorian villa where money had been far from plentiful, and this had given him not only austere tastes but an inverted snobbery about the luxuries money could buy; he always had to pretend he hated luxury, but I think deep down he found it attractive and the only way he could give vent to this attraction was in his religious life. That somehow sanctified the illicit passion which could never be consciously acknowledged, and becoming an Anglo-Catholic had been his way of escaping from the emotional constipation and straitened circumstances of that Victorian middle-class upbringing.
But I hadn’t had that kind of upbringing, and now that I was old enough to think for myself, I felt increasingly confused about Anglo-Catholicism. It was well over a century since the Oxford Movement had relaunched the Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the ageing of a once dynamic movement was becoming all too apparent. Undermined by Vatican II which (so the traditionalists said) had Protestantised the Church of Rome, the Anglo-Catholics had been left high and dry with a bunch of rituals which were going out of fashion not only among the Romans but among the Anglicans. The new trend towards a weekly parish Eucharist, that watered-down version of the mass, now made the Anglo-Catholic services look archaic and – that most damning word of the 1960s – irrelevant. And the majority of English churchgoers – the Protestant majority – hated ritualism anyway.
Yet I had been brought up an Anglo-Catholic. It was my wing of my Church. I belonged there, and as a mystic I too was drawn to the numinous qualities of the services. Yet although I knew I couldn’t abandon Anglo-Catholicism I was deeply dissatisfied with it. I felt strongly that it should be modernised but the traditionalists who ruled the roost were holding fast to the old ways as they developed a siege mentality. No hope of change there, and meanwhile that fatal old-fashioned look was becoming tinged with decadence. Often it seemed to me that the idol of the die-hards was now a god called LITURGY – and there were other even more unsavoury hints of decadence than idolatry, hints that were beginning to surface in the sexual hothouse of the late 1960s. Anglo-Catholicism had always attracted a homosexual element, but in Victorian times the homosexual priests had committed themselves to the celibate ideal and followed the fashion for intense friendships which were never consummated. Now celibacy was on the wane and society worshipped the idol called SEX. No wonder Anglo-Catholicism was in trouble. Sometimes I thought even heterosexual Anglo-Catholics were only interested in providing a camp stage-show of all the fashions imported from pre-Vatican-II Rome.
I said nothing of my dissatisfaction to my father. A relic of another age, the age when Anglo-Catholicism had been a dynamic movement sweeping all before it, he would have been deeply upset by my critical thoughts. He might even have thought I was a closet Protestant but I wasn’t. I just hated seeing Anglo-Catholicism go down the drain, and during my terms at Theological College I had found it a relief to retreat into the churchmanship of the Middle Way which I found not only in the College chapel but in the Cathedral. There was an Anglo-Catholic church in Starbridge – St Paul’s at Langley Bottom – but I never went near it. The Principal of the College said it had fallen into the hands of cranks. (‘Cranks’ was his shorthand for homosexuals and/or nutcases). Even my father, who thanks to his small circle of distinguished visitors was well primed with diocesan gossip, said once that he did hope I wouldn’t go there, and I was relieved to find I had no difficulty in giving him the necessary reassurance. I had no interest whatsoever in a square, dated ritualism oozing eccentric decadence. It would have been far too painful to watch, particularly since I attended my father’s services and knew how with the right priest even a dated ritualism could be made fresh, exciting and above all spiritually alive.
The big irony of this decline in Anglo-Catholicism was that a great many Anglo-Catholics were still able to kid themselves that everything was fine. This was because the Archbishop of Canterbury himself stood in the Church’s Catholic tradition, but if one stopped being sentimentally proud of the Archbishop, the uneasiness soon began. Although Ramsey might look old-fashioned he certainly wasn’t decadent and he certainly wasn’t out of touch with the harsh ecclesiastical realities of the 1960s, but I was now convinced he wasn’t typical of the High-Church wing. That wing needed to be revamped, given a hormone shot, dragged kicking and screaming into the midst of the Now Generation … or so I found myself thinking for the umpteenth time as I sat down amidst the florid, old-fashioned Catholic trappings in our family chapel that afternoon, but then who was I to criticise my elders and betters? I was just a twenty-five-year-old ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails.
As I tried to crawl back on the rails again I knelt in the front pew, gave thanks to God for my deliverance from the demonic power unleashed at the séance, and prayed that Katie might be restored to full health. Then I set about making a comprehensive confession. I had become accustomed to making a private confession to God after every sexual lapse – a meaningless exercise, as I well knew, since I had had no intention of giving up fornication, but at least I’d found it helpful to go through the formal motions of repentance, and at least I had been able to tell myself that if I prayed regularly for the grace to be chaste there was always the chance that God might respond to my request. However, the catastrophe with Katie was in a very different league from my regular bouts of fornication and required not merely the acting out of a repentance ritual but a full-blooded, utterly honest confession combined with an unqualified promise to God that I would never behave in such a disgusting way again. This time my prayer for the grace to reform would be unmarked by insincerity. As I begged on my knees for forgiveness, every word would come straight from the heart.
Off I started. One by one I dragged my sins out of my memory and laid them carefully before God like a cat laying all manner of mangled little corpses before his owner. Pride, arrogance, lust, selfishness, vanity, disobedience, deceit (these last two related to the interview with my father) – and worst of all, the sexual abuse of a damaged human being. This was cruelty, a sin which always seemed to me to be much worse than mere lust. Nobody got much worked up about lust nowadays except my Uncle Charles ‘Anti-Sex’ Ashworth, but cruelty … Yet I hadn’t meant to be cruel. I’d meant to be – no, God only knew what I’d meant to be.
Thinking of God recalled me to my confession. I went on kneeling, mentally pawing over all the sins, but eventually I recited the Jesus prayer. This had a calming effect. Afterwards I scooped up all the sins, offered them to God and said without words: sorry, sorry, sorry, I want to reform, I want to turn around and lead a better life, please forgive me, please help me, please rescue me from this awful mess my life’s become. I prayed very hard, wordlessly, along these lines for some time. I did indeed feel deeply ashamed.
Finally I topped off the confession with the Lord’s Prayer and flipped the switch in my head to tune in to the Light. To my great relief a calmness instantly enveloped me, and I knew I’d been forgiven, I just knew, it was –
But my father hated that word ‘gnosis’ which recalled the Gnostic heresy.
Some people said Jung had been a Gnostic. My father had introduced me to Jung’s writings on religion with the caveat that I should beware of anything he wrote about Christianity. Jung was sympathetic to religion but often got in a muddle about Christianity and misrepresented the orthodox view.
‘Nevertheless he’s a profoundly religious man,’ my father had said, ‘and his writings are of immense interest as we all, priests and laymen alike, struggle to understand the human spirit.’ My father had long since grasped that the languages of Christianity and psychology could form two ways of expressing one truth, but I longed for a detailed synthesis which would make Christianity blaze across the minds of the unchurched mid-twentieth-century masses and render its message meaningful. It’s no good performing the classic academic exercise of expressing Christianity in terms of the latest fashionable philosophy. That appeals to no one outside the universities. For the mid-twentieth century you’ve got to express Christianity psychologically because even the average moron at a cocktail party has heard of the Oedipus complex. Or in other words, psychology’s the grassroots intellectual language of our time, and if you can translate Christianity into that, everyone will finally understand what the preachers are wittering on about in the pulpit – and then with understanding will come spiritual enlightenment …
I went on planning the conversion of England, but of course I was just an ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails and was busy kidding himself he had crawled back on to them again.
At last, convinced that after such a successful confession I was now free to embark on the moral life which would signify my repentance, I set aside all thought of sin and realised I had missed lunch. To my surprise I found I was hungry. Back at the house I raided the larder, consumed two large roast-beef sandwiches, retired to my bedroom and slept.
Of course I never went to Starwater Abbey to see Father Peters.
X
My father had calmed me by his brisk dismissal of the Devil during his bilingual analysis; I was now able to believe that although I had encountered a demon, its master had been absent from the scene. Or, in the other language: I was now able to believe I had encountered neurosis but not the insanity which destroys the personality and prompts the murder and maiming of others. Nevertheless the memory of the paranormal phenomena continued to trouble me, and that evening in my sitting-room I began to reflect on the condition known in religious language as ‘possession’. If Christian was occupying Katie’s psyche in such a way that he was driving her to breakdown, could this perhaps represent the traditional ‘demonic possession’ in an updated form? My father had brushed aside the possibility that Katie was, in a traditional sense, ‘possessed’, but it seemed to me that the reality behind all the language did reflect a form of psychological possession.
I juggled with the two languages for a moment. One could say that Christian’s memory was at the root of Katie’s guilt, and that this guilt was making her neurotic. But could one say that Christian, not at peace with God as I had blithely supposed, was roaming around as a malign discarnate shred and infesting her? Perhaps, if one acknowledged the heavy use of symbolism, one could – but how confusing language was, how distracting! No wonder philosophers had become so bogged down in the problems it created for clear thinking.
The intercom buzzed on the side-table.
‘Call for you, Nicholas,’ said Agnes as I responded with a grunt. ‘Marina Markhampton.’
‘Okay, I’ll talk to her.’ I kept the bell of my telephone extension switched off because I liked the Community to screen my incoming calls; this was useful when I was meditating or studying or just feeling unsociable. Picking up the receiver I said: ‘Hang on, Marina,’ and waited for the click as Agnes hung up. It was always vital to wait for the click. Then I said: ‘Hi – how is she?’
‘Look, we’ve got to talk.’
The hairs rose on the nape of my neck. ‘What’s happened?’
‘When she got home she tried to cut her wrists.’
I opened my mouth. No words emerged. I clutched the phone and started to sweat.
‘It’s all right,’ said Marina rapidly. ‘She didn’t get far – the knife she chose was blunt. I got hold of the doctor and we managed to get her into that funny-farm near Banbury, the one where everyone goes to be dried out and detoxified. Emma-Louise went there after her first husband ran off with another man, Holly spent a month there after her first suicide attempt and Venetia’s sister Arabella practically lives there, so it’s all madly respectable.’
I managed to say: ‘Katie needs a hospital, not a chic rest-home! She needs a psychiatrist!’
‘My dear, there are oodles of psychiatrists there, they’re wall-to-wall. Anyway, I got Katie settled in and now I’m back in Oxford waiting for Katie’s mother to collect the children – that au pair’s good but I don’t think it’s right to give her total responsibility for three children in a crisis which could last some time. I plan to stay the night here, go back to the funny-farm tomorrow morning for a visit and then head for London. If you could come to my flat –’
‘What time?’
‘About three? Oh, and don’t forget I’ve moved from Cadogan Place – you do have my new address, don’t you?’
I flicked stiff-fingered through my address-book and eventually read aloud some words which included ‘Eaton Terrace’.
‘That’s it. Thanks, Nick.’ She hung up.
That night I walked in my sleep, and when I awoke the next morning I was lying on the library couch. That shocked me so much that I almost decided to visit Father Peters after all. Eleven years ago after my mother’s death he had cured me of somnambulism just as he had simultaneously cured me of triggering the poltergeist activity; he had taught me to stroke my psyche at regular intervals by prayer and meditation, and to channel the abnormal psychic energy out of my body by means of strenuous physical activity.
Remembering these vital lessons I devoted myself to reciting the mantra for half an hour. Then after attending mass I meticulously expended a lavish amount of energy on washing and waxing my car until it looked like a four-wheeled fantasy in an advertisement. But all the effort was worthwhile. By this time I was feeling well in control of myself, and as soon as I had finished an early lunch I drove off in my jet-black Mini-Cooper towards the road which led to London.
XI
Marina now lived in a large maisonette, the bottom two floors of one of those houses which cost a fortune a stone’s throw from Eaton Square. There was a sixty-foot garden, all paved, with a fountain flanked by stone cherubs at the far end. Marina told me she planned to hold ‘happenings’ there provided that the summer weather was benign and the neighbours were tame.
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