Glamorous Powers (65 page)

It took a great effort of will to open the door but once I had crossed the threshold my tension eased. The chapel had been
cleaned and tidied; the defilement was not visible to the eye, and although the atmosphere was clogged with an intangible grime I was confident that I had the power to cleanse it; I felt as if I were confronting an unwashed window and reminding myself that beneath the dirt the glass would still be clear.

I set to work. First I prayed. Then I filled a bowl from the tap in the vestry, blessed the water and used it in making the sign of the cross on every row of pews. I also made the sign on all the doors. Once this ritual had been accomplished I celebrated mass. I knew no ghost had been seen; Father Darcy’s image had merely been a projection of my disordered mind, but I thought Wilfred would have sanctioned a sacramental gesture to complete not the exorcism of the chapel but the neutralizing of a painful memory.

The sun began to shine through the east window, and when I returned to the chapel after washing the chalice in the vestry I found that the atmosphere was once more pellucid and serene. Sinking down in the nearest pew I thanked God and savoured the peace.

Later when I had returned to the house I headed on an impulse to the conservatory and cut some of the lilies which Anne’s grandmother had favoured long ago. Her handsome glass vase was still in the flower-room, and soon I was setting it in its old place beneath the brass memorial tablet. I thought I would take Anne to the chapel that afternoon so that she too might conquer her natural aversion to the scene of the catastrophe, and I hoped that the lilies, symbol of beauty, would help her to see that the chapel was no longer polluted.

Once again I returned to the house. Then as soon as I had breakfasted I summoned the motor and set off to Starbridge to bring Anne home from the hospital.

‘Jon, there are more things which Francis said I should tell you,’ said Anne as we sat hand in hand in the front pew during our
visit to the chapel that afternoon. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be able to just yet but the chapel’s so soothing and you’re so serene again that I no longer feel frightened.’

‘Frightened?
’ I was appalled. ‘But my dear Anne, what on earth do you mean?’

‘Didn’t you guess? That awful outburst of mine just before the service didn’t spring from anger but from terror. I thought the reason why you were neglecting me to sink yourself so fanatically in the healing was because you were secretly miserable and dissatisfied.’

‘With the curacy, you mean? Well, I must confess –’

‘No, not just with the curacy. With everything. I was absolutely tormented by the dread that you were bored to tears in quiet dull little Starrington Magna and had come to regret your hasty marriage.’

‘Regret my – I’m sorry, obviously I’ve misheard you. Did you actually say –’

‘That’s why I encouraged you to take up the healing,’ said Anne, rushing on. ‘I wasn’t easy in my mind about it but I could see it kept you busy and happy and compensated you for being such a big fish in such a small pond. I thought that so long as you were happy being a healer you wouldn’t get tired of me and go away.’

‘Go away?
Me?
But –’

‘That’s why I didn’t speak up to you about all the Anglo-Catholic business – I knew you were making a mistake by introducing those changes so quickly, but I didn’t dare say anything because I was afraid of making you upset. I thought: so long as he’s happy, worshipping in the way he wants, he’ll be able to overlook the fact that I haven’t followed the example of his devoted ladies and become a fervent Anglo-Catholic –’

‘But I don’t want a wife who switches to Anglo-Catholicism for all the wrong reasons!’

‘Yes, but I was so afraid you might be secretly regretting your marriage to someone you couldn’t convert –’

‘I could never regret our marriage. I don’t care whether you’re Low-Church, Broad-Church or High-Church. All that matters
is that we belong to One Church,
The
Church, Our Church, the English Church –’

‘Darling!’ said Anne, kissing me. ‘But you do see, don’t you, why I felt I couldn’t be honest? I was so terrified that you’d become dissatisfied.’

‘But my dearest Anne, I spent my whole time fearing that
you
might become dissatisfied! I was so worried about being old, so anxious that I wouldn’t be able to satisfy you in bed –’

‘
You
were anxious about that? But Jon, I tortured myself with the terror that I wouldn’t satisfy
you?

‘I must be imagining this conversation,’ I said. ‘I’m hallucinating.’

‘I used to think to myself: it’s all right now I’m young but supposing he gets tired of me when I’m middle-aged? That’s why I got so upset when you set up the camp-bed in your cell as soon as I was pregnant. I thought you were already tired of me and were glad to have an excuse for a separate bedroom.’

‘My darling Anne, I …’ Words temporarily failed me. However at last I managed to say in my firmest voice: ‘I shall never get tired of you, no matter how middle-aged you become. How on earth did we sink into this absolutely appalling muddle?’

‘Francis said that since I’d had the painful experience of Hugo and you’d had the painful experience of Betty it was inevitably going to take the two of us much longer to learn to trust each other than it would take the average couple.’

I had a vivid memory of Francis saying: ‘Of course I’m just an ignorant old bachelor …’ and I felt humbled. Here indeed was a case where the onlooker had seen most of the game.

I could only exclaim stupefied: ‘But this is unforgivable of me! I was so absorbed in my own fears that I completely forgot about your adverse experience with your fiancé – I just assumed that once the sexual difficulty had been overcome all would automatically be well, but how could I have ignored the possibility that not all the psychological scars would be healed?’

‘We both have our scars. But all that matters now is that we’re not hiding them from each other.’ She kissed me again before adding in her briskest, most businesslike voice: ‘Jon, there’s one thing more I simply must say and it’s about bed and it’s this: sex is very nice but if it results in us perpetually worrying ourselves into a frenzy about whether we’re satisfying each other then it’s soon going to become very awful. Please try not to worry about me too much. As far as I’m concerned love’s more important than sex, and there you’ll always satisfy me, even if you wind up bald, bedridden and toothless. You see, to be quite frank –’ She took a deep breath ‘– I like you being old. I could never trust any man of my own age again, but an older man … Well, the older you get the more secure I shall feel. The last thing I’d ever want is a young husband. I’d never have a moment’s peace of mind.’

And then for the first time since my mother’s death I found I could love without fear of the future.

Later that afternoon when Anne was resting I retired to my cell, removed from the album the best photograph of my mother and propped it up on the mantelshelf. I found I could look at her without pain; it was as if I could at last see her death in perspective. Now it seemed so obvious that the unhealed bereavement, damaging my trust of the opposite sex, had been one of the factors which had driven me into the fatal marriage with a woman I had not loved, the marriage which in turn was to drive me towards those seventeen years of celibacy in the Order. I could see clearly too the power of my Maker, that ultimate force, as he had quite literally created me, casting me into the crucible of suffering so that I could be moulded into the man he wanted me to become. Out of the pain had come the growth and the development; after the darkness had come the light. And as I saw my life illuminated by these mystical symbols I could look at my mother’s photograph and think:
yes, it was a terrible bereavement. But I lived through it, I endured it and now at last I know I’ve survived.

‘How lucky you were to have the perfect mother for fourteen years!’ Francis had said during one of our healing conversations as he had shifted the emphasis from the pain I had suffered to the love I had enjoyed. ‘But what would it really have been like if she’d lived? Could you ever have looked seriously for a wife with this remarkable woman always hovering in the background? Even the most heterosexual of men can have problems with remarkable mothers, particularly if the remarkable mother falls into the notorious maternal trap of being too possessive, and although your mother might have been perfect for you when you were a child, would she in fact have been quite so perfect later? Even if you’d managed to detach yourself for long enough to reach the altar, how would she have got on with your wife? These are difficult questions, and perhaps it’s just as well that you’ve never been obliged to answer them.’

Remembering these disturbing questions which it had never occurred to me to ask during all the decades of my long bereavement, I wondered for the first time what my mother would have thought of Anne but they were so far apart in time that it was hard to picture them together. My mother would have been eighty-four if she had lived. I tried to imagine her as an old woman, perhaps a little querulous and demanding, not in good health, maybe even verging on senility, and I shuddered. My mother would have hated old age. She would have wanted me to remember her as she was in the prime of life, bewitching in her silence as she glided across the daisy-studded lawn and idly stooped to stroke her cat by the peach-tree. Then remembering Chelsea I found I knew exactly what my mother would have thought of Anne. I could hear her saying as she picked up William: ‘This is a most intelligent, interesting little creature, not only sensitive but sensible too – a good companion, always loyal and affectionate and never a yowling nuisance. Chelsea was always very partial to tabby-cats.’

I smiled, left the photograph on the mantelshelf and strolled downstairs into the garden.

The weather had changed. The sky was now heavy with unbroken cloud and the sultry air hinted that a storm was approaching. Halfway across the lawn I almost turned back to fetch an umbrella but in the end I decided not to bother; the humid heat was conducive to laziness. Drifting on across the lawn I entered the woods, which were verdant with the summer foliage, and wandered in the dim green light down the path which led to the chapel.

I was thinking of nothing in particular. I had already decided that concentrated thought should wait until I reached the chapel so I strolled on like a somnambulist, my mind restfully inactive as I listened to the distant call of a wood-pigeon. I had just become irritated by his persistence when I glanced below me into the dell and realized in a single electrifying second that I was finally duplicating the walk I had taken in my vision.

I never stopped. On I moved, my brain blank with shock until at last, scarcely able to breathe in case some wrong movement should shatter this bizarre replication in time, I crossed the floor of the dell. As I walked I glanced to the right but although the suitcase stood beneath the trees I saw it only in my memory, and on reaching the porch I ran up the steps without a backward glance.

The latch clicked. The right-hand door swung wide, and there before me was the chapel of my vision, the wide space at the back where the pews had been removed, the wooden cross on the plain altar-table, the lilies which I had placed that morning beneath the brass tablet. For one long moment I stood staring at them all. Then closing the door I crossed the open space and began to move down the aisle.

No light shone through the north window.

At the front pew I stopped and waited. Sweat trickled down my temple; I had to make an effort to breathe evenly. Then I told myself that the light in the vision had been symbolic. Had I really expected a light to shine from the north? Yes. How unrealistic! I now had to stop thinking like a befuddled romantic and behave like an intelligent priest. Reminding myself that the hallmark of genuine mysticism is a practical no-nonsense
outlook, I knelt in the front pew, closed my eyes and applied myself with a workmanlike efficiency to the task of communicating with God.

To liberate the full power of my psyche I had to phase out all distractions; it was as if my mind were a brilliantly illuminated house and I were engaged in moving from room to room to extinguish every lamp. Only in the darkness, as I knew from past experience, would I have the light to see with the eye of the soul.

The process of darkening took some time and required an intense concentration which I found almost impossible to sustain because of my spiritual debility. I was like an athlete who had fallen out of training, but I prayed for grace and persisted. More time passed, although in such states of altered consciousness time tends to fragment into a succession of timeless moments. I prayed again for grace but that was my last prayer in words. The river of consciousness became darker and deeper. I tried to see but my psychic eye was still myopic; closing it again I waited in the dark. God was there, but it was the God of the Neo-Platonists, the God of the Pseudo-Dionysius, the God of John Scotus, above everything, beyond everything, indefinable because any definition would only render him finite. I knew him by his absence and by his very absence he was there.

Then I felt his warmth. It was like the sun coming up over the horizon, but although the warmth was very bright it was a brightness which no eye could perceive so I still saw only darkness. The warmth was as paradoxical as the brightness, bracing not enervating, clear and pure as ice in the radiant heat. Yet even as I saw the image of ice I recognized the warmth of life and in the heart of that life was the flame of love. God was here too, not the God of the Neo-Platonists but the God of Julian of Norwich and Walter Hylton and the unknown author of
The Cloud of Unknowing,
the God of the joyful English mystics, personal, loving, immanent, real.