Glamorous Powers (66 page)

I opened my eye again, the psychic eye, and in the warmth I was able to relax without consciousness of the self. I could see clearly then; I saw all kinds of people, both the people who had
sought my spiritual direction when I had been a monk and the people whom I had yet to meet. I saw not their faces but their psychic entities; they formed a continuous strand so that I knew my work in the world would be similar to the work which I had undertaken as a monk, but the exact nature and context of that work remained hidden from me. I was aware that all the burdens and constraints of my monastic life had been rolled away so that I could concentrate on my work with a new freedom; I was aware that so much past sorrow had been smoothed away, slotted into place at last in the jig-saw of my life, but immediately I saw the image of the jig-saw I realized one piece was still missing and that this piece was somehow blocking the light of the revelation. I could only grasp the knowledge that I had been sent back into the world to be neither a parish priest nor an unqualified doctor but to reflect Father Darcy’s training on some broad stage which at present lay beyond my power to define. Contrary to what I had always supposed, the end of my monastic career did not mark a complete break with the past; in a very real sense there was no new life beginning, only the old one continuing, but now God had responded to my deepest needs by giving me the right wife so that with both body and soul in harmony at last I could reach the height of those powers which I had long since dedicated to his service.

I had a sudden awareness of God’s generosity, and the next moment I was overwhelmed by the boundless and indescribable nature of the divine love. I opened my eyes – my physical eyes – and for a split second the psychic and material visions collided so that my oak cross on the altar vibrated with light. I saw Christ crucified, Christ redeemed – and at that moment it was imprinted on my mind that I was finally liberated from all my past guilt. The tide of forgiveness was too strong; no anguish and self-hatred could face it and survive.

I heard Julian of Norwich call across the centuries: ‘He is love!’ and the darkness blazed with fire. I could not look at the light pouring through the north window but I knew it was there and as I stretched out my hands towards it I felt the
brilliant darkness enfold my psyche. For one radiant second my fingertips touched eternity, and then as I slipped back through the levels of consciousness into the prison of time and space I knew that the missing piece of the jig-saw lay with Martin and that I had to write to him without delay.

‘The mystics all speak the same language. But there is something singularly impressive in reading (Plotinus’) testimony, vibrating with restrained emotion, not in some ascetic of the cloister, but in one of the great thinkers of all time, a Greek and a loyal disciple of Plato, the last deep organ-voice in that long series of lovers of wisdom, which begins with the cosmic speculations of the Ionians, and ends, as we have seen, in a profoundly religious philosophy …’

W. R. INGE
Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934
Mysticism in Religion

I am unsure how long I remained in the chapel while I recovered from the immediate effects of such a profound experience, but as soon as I was strong enough to put one foot in front of the other I struggled back to the house.

On reaching my cell I sank down at the table and picked up my pen to embark on the vital letter. ‘My dear Martin,’ I wrote and stopped. I had belatedly realized I had no idea what I was supposed to say. Had I really thought that God would write the letter for me as soon as I held my pen over a blank sheet of paper? I was behaving like a befuddled romantic again. Conscientiously I roused my intellect and began to frame in my mind the conventional enquiries about Martin’s health and activities, but almost at once I realized that conventional enquiries were now irrelevant; they had been no more than meaningless platitudes offered by a father bowed down by guilt. Again I was overwhelmed by the tide of forgiveness I had
experienced in the chapel and suddenly I saw what I had to write. Instead of cowering behind the wall which my guilt had built around me and shooting polite arrows of inquiry over the ramparts I had to abandon my bow and arrow and walk out of my refuge to meet him.

Without further hesitation I wrote: ‘I’ve recently wound up in the most humiliating mess: I had a spiritual breakdown before a large congregation when I thought I was possessed by the Devil. I’m better now but Anne had a miscarriage as the result of this catastrophe and the baby was born prematurely, dying within an hour. We called him Gerald. I should have written to you and Ruth but I was in such an agonized state of mind that I didn’t. I’m sorry. The notice did go in
The Times
but I don’t suppose either of you saw it. Anne is home now and I’d so much like you to meet her. Please come and see us. I feel very old and battered at the moment and I need you to cheer me up with some of your amusing theatrical stories. Yours, etc, J.D.’

This letter, so painfully honest, so utterly unlike any letter which I had ever written to either of my children, seemed so strange to me as I reread it that I even wondered if I had finally lost my mind. But I knew the letter had to be sent. Cramming it in an envelope I printed the address in capital letters to make sure there was no misdirection, slapped on the stamp and bicycled straight to the village to drop the letter safely in the pillar-box.

‘Dear Dad,’ wrote Martin by return of post, ‘you poor old sod! I do sympathize – making a balls-up before an audience is the actor’s permanent nightmare. I remember. I was playing Jack Worthing once in
The Importance of Being Earnest
when Lady Bracknell went over the top. You’ve no idea how powerful that line about the handbag can sound when screeched out with the
volume of four express trains about to dive into a particularly nasty tunnel. We had to carry the poor thing off the stage in the end, but six months later, believe it or not, she was hamming it up in some ghastly farce and saying she felt positively reborn – so the whole story had a happy ending.

‘I shall arrive on Saturday at lunchtime unless I hear from you to say this doesn’t suit. Please lock up all drink and offer me fizzy lemonade very firmly. Yours, MARTIN. P.S. Sorry the new little Darrow was so short-lived. You don’t have much luck with your replicas, do you?’

I stared at this sentence for a long, long time. Then I wrote a brief line to say how much I was looking forward to seeing him.

‘It’s good to escape into the country for a few hours,’ said Martin. ‘London’s hell at the moment. Maybe I should chuck up my dreary clerical job, abandon all my efforts to get into ENSA or the BBC and volunteer to work on the land, but the trouble is I’m most definitely not the bucolic type. And talking of farming that reminds me: what a secretive old devil you’ve been about your farmer-wife! I thought you’d married some upper-class nitwit who was incapable of reading anything but
The Tatler
! Why didn’t you tell me you were married to this charming business-woman who possesses not only the entire works of Noel Coward but a cat called William after Shakespeare?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t been very good at communicating vital information to you, Martin –’

‘Well, never mind, better late than never … My God, what’s that down there? It looks like Inigo Jones’ pipe-dream of the Eighth Wonder of the World!’

I showed him around the chapel and was pleased by the genuine admiration which lay beneath his actor’s hyperbole. ‘I love beautiful things,’ he said. ‘The world’s so foul and ugly but
a glimpse of something beautiful makes one forget for a moment how bloody awful life is.’

I cleared my throat. That sounds as if you’ve succumbed to the Manichean heresy, but it’s a mistake, in fact, to see the world as –’

‘Oh my God, he’s going to play the Priest with a capital P! Don’t do it, Dad, don’t do it! I can’t stand it when you start playing your favourite roles. I like you so much better as you are now with all the greasepaint stripped off by your experience of going over the top as a miracle-worker – I feel I’m seeing your true self at last. You’re
such an actor,
Dad! In fact sometimes when I see you acting I wonder if against all the odds I did wind up after all as that replica you always wanted.’

From the moment I had read the postscript of his letter I had known this moment would arrive. I was aware of the urge to retreat, take cover, hide, even bury my head in the sand and pretend I had not heard him, but I conquered the temptation to be a coward; I stood my ground. I heard myself say: ‘I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I must have made life very difficult for you when you were growing up. Perhaps now’s the moment when you should finally tell me exactly how difficult it was.’

And then at last I knew I no longer saw my father in the dark glass of estrangement but with blinding clarity, face to face.

‘I’m not sure when I first realized I was meant to be a replica,’ said Martin, ‘but I remember the sheer awfulness of my panic. I thought: I can’t possibly grow up because once I’m grown up he’ll discover I’m not a replica. And I couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing you. I mean, there you were, always so good, so kind, so decent, never complaining no matter how naughty Ruth and I were – and you were such a hero too, fighting in the War, winning that medal at Jutland … what an act to
follow! I remember lying awake at night and shuddering at the terrible task which lay ahead of me.

‘At first it wasn’t too difficult to be a replica; I just worked hard at school and took a precocious interest in religion. Then gradually it dawned on me that you wanted me to be not just any priest but the sort of priest who would go right to the top of the Church-of-England tree – it dawned on me that I was supposed to live your life again for you without making the mistakes you made when you married a woman of the wrong class and wound up in a dead-end chaplaincy.
My
life (so you thought) was going to be quite different. I was going to marry well and glide effortlessly upwards from vicar to canon to archdeacon to dean to bishop, redeeming your past and keeping you perpetually drenched in paternal pride. What a dream! But I knew it hadn’t a hope of coming true. God knows what I think about religion – I’m still too mixed up about it all to know – but I’ve never deluded myself that I could succeed as a churchman. I’d have died of boredom while I was still a curate – it just wasn’t “me” at all. But you didn’t want to know “me”, did you? I wasn’t allowed to be “me”. I was only allowed to be the replica. My God, I used to feel so angry and miserable, trapped in the cage you’d created for me and worrying myself to death about where it would all end …

‘Then when I was eighteen the end came and I told you I was going to be an actor – but lo and behold! I dropped the bomb and there was no explosion. No shouts of horror, no shrieks of rage – only a saintly resignation. In fact you were so kind, so good, so sympathetic, so understanding, so noble and so heroic that you bloody nearly killed me with guilt! But after I’d recovered from my relief that I’d survived I began to feel angry. At first I didn’t know why. Then I realized it was because none of the emotions you were projecting were real. You
hated
me being an actor! You
hated
me not going into the Church! And most of all you
hated
me smashing your cherished dream that I’d be a replica! Oh, if only you could have shouted: “You silly little bastard, how dare you do this to me!” Then we could at least have had an honest conversation, but no, our relationship
had been dishonest for years and that scene just put the final nail in the coffin of our dishonesty. After that no matter how often I yelled at you all I got was this mask of saintly resignation studded with Christian platitudes.

‘After I had my breakdown I said to the psychiatrist: “The most ghastly thing about my father is that
he never complains.
He just smiles and says whatever I do he still loves me, but can’t he see that’s all rubbish? Can’t he see that if he really loved me he wouldn’t wall himself off from me with all this acting? Can’t he see that he’s absolutely destroying me by maintaining this relationship which is false from beginning to end?”

‘The psychiatrist was a maddening old bird who often pretended to be stupid in order to needle me into talking. He put on his stupid look and said: “But why can’t you believe your father when he says he loves you whatever you do?” I told him you couldn’t love any son who wasn’t a replica, but he just said: “Why should the fact that he wanted a replica mean he didn’t also love you as you were?” God, how he irritated me! I said: “My father rejected my true self by wanting a replica. If you reject something you don’t love it,” but the stupid man couldn’t accept that. “If he’s rejected you,” he said, “why didn’t he wash his hands of you as soon as you told him you were going to be an actor?” “Because he’s an actor himself!” I shouted. “And he felt he had to put on this fantastic act for me!” And do you know what this madman said next? “What an exhausting thing to do!” he said. “If he cared nothing for your true self, why should he go to all that trouble?”

‘Well, of course one can’t argue with doctors who think they know everything so I said: “Okay, perhaps he does care about me in his own peculiar way, but he shouldn’t have wanted me to be a replica.” I thought that if I made that concession the conversation would come to an end, but no, back came the madman with the question: “Why do you think he wanted a replica? If you understood this desire better perhaps you wouldn’t be so angry with him.” “I understand it perfectly,” I said coldly, and trotted out my theory that you secretly wanted to compensate yourself for the career you never had. Then the
moron exclaimed, pretending to be enlightened: “Ah! So what you’re saying is that your father is a deeply frustrated and unhappy man! How sad! Why don’t you stop being angry with him and feel sorry for him instead?” Silly old fool! Of course I then told him in no uncertain terms that you’d always been happy as a lark ever since your ordination – except when Mother died and your happy marriage came to an end.