Mystical Paths (18 page)

‘Just as well, since you’re going to be a clergyman.’

‘Right. But what I’m trying to say is that the sex-myth you’ve just trotted out has only arisen because people are capable of experimenting widely. Once you get past the one-off experiments, it seems to me that most people prefer to express themselves sexually in a certain way. For example, I’m drawn only to women and within that gender I prefer brunettes. No matter how many experiments I tried I’m sure I’d always revert eventually to my special preference — and even my experiments would be limited by my personal taste. That’s why copulating with a sheep wouldn’t just be undesirable; it would be impossible. I’d never even get an erection.’

‘You sound most formidably normal, but obviously you haven’t yet realised that not everyone’s quite so normal as you are ... God, my head feels as if it’s about to drop off again — get some more Alka-Seltzer, would you? I threw the last lot up.’

I mixed him another potion.

‘You’re a saint, Nick. Thanks.’ He drank the Alka-Seltzer, grimaced and slumped back on the pillows. ‘In my saner moments,’ he said, ‘I can convince myself that Christian died by accident, but unfortunately my saner moments are becoming less frequent and now I suspect that what’s really slaying me is not knowing for sure how he died. That’s why I’ve been cultivating Perry recently. It occurred to me that if I could get chummy with him he’d eventually open up and reveal what he was hiding — if anything — but I’ve begun to think I’m wasting my time.’

Why?’

Two reasons. One: if Perry’s telling the truth, he didn’t see Christian die and therefore he’s just as much in the dark as we are. And two: if Perry’s lying, we’ll never know because not all the chumminess in the world could coax him to open up. That one’s like a steel clam. In the absence of the KGB and the Spanish Inquisition, we haven’t a hope of hearing how his best friend committed suicide under his nose.’

‘If he ever did. Norman, is Perry really a spy?’

‘Oh, I think so, but it’s just a desk-job. He doesn’t go waltzing off to Berlin with a Luger.’

After a pause I said: ‘But presumably he could get a Luger if he wanted one.’

‘I’d imagine so, yes. In a hush-hush job like that he’d have access to all kinds of esoteric departments ... God, I feel terrible! How the hell am I going to get to the station? Probably have to crawl to Victoria on all fours.’

‘No car?’

‘Lost my licence for six months. Got nabbed when I was plastered on New Year’s Eve.’

‘I’ll drive you down to your father’s,’ I said. ‘I’ve no plans for today.’

‘You’ll grow a halo if you’re not careful! Many thanks - I suppose I should cry: "No, no!" but if you really want to be a Christian masochist, what right have I to stop you? And now I think I’m about to pass out again. Can you wake me at ten if I’m still alive?’

I promised to wake him. Then I waited in the kitchen until I heard him snoring and knew it was safe to search the house. This trawl for alcohol produced several bottles hidden in imaginative places; I also uncovered a cache in the dining-room sideboard and retrieved the bottle of whisky I had kidnapped earlier. Working methodically I removed all the bottles to the top floor landing and hid them in the crawl-space under the roof next to the water-tank. Norman would soon find this hiding-place but at least if he woke before I did and came upstairs to search for sustenance there was a good chance that I’d hear him. I hardly fancied going downstairs for breakfast and finding him dead drunk in the kitchen.

I shut the small door which opened into the crawl-space. Then I returned to the nurse’s room, tethered my ankle again and sank at once into unconsciousness.

IV I awoke at nine-thirty to find Norman creeping into the crawl-space. I could see him through the open door of my room. ‘Hey!’ I said as soon as my brain had registered what was happening, and scrambled out of bed. Having forgotten my tethered ankle I nearly fell flat on my face.

Meanwhile Norman, having heard my voice, was edging backwards out of the crawl-space. ‘You crafty bastard, what have you done with my drink?’ I heard him yell in panic as I tore apart the knotted string around my ankle.

‘It’s behind the water-tank. Norman –’

‘Don’t worry, I only want the smallest possible nip of vodka. Got to keep myself sober for Father.’ He began to plough forward again towards the tank.

‘Let me retrieve the bottle,’ I said, ‘because I know exactly where it is. You go and make us some coffee.’

‘If you think you can adulterate the bottle with water as soon as I’m out of the way –’

‘No, I won’t do that, I promise.’ Since it was obvious that I couldn’t stop him drinking, one shot of undiluted vodka seemed a reasonable compromise.

Norman withdrew from the crawl-space and said: ‘I can’t see a bloody thing in there, and I don’t think the bottles are behind the tank at all. Christ, if you’ve poured everything down the drain, I’ll –’

‘I haven’t. I’ll retrieve the vodka,’ I said, acting on thç principle that if one repeats something often enough people eventually hear it. ‘You make the coffee.’

Norman hurtled downstairs in a cloud of four-letter words.

Having retrieved the bottle I found yet another tooth-mug in the main bathroom and poured out a shot that was moderate but not stingy. Then I returned the vodka to the collection behind the water-tank. Downstairs I was astonished to discover that Norman had started to brew the coffee. Having assumed he’d be incapable of performing any task without first refresh- ing himself with alcohol, I’d given the order about coffee solely to get him out of the way while I dished up the drink.

‘Sorry I sounded a trifle irritated,’ he said after knocking back the shot like a Cossack. ‘No offence meant.’

‘None taken.’ I made some delicious buttered toast out of some stale sliced bread. No marmalade, no milk, no eggs, no cornflakes in the house, but at least I’d caught the bread before it turned mouldy. Norman had also succeeded in making excellent coffee. I began to feel better.

‘Can I borrow your razor?’ I said to him when the toast had disappeared, but this decision to shave was a mistake. By the time I emerged from the bathroom Norman was reciting bright-eyed from
Henry V:
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ..."‘ And I realised the bottle of vodka had been retrieved from the crawl-space.

‘Norman, let’s talk about how you can get back to writing poetry.’

"I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips ..." What’s the point of writing poetry? I’ll never be Shakespeare.’

‘No, but you could be Norman Aysgarth,’ I said, but that made no impression and I knew that once again I had failed to heal someone in distress. Suddenly my impotence seemed intolerable to me. ‘What you need, Norman,’ I said, unable to stop myself jettisoning the cool, calm, utterly controlled concern which had won his confidence at three in the morning, ‘is regeneration. You need to escape from this dead desert you’re living in and save yourself by —’

‘If you say "by turning to Jesus" I’ll smash your teeth in.’

‘No, I shan’t say that! That’s just a coded phrase that no longer has any meaning for you, but I’m going to break that code, I’m going to say instead: "Salvation equals integration and self-realisation!" Integrate yourself by overcoming this false ego which is strangling you, and line yourself up with your
true
self, the man God created you to be —’

‘Oh, belt up, for Christ’s sake —’

‘No, listen, Norman,
listen!
’
I urged, now as fiery as the worst kind of evangelist, the kind guaranteed to make Norman recoil.

‘You’re cut off from God. That’s code-language for: you’re living an inauthentic existence, you’re living at odds with the man you’ve got the potential to become —’

‘Piss off!’

The sad part was that everything I said was true but I was going about the healing in entirely the wrong way. As I was to be taught later, you can’t heal the sick by force-feeding them with ideas they’re not ready to accept; you can’t cure people by the simple imposition of your will. It’s the power of the Holy Spirit that heals, not the power of a would-be wonder-worker trying to play God.

‘But don’t you see?’ I cried in exasperation. ‘You’ve got to live an authentic existence by being tnue to your real self! That’s the point about Christ — he was uniquely integrated, he wasn’t at the mercy of a false ego, he was wholly at one with God’s design for him, and that’s why we have to "follow Jesus" — "following Jesus" is code-language signalling that because he’s the finest example there’s ever been of what it means to be fully human, we have to tread in his footsteps if we want to reach our maximum potential and —’

‘
Get out of my house!
’

Having no choice then but to admit my failure I withdrew reluctantly to my car.

At eleven o’clock Norman joined me. He was clean-shaven and dressed in fresh clothes, but I knew at once by his careful walk that he had polished off the remaining vodka in the bottle.

‘Sorry I yelled at you,’ he said, ‘but I just can’t stand all that Christ-talk. It always makes me feel so guilty that I disappointed Father by not going into the Church.’

‘You don’t have to go into the Church, Norman. You have to write poetry.’

‘Oh, shut up, there’s a good chap! It’s all too late.’ ‘It’s never too late.’

‘It is for me.’

Silence.

I drove out of London.

V It was a clear day, unseasonably warm, with small fleecy clouds bowling along in a bright sky, and as the car plunged down the hill past Putney Vale Cemetery the horizon looked as if it had been scored with a knife. Traffic was heavy. A fine spring Saturday always brings the city-dwellers roaring out of the woodwork. After the traffic jams by Putney Bridge it was a relief to hit the Kingston by-pass and pick up speed in the fast lane.

‘By the way,’ said Norman, breaking a long silence, for God’s sake don’t mention Christian while you’re under my father’s roof. We don’t talk about him. Father thinks it’s better that way.’

I immediately wanted to burst into Dean Aysgarth’s house and bawl out Christian’s name at the top of my voice. ‘I see,’ I said politely.

‘It nearly killed the old boy when Christian died. Lost all interest in his work. Took that premature retirement. Tragic. It was lucky he had your father to give him a helping hand.’

Did he?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘My father doesn’t talk about his cases.’

‘Oh, Father wouldn’t like to hear himself described as a "case"! He just used to drop in on Father Darrow for tea and sympathy.’

But since my father had begun to live as a recluse few people were allowed to call on him for either tea or sympathy or anything else. Martin visited, of course, and I was permitted to present friends, but otherwise my father saw no one who lived beyond the walls of the Manor except for a small circle of very old acquaintances, such as Bishop Ashworth, and the occasional desperate case. Dean Aysgarth had never belonged to the circle of very old acquaintances. Therefore he had to be one of the desperate cases. But naturally I said nothing of this to Norman.

‘My father had two crises before he retired,’ Norman was reflecting. ‘The first one took place in 1963 when he got in a muddle over commissioning that pornographic sculpture for the Cathedral churchyard and the Bishop nearly sent him to the stake. Father was very depressed by that row for some reason — the depression was quite out of proportion to the rather ludicrous fiasco — but your father cheered him up, got him back on an even keel. I think Father had probably just been working too hard. Then the second crisis arose at the time of Christian’s death.’

‘How’s he doing at the moment?’

‘Amazingly well — he’s now a big fund-raiser for Guildford Cathedral and he’s muscled his way into the British Council of Churches — he’s got some part-time job working out how the Church of England can take over the Methodists. Oh, and he runs the local church, of course, keeps the vicar up to the mark and charms all the flower-ladies. He got himself appointed churchwarden in double-quick time.’

‘Does he miss Starbridge?’

‘Yes, but he’s adjusted. In fact he’s absolutely fine nowadays so long as no one mentions Christian.’

I made no comment. I was too busy wondering how Dean Aysgarth had managed to become one of my father’s desperate cases in 1963, but I supposed my father had taken him on in order to do the Bishop a favour. Uncle Charles had probably been at his wits’ end after the long-running feud with his dean had culminated in the pornographic sculpture scandal.

‘I suppose your father’s two crises weren’t related?’ I said suddenly to Norman. ‘He didn’t take that early retirement in 1965 because he and the Bishop had a final bust-up?’

‘Oh, good God, no! The premature retirement was all connected with Christian’s death — Father felt he couldn’t go on as he was, had to have a complete change. I believe a severe bereavement often takes people that way.’

Another silence ensued but as I swung the car off the by-pass towards Leatherhead I said: ‘If we can go back to Christian for a moment —’

‘Watch it — this is becoming an obsession!’

‘Well, if I can’t talk about him later I might as well talk about him now. Norman, could there have been a third woman in Christian’s life?’

‘You’re thinking of Venetia, aren’t you, but that was purely platonic.’

‘So outside his eternal quadrangle he didn’t screw around at all?’

‘Why can’t you say "fuck" and be done with it? Why do you have to use a bloody Americanism like "screw"? I can’t stand this tendency among the young to lapse into a mid-Atlantic patois —’

‘Come on, Grandad, you’re not that old!’

‘— and I think you’re looking back at the past through the sex-mad lens of 1968. I know everyone runs around nowadays with their flies permanently open, but —’

‘No, they don’t. They just say they do.’

‘— but the point to note about Christian was that he wasn’t interested in being promiscuous. I’m not saying he was puritanical and I’m not saying he was undersexed; I think he probably did give promiscuity a whirl when he was young —’ I noticed that Norman was speculating. Evidently where sex was concerned Christian had never confided in him — but once he found out he could have any woman he wanted, promiscuity would soon have seemed unutterably boring. Christian got his kicks out of challenges, not easy victories.’