Mystical Paths (34 page)

IX

‘
I wouldn’t mind some tea and biscuits,’ said Lewis after the service. ‘I’m feeling a trifle peckish.’

Daniel, who was on his way to bed, revealed the existence of flapjacks baked specially for the guests. The Fordites never stayed up late. The night office had been abolished at the beginning of the 1960s – my father had at once declared that the monks were being fatally pampered – but the first service now began earlier and lasted longer; Matins had been merged with Prime.

‘I’ll make the tea, Daniel,’ said Lewis. ‘Off you go.’

Daniel flapped away. As the other guests too headed for bed they murmured ‘Good night’ to us and Lewis, waiting for the kettle to boil, gave a succession of robust responses. He was already halfway through a flapjack.

We’ll take the tea to one of the confessionals,’ he said. ‘If we talk in my room we’re bound to keep someone awake. But how do you feel about tackling Session Three? If you’re tired it would be better to postpone it till tomorrow.’

‘I’m all right.’ I was unsure how true this statement was but I was certain I wanted to complete the interviews so that we could focus on discovering what had happened in the garden.

When the tea had been made, we withdrew from the kitchen to the passage which linked the guest-wing with the main house.

‘Cosy, isn’t it?’ remarked Lewis as we entered the first little room on our right. ‘I like the Grantchester confessionals. Less baroque than London, less austere than Ruydale – alas, poor Ruydale! – and less fussy than Starwater.’

I said suddenly: Were you ever a Fordite monk?’

‘No, but I became very involved with the Order when I was a mixed-up psychic teenager at Starwater Abbey. The monks and their Anglo-Catholicism represented the stable religious framework which I came to realise I had to have.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘So that particular little lost sheep needed a whole gang of shepherds to bring it back into the fold.’

We looked at each other and then, much to my surprise, we both laughed. I had had no intention of laughing. I had made the comment out of a desire to hit back at him for his brilliant extraction of a truth I had had no wish to reveal, yet now I found my animosity had dissolved. Perhaps that was because he was genuinely amused by my remark and his humour was infectious; or perhaps his skill at befriending was finally bearing fruit; or perhaps the psychic affinity between us was strong enough to override any clash of our personalities. I didn’t know. I couldn’t decide. I was even unsure how well I liked him. I sensed he could be difficult, possibly hot-tempered, certainly domineering, not a priest who would ever find it easy to fit into conventional ecclesiastical structures – and not a priest who fitted the conventional ima
^g
e of the patient, self-effacinglistener, the model to which modern counsellors were supposed to aspire. Yet in his unorthodoxy, in the sheer originality of the style which displayed his gifts as a priest, I felt at ease. The conventional men of the Church had all failed me. But this man understood. What did it matter how likeable or dislikeable he was? All that mattered was that I trusted him and that he wanted to help me survive.

‘Oh, I know all about being a little lost sheep!’ he was saying amused. ‘But most of us have to endure a woolly phase when we’re young ... Am I forgiven now for using the symbolic rake as a scalpel?’

I merely said: ‘It’s good to meet a priest who talks the lan- guage of psychology as well as the language of religion.’

‘If one believes in the unity of knowledge, then all languages point to one truth.’

By this time we were sitting down. Although the room was so small, it contained a table and two chairs in addition to the prie-dieu in front of the little altar; it had long been a Fordite custom that a formal confession at the prie-dieu should be preceded by an informal talk at the table.

‘Right,’ said Lewis, producing his cigarettes and reminding me that we were to examine my life-story, not the state of my soul. ‘Session Three: your self-portrait. Begin: "I was born on ..." and continue from there.’

I thought: this’ll be the easy session, the one where I’m wholly in control from start to finish.

But I was wrong.

X

‘I was born on the twenty-fourth of December, 1942,’ I began, ‘at my mother’s family home, the manor house at Starrington Magna. My father ... well, you know all about my father. My mother –’

‘No,’ said Lewis. ‘I don’t know all about your father. Tell me about him.’

Well, he’s a fabulous priest, a famous spiritual director, a former abbot of Grantchester –’

‘Yes, I certainly know all that. But what was he like as a husband and father?’

‘Fantastic. He’s never put a foot wrong.’

‘How very remarkable. So he coped well, did he, with your development as a psychic?’

‘Brilliantly. I learnt from the start that he could always keep the Dark at bay.’

Of course Lewis never asked what I meant by ‘the Dark’. He already knew. So enrapt was I by the sheer luxury of this easy communication that I failed to hear his next question and had to ask him to repeat it.

‘I said: when did he start to train you to do without him? Psychics need careful training if they’re to avoid getting into messes in later life.’

Well, of course my father recognised that. He started to train me before I went away to school at Starwater. I hadn’t been away from home before. I’d been a day-boy at the Cathedral Choir School.’

What form did his training take?’

‘Before my first term at Starwater he tried to get me into a religious routine. I already went to mass every Sunday, but I’d never bothered about attending church during the week and he’d never pressed it. He’d just encouraged me to say my prayers daily.’

‘But if you were at the Choir School, surely you were attending at least one service almost every day?’

‘I wasn’t one of the choir, and apart from Sundays the choir only sing evensong anyway. Even if I’d been a chorister I’d still have been a long way from a daily attendance at mass.’

‘I see. Go on.’

Well, when my father started to train me he said: "No demon can withstand the power of Christ" – that was his big slogan – and he told me that the best way to develop an awareness of Christ, an awareness strong enough to keep the demons at bay, was to adopt a more frequent pattern of worship andrecollection. He said one of the reasons why he wanted me to go to Starwater was that the monks provided a good daily service for the boys and I’d have every opportunity to build up my spiritual strength.’

‘And what did you, aged twelve or thirteen, think of all this religion being rammed down your throat?’

I blinked at this coarse description but said without hesitation: ‘I thought it all made sense. But somehow when I got to Starwater ... well, you know what public schools are like. My first priority was to survive community life without going crazy. Fortunately there wasn’t much bullying because the monks took a firm line on that, but I soon found out it didn’t do to be "churchy", even in a school like Starwater, because the tough boys would think you were soft. So I wound up just paying lip-service to the religious routine.’

‘Did you tell your father that?’

‘Oh no, I couldn’t bear to disillusion him! He’d gone on a scholarship to a minor public school which was Low-Church Evangelical, and he was so happy to think I was getting the kind of religious education he’d never had.’

‘But didn’t your father – this almost superhuman psychic – intuit that you had problems?’

‘He realised I was having a little trouble settling down, but he thought that was normal – as I suppose it was. But it never occurred to him that I wasn’t tuning in properly to the religious life because he couldn’t imagine Starwater being a failure in that respect.’

‘But surely as time went on –’

‘Oh, I’m sure he would have intuited the truth eventually, but then the catastrophe happened: my mother died.’ I described how the death had affected my father. ‘He couldn’t cope with anything,’ I said. ‘All he could do, when I generated the poltergeist activity at school, was arrange for me to be counselled by someone else. He did make a new effort to train me once he was better, but somehow it didn’t work out and soon he said he was too emotionally involved to carry out the training successfully. But the parent-child relationship often fails to work as a teacher-pupil relationship, doesn’t it? That’s not unusual. There were boys at school whose fathers nearly had strokes as the result of trying to teach their sons to drive.’

‘I certainly had to abandon the attempt to teach my daughter. So who did train you in the end?’

‘I just continued with my counsellor at Starwater, Aelred Peters ... Do you know Aelred?’

‘Yes, a nice old boy, quite bright but rather a limited psychic range. He’d do well in a prayer-group for the sick, I’ve always thought, but in my opinion dealing with the psychic aftermath of a catastrophe would be well beyond his powers.’

I said defensively: ‘He did stop the poltergeist activity.’

‘No doubt he did – I can imagine him praying hard for you and teaching you some appropriate meditation techniques. But did he shore up your spiritual life? And did he make any real attempt to come to grips with what was going on in your mind?’

‘Well, he was very knowledgeable about paranormal phenomena –’

‘So are a lot of people who believe in anything from devil-worship to UFOs, but unfortunately a knowledge of the paranormal doesn’t guarantee the ability to give good spiritual direction. It would seem, wouldn’t it, that throughout the crucial years of your adolescence your father was disabled and the substitute he appointed was inadequate ... Or am I being much too unfair to your father?’

‘You’re not just being unfair – you’re being bloody unjust!’ ‘Just take a moment to revise that last sentence, please.’

"You’re being very unjust".’ I was now furious but anxious to control myself in order to vindicate my father with convic- tion. ‘My father cared very much what happened to me,’ I said.

‘He often gave me good advice. It wasn’t his fault if I was too stupid to take it.’

‘Advice on what?’

‘Well ... psychic parlour-tricks, for instance.’ ‘What did he say?’

‘I told you earlier. He said: "Don’t do them."‘‘I suppose I just couldn’t believe he actually said that.’ ‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to be much more subtle when you’re trying to deflect a young man from risky behaviour! Nicholas, your father may be a brilliant spiritual director, brimming over with · gifted advice on prayer, but he seems to have had only the sketchiest idea of how to deal with his adolescent son. Of course if one tells a teenager anxious to establish his own identity: "Don’t do this!" he immediately longs to rush out and do it.’

‘I wasn’t eager to establish my own identity.’

There was a slight pause before Lewis said: ‘You weren’t?’

‘No, I wanted to be just like him. But because I’m so inferior to him, so much less gifted, I can’t always live up to his high standards.’

‘I thought we agreed earlier that just because you don’t have visions you shouldn’t automatically assume you’re less gifted than he is? But never mind, let that pass – and let me assure you that I do believe your father’s always tried his best to be a good parent. Now I want to go back for a moment to your birth in 1942. What was your father doing in those days?’

‘He’d started to work at the Theological College – but only as a lecturer. He didn’t become the Principal till later.’

‘And what did he do between 1940, when he left the Order, and 1942, when he began to work at the College?’

‘Got married. Worked temporarily as a parish priest, but that didn’t pan out.’

‘Why not?’

‘He made a mess of a ministry of healing. But he was soon blazing around being dynamic again. He was fantastic, he really was – well over sixty by that time but with so much energy, so much charisma –’

‘How did the marriage fare while all this was going on?’

‘Oh, everything was fantastic. They were really happy. My mother had her work too – she ran her family estate. She was great, lots of personality, strong but sensitive – one of those vital, competent brunettes who can have a career and a family and a social life, all with one hand tied behind her back while reading Shakespeare. She was twenty-eight years his junior but it didn’t matter, never bothered them, it was all just –’

‘Fantastic. Yes, I see. Did they have any other children?’

‘No. Well, there was Gerald. He was their first son, but he died at birth. For some reason they always made a great fuss about him, can’t think why, it was pointless.’

‘What sort of fuss?’

‘Oh, they used to lay flowers on his grave and remember his birthday every year as if he’d been a real person. I thought it was all very stupid, sentimental behaviour. I doubt if he’d have added up to much if he’d lived.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because
I
was the special one, not Gerald. My father saw me in a vision well over a year before I was born. He told me that after my mother died. The vision made it clear to him that I was to be exactly the son he wanted, a replica of himself. So Gerald would inevitably have been inferior to me and a disappointment to him. Like Martin.’

‘Who’s Martin?’

‘That’s my father’s son by his first marriage, the marriage he blundered into when he was too young to know better, but fortunately his wife died when Martin was seven and Ruth was eight. Ruth’s dead now. She had two children, but Colin’s farming in New Zealand and Janet’s married to an American so they’re not around.’

‘What does Martin do?’

‘Act. Martin Darrow. Stage, TV and all that crap.’

‘Good heavens, yes – a most distinguished actor!’

‘Yes, but he’s a big disappointment to Father. He’s queer.’
^‘
Homosexual? Or just odd?’

‘Both. And he’s a reformed alcoholic.’

‘Reformed! But how admirable! It’s not every alcoholic who can reform with such spectacular success!’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t really count.
Pm
the one who counts because I was specially designed by God to make Father happy after his vicissitudes.’’That’s your father’s interpretation of the vision, of course. But what’s your interpretation, Nicholas?’

‘Mine?’ I stared at him. ‘I don’t have one. I mean, Father’s interpretation is my interpretation. We think exactly alike. We
are
exactly alike, except that I’m not so gifted as he is, but I’ll put that right by living his life for him all over again.’

‘Is that what he wants you to do?’

‘Yes. Well, he does say: "I don’t want you to be my replica," but that’s not what he really thinks – that’s just what he knows he’s supposed to say. But I
know
he wants me to be a replica, I just know, it’s "gnosis". How can I be "me" anyway? There
is
no "me". I’m him – not literally, of course, but sometimes I think it’s exactly as if we’re Siamese twins joined at the psyche, and –’ I stopped.

There was a long pause.

Lewis, who had taken such a strong hand in the conversation earlier was now utterly silent.

At last my voice said: ‘I’m getting mixed up, everything’s coming out wrong, I’m saying things I’ve never said to anyone before because you’ve got under my guard, but you’re not getting under my guard any more, I’m shutting you out before you start thinking I’m nuts. The truth’s simply this: I love my father and he loves me; I loved my mother and I know very well she loved me too; we were a happy family and everything was perfect and if you try to tell me it wasn’t perfect, I’ll –’

‘Indeed I shan’t try to tell you it wasn’t perfect. You’re the one, I think, who’s secretly longing to tell someone how imperfect it all was.’

And as I stared at him in horror he said neutrally: ‘These parents of yours who spent their time rushing around being fantastic – how much did you actually see of them?’ Then he added: ‘How much did they see of each other?’ And finally he said, no longer speaking neutrally but in the gentlest possible voice: ‘What really lay at the bottom of your father’s terrible grief when she died?’

Then I knew I no longer wanted to shut him out.