She was silent for a long time but eventually she said: ‘He must have been very unhappy. People always are, aren’t they, when they can’t face reality? He must have known Gerald was no good. He must have known I’d be better off up at Oxford. But he couldn’t cope with the knowledge. Mummy would have helped him cope. She was a very sensible, down-to-earth person and she wouldn’t have let him retreat into this fantasy world where Gerald was the faultless heir apparent and I was the conventional heiress – she’d have helped him to put aside his dreams and face up to the way things really were, but without her he just didn’t have the courage to do that. In fact,’ said Anne, speaking more rapidly as her insight deepened, ‘I can see now he must have been a frightened sort of person underneath that confident exterior. Insecure. Perhaps even a little weak. Isn’t that strange? Maybe Gerald was far more like him than I ever realized … How eerie it is to think that families can spend years under the same roof yet know each other so imperfectly!’
‘Eerie, but not unusual.’
Another long silence elapsed. Then Anne said simply: ‘Poor Daddy. I suppose it was all a sort of tragedy, wasn’t it?’
I took her in my arms to celebrate her first steps along the road to recovery.
Later Anne said: ‘I feel as if I’ve climbed Mount Everest!’ but I could only respond: ‘I’m wondering if I’ve sunk into a bottomless pit.’
Anne looked astonished. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
I sighed and began to tell her how I had abused my powers during my days as an undergraduate up at Cambridge.
‘I can quite see why you got into trouble when you were too young to know better,’ said Anne, exercising great charity after I had completed my confession, ‘but now that you’re so wise and good why shouldn’t you heal people if you want to?’
‘Because I’m capable of being unwise and very bad.’
‘Oh, rubbish!’ said Anne robustly. ‘You’re setting yourself impossibly high standards!’
‘Healing demands high standards. Father Darcy was always convinced I was temperamentally unsuited to any healing ministry which extended beyond the counselling of men.’
She was baffled. ‘But why?’
‘The humility required for such a ministry is so great that it really has to be inborn. I’m not naturally a humble person – I can attain humility, but I have to work hard to achieve it. My natural inclination is to be proud and arrogant.’
‘But why does healing require this great humility?’
‘Because healing is really an exercise in power, and as everyone knows, all power corrupts. The humble man will be in a better position to withstand corruption because he doesn’t find power attractive, but the proud arrogant man is vulnerable because power provides the most delectable fodder for his hungry ego.’
‘But if you have the gift of healing,’ persisted Anne, ‘isn’t it wrong not to use it?’
‘Strictly speaking there is no gift of healing – all healing comes from God. A ministry of healing begins when an individual feels called to offer himself as a channel for the healing power of the Holy Spirit. The power comes from without, not from within.’
‘But surely you must have some inborn gift! What about the way you can make your hands tingle?’
‘That’s an interesting physical phenomenon but by itself it accomplishes nothing. You don’t have to make your hands tingle in order to be a healer.’
‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Anne in her most businesslike voice: ‘What exactly did you do just now?’
‘I used my gifts as a psychic to perceive what was going on in your mind. Then I prayed for the charismatic power, the gift from God, to excise the blight from your psyche. This power was granted but the healing was accomplished not merely by the laying-on of hands but by the use of various hypnotic techniques and – most important – by the listening and counselling afterwards. Throughout the whole process the psychic power was used merely as a tool to buttress the charismatic power, and that’s strictly orthodox, strictly as it should be.’
‘But if you followed the rule-book so conscientiously,’ said Anne mystified, ‘and the result was so successful, why are you so ambivalent?’
‘Father Darcy said –’
‘Yes, I know he said you were unsuited for a ministry of healing, but this wasn’t a ministry, it was just one isolated act and I can’t see any harm in it!’
‘Father Darcy said I was never to heal women. If he’d ever dreamt that I’d again try to heal a woman under sexual circumstances, he’d have had apoplexy.’
‘But this was quite different from –’
‘Yes. But it was a dangerous thing to do. Father Darcy said healing would always be dangerous for me. He wanted me to teach – that’s a charism too, of course, and Father Darcy thought I was ideally suited to keep order, command my pupils’ attention and cram knowledge into their heads with the maximum of efficiency. He said a touch of arrogance never did any harm in the classroom.’
‘But did you want to teach?’
‘Not in the least, no, but I wanted to be a good monk so that meant I had to obey orders to the best of my ability. As a matter of fact I was a highly successful Master of Novices – nearly all my men went on to become priests. Father Darcy said –’
‘Jon,’ said Anne, ‘have you any idea – any idea at all – how often you mention this man? And have you any idea – any idea at all – what a monster you make him seem?’
‘He
was
a monster. I detested him all the while I was admiring him.’
‘How thoroughly creepy and peculiar!’
My psyche flinched. I said carefully in a voice devoid of emotion: ‘You speak, of course, from ignorance, so let me try to explain the relationship in terms you can understand. We were two mountaineers roped together and he was showing me the way up the mountain. That meant that the essence of our relationship consisted of neither love nor hate but trust. I trusted him to lead me to the top and he trusted in my ability to follow him there. As men we disliked each other but as psychics we found each other fascinating and as monks we were obliged to love each other as brothers.’
‘I’ve never heard anything quite so convoluted in all my life! Was he responsible for those scars on your back?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘What a sadistic brute! I simply don’t understand how you could have borne to go on obeying him – he beat you up, forced you to do work you didn’t want to do,
murdered your cat
–’
‘He saved me.’ I used my harshest voice and saw her recoil. ‘He taught me how to live with myself. He showed me how to survive. Perhaps you think it’s fun to be a psychic but it’s not. It can be terrifying beyond belief. One spends most of one’s time feeling either cut off from the rest of humanity or else invaded, battered and laid waste by forces beyond one’s control. A lot of psychics either go mad or go to the Devil, but Father Darcy saved me from either of those fates – he made me the sane healthy man you love today. What if he did beat me? What if he did kill that cat? Those were mere pinpricks compared with what I might have suffered if I hadn’t met him! If you’re drowning in the sea and someone comes along with a lifeboat you don’t care if he drags you aboard by your hair and slaps your face to revive you – oh no, quite the reverse! As soon as you’re conscious you just go down on your knees and thank God that the lifeboat turned up in time!’
I stopped speaking. I was shaking. I opened my mouth again
to apologize for shouting at her, but it was she who spoke first. She said in a small voice: ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize. Please forgive me for being so stupid and not understanding.’
I groped for her hand and held it. Eventually I was able to say: ‘The fault’s mine. I never explained my spiritual history. Anne, there’s so much I haven’t told you –’
‘Well, at least I understand now about Father Darcy.’
‘Then you’ll understand why I feel so ambivalent about the healing.’
‘Yes, but I don’t feel ambivalent!’ said Anne. ‘I think the healing was utterly wonderful and I want to make mad passionate love to you until we both pass out with exhaustion!’
Father Darcy’s memory immediately receded. Indeed for the first time in seventeen years it occurred to me that I could survive remarkably well without him.
However next morning Father Darcy had returned to his habitual corner of my memory and I became convinced that I was drifting into a most dubious spiritual state. Deciding that I should seek solitude in order to apply myself to some rigorous spiritual exercises I wondered how to sever myself tactfully from Anne, but the problem was solved when she revealed she had encountered the onset of her monthly indisposition. With a clear conscience I left her to rest at the inn.
After walking some way into the hills I found a church set half a mile from an isolated hamlet and decided that I had reached the ideal place in which to smooth a bedraggled psyche. In fact by that time I could barely wait to sink myself in the austerities of meditation, prayer and ‘lectio divina’, and the hours passed in a healing silence as I read my Missal, studied passages from
The Cloud of Unknowing
and prayed with all the concentration at my command.
After praying for Anne I prayed, as I did daily, that I might
receive further enlightenment about my new call, and when I paused at last I found my mind dwelling idly on the ministry of healing. Was it possible that I now had the wisdom, the maturity and the spiritual strength to triumph consistently over my innate pride and thus attain the continuous humility which such a ministry required? Almost certainly not, and Father Darcy would have said the Devil had put this question into my mind. Nevertheless it was an interesting question. I saw no harm in allowing it to interest me, but of course I could hardly deduce I had received a call to be a healer just because my wife had been enrapt by a healing which would have given Father Darcy apoplexy.
‘Stop whining that you’ve never felt called to teach!’ said Father Darcy in my memory. ‘I want more priests at Ruydale. This house has been all brawn and no brains for too long.’
The years continued to roll back and the next moment my father was saying: ‘If you want to be a clergyman I couldn’t be more pleased – such a fine respectable profession – and of course you could still teach eventually, couldn’t you? With your ability you could have a most successful career at any of the leading Church-of-England public schools …’
My memory somersaulted away from him into my childhood until I heard myself say to my mother during our excursion to the seaside at Brighton: ‘I want to be a sailor when I grow up.’
‘I see you on a big ship,’ said my mother, gazing out to sea, ‘a grey ship with guns on it. But I don’t think you’re a sailor.’
‘Then what am I?’
‘You’re yourself, living in harmony with the universe,’ said my mother, much as she might have said: ‘Tomorrow we’ll have mutton chops for dinner,’ and added: That’s good. Most people don’t.’
‘How will I know if I’m living in harmony with the universe?’
‘You’ll feel that your profession fits you as snugly as a bespoke suit from a very expensive tailor.’
I recollected myself. My mind had wandered, and as I hauled it back from its travels I seemed to hear my mother wondering if the ill-fitting healer’s clothes I had worn up at Cambridge had
at long last been transformed into a bespoke suit from Savile Row. My mother would have been deeply interested in any career as a healer. But what would my father have thought? He would have seen a call to heal in professional medical terms, of course; in his view anyone practising medicine other than a qualified doctor was a quack. But in his own way he would have supported me. ‘If you want to be a doctor I couldn’t be more pleased – such a fine respectable profession – and you could still teach eventually, couldn’t you? With your ability you could have a most successful career at any of the great London teaching hospitals …’
Again I recollected myself, this time with a shudder. What my parents would have thought of a call to heal was irrelevant. All that mattered was what God thought, and God was still silent, his opinion shrouded in a darkness which remained impenetrable.
Closing my Missal I set off on the return journey to the inn.
Anne ran out to meet me as I approached the house, and to my alarm I saw she was thoroughly overwrought.
‘Darling –’ I held out my arms and she hurtled into them ‘– what is it? What’s the matter?’
I sensed her relief receding as her anger gained the upper hand. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded in an unnerving echo of Ruth. ‘You’ve been gone for hours and hours! What on earth happened?’
‘Nothing! I’ve just been praying, reading and meditating.’
She stared at me. ‘All this time?’
I suddenly realized my premarital reticence was about to catch up with me yet again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said rapidly. ‘I see now I should have warned you –’
‘Yes, you damn well should!’ stormed Anne. ‘How could you have been so thoroughly selfish and insensitive! Didn’t you think of me at all?’
‘Oh yes! I spent a long time praying for you –’
‘I didn’t mean that!’ shouted Anne, and then stammering: ‘I thought you were dead,’ she collapsed sobbing against my chest.
“Obviously I’ve been very much at fault,’ I said as we attained the sanctuary of our room.