Authors: Susan Howatch
Tags: #Historical, #Psychological, #Sagas, #Fiction
‘What began all over again, Katie?’
‘It. I don’t know what it was. But something had happened to Christian. Something had gone terribly wrong.’
After a pause I said: ‘When did this begin?’
‘Oh, ages ago, but it didn’t become chronic until about six months before he died. I think it started in 1961 when Helen was born. "You name it," he said as if he couldn’t have cared less. Oh, how I cried! But then he recovered and was nice again ... for a while. By 1963 I was in despair – but then the miracle happened and Marina joined us.’ She withdrew one of her hands from mine in order to wipe her eyes, but the tears had stopped and I knew that by listening I was helping her.
I made a small noise indicating intense sympathy and deep interest. Then I reclasped her hand.
‘I love Marina,’ she said. ‘She’s such a wonderful friend. Christian loved her too because she was so bright and amusing and she never bored him. "If Katie were as bright and amusing as you are," he said to her in 1963, "she wouldn’t be driving me up the wall." "You absolute pig!" said Marina. "How dare you be so beastly about darling Katie!" I was terrified when she said that, but do you know what happened? He laughed. He actually laughed – and then he apologised to me and said sorry, he knew he’d been a bastard but he was going to reform. Of course that was when I realised we had to have Marina in our marriage.’
‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound as if she had made an unremarkable observation. On an impulse I added: ‘How very perceptive of you.’
‘Well, she had such a wonderfully benign effect on him, you see, and she was so devoted to both of us. We’d known her for a long time – that grandmother of hers living almost next door to my in-laws – but because she was so much younger than we were we didn’t start to meet her at social occasions until about 1962. And then in the May of 1963 she gave that wonderful party at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close ... you were there, weren’t you? I can remember you dressed in jeans and eating a sausage roll –’
‘– and I can remember Christian being on edge with you.’
‘Yes, he was – and that was when Marina made her stunning interventidn and I realised we had to have her in our marriage ... Of course sex didn’t come into it at all.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, Marina finds sex repulsive, but Christian quite accepted that it wasn’t on offer – in fact he liked that, found it original. Women were always throwing themselves at him, just as men were always throwing themselves at Marina.’
‘Sounds as if they were made for each other.’
‘Oh, we were all made for each other! It was quite perfect ... for a while. But in the end, in 1965, not even Marina could stop him going off every weekend with Perry to that bloody boat at Bosham.’
‘How did you feel about Perry Palmer?’
‘Jealous. Funny, wasn’t it? You’d think I’d have been jealousof the woman and tolerant of the man, but it was quite the other way round.’
Was Christian as close to Perry as he was to Marina?’
‘Oh, closer, because of their long shared past. But the relationship was certainly similar. Of course sex never came into it at all.’
‘Ah.’
‘No, Perry’s no more interested in sex than Marina is, and anyway Christian was never drawn sexually to other men. My brother Simon used to say that Christian was very middle-class about sex,’ Katie added, unintentionally revealing her upbringing in an aristocratic world where sexual permutations failed to raise eyebrows, ‘but that was just because Christian found smutty jokes boring and immorality an unintelligent waste of time and energy. Christian was actually a very moral man. It was the clerical background.’
As I knew so well, a clerical background was no guarantee of moral behaviour but I understood what she was trying to say: a clerical upbringing at least makes one acutely aware of morality even if one fails to wind up as a replica of Sir Galahad.
‘What’s Perry’s background?’ I said, more to keep the therapeutic conversation going than to satisfy my curiosity.
‘His father was some military VIP in India. Wealthy family but new money,’ said Katie, again offering a glimpse of a background where respectable fortunes had to be at least three hundred years old. ‘His grandfather manufactured something in Lancashire, a sort of hip-bath it was. Perry has a picture of the original drawing in his lavatory at Albany.’
‘I think I remember it. When exactly did Perry meet Christian?’
‘On their first day at Winchester when they were both thirteen. I didn’t meet Christian till much later, and we didn’t marry till he was nearly thirty. Sometimes I feel I never caught up with Perry ... oh, how baffling it all seems in retrospect! The truth is that at the end it was Perry he turned to, but why the marriage was disintegrating I don’t know. I just feel increasingly sure that it was all my fault, and I’ve reached the stage where I don’t know how to bear either my guilt or my ignorance.’
‘I understand,’ I said at once. But did I? One could say that she was being haunted to an abnormal degree by her unhappy memories, but beyond this dramatic symbolic language it seemed to me that a very commonplace situation was being described: a man had fallen out of love with a woman, got bored and hadn’t quite been able to figure out how to extricate himself from the relationship. Love affairs disintegrated in that way every day, and so did marriages — although of course the disintegration of a marriage would usually be a more complex matter. It would be rarer too because in marriage friendship was supposed to take over when the sexual excitement had expired, but supposing one woke up one morning and realised that not only was desire dead but that even the possibility of friendship had fizzled? Inevitably one would toy with the idea of divorce, but divorce might be undesirable for a number of social, professional and financial reasons. In such a jam what could be more natural than to escape from home as often as possible in order to relax with one’s best friend? That all made sense. But it also made sense to note that none of this marital distress was necessarily the wife’s fault. She could have been a model wife and still have induced boredom. The real difficulty almost certainly lay in the fact that the marriage had been based on illusions which time had mercilessly exposed.
I said with care: ‘It certainly seems that Christian had a problem which was putting a strain on the marriage, but that problem needn’t have been connected with you.’
‘If he had a problem,’ she said at once, ‘I should have been told about it. The fact that he couldn’t confide in me just underlines how deeply I failed him.’ And she added in a rush: ‘You do see now, don’t you, why I wanted to contact him at the séance? I wanted to tell him I was sorry for whatever it was I did wrong, and I wanted to hear him say: "I forgive you."‘
The words ‘repentance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘absolution’ and ‘salvation’ flashed across my mind in an automatic clerical reaction to the pastoral challenge which now confronted me. I had beenabout to draw the conversation around to the subject of seeking help -- I had already phrased my opening remark on the prolonged physical stress which could result from the mental torment of guilt — but now I suddenly thought: maybe I can still fix this. And I felt driven to wipe out not just the fiasco of the séance but my guilt that I had only exacerbated her grief.
‘Katie,’ I said, looking straight into her eyes and putting considerable emotion into my voice, ‘you did your best to be a good wife and we can never do more than our best. Set aside these bad feelings about yourself. If you did do something wrong, it’s obvious you repent with all your heart and that means you’re forgiven.’
‘But —’
I piled on the emotional pressure by leaning forward and tightening my grip on her hands. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m not Christian. I can’t be him saying: "I forgive you." But I can be me saying: "You’re forgivable." That’s because you loved him and love generates forgiveness, it’s automatic, it’s assured, it’s built into the system.’
‘But I feel my love was such a failure — I feel
I
’
m
such a failure —’
‘Absolutely not. You loved him devotedly, with your whole heart — and that makes you a success, a great success, the greatest success you could possibly be.’
‘Oh Nick, you’re being so kind, so —’
‘A beautiful woman capable of a deep, unselfish love — of , ourse Christian would forgive you if he were with us now! Any man would forgive you. I forgive you.’
The next thing I knew I was kissing her and her arms were sliding around my neck. This was hardly what I had intended to happen, but I knew how important it was to restore her self-esteem. Christian had destroyed her sense of her own worth, I could see that now, but if I could give her back her faith in herself and in the power of love ... I was dimly aware of my feet leaving the floor as my body arranged itself on the bed beside her.
She said in a low voice: ‘You’re standing in for Christian, aren’t you? Maybe the séance worked after all and he’s speaking to me through you.’
I couldn’t answer. I just thought: a couple more kisses, then I stop, no harm done, total cure.
‘Tell me again you forgive me.’
‘I forgive you, Katie,’ I said, saying Christian’s lines for him. ‘I promise.’
Immediately she clung to me with great passion.
Funny how difficult it was not to be passionate in return. No, it wasn’t funny at all. And it wasn’t just difficult either. It was quite impossible not to return that passion, especially when her fingers encountered the zip of my jeans. Her fingers? My fingers? The terrible part is I don’t remember. No, they were her fingers, must have been. Mine were already unbuttoning her blouse.
Her last words before we copulated were: ‘I feel forgiven now.’
Pathetic.
I can hardly bring myself to admit this, but I still honestly believed I was healing her.
Game, set and match to the Devil.
What a catastrophe.
V In my rational moments, as I’ve already noted, I wasn’t attracted to underweight women who looked fragile enough to break during intercourse. But this was not one of my rational moments. The obsession to achieve a healing had unplugged my brain.
She didn’t break during intercourse. It was afterwards that she went to pieces.
As soon as she could speak she said in a shaking voice: ‘You’re not standing in for Christian at all. You couldn’t. You’re quite different.’
‘It’s okay, Katie, it’s okay –’But of course it wasn’t.
‘I never realised how different it could be – I thought all men made love in the same way.’
‘Look, don’t be upset, I –’
‘I’ve betrayed him. And
you
’
ve
betrayed
me!
’
‘
No, no – honestly – just think of it as a kind of therapy –’
‘
Therapy?
My God, how utterly revolting!’
‘But Katie, I didn’t mean –’
‘You’ve deliberately taken advantage of my grief – you’ve cold-bloodedly exploited me –’
‘But all I wanted to do was help you!’
‘You think
that
could help? You deceived me into thinking you could stand in for Christian and then raped me when I was in no fit state to fight you off!’
‘It couldn’t have been rape. Raped women don’t have orgasms.’
She hit me. I gasped. ‘Katie, for God’s sake –’ She hit me again. ‘Get away from me!’ she said revolted. ‘Never come near me again! I hate you,
I hate you,
I HATE YOU –’
I grabbed my clothes and fled.
In my sitting-room I found I couldn’t recite the Jesus prayer to calm me down, couldn’t even remember it. I buttoned my shirt wrong, nearly fell over as I pulled on my jeans, and all the while I was becoming aware that the room was a shambles, the fallen chairs and smashed glass creating the impression of a violated space. The chilly air had a peculiarly desolate quality, and as I shuddered I at last remembered the mantra.
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner ...’
Never had the prayer seemed more appropriate.
In the bedroom Katie began to scream for Marina. I shuddered again and knew I was in hell.
VI
Marina returned ten minutes later. As soon as I saw the car I went to the bathroom, where Katie had barricaded herself, and told her the good news. She ran downstairs sobbing. Outside the two women embraced before Marina guided Katie into the car and drove away.
Leaving the landing window I stumbled downstairs. Sounds in the dining-room indicated that the members of the Community were having lunch. No conversation was permitted at meal-times but Dorothy the ex-missionary was reading aloud from
Pilgrim
’
s Progress.
Silently I slunk into the kitchen and swiped the brandy bottle, which was kept in the house for medicinal purposes. It lived under the sink next to the spare bottles of lavatory-cleaner, a home reflecting the contempt with which the Community regarded alcohol. I had a swig straight from the bottle. My tastebuds felt as if they’d been mugged but within a minute I felt steadier. Burying the bottle in the cupboard again I rinsed out my mouth with water and set off rapidly through the back garden to my father’s cottage in the woods.
VII
I knew I could tell my father only a highly censored version of what had happened, but nonetheless I knew I had to see him. Whenever I was in pieces there was only one person who could weld me together again.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said my father as I entered his cottage. Thank goodness. I had the feeling you were troubled in some way, perhaps even a little frightened.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you switch off sometimes? I’m sick and tired of you invading my privacy with your ESP!’ Of course I was terrified how much he had intuited.
My father’s grey eyes filled with tears. He was very, very old now, almost eighty-eight, and he moved slowly. His greatheight had been reduced by a stoop. He was still
compos mentis
but his body was wearing out. Eight years after his successful prostate operation he was suffering from bladder problems again, and although tests had revealed there was no cancer the pain and difficulty continued. His digestion, which had always been excellent, had begun to cause trouble. He vomited, suffered headaches. The doctor continued to prove there was no cancer and in despair prescribed some tranquillisers which my father, much insulted, flushed down the lavatory. Now something had gone wrong with his hands and he refused to see the doctor at all. He made his own diagnosis, eczema, and rejecting all offers of help from Rowena, Agnes and Dorothy, he somehow managed to bandage the hands himself. Mark and Luke, the ex-monks, and Bob, the ex-naval-chaplain, spent hours arguing about the dermatitis entry in the medical dictionary but came to no conclusion. Morgan, the ex-pop-star, had left the Community long ago after abandoning his attempt to write an opera about God, and Theo, the ex-ordinand who thought he was being persecuted by Buddha, was now in a mental home. The Community had been reduced to six.
‘Oh Father, I’m sorry, I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to yell at you like that ...’ I couldn’t stand it when his eyes filled with tears. This tendency to weepiness was new, another result of extreme old age. He couldn’t control his emotions as well as he used to, and his psychic powers, once so formidably disciplined, were now more erratic. I was sure he hadn’t deliberately tried to tune in to my activities; the tuning in would have been a mere reflex, triggered by his anxiety.
Hating myself for losing patience with him I said: ‘As a matter of fact you were right in sensing that I’ve been having an awkward time.’ Picking up Whitby, who was skulking around my ankles, I dumped him in my father’s lap. I did this not just to give myself a chance to review the censored story I had prepared but because I thought it was once more time Whitby earned his keep by having a tranquillising effect on those nearest and dearest to him.
I stroked the striped fur. So did my father. Whitby tried to knead my father’s knees but collapsed in ecstasy seconds later. The sonorous rise and fall of his purring thrummed around the room.
Having reviewed my story I took a deep breath and said: ‘I’ve just had a very disturbing visit from Marina and Katie. They wanted me to hold a séance but of course I told them that was out of the question. However, when I realised Katie wanted to make contact with Christian in order to obtain his forgiveness, it occurred to me that this was a pastoral situation where I could be of use. I thought that if we all prayed together . the grace of God ... love and peace ... well, I might have been able to alleviate this mysterious burden of guilt, mightn’t I? It really did seem as if I could be of use.’
‘Nicholas, you’re not yet a priest. And you’re certainly not a doctor. If Mrs Aysgarth was in such a troubled state, you should have advised her to seek professional help.’
‘Yes, of course. However —’
‘Very well, tell me the worst. What happened?’
I prepared to skate on thin ice. ‘We sat down at the table in my sitting-room and I led them in prayer. I wanted to convey that Christian was at peace with God, so I prayed that we might be allowed to experience that peace. I didn’t pray for his soul — I thought non-church-going Protestants might have balked at prayers for the dead — but I thought that if we simply remembered him before God ... well, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’
‘No, but what exactly was your motive here, Nicholas? Did you act solely out of a desire to help Mrs Aysgarth or were you perhaps attracted by the chance to adopt a powerful role in the presence of two beautiful and charming young women?’
‘I most strongly deny —’
‘Yes, of course you do. But Nicholas, even if your motive was as pure as driven snow, this apparently harmless attempt at prayer could still have been dangerous. If someone’s emotionally disturbed — and in particular if they’re haunted by guilt — any psychic activity, even prayer, can trigger an unpleasant reaction.’
‘But this was worse than just an unpleasant reaction from Katie! There was an interruption by a discarnate shred.’ ‘Are you quite sure you weren’t conducting a séance?’ ‘Oh no, Father! That was why I was so surprised when —’ ‘I too find it surprising. An emotional disturbance from Mrs Aysgarth is easy to explain: the psychic activity of prayer might have caused her to break down as she sensed the opportunity to express her grief and guilt — she could easily have had hysterics or possibly even a psychotic episode if the channel of prayer wasn’t wide enough to contain her emotions. But I wouldn’t have expected an infiltration of the scene by a discarnate shred unless you were actively trying to align yourself with the dead.’
‘Father, it wasn’t a séance. Honestly. It was just a pseudo-séance. I —’
‘You appal me.’
‘But Father, listen —’
Did you all hold hands and deliberately try to align yourselves with the spirit of a dead man?’
‘Yes, but since Christian’s at peace with God, surely an alignment could only be beneficial?’
‘How do you know he’s at peace with God?’
‘Well, I —’ I stared at him. Then as my scalp prickled I stammered: ‘I assumed — I felt sure — I mean, I just knew, it was "gnosis" —’
‘Don’t you dare use that word to me!’
‘I’m not using it as a Gnostic — I’m using it as a Christian who needs a code-word for psychic certainties —’
‘There
are
no psychic certainties.’
‘But Father —’
‘Be quiet. Now listen to me.
Never
try to communicate with the dead, even those likely to be at peace with God, because even a seemingly harmless attempt to align yourself with a departed soul can have a profoundly disturbing effect on the living.’
‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why what happened did happen. The discarnate shred was malign — I mean, it was
very
malign, it was driven by the most tremendous power, and in the end I realised that this power could only have been generated by —’
‘I should think it most unlikely that the Devil could have been bothered to drop in on your shoddy little séance. It’s much more probable that you lost your nerve and began to fantasise once the energy disturbances spiralled out of control. I assume that there were, in fact, energy disturbances?’
‘Yes, and Katie was in a sort of coma, moaning and groaning as if she were possessed —’
‘Rubbish, of course she wasn’t possessed! She was merely manifesting her deep psychological troubles. Did you hypnotise her?’
‘No, Father, certainly not.’
‘It would explain the appearance of coma. How on earth did you regain control of the scene?’
‘I shouted to the Devil: "In the name of Jesus Christ, Satan, be gone from this room!" and all the glass in the picture-frame shattered as he went out of the window.’
‘Nothing went out of the window, Nicholas, except the vibrations of your guilt and your panic.’
‘But Father, that force I experienced — okay, maybe it wasn’t the Devil himself, maybe it was just a malign shred acting alone — well, whatever it was, it came from without. It wasn’t welling up from within.’
‘How did you experience it?’
‘As a mounting pressure on the psyche.’
‘Exactly. It was a pressure exerted by your unconscious mind — which in your panic would have seemed quite external to your ego.’
‘But Father —’
‘All right, Nicholas, calm down. I think our disagreement is an illusion created by the fact that we’re mixing up two different languages, the religious language employing symbols such as "the Devil", and the scientific language which employs concepts such as "the unconscious mind". Why don’t we try to produce a version of your story in each language so that we can seewe’re talking about a single truth? Then perhaps we won’t get so cross with each other.’
I was hooked, just as I always was when religion and psychology were seen not as mortal enemies — the grand illusion of so many people — but as complementary approaches to a multi-sided truth. I gave Whitby another long, lingering stroke. Then I said to my father: ‘Okay, go on.’