Mystical Paths (12 page)

VIII

Whichever language we adopt,’ said my father, ‘it’s safe to say that some very unpleasant forces were on the loose in that room. It’s also safe to say that Mrs Aysgarth was in a highly disturbed state and that you too became disturbed when you found the scene was moving beyond your control.

‘Very well, let’s express ourselves in religious language first. We can say that something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth; we can describe it by a symbol and call it the demon of guilt. When you finally saw how horrific that demon was, your psyche was opened up by your understanding with the result that the demon was tempted to move from Mrs Aysgarth to you. You experienced this demon as a strong pressure on the psyche. However, you then repelled this demonic invasion by calling on the greatest exorcist who ever lived and who we believe is living still; by invoking his name you aligned yourself with his power and succeeded in expelling the demon from the room.

‘So much for the religious language. By the liberal use of important symbols we’ve created a true description of what happened, but there’s another way of expressing the truth and it doesn’t diminish the religious description; it merely complements and confirms it. Let’s now turn to the verbal symbols of psychology.

‘Something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth, we said. We can express that in the other language by saying that she was suffering from a neurosis — obsessed by a sense of guilt. This neurotic guilt is rooted in her unconscious, but has recently begun to break into her conscious mind and lead to an impairment of her health. When you interfered, conducting this séance and subjecting her to psychic manipulation, the control normally exercised by her conscious mind was removed with the result that the darkest and most chaotic emotions began to rise out of the unconscious and manifest themselves in a variety of frightening ways.

‘Mrs Aysgarth may not, medically speaking, have been experiencing a psychotic episode, but I suspect her behaviour had the same effect on you as if you’d been witnessing the behaviour of a violent schizophrenic: you were terrified of what was going to happen next and your terror combined with your guilt that you’d induced such an appalling state of affairs. This made you unusually receptive to the guilt now spewing out of Mrs Aysgarth’s unconscious mind, and when her guilt merged with yours the merger appeared to you as a highly dangerous invasive force. In an instinctive gesture to repel the invasion you invoked the name of Our Lord — which is the point where the two languages meet. The invocation gave you the confidence to regain control; or in other words, the invocation resulted in an outpouring of grace which enabled you to triumph over the evil.’

My father paused for a moment before concluding: ‘So the disaster can be accurately described in both languages and there would appear to be no mystery at all about what happened, but I confess there’s one feature which still puzzles me: Mrs Aysgarth’s guilt. It must have been very extreme to create such a disturbance. Indeed it hints at something grossly abnormal.’

I said cautiously: ‘Afterwards she revealed to me that even though she’d tried her hardest to be a good wife the marriage had been in bad shape.’

‘That would explain the existence of some degree of guilt on her part, certainly, but I’d suspect there was more she wasn’t revealing to you — much more. Tell me, was she difficult to hypnotise?’

‘No, she —’ I stopped. He’d caught me. Clever, cunning old —

‘So you did use hypnosis. I’m outraged, Nicholas, absolutely outraged. I’ve told you time and time again —’

‘I know, I know, I’m sorry —’

‘And how dare you lie to me about it earlier! Did you seriously think you’d take me in? As Father Darcy used to say —’ Here we went again. I knew what was coming. Father Darcy had said to anyone who he judged was making an unsatisfactory confession —

‘— "You’re saying the words you want me to hear but I hear the words you can’t bring yourself to say,"‘ quoted my father, and added: ‘You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully, and when I think that in a few weeks’ time you’ll be ordained I feel quite ill with despair.’

‘I’ll drive over to Starwater straight away — see Father Peters — make my confession —’

‘Yes, do all those things — and in future stay away from poor Mrs Aysgarth, who quite obviously needs medical help as soon as possible. Which reminds me, how did you deal with her once you’d brought her out of the hypnotic state?’

‘Oh, I just talked to her, held her hand for a bit, calmed her down —’ By this time I was on my feet and hurtling from the room.

‘If Father Darcy were here,’ said my father, intuitive powers "ow working full blast, ‘I think he’d demand a somewhat fuller explanation. In fact if Father Darcy were here —’

But he wasn’t.

I flung open the door and fled.

IX staggered across to the chapel, which stood near my father’s cottage on the floor of the dell. A hundred yards away I could see the wall which surrounded the grounds of the Manor, and I could also see the door there which the members of the Community used when they brought provisions to my father. It was easier to park the car beyond the wall and walk the few yards up the track to the cottage than to carry the shopping-bags for ten minutes along the meandering path from the main house, and in those days, before crime became a problem even in rural areas, my father kept the door in the wall unlocked during the daylight hours.

I was in such a state that I nearly bolted straight down the track to the road and hared to the village pub for another shot of brandy, but the chapel exerted its familiar magnetism and I headed across the floor of the dell instead. The chapel was young, about a hundred and twenty years old, and had been built in the style of Inigo Jones with such panache that it never seemed like a pastiche of his Palladian designs. It was small but perfectly proportioned, austere when viewed from the outside but fussier when viewed from within. This fussiness arose from the fact that my father had been unable to resist decorating the interior with various sumptuous Anglo-Catholic aids to worship. They formed a bizarre contrast with the plain, stark beauty of the altar’s oak cross, made by him before he had left the Order.

There were candles everywhere – my father was mad on candles – candles on the altar, candles to the side of the altar, prickets for the burning of votive candles at the back behind the pews. There was a holy water stoup by the door. Another candle (no electricity; that would have been cheating) burned before the Blessed Sacrament which was reserved (of course) in a pyx. The whole place reeked of incense but I didn’t mind that; I’d grown up with it, and a strong whiff of the Fordite Special always made me feel relaxed and at home. What I minded were the pictures, florid representations of biblical scenes which in turn represented my father’s uncertain taste in art. This uncertainty found its most embarrassing expression in a sentimental plaster statue of the Virgin and Child, vulgarly coloured and placed to the right of the altar on a fake-jewelled plinth. This had been installed after my mother’s death. My mother, a Protestant who had loved my father not because ofhis Anglo-Catholicism but in spite of it, would have booted that statue out of her ancestors’ chapel in no time flat.

It interested me that my father, who was extremely ascetic in so many of his habits, should choose to worship in this particular way. Ritualism does tend to be attractive to mystics because it’s designed to express those mysteries which are beyond the power of words to describe, and indeed I believed my father when he said a rich liturgy infallibly created for him a deep sense of the numinous and a consciousness of the presence of Christ in the mass. Yet now that I was older I thought there was also a psychological reason for his attraction to this lavish, extravagant classical ritualism which had been such a daring liturgical fashion in his youth. He had had a sedate upbringing in a little Victorian villa where money had been far from plentiful, and this had given him not only austere tastes but an inverted snobbery about the luxuries money could buy; he always had to pretend he hated luxury, but I think deep down he found it attractive and the only way he could give vent to this attraction was in his religious life. That somehow sanctified the illicit passion which could never be consciously acknowledged, and becoming an Anglo-Catholic had been his way of escaping from the emotional constipation and straitened circumstances of that Victorian middle-class upbringing.

But I hadn’t had that kind of upbringing, and now that I was old enough to think for myself, I felt increasingly confused ibout Anglo-Catholicism. It was well over a century since the Oxford Movement had relaunched the Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the ageing of a once dynamic movement was becoming all too apparent. Undermined by Vatican
II

which (so the traditionalists said) had Protestantised the Church of Rome, the Anglo-Catholics had been left high and dry with a bunch of rituals which were going out of fashion not only among the Romans but among the Anglicans. The new trend towards a weekly parish Eucharist, that watered-down version of the mass, now made the Anglo-Catholic services look archaic and – that most damning word of the 196os – irrelevant. And the majority of English church- goers – the Protestant majority – hated ritualism anyway.

Yet I had been brought up an Anglo-Catholic. It was my wing of my Church. I belonged there, and as a mystic I too was drawn to the numinous qualities of the services. Yet although I knew I couldn’t abandon Anglo-Catholicism I was deeply dissatisfied with it. I felt strongly that it should be modernised but the traditionalists who ruled the roost were holding fast to the old ways as they developed a siege mentality. No hope of change there, and meanwhile that fatal old-fashioned look was becoming tinged with decadence. Often it seemed to me that the idol of the die-hards was now a god called LITURGY — and there were other even more unsavoury hints of decadence than idolatry, hints that were beginning to surface in the sexual hothouse of the late 1960s. Anglo-Catholicism had always attracted a homosexual element, but in Victorian times the homosexual priests had committed themselves to the celibate ideal and followed the fashion for intense friendships which were never consummated. Now celibacy was on the wane and society worshipped the idol called SEX. No wonder AngloCatholicism was in trouble. Sometimes I thought even heterosexual Anglo-Catholics were only interested in providing a camp stage-show of all the fashions imported from pre-Vatican-II Rome.· I said nothing of my dissatisfaction to my father. A relic of another age, the age when Anglo-Catholicism had been a dynamic movement sweeping all before it, he would have been deeply upset by my critical thoughts. He might even have thought I was a closet Protestant but I wasn’t. I just hated seeing Anglo-Catholicism go down the drain, and during my terms at Theological College I had found it a relief to retreat into the churchmanship of the Middle Way which I found not only in the College chapel but in the Cathedral. There was an Anglo-Catholic church in Starbridge – St Paul’s at Langley Bottom – but I never went near it. The Principal of the College said it had fallen into the hands of cranks. (‘Cranks’ was his shorthand for homosexuals and/or nutcases). Even my father, who thanks to his small circle of distinguished visitors was wellprimed with diocesan gossip, said once that he did hope I wouldn’t go there, and I was relieved to find I had no difficulty in giving him the necessary reassurance. I had no interest whatsoever in a square, dated ritualism oozing eccentric decadence. It would have been far too pain ful to watch, particularly since I attended my father’s services and knew how with the right priest even a dated ritualism could be made fresh, exciting and above all spiritually alive.

The big irony of this decline in Anglo-Catholicism was that a great many Anglo-Catholics were still able to kid themselves that everything was fine. This was because the Archbishop of Canterbury himself stood in the Church’s Catholic tradition, but if one stopped being sentimentally proud of the Archbishop, the uneasiness soon began. Although Ramsey might look old-fashioned he certainly wasn’t decadent and he certainly wasn’t out of touch with the harsh ecclesiastical realities of the 1960s, but I was now convinced he wasn’t typical of the High-Church wing. That wing needed to be revamped, given a hormone shot, dragged kicking and screaming into the midst of the Now Generation ... or so I found myself thinking for the umpteenth time as I sat down amidst the florid, old-fashioned Catholic trappings in our family chapel that afternoon, but then who was I to criticise my elders and betters? I was just a twenty-five-year-old ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails.

As I tried to crawl back on the rails again I knelt in the front pew, gave thanks to God for my deliverance from the demonic power unleashed at the séance, and prayed that Katie might be restored to full health. Then I set about making a comprehensive confession. I had become accustomed to making a private confession to God after every sexual lapse – a meaningless exercise, as I well knew, since I had had no intention of giving up fornication, but at least I’d found it helpful to go through the formal motions of repentance, and at least I had been able to tell myself that if I prayed regularly for the grace to be chaste there was always the chance that God might respond to my request. However, the catastrophe with Katie was in a very different league from my regular bouts of fornication and required not merely the acting out of a repentance ritual but a full-blooded, utterly honest confession combined with an unqualified promise to God that I would never behave in such a disgusting way again. This time my prayer for the grace to reform would be unmarked by insincerity. As I begged on my knees for forgiveness, every word would come straight from the heart.

Off I started. One by one I dragged my sins out of my memory and laid them carefully before God like a cat laying all manner of mangled little corpses before his owner. Pride, arrogance, lust, selfishness, vanity, disobedience, deceit (these last two related to the interview with my father) – and worst of all, the sexual abuse of a damaged human being. This was cruelty, a sin which always seemed to me to be much worse than mere lust. Nobody got much worked up about lust nowadays except my Uncle Charles ‘Anti-Sex’ Ashworth, but cruelty ... Yet I hadn’t meant to be cruel. I’d meant to be – no, God only knew what I’d meant to be.

Thinking of God recalled me to my confession. I went on kneeling, mentally pawing over all the sins, but eventually I recited the Jesus prayer. This had a calming effect. Afterwards I scooped up all the sins, offered them to God and said without words: sorry, sorry, sorry, I want to reform, I want to turn around and lead a better life, please forgive me, please help me, please rescue me from this awful mess my life’s become. I prayed very hard, wordlessly, along these lines for some time. I did indeed feel deeply ashamed.

Finally I topped off the confession with the Lord’s Prayer and flipped the switch in my head to tune in to the Light. To my great relief a calmness instantly enveloped me, and I knew I’d been forgiven, I just knew, it was – But my father hated that word ‘gnosis’ which recalled the Gnostic heresy.

Some people said Jung had been a Gnostic. My father had introduced me to Jung’s writings on religion with the caveat that I should beware of anything he wrote about Christianity.

Jung was sympathetic to religion but often got in a muddle about Christianity and misrepresented the orthodox view. ‘Nevertheless he’s a profoundly religious man,’ my father had said, ‘and his writings are of immense interest as we all, priests and laymen alike, struggle to understand the human spirit.’ My father had long since grasped that the languages of Christianity and psychology could form two ways of expressing one truth, but I longed for a detailed synthesis which would make Christianity blaze across the minds of the unchurched mid
^.
twentieth-century masses and render its message meaningful. It’s no good performing the classic academic exercise of expressing Christianity in terms of the latest fashionable philosophy. That appeals to no one outside the universities. For the mid-twentieth century you’ve got to express Christianity psychologically because even the average moron at a cocktail party has heard of the Oedipus complex. Or in other words, psychology’s the grassroots intellectual language of our time, and if you can translate Christianity into
that,
everyone will finally understand what the preachers are wittering on about in the pulpit – and then with understanding will come spiritual enlightenment .. .

I went on planning the conversion of England, but of course I was just an ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails and was busy kidding himself he had crawled back on to them again.

At last, convinced that after such a successful confession I was now free to embark on the moral life which would signify my repentance, I set aside all thought of sin and realised I had missed lunch. To my surprise I found I was hungry. Back at the house I raided the larder, consumed two large roast-beef sandwiches, retired to my bedroom and slept.

Of course I never went to Starwater Abbey to see Father Peters.

X My father had calmed me by his brisk dismissal of the Devil during his bilingual analysis; I was now able to believe that although I had encountered a demon, its master had been absent from the scene. Or, in the other language: I was now able to believe I had encountered neurosis but not the insanity which destroys the personality and prompts the murder and maiming of others. Nevertheless the memory of the paranormal phenomena continued to trouble me, and that evening in my sitting-room I began to reflect on the condition known in religious language as ‘possession’. If Christian was occupying Katie’s psyche in such a way that he was driving her to breakdown, could this perhaps represent the traditional ‘demonic possession’ in an updated form? My father had brushed aside the possibility that Katie was, in a traditional sense, ‘possessed’, but it seemed to me that the reality behind all the language did reflect a form of psychological possession.

I juggled with the two languages for a moment. One could say that Christian’s memory was at the root of Katie’s guilt, and that this guilt was making her neurotic. But could one say that Christian, not at peace with God as I had blithely supposed, was roaming around as a malign discarnate shred and infesting her? Perhaps, if one acknowledged the heavy use of symbolism, one could — but how confusing language was, how distracting! No wonder philosophers had become so bogged down in the problems it created for clear thinking.

The intercom buzzed on the side-table.

‘Call for you, Nicholas,’ said Agnes as I responded with a grunt. ‘Marina Markhampton.’

‘Okay, I’ll talk to her.’ I kept the bell of my telephone extension switched off because I liked the Community to screen my incoming calls; this was useful when I was meditating or studying or just feeling unsociable. Picking up the receiver I said: ‘Hang on, Marina,’ and waited for the click as Agnes hung up. It was always vital to wait for the click. Then I said: ‘Hi — how is she?’’Look, we’ve got to talk.’

The hairs rose on the nape of my neck. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘When she got home she tried to cut her wrists.’

I opened my mouth. No words emerged. I clutched the phone and started to sweat.

‘It’s all right,’ said Marina rapidly. ‘She didn’t get far — the knife she chose was blunt. I got hold of the doctor and we managed to get her into that funny-farm near Banbur
^y
, the one where everyone goes to be dried out and detoxified. Emma-Louise went there after her first husband ran off with another man, Holly spent a month there after her first suicide attempt and Venetia’s sister Arabella practically lives there, so it’s all madly respectable.’

I managed to say: ‘Katie needs a hospital, not a chic rest-home! She needs a psychiatrist!’

‘My dear, there are oodles of psychiatrists there, they’re wall-to-wall. Anyway, I got Katie settled in and now I’m back in Oxford waiting for Katie’s mother to collect the children — that au pair’s good but I don’t think it’s right to give her total responsibility for three children in a crisis which could last some time. I plan to stay the night here, go back to the funny-farm tomorrow morning for a visit and then head for London. If you could come to my flat —’

What time?’

‘About three? Oh, and don’t forget I’ve moved from Cadogan Place — you do have my new address, don’t you?’

I flicked stiff-fingered through my address-book and eventually read aloud some words which included ‘Eaton Terrace’.

‘That’s it. Thanks, Nick.’ She hung up.

That night I walked in my sleep, and when I awoke the next morning I was lying on the library couch. That shocked me so much that I almost, decided to visit Father Peters after all. Eleven years ago after my mother’s death he had cured me of somnambulism just as he had simultaneously cured me of triggering the poltergeist activity; he had taught me to stroke my psyche at regular intervals by prayer and meditation, and to channel the abnormal psychic energy out of my body by means of strenuous physical activity.

Remembering these vital lessons I devoted myself to reciting the mantra for half an hour. Then after attending mass I meticulously expended a lavish amount of energy on washing and waxing my car until it looked like a four-wheeled fantasy in an advertisement. But all the effort was worthwhile. By this time I was feeling well in control of myself, and as soon as I had finished an early lunch I drove off in my jet-black Mini-Cooper towards the road which led to London.

XI Marina now lived in a large maisonette, the bottom two floors of one of those houses which cost a fortune a stone’s throw from Eaton Square. There was a sixty-foot garden, all paved, with a fountain flanked by stone cherubs at the far end. Marina told me she planned to hold ‘happenings’ there provided that the summer weather was benign and the neighbours were tame.

‘Nice,’ I said as she indicated the garden from the drawing-room window, but in fact I thought the place was unpleasantly sterile. I don’t like stone gardens where a cat can’t even scrape an essential hole with his paw.

‘Drink?’ said Marina.

‘Coke. Thanks.’ I prowled around the room which was expensively furnished in exquisite taste. The atmosphere indoors was sterile too, but maybe this particular air of sterility arose from the fact that Marina had only recently moved in and hadn’t had time to impress her personality on her surroundings. Or possibly the sterility reflected some off-key aspect of Marina herself: the beauty that was a little too perfect, the charm that was a little too artificial, the brain that she had long since consigned to mothballs.. She had stopped pretending to work when she had become engaged to Michael Ashworth, but she had never attempted to be more than an ornamental secretary. I often wondered if her background had deformed her in someway. Her father was a typical upper-class oaf whose preoccupation in life was gambling at the races. Her mother, a far more intriguing character, was a minor painter of some repute but seemed to float through life without caring much about what went on outside her studio. Marina’s brother Douglas ran a starchy antiques business in St James’s. There were two much older married sisters about whom I knew almost nothing. Marina was the afterthought,
sui generis,
emotionally detached from the other members of her family who seemed to bear so little resemblance to her. Perhaps it was because of this detachment that she devoted herself so intensely to friendships with people of both sexes. Uninterested in her family, uninterested in consummated love affairs, she chose this way to relate to the world.