Mystical Paths (30 page)

VII

I dreamed about my father that night. In the dream he was about sixty-five, the age at which I could first remember him, and he was a youthful sixty-five, swift-moving, straight-backed and, to my child’s eyes, huge. Those were the days before his stoop when he was six foot three. He walked into the room where I was sleeping and turned on the light so that I woke up.

Except that I didn’t wake up. But I thought I had woken up, and there he was, walking into the room and sitting down on the chair by the window. He said nothing; but suddenly I saw there was blood all over his hands and I knew he was bleeding to death like Marina’s friend, poor Holly Carr, who had committed suicide by slashing her wrists. I leapt out of bed to staunch the blood, but Christian stepped in front of me, a Luger in his hand, and as I flung up my arms in a futile effort to protect myself he pointed the gun at my heart and squeezed the trigger and I woke up.

Except that I couldn’t have woken up because I wasn’t in bed. I was now dreaming I was in a black cell. There was a grey square halfway up one wall, and when I stretched out my hand towards it my fingers touched some stuff which turned out to be a curtain. A pale light flicked across the cell for a second as I exposed the window. Then I realised I stood not in an unknown cell but in Martin’s living-room.

I woke up.

Except that I couldn’t have woken up because I had gone to sleep in the spare-room. I could clearly remember pulling back the bedcovers, slumping down on the mattress, swinging my feet off the floor – My feet. I had forgotten to tether my ankle. The string which I had been using was still at Charley’s vicarage. I could recall rolling the string into a ball but I had no memory of packing it, and last night I had been so exhilarated by my theories about Christian that the possibility of unwanted nocturnal adventures had entirely slipped my mind.

Clutching the curtain again I dragged it aside and sank down on the moonlit sofa to struggle with the vile aftermath of somnambulism.

The shock came first, but fear followed close behind and within seconds the two of them were hammering away in tandem. My heart thumped. My fists ached as I clenched them. I was struggling with the terrible suspicion that I had killed Martin in his sleep. I knew the idea was absurd, but so overwhelmed was I by panic that I found I had to go and take a look at him.

He was alive, breathing peacefully. Weak with relief I tiptoed out of the room but was then bludgeoned by the dread that I might have gone outside and killed a stranger in the street. I looked at the soles of my feet. They were clean. I hadn’t left the flat. It seemed I had merely walked from the spare-room to the living-room, and all I now had to do was calm myself down.

I began to recite the mantra and when I stopped twenty minutes later I knew I had once more succeeded in squeezing my consciousness back behind the orthodox boundaries. Moving to the kitchen I searched the cupboards until I found a ball of string. Then I returned to the spare-room and tethered myself to the bed.

But I was unable to sleep again.

VIII

Making an early start I drove north out of London up the Ai. Rush-hour traffic chugged slowly in the other direction but I sped along in my Mini-Cooper until I reached the road to Biggleswade, the point where I could head cross-country to Cambridge. I began to drive through rural Bedfordshire. Huge fields undulated around compact, workmanlike little villages. A succession of church towers pierced the horizon.

After crossing the county border into Cambridgeshire I eventually reached the summit of the hill beyond Orwell where the spires of the University could be seen in the distance, and as I drove down on to the plain I pictured Cambridge itself, that city of the mind, with its bookshops and bells and bicycles, its smooth lawns and hidden gardens and its somnolent river flowing through the meadows of the Backs. It was in Cambridge that I had first met Marina and begun my journey towards Christian. How neat it would be if I could end my quest where it had begun, but no, I wasn’t destined to enact that famous line from the ‘Four Quartets’; I was heading for Grantchester, the village which a lesser poet than Eliot had immortalised in drivel about the church clock standing at ten to three and was there honey still for tea.

The Grantchester monks kept bees and since the 1920s had traded brazenly on the Rupert Brooke connection. My father had redesigned the packaging of the honey long ago in 1937 after Father Darcy had yanked him out of Ruydale, his home for fourteen years, and dumped him at Grantchester to be the abbot. The community had gone soft and someone from another house had been required to toughen it up. ‘There was even a cream-cake in the larder!’ my father used to reminisce scandalised. ‘Father Darcy said ...’

What a bore my father was about that old thug, but old people had to talk about the past, it was necessary for them, their psyches required to be stroked by memory in that way. Yet it was curious which sections of the past my father selected for the stroking. He never reminisced about his marriages and only occasionally did he mention his childhood with his parents. What he talked about was his great monastic soap-opera which had run from 1923 until 194o.

I knew that soap-opera inside out. I knew not only all about Father Darcy but about Francis Ingram, the debonair aristocrat who had succeeded him as Abbot-General; I knew about Aidan Lucas, my father’s abbot at Ruydale, and about Cyril Watson, who had been abbot of Starwater; I knew too about the minor characters such as Wilfred and Ambrose and Bernard and Barnabas and ... The list went on and on. I even knew the entire life-story of the original Whitby, the house-cat at Ruydale. This vast accumulated knowledge was why I always found it so strange, almost uncanny, to visit the Grantchester house where my father had spent three years as a Fordite abbot. I wasn’t just visiting a monastery. I was stepping on to one of the sets of my father’s epic soap-opera.

The house had been built in the late nineteenth century and was one of those solid, unspectacular country mansions which the Victorians specialised in producing once their architects had recovered from the national love affair with medieval fantasy. On one side of the house was the extension, designed by my father in 1938, where the guests stayed; he had wanted to encourage visitors but at the same time guarantee the monks greater privacy. This wing was connected to the main house by a long, low building which contained not only the linking passage but the confessionals, small rooms where guests could discuss spiritual matters with the priest-monks.

The gravelled drive wound gracefully up to the front door of the house, flowed on to the front door of the guest-wing and then looped around to rejoin itself so that its final shape resembled a curvy letter P. Around this elegant design were neat lawns bordered by beech-trees. A fence on the perimeter preserved the monks from prying eyes, but the gates stood open. Having parked my car by the guest-wing, I rang the bell, turned the handle and walked in.

Across the hall was a kitchen. Lunch – which the monks called dinner – was brought over from the main house everyday, but a light evening meal was produced in the guest-wing after the monks had supped off bread and cheese in their refectory. Guests also used the kitchen to make themselves tea when they fancied it. On the left of the kitchen was the guest-master’s office where he attended to the running of his miniature hotel, and on the right was the dining-room where all the visitors ate sitting around a long table. Beyond the dining-room was the common-room, painted the deadest of dead whites but furnished with colourfully upholstered armchairs and well-stocked bookcases.

As I entered the hall the guest-master bobbed out to meet me and I saw he was a stranger. He was drying a plate with a scarlet tea-towel which might have been specially designed as a striking accessory for his black and white habit.

‘Good morning!’ he said with that peculiarly relentless cheerfulness which is so often found among practitioners of the cenobitic life. ‘I’m Daniel, the guest-master. How may I help you?’

My father would have hated this modern chumminess. In his day only the monks themselves had called one another by their Christian names, and outsiders had used surnames preceded by the title ‘Father’, if the monk was a priest, or ‘Brother’, if the monk was a layman. Although the Fordites had made no distinction in dress between the two groups, there had been no problem of classification for visitors because in the old days the priests were the ones who were gentlemen and one always knew a gentleman as soon as he opened his mouth. Nowadays when social boundaries were hazier the Fordites still refused to make a distinction in dress but had encouraged the use of Christian names both to reflect the informality of the zeitgeist and to simplify monastic protocol.

‘Hi, Daniel,’ I said, shaking the hand he offered me. ‘What happened to Christopher?’ That was the guest-master I remembered from my last visit in 1964.

‘He’s Bursar now, Mr –?’

‘Darrow – Nicholas Darrow. Son of Jonathan Darrow, your abbot from 1937 to 1940,’ I said shamelessly, knowing I had to pull out all the stops to gain an instant audience with Father Wilcox. (Abbots, to my father’s relief, were still addressed formally by outsiders.)

‘Aha!’ said Daniel rising to the bait and becoming very chummy indeed. ‘Welcome to Grantchester, Nicholas!’ ‘Thanks. Any chance of seeing Father Wilcox for five minutes? My father asked me to say hullo to him.’

Daniel, oozing good will, said he would see what he could do.

I wandered into the common-room to wait and found a limp middle-aged cleric reading Thomas Merton’s
Thoughts in Solitude.
I liked Merton, an emotional monk but tough and modem. It occurred to me that the Fordites could do with a few Merton clones. That Daniel was much too precious.

The limp middle-aged cleric said ‘Good morning’ in an alto-tenor, and I realised he was precious too. I found myself longing for a replay of 1937 when my father, then in his fifties, had swept through the front door to tone everyone down and toughen everyone up.

I was still reflecting on this dramatic incident in my father’s monastic soap-opera when Daniel pattered back to announce his success in securing me an audience with the Abbot. Leaving the common-room we crossed the hall, walked down the inter-linking passage and entered the hall of the main house.

The Abbot was waiting to meet me, and as soon as I saw him again I forgot the spectre of decadence now haunting the Church because I knew I was in the presence of a man who had no time for the thought that we were all dissolute and effete and fit only for the nearest drain. Here was someone who accepted us as we were, warts and all, and looked upon us with faith and hope and love because he knew we were made, no matter how imperfectly, in the image of God. Here was a real disciple of Christ, someone who made me want to put up with the Church for the sake of Christianity.

He was a friendly old buffer, with mild eyes and a stout frame – quite different from my father, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he exuded the right aura of intelligent compassion, the aura of a devout man who was a conscientious, balanced leader.

‘How nice to see you again, Nicholas!’ he said, shaking my hand and ushering me into the parlour where he received visitors. ‘Is your father well? I haven’t heard from him lately.’

‘Yes, he’s fine, said he’d write soon.’ The room was amazing, a museum-piece unchanged since the 1890s when the Fordites had acquired the house from the bankrupt merchant who had built it. The most riveting feature was the high, wide marble fireplace which bore a sculpted frieze of naked nymphs doing gymnastics with animals. Or at least I supposed that was what they were doing. My father had said it was a most unsuitable frieze for a monastery but Father Darcy had ruled that allowances had to be made for great art. Naughty old thug. Of course it wasn’t great art at all, but I suspected he had been unable to resist the chance to have a dig at my father’s uncertain artistic taste.

Recalling my attention from the raunchy frieze, I said politely: ‘Thank you for seeing me so quickly, Father. I promise I won’t keep you long.’

‘But there’s no need to rush along at top speed for my sake! Sit down, relax and tell me all your news – the big day’s coming up very soon now, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t come to talk to you about my ordination. I wanted to ask you about a man who made a retreat here in the last quarter of 1963. He was sent by my father and his name was Christian Aysgarth.’

‘I certainly remember that unusual name,’ said Father Wilcox as we sat down facing each other in the high-backed chairs which flanked the fireplace. ‘He was the brilliant young don who drowned in that sailing accident, wasn’t he? As soon as I read the report in the paper I wondered if he was related to Dean Aysgarth of Starbridge and later I heard he was the eldest son. A terrible tragedy ... But you’re mistaken about the retreat. He never came here, and in fact I don’t even remember receiving the letter of referral from your father.’

‘I don’t think he wrote one. He just pointed Christian in your direction,’ I said, busy savouring the fact that Father Wilcox had never met anyone called Christian Aysgarth. The report he had read of the accident would have been the one produced by
The Times,
the only newspaper allowed to cross the monastic threshold, but
The Times
had printed no photograph. If Christian had arrived at Grantchester to embark on a new life he would have been unrecognised.

‘Father, have you anyone here at the moment who’s six foot tall, dark, good-looking, slim, fortyish, with an educated accent and a trick of either drawling his words or else speaking unusually fast with a very slight, barely noticeable stutter?’

‘No,’ said the Abbot bemused, but added as an afterthought: ‘Are you talking about a monk or a guest?’

‘Well, I thought he might be a monk by now, but —’

‘You’ll have to ask Daniel about the visitors, but I can assure you we have no professed monks, no novices and no postulants here who answer that description. May I ask who this man is?’

‘He’s connected with Christian Aysgarth, and I’m trying to trace him. Father, has anyone ever applied to you for admittance to the Order and said his name was either Charles Gore or Henry Scott Holland?’

Father Wilcox was astounded but responded good-humouredly: ‘No, we don’t go in for ghosts here, Nicholas!’

I laughed. Then I suddenly realised I had no idea what to say next, but fortunately Father Wilcox was eager to steer the conversation into other channels.

‘Now do tell me all about your father!’ he exclaimed warmly. ‘He’ll be eighty-eight in May, won’t he? Amazing! I can so clearly remember when I was a novice back in
¹
937 Back we went into the past again. Out came the monastic soap-opera for another rerun, but this was different, this was the story filmed from another angle, and this time the hero was not Father Darcy but Father Darrow.

.. and I always felt sorry that I only knew Father Darcy at the end of his life when he was so crusty and cantankerous - dear me, how we used to shake in our shoes before his annual visitation! "You’re saying the words you want me to hear,’”he’d declare when he interviewed us, "but I hear the words you can’t bring yourself to say!’” How terrifying that was, especially for the novices! But your father had quite a different approach; he
never
ruled by terror. What a leader he was, so wise, so compassionate, so understanding, so spiritual ...’

I switched off and began to plan my cross-examination of Daniel.

‘... but quite difficult for you, I should imagine,’ Father Wilcox concluded suddenly.

I realised I had to tune in again. ‘Difficult for me?’ ‘Having such a very outstanding man as a father,’ said the Abbot kindly. ‘A hard act to follow, perhaps, but I’m sure you’ll do equally well in the Church in your own way.’

I murmured some polite banality, dredged up some neutral news about my father for him and made a tactful escape.

Returning to the guest-wing I found Daniel typing with two fingers in his office. The typewriter looked like a prop from a pre-war film-set. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but is there any guest here who ...’ I described Christian but again drew a blank. Daniel said with a sigh of regret that none of the current guests could be classified as tall, dark and handsome. ‘Will you be staying to dinner, Nicholas?’ he added. ‘Today it’s roast lamb with bread-and-butter-pudding to follow.’

I hesitated, confused by the apparent failure of my psychic ‘gnosis’ and uncertain what I should do next. Feeling that I needed to be somewhere quiet in order to think, I glanced at my watch to see how much time remained before the midday meal. The hands pointed to eleven-twenty.

. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Daniel. ‘Yes, I’d like to stay. Meanwhile can I go and sit in the garden?’

‘Of course you can, but keep an eye open for the sections that are out of bounds. They’re all marked, but visitors sometimes get absent-minded and overlook the signs.’

This was a tactful order not to stray from the area set aside for guests. Assuring him that I already knew exactly where not to go, I left his office and stepped out once more into the drive. There was a wooden seat under one of the beech-trees in the front garden, but I knew I would be disturbed there by the noise of passing traffic, so I began to pad around the side of the guest-wing. A monk was weeding a flowerbed nearby, and as he heard the crunch of my footsteps on the path he turned to smile at me. He was about fifty, thickset, bald — definitely not Christian, but of course I now knew Christian was not at Grantchester.