Mystical Paths (47 page)

Authors: Susan Howatch

Tags: #Historical, #Psychological, #Sagas, #Fiction

VIII

I could hardly contain myself until the waiters had departed but as soon as we were alone again I said incredulously: ‘Lewis, you can’t seriously think that dear old Perry —’

‘Despite his drunken state "dear old Perry" struck me as being a tough, resourceful customer who’d survived a considerable amount of adversity. Try this script: Perry kills Christian in the kitchen and buries the body beneath the floor of the coal-cellar. Three years later you bounce along asking such searching questions that the horrific guilt, which Perry’s been suppressing in order to live close to his friend’s corpse, starts to rise to the surface of his mind. He gets himself in such a state that even he, the dedicated rationalist, becomes aware of the cold spot, an area of abnormally dense psychic pollution caused by the projection of an evil memory so intense that it can even be sensed by an uninvolved third party. Then just when Perry reaches the point where he feels haunted by Christian’s ghost, back you bounce and declare that the coal-cellar should be exorcised. Don’t you think that in those circumstances Perry would feel tempted to liquidate you?’ ‘But Lewis, why would Perry kill Christian?’

‘Oh, lovers often kill each other. Happens every day.’ ‘But they weren’t lovers.’

‘So Perry says.’

‘But Lewis, even supposing they were lovers, we know for a fact that Christian died on that boat!’

‘But we don’t,’ said Lewis. ‘That whole story rests on Perry’s uncorroborated evidence. Let’s now expand the script: Christian arrives at Perry’s set on that Friday for another sailing weekend; Perry kills him that evening and the big question immediately becomes: what can he do with the body? Obviously he can’t carry it through the front door of Albany and dump it outside the Royal Academy. There’s the time-honoured solution of the trunk and the railway left-luggage office, but a taxi-driver is going to remember a man who leaves a posh address like Albany with a trunk so heavy that two men are required to carry it. However, fortunately Perry has his coal-cellar, the perfect makeshift grave. No megawatt cables there and no concrete foundations - not in an old-fashioned coal-cellar where the flooring would be primitive — and he realises that given sufficient time he could haul out the coal, haul up the floor and conceal the corpse. No need to carry out a massive excavation. All that’s required is a depth which will seal up the smell of decay.

‘But his first task isn’t to embark on this lengthy burial. It’s to create the fictional story of Christian’s death, and leaving the body temporarily concealed in the coal-cellar he heads for Bosham as planned. I’d guess he left even earlier than five to ensure that no one saw him either when he left Albany — using the back entrance, of course — or when he arrived at Bosham. Obviously it was vital that no one should notice he was on his own.

‘He sails around for a time and creates below deck the disorder which can be blamed on the freak wave. Finally he returns with the story of a disaster and everyone believes him. Why shouldn’t they? He’s an experienced sailor who’s no doubtheard all about freak waves, and he knows exactly what to say. ‘On returning to Albany he begins the long, laborious task of burying the corpse where it may well never be discovered. Full marks to Mr Palmer! A highly successful murder. The only thing he fails to foresee is the lethal effect of his fermenting guilt.’

I laid down my knife and fork. I leaned back in my chair. And I said: ‘You’re crazy.’

We discussed the theory for the remainder of dinner and during the entire journey back to Starbridge. We shared the task of driving, but during my stint Lewis had to remind me more than once to keep my eyes on the road.

‘I freely admit I could be wrong,’ he said when we were still at the restaurant, ‘but once one accepts that your hunch about the coal-cellar hit the mark the theory evolves with no obvious flaws. If it didn’t hit the mark — if Perry’s expression of horror and incredulity merely arose from the fact that he couldn’t stand you holding forth like a fairground charlatan — then my theory bites the dust.’

‘But if your theory’s right,’ I said later, ‘he must have been lying extensively during our interview with him, and I found him plausible throughout.’ We were both in the car by that time and Lewis was driving. I think we were somewhere near Basingstoke.

‘Detecting false notes in a confession is an art which I wouldn’t expect you to have mastered.’

‘But which notes struck you as false?’

The ones relating to his sexuality.’

I was very surprised. ‘You didn’t believe him when he said he’d been assaulted when he was seven?’

‘Oh, that rang true enough; one would expect a mental castration of some kind in order to account for the remarkable consistency of his reputation for being a sexual abstainer. But just because he chooses, for whatever reasons, to abstain, one shouldn’t automatically assume he’s uninterested in sex — and neither should one assume he’s incapable of doing anything except living up to his reputation. If he has the standard physical equipment and all the right hormones, some form of sex could still occasionally appeal to him.’

‘But there’s no evidence for that!’

‘There’s certainly circumstantial evidence. I regard it as suspicious that he runs with this homosexual crowd. I accept that he has to be very careful because of his work, but maybe he’s just that: very careful. As I’ve already said, he struck me as being a tough, resourceful survivor, just the kind of man who could get away with leading a sexual double life.’

‘But he clearly stated how much he liked women!’

Well, he would, wouldn’t he? But I didn’t find his assertion of heterosexuality convincing. You don’t tune in to the homosexual circuit just because women become emotional when you turn them down.’

‘So are you saying that he and Christian —’

‘I can certainly accept that Perry’s extreme devotion to Christian had no physical expression while Christian was leading a wholly heterosexual life. But if Perry’s not wholly asexual, what would his reaction be when this adored friend embarked on a love affair with your brother? We know he was shocked and incredulous. But don’t you think that once he’d calmed down he’d be anxious for a piece of the action?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The whole structure of the relationship was built around the understanding that there would never be any sex between them.’

‘That’s what Perry wanted us to think,’ said Lewis, ‘but is it true? Surely the real structure of the relationship was built around an unspoken understanding that Christian could do what he liked with women — even marry — but never betray Perry with another man.’

‘But what grounds have you for saying that?’

‘It was all there between the lines of his narrative. He was disgusted by the Dinkie affair because Dinkie the drug-addict wasn’t worthy of Christian. He disapproved of Katie but itseems he was still able to treat her courteously. He found it easy to tolerate — even like — Marina and Venetia, who weren’t sexually involved with Christian but who both cared deeply for him. Yet what he just couldn’t stand was the affair with Martin, and once Christian had rewritten the sexual rules why shouldn’t Perry have started to wonder if the rules of their relationship could be rewritten as well?’

‘So you think that the continental holiday — and all the sailing weekends —’

‘It’s impossible to say for sure what was going on, but it’s certainly a fact that Perry was the one Christian was seeing regularly at the end of his life.’

I took some time to consider my thoughts but finally I commented: ‘If we believe Perry’s story that the Continental holiday, the sailing trips and the false passports were all part of a scheme to save Christian from breakdown, then sex needn’t have featured on the agenda at all.’

‘That’s quite true,’ Lewis agreed, ‘and I do believe that Perry’s prime concern was to save Christian by providing what he thought was appropriate therapy. But Perry’s ideas on how to save his friend were so misconceived that he might well have reached the conclusion that the therapy should include sex.’

‘Were they so misconceived? I can certainly see the logic behind Perry’s ideas —’

‘So can I, but it was faulty. You don’t heal someone’s personality disorder by providing him with false passports and sailing trips; Christian needed intensive counselling, not JohnBuchan-style escapades. And I’m afraid Perry’s theory that all would have been sunshine and roses after a divorce strikes me as being psychologically naive. A man like Christian, brought up in that religious, conventional, middle-class home, would almost certainly have been unable to abandon a loving wife and three young children without suffering the most catastrophic guilt which would have destroyed his career and ploughed him right under.’

‘But if he was being ploughed under anyway —’

‘A divorce would have buried him six feet deep. Don’t think I’m automatically hostile to the notion of divorce; after all, I’m a divorced man myself. But I don’t believe it would have been the answer for Christian. What he needed to do was to find out who he was and be helped to love and accept who he was. Then he would have been better equipped to love and accept those who were closest to him.’

After we had stopped the car to change places and give Lewis a break from the driving, I said: ‘I still don’t believe Christian and Perry were ever lovers, and I still don’t believe – sorry, Lewis! – that Christian’s buried beneath Perry’s coal-cellar. A far more likely possibility, it seems to me, is that they quarrelled badly on that Friday night but survived to go sailing together as planned. I don’t see a quarrel as unlikely. After all, Christian was being intolerable to just about everyone; why shouldn’t he have started being intolerable to poor old Perry? So my theory is that they came to blows by the coal-cellar – perhaps Perry was trying to walk out of the back-door in disgust and Christian lost his temper and clobbered him. However then Christian patched up the quarrel because he wanted to go sailing and escape into another identity as usual. After the accident Perry’s consumed by survivor’s guilt, just as you theorised earlier, and the cold spot is the physical projection of Perry’s current grief – the grief that he actually came to blows there with his friend on the night before the disaster at sea. Perry’s expression when I started bawling about the coal-cellar can then be explained by saying he was appalled to be reminded of that painful quarrel and stupefied that I should apparently know about it.’

Lewis said: ‘You could be right. But so could I. We just don’t know.’

Later – I was still driving and the car had begun to wind through the hills near Starbridge – I said: ‘So what do we do now?’

‘Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.’

‘But Lewis –’

‘Perry has my card and I hope that eventually he’ll phone me. If he does, I’ll have the chance to help him.’

‘But supposing you’re right and Christian’s buried in the coal-cellar? Surely we should do something!’

‘What do you suggest? Do you really propose to turn up at Scotland Yard and say: "Excuse me, I’ve no proof and I’m not likely to get any, but by a series of psychic insights I’ve deduced that a Dr Christian Aysgarth, believed drowned in 1965, was in fact buried in a coal-cellar at Albany after being murdered by his best friend?"‘

‘So the whole expedition was a complete failure!’ I said violently. ‘We haven’t helped Perry and we’re left picking over theories we can’t prove!’

‘Oh no,’ said Lewis as the car turned the final corner and we saw the floodlit Cathedral in the valley below. ‘The evening was a great success. You’ve finally been weaned from your conviction that Christian’s still alive.’

I stared at the Cathedral. I remember being surprised that it was still floodlit. The lighting was turned off at eleven.

‘That’s true, isn’t it?’ Lewis was saying. ‘You now accept that Christian’s dead.’

After a pause I said: ‘Yes, I do. Perry wouldn’t be coming apart at the seams in that particular way if Christian were still alive.’

‘And I think you’d agree now,, wouldn’t you, that Christian has no message for you.’

I knew only one answer was possible. ‘None. He never found the way to the centre. He was just bucketing down a dead-end street.’ I sighed before adding: ‘I suppose all that’s left for me to do now is to thank you for straightening me out and ask you to close the case.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Lewis, ‘this is where the case splits wide open at last. If Christian’s dead, you couldn’t have seen him at Grantchester in the present or future – and we already know that you couldn’t have seen him in the past. So just who was it, in fact, that you saw in the garden on Monday?’

All the lights around the Cathedral went out and the valley was plunged into darkness.

PART THREE

SELF-REALISATION/ ETERNAL LIFE

‘But the eternal life which is a major theme of St John’s gospel is not

simply unending life, but an enhanced quality of life, a fuller, richer,

freer life which begins in this world though it is consummated in the

next. The psychologist can shed a flood of meaning on the "this world"

meaning of eternal life. One of the ways the psychotherapist

understands the goal of life is as the attainment of self-realisation.

He works on the assumption that each person has an inborn need so far as

possible to realise his capacities to the full.’

CHRISTOPHER BRYANT