The High Flyer (28 page)

IX

I lost my job.

The articles of partnership at Curtis, Towers provided for those unfortunate circumstances when a partner behaved in a manner unbecoming to a lawyer, and no eminent legal firm could wish to retain a partner who had not only blundered as I had blundered at Oakshott but had witnessed a lurid stabbing, hobnobbed with an exorcist and featured in the tabloids as a scandal-prone
femme fatale
. Moreover the Law Society were already considering whether they should officially censure my Oakshott conduct, and any partner who fell foul of the Law Society was always in line for liquidation. I could not be fired as if I were a mere employee, but I had no trouble picturing the other partners voting to line me up for the golden handshake.

The only redeeming feature of the mess was that my competence as a tax specialist was unmarred, and that my crucial mistake lay not so much in my stupid behaviour as in the fact that I had been found out. (In this respect my situation resembled Nicholas’s.) However as most of my partners had probably also suffered from bouts of stupidity in the past, I suspected they were even now shuddering in sympathy for me, a state of affairs which suggested the golden handshake was likely to be substantial.

When the time came to terminate me, the chief dinosaur declared that my partners extended their “fullest sympathy” over the “personal nature” of my ordeal, and regretted that, given the “difficult circumstances,” I might not be “entirely happy” at the prospect of remaining at Curtis, Towers. It was everyone’s “most earnest and sincere wish” to be generous to me in my “time of trial,” and in order to settle this most unfortunate matter as “speedily and discreetly” as possible, the partners were willing to cede me more than the required sum laid down in the articles of partnership.

The chief dinosaur continued to grind out this sick-making pompoguff for some time, but the message was already clear. If I went quietly, my bank account would be considerably expanded by the fruits of my partners’ goodwill; but if I put them all to the trouble of prising me loose they would screw me financially as far as the articles allowed and probably top off this brutality by bad-mouthing me to the next set of people who invited me to join a partnership. Or in other words, if I fell on my sword I would not only save myself from being murdered but ensure myself of a generous eulogy at the funeral.

It was nice to think we were still maintaining the traditions of Ancient Rome in our modern version of Roman Londinium.

I fell on my sword.

Afterwards I knew it was not without significance that I remained dry-eyed as I walked away for the last time from that office in Bevis Marks.

But I still felt gutted to the core.

X

Kim was still officially at Graf-Rosen; it was considered not ethically correct to terminate a colleague while he was in hospital, but I had no doubt the appropriate financial package was being drawn up.

While all this upheaval was unfolding, Tucker left hospital and was whisked away by his doting parents to convalesce at their villa on the Algarve. On the day I fell on my sword a postcard bearing a picture of an idyllic Portuguese seascape arrived for me at the Rectory. Tucker had written: “Greetings, Ms. G! I’m already bored with swilling Portuguese plonk. Drink a tankard of the Widow for me at the Lord Mayor’s Cat! Thanks for those tulips. What an erotic vision of femininity they conjured up! Yours still stimulated, E.T. (No quips about extra-terrestials, please.)”

Having obtained the Algarve address from his brother I bought a postcard of St. Benet’s and wrote: “Just joined the ranks of the unemployed. Heading for the Lord M’s C. Will Swill.
Re
tulips: I don’t get it. They were the most macho flowers I’ve ever seen! Yours baffled, C.G.”

As I dropped the card in the nearest postbox I wished I too could have a holiday on the Algarve, but I knew I was still a long way from gaining a respite from my troubles.

I was becoming increasingly disturbed by the thought of Kim.

I

The trouble was that I could not now think of my marriage without being assaulted by a wave of unbearable emotions which I felt quite unable to handle. Rage that Kim should have been deceiving me on such a huge scale, coupled with horror at his disastrous involvement with Mrs. Mayfield, were followed by grief that my love had apparently been a grand illusion, coupled with a violent, unforgiving self-disgust that I should have made such a devastating mess of my personal life. I began to think I was going through emotions similar to those which a man must experience after castration: an overwhelming shame, an all-consuming humiliation and a marked loss of confidence and self-esteem.

I was coping with the collapse of my career at Curtis, Towers by telling myself, with justification, that the disaster was survivable. But I had no idea how to cope with the collapse of my marriage. I found such a failure impossible to process mentally; whenever I started to think of Kim, my mind would shut down in less than twenty seconds. The memories of the final scene at my flat were unendurable.

It was obvious that his final frantic attempt to regain his files meant that I had by no means heard the whole story of his past. It also seemed plain that Mrs. Mayfield’s willingness to help him conceal it must mean that the rock-bottom secret involved her in some way. But beyond that point my powers of reason and logic refused to work. I was still too traumatised by that scene when Mrs. Mayfield had called the shots and Kim had acquiesced in her attempt to brutalise me. How could he have stood by while she reduced me to a speechless, panic-stricken wreck? I accepted that the stabbing of Tucker was an accident; I accepted that the charade with the knife had seemed the best way to get Tucker to disclose where the files were; but I could not accept any behaviour which had permitted Mrs. Mayfield to scare me out of my mind.

I could only conclude he had never genuinely loved me, and that conclusion, making a mockery of my judgement, my discernment, my perspicacity, my common sense, my good taste—indeed my whole grasp of reality—was devastating to me. I felt he had rewritten the past and trashed the happy memories we had shared.

Nicholas tried to tell me that Kim had been in the opening stages of mental breakdown and so not responsible for his final actions at the flat, but I refused to listen. I still thought Kim was faking the breakdown to gain time to plan how he could best survive the disasters of Sophie’s death and Tucker’s wounding. Nicholas also said that Kim might well still love me but that Mrs. Mayfield had so subjected him to her will that by the end of the scene at the flat he had had no will of his own. However, I refused to listen to this theory either, since it failed to correspond to my knowledge of Kim as a tough customer, and when Nicholas tried to reason with me I cut him off.

I could not cope with Nicholas by that stage. I could not now cope with the memory of him as an exorcist, unleashing the power of his personality to grapple with forces which terrified me. Or perhaps the truth was I was recoiling from the sexuality which was keeping Alice in thrall to him and which any woman who valued her sanity would do better to avoid. I distrusted men who had such power over women. I distrusted men who had power. I distrusted men. I was awash with distrust, battered and broken by it. I felt I would never be able to trust any man again.

“How about me?” said Lewis on the day Tucker’s first postcard arrived from the Algarve. “You can’t possibly feel threatened where I’m concerned! After all, I’m just a dilapidated old tiger-thumper—what could be more reassuring than such a familiar and pitiable stereotype?”

I laughed but was unconvinced. Lewis had told me that he wanted to visit Kim in hospital.

II

Nobody suggested that it was my moral duty to visit my husband. Nobody talked about my moral responsibilities as a wife. But Val kept in touch with the doctors at the hospital, Nicholas kept in touch with the senior chaplain there, and now Lewis was talking of keeping in touch with Kim himself. The more I tried to escape from the reality of my shattered marriage, the more my new companions seemed to be quietly drawing my attention back to the husband I was unable to confront.

“The chaplain’s told Nicholas that Kim’s well enough now to receive visitors,” Lewis said, “so I thought I might drop in for a word or two. After all, I was the one who established the rapport with him at the Rectory.”

I said nothing.

“You remain our primary client,” said Lewis after a moment. “Never doubt that. But the trouble is that Kim is so inextricably bound up with your case that we can’t just ‘split him off,’ as a psychologist would say, and pretend he doesn’t exist. We have to try to integrate him into the healing process.”

I still said nothing.

“Kim has no family,” persisted Lewis, “and his friends are now giving him a wide berth because mental illness is the modern equivalent of leprosy, so I could be useful in alleviating his inevitable feelings of isolation. Besides, Mrs. Mayfield’s abandonment of him could create a dangerous vacuum. We don’t want more passing Powers taking up residence in his personality—they could be even worse than the ones introduced by Mrs. Mayfield.”

But again I was unable to make sense of the foreign language. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to write him off?”

“Christ never wrote anyone off. And he had a particularly good track record with the mentally ill.”

“I’m not interested in Christ,” I said. “I don’t believe what you believe. I only believe in what I can perceive with the aid of my five senses.”

Now it was Lewis’s turn to be silent. I sat there with him in the kitchen. I sat there with this clergyman in the main kitchen of the Rectory. I sat there in a situation which even as recently as a month ago would have seemed inconceivable, and every one of my five senses told me the scene was real, just as every cell of my rational brain told me I was being cared for with infinite patience. I looked over my shoulder; the door of the room was closed but it was as if someone had come in. As I covered my face with my hands I felt someone sit down beside me, but of course that was Lewis, moving around the table to offer me the box of Kleenex. Through my fingers I could see the box, see his square old hand, covered with age spots, but as the tears blurred my vision the hand began to seem younger, smoother, tougher, brimming with energy, vibrating with power, bursting with light.

I wanted to touch it but I was too frightened of hallucinations and of breaking down beyond repair. I knew then how frightened I was, and what frightened me most of all was the chaos of a world which my five senses could not reduce to order.

My unseen companion urged: “Start naming the names!” I heard him clearly, inside my head, so I knew he was present; I knew he had come through the closed door of the room; I knew he was separate from Lewis although at the same time mysteriously fused with him. “Start naming the names!” he urged, and I knew that if I could name the names I would reach my destination, whatever that was, just as I had reached St. Eadred’s vicarage after my long journey across the City through the dark.

“Bevis Marks,” I whispered, “Houndsditch, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Lothbury, Aldermanbury, Cornhill, Threadneedle Street, Poultry, Cheapside, St. Martin’s Le Grand, Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Amen Court . . .”

Someone said: “You’re going to be all right, Carter. You’re going to be all right,” and of course it was Lewis’s voice which I heard.

But the person beyond the voice was not a dilapidated old tiger-thumper at all.

III

A long while later I said to Lewis: “I can’t stand there being no order. I’m so frightened of the chaos.”

“It’s like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming-pool, isn’t it?” said Lewis casually. “The rules that apply to life on dry land no longer apply. You’re immersed in water, a substance which has the potential to drown you. If you’re not accustomed to swimming every instinct tells you to yell in terror and grab the rail at the side of the pool, but in fact this isn’t the way to deal with the problem. You have to make the problem no longer a problem by embracing it—you have to let go of the rail and launch yourself out on the water because once you’re swimming, playing by the water-rules instead of the land-rules, you find the water’s stimulating, bracing, even welcoming. So by embracing the chaos instead of shunning it you’ve opened up a whole new dimension of reality.”

I pushed this picture around in my mind for a moment but could only say: “I feel more like an earthquake victim than a swimmer. I feel I could cope better if only I had a patch of firm ground to stand on.”

“What would the patch look like?”

We started to speculate about what would make me feel more secure. Lewis suggested that I might be missing the comforting routine of the office but I said no, it was a relief not to be battered, blitzed and brutalised daily by the demands of a top job. He then suggested that I might be missing the comforting surroundings of my own home, but I just shuddered. Finally he suggested I might be missing the comforting presence of a husband, but at that point I just reached for the Kleenex again.

However, before I could get as far as shedding a tear I heard myself say: “If only I could understand why I’ve wound up like this, the chaos wouldn’t seem so chaotic. Perhaps my ‘patch of firm ground’ is just a mental state where I can look at the chaos and see a pattern of meaning.”

“Sounds promising.”

“You asked me questions the other day which I couldn’t answer. Why did I really marry Kim, how have I wound up camping out at a rectory—”

“I remember.”

“Well, I can think of more questions. Why have I been so in thrall to the dream of becoming a high flyer? Why have I devoted myself to a fanatical lifestyle which is as strict as the fanatical lifestyle required by a fundamentalist religion? I feel as if I’ve been brainwashed about how I should live—about how much sex and money and power I should have in order to achieve salvation. I feel as if I’ve been conned all the way along the line.”

“No salvation?”

“Well, I’m hardly living happily ever after, am I, even though I’ve sweated and slaved for years to do everything this fundamentalist religion said I ought to do. So obviously my world-view needs changing, but how do I do it? And how do I recognise a world-view which will be liberating and life-giving instead of oppressive and soul-destroying?”

“Those are certainly big questions. But you’ve made enormous progress just by asking them.”

“So what are the answers?”

“Your next task is undoubtedly to find out.”

“You mean I have to answer all these questions myself?”

“Yes, in the sense that it’s your spiritual journey, no one else’s, but no, in the sense that you won’t have to take this journey without guides. I suggest the first question you might try to answer is why you were prepared to make such sacrifices to be a high flyer—and if you’re going to take a look at your unconscious drives you might like to have a word with Robin.”

Robin was the Healing Centre’s psychologist. I must have looked unenthusiastic for Lewis added quickly: “He’s good at giving people encouragement in this sort of situation, and as counselling’s a short-term process, designed to get people in trouble back on their feet quickly, you needn’t fear you’re heading for years of analysis.”

I toyed with the idea of Robin. Finally I said: “I’m so desperate I’ll try anything. But will this mean I won’t get to talk to you any more?”

“Of course it won’t mean that! Robin and I will complement each other. He’ll help you uncover the information you need about your past, and then you and I can discuss what meaning and value can be attached to it so that the present makes more sense.”

“But if you’re going to cosy up to Kim, won’t there be a conflict of interests?”

“I’m only going to visit Kim as a sympathetic acquaintance. I’m not going to counsel him.”

I was unable to stop myself saying: “I wish you’d give up the whole idea.”

“Don’t you at least want firsthand information about what sort of state he’s in? The Maudsley will report to you, of course, whenever you care to approach them, but you’re not their patient and their views are inevitably going to be coloured by what Kim tells them. So if you bear this in mind, doesn’t it seem a good idea to sanction a scout to make a reconnaissance?”

With dread I had to concede that it did.

IV

Robin, the psychologist and counsellor at the Healing Centre, was a man of about forty-five, very tall and thin with horn-rimmed glasses, a campish air and a florid taste in ties. I was surprised to see he wore a wedding ring. It took me more than one session to realise that Robin himself did not find his marital status surprising at all.

He was adept at giving the impression that he sympathised with me entirely on every emotional level I had ever imagined and quite a few that I hadn’t. Beneath this faintly nauseous professional caring he was sharp as a needle and nudged me skilfully into some interesting insights. These I appreciated, and gradually I came to respect him, despite his trick of talking in italics as if to stress the sincerity behind his professional manner.

“Of course I’m not a
Freudian
,” he said after I had completed the trip through my past. “In my counselling role I’m more interested in the
here and now
instead of remote history, but sometimes connections
pop
up
, as it were and simply
demand
to be noticed . . . like this business of your mother telling you not to cry when your father lost the
cat
. And like—gosh, now I’m
really
reaching for it!—the fact that your real name’s Catriona, a word beginning C-A-T. Am I being
completely
fruity-loops, as you would say, or is this rather
more
than just a curious little coincidence?”

I heard myself say: “My father calls me Kitty. I was his Little Kitty,” I said, “and he lost me. He let go of my hand and he let my mother take me away and all my mother said afterwards was: ‘Big girls don’t cry.’ ”