Authors: Susan Howatch
Alice has baked a magnificent cake which has WELCOME HOME written on the top in royal blue icing. I sit in the kitchen, drink Madeira, eat cake and feel very happy. Eventually I go to my room and phone Rachel. “Oh, and I’ve had my hip done,” I say casually at the end of the conversation. “I’m okay now.”
Rachel hits the roof. Why didn’t I tell her I was having it done? Supposing I’d died—think what a shock it would have been for her since she hadn’t even known I was in hospital! How could I have been so selfish? And how had I dared deprive her of the chance to send cards—flowers—presents—what on earth could the nurses have thought of her neglect?
“They didn’t think anything,” I say. “I never told them I had a daughter.”
Rachel takes violent offence, bursts into tears and hangs up.
As usual Nicholas straightens us out. He rings her back and explains that I was trying to spare her anxiety.
I’m put on the line. Rachel sobs that she’s sorry, she didn’t mean
to be beastly to me, she was just in shock, but now she’s recovered she’ll send cards, flowers, chocolates, champagne—
“Very nice,” I say. “Thanks. Vintage Moët would do,” and we finally manage to part on an affectionate note.
After this I feel in urgent need of a light-hearted interlude, so I phone Venetia.
“How was your retreat?” she enquires.
“Successful. How were your pussyfoots with Nicholas?”
“My dear, he tried to drink Coca-Cola but I wouldn’t let him. It was sheer inverted snobbery—he wanted to cock a snook at Claridge’s!”
“Disgusting! I’ve missed our pussyfoots. Can we meet?”
“Name the day.”
“Tomorrow? At the Connaught?”
“No,” she says, and for the first time she hesitates. “Not the Connaught. Somewhere larger and noisier where no one will pay attention to what we’re saying.”
I deduce she wants to talk about her therapy. “We could go back to the Hilton.”
“Fine. Tomorrow at six-thirty?”
Almost delirious at the thought of pussyfooting I return to the kitchen and find Alice making soup for lunch. “If you’re looking for Nicholas,” she says, “he’s gone over to the church.”
I glance at my watch and discover with surprise that the time’s much later than I thought. The lunch-time Eucharist will be beginning in ten minutes.
I’m anxious to attend, but for a moment I’m diverted because I’ve suddenly realised how odd it is that Alice never abbreviates Nicholas’s name. Why has this habit never seemed odd to me before? Because it’s not odd, is the answer; it’s unusual but not odd. So why does it seem odd to me now? Because my psychic antennae are vibrating away, picking up any hint that Nicholas could be in danger and converting any unusual feature of the familiar landscape into a potentially sinister threat.
Apart from me—and apart from Rosalind, who clings to the “Nicky” he was called in kindergarten—everyone calls him Nick. I was the only one left who called him Nicholas, just as his father did, but I’m the only one no longer. Alice has annexed all three syllables so that she stands out from the crowd of Nick-people. Alice has taken a stand which makes her special.
The kitten’s up to his old game of chewing my shoelaces. Stooping to pick him up I say casually, very casually, so casually that no one would ever suspect my nerves are jangling: “Alice, why do you never call Nicholas Nick?”
She pauses in the act of stirring the soup and gives this question serious consideration. “Nick Darrow’s the star of the Healing Centre,” she says at last, “but Nicholas Darrow is his whole self, not just the Nick-part but the other parts of his personality as well. There’s the part he shares with Rosalind, for instance, and there’s the part we see here when he’s off-duty. And finally there’s that very mysterious hidden part which is invisible, the part which enables him to understand people so well. It’s a sort of
dimension
,” she explains, not sure she’s found the right word but confident she’s describing something real. “I’m sure I’m not imagining it.”
I stare at her. She reddens and starts stirring again. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m sounding weird.”
“Not to me. You’re being most perspicacious,” I say, keeping my voice casual, but I’m stunned. Little Alice, who can so easily be written off by people like Rosalind as a dull lump, has just displayed intelligence and intuition on the grand scale; she’s described not merely the self which belongs to Nicholas but the psychic strand of that self, the gift which Nicholas never discusses except with me and his spiritual director.
I’d bet heavy money that no one at the Healing Centre knows about this hidden strand of Nicholas’s personality. People know he’s charismatic (in the technical sense), but the charisms of healing or preaching or teaching—or any of the other gifts listed by St. Paul—can be displayed by psychic and non-psychic alike, and outwardly Nicholas gives no hint of his psychic powers. They’re private, dedicated to God, never to be flaunted or exploited for personal gain. It’s only the wonder workers who use such powers for their own aggrandisement.
It’s a long time now since Nicholas played the wonder worker. It’s a long time since he used psychic parlour-tricks to boost his ego, a long time since he told fortunes by stroking the palms of pretty women, a long time since he pretended to relay messages from the dead by reading the minds of the living. He’s offered his psychic gifts to God in humility, and as a result they’re nowadays so seamlessly incorporated in his ministry that they’ve become a hidden asset instead of an ego-distorting handicap. Yet Alice has recognised the extra
sensory perception which makes him exceptionally intuitive when dealing with clients and exceptionally adroit when dealing with paranormal phenomena. She’s recognised it even though this extremely discreet and disciplined use of psychic power is beyond the recognition of most people. It takes a psychic to know a psychic like Nicholas—and little Alice, I now see to my profound astonishment, knows the Nicholas all the non-psychics never meet.
But wait a minute, maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Maybe Cynthia said something to Alice about the psychic gifts. Both Cynthia and Venetia knew Nicholas way back in the Swinging Sixties before his ordination when he was playing the juvenile wonder worker and getting up to all manner of mischief.
But no, that explanation doesn’t quite pan out. Cynthia might possibly have mentioned to Alice that Nicholas was a psychic, but she could never have described the psychic dimension of Nicholas’s personality as Alice has just done. In Cynthia’s eyes Nicholas was just someone who used to perform psychic parlour-tricks but who now wouldn’t be seen dead with a crystal ball. She had no grasp of the fact that the gift was still used but in a completely different way.
I say idly as I stroke the kitten and pretend the conversation’s about something normal: “It sounds as if you’re a sensitive, Alice.”
“A what?”
“A psychic.”
“Oh no!” she says horrified. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing at all. Aunt always said it was rubbish.”
That great-aunt of hers was without doubt a pig-headed old trout. (What a curious piscine vision that phrase conjures up! But I’m too annoyed to amend the metaphor.) Austerely I say: “Well-developed psychic ability is a gift, like a talent for music, and like a talent for music it doesn’t automatically make you a better person than those people who don’t have the gift. That’s because spiritual gifts and psychic gifts aren’t the same thing, although since both deal with the unseen they can overlap.”
“But surely scientists don’t admit—”
“A true scientist should keep an open mind and examine the evidence—as scientists in America and Russia are doing right now in order to find out more about what they call ‘psi.’ Both countries have been spending fortunes on research in the hope that ‘psi’ can be used in espionage.”
Alice is round-eyed with surprise but still valiantly sceptical. “Do you really believe that?”
“I believe they’ve been spending fortunes and doing research on the assumption that ‘psi’ exists. Those are matters of fact. What I don’t believe is that they’ll ever be able to harness the ‘psi’–factor for espionage. ‘Psi’ isn’t suited to such a concrete activity—it couldn’t possibly be reliable enough because even the best psychics have blind spots and make errors.”
“I don’t believe in any of it,” persists Alice stoutly, as loyal to Great-Aunt Beatrice as I am to Great-Uncle Cuthbert—ye gods, what power these eccentric old monsters acquire when they rescue abandoned children! I perfectly understand why Alice feels compelled to adopt a blind faith in disbelief, but I understand too that Alice, whether she likes it or not, has a psychic gift that she’s repressed. However, with the great-aunt out of the way, it at last has the chance to open up—and to put her right on Nicholas’s wave-length. She and Nicholas are two of a kind, I see that now.
I’m horrified.
COMMENT
: Thank God Alice is a plain girl with no sex-appeal. But wait a minute. If she’s got psychic potential has she also got physical potential? Let me try to see her in a way that censors out the fat.
That means I have to reverse my usual order of priorities. Instead of noting (a) bosom, (b) legs, (c) bottom and (d) face, I’ve got to start with the face and ignore the rest. An intriguing challenge! But let’s have a go.
Alice has dark hair, which shines nicely when it’s washed, and she’s got those velvety-brown doggish eyes which could be more flatteringly described as doe-like. She has white, even teeth—she’s a non-smoker, of course—and a wide, appealing smile. She’s got an extremely well-endowed bosom, and—no, hold the censored portrait right there. What do I see? I see a potential version of the type of woman Nicholas misbehaved with in his disturbed preordination days. When I first met Nicholas in 1968 and helped him sort himself out he told me exactly what his preferred type of woman was. “I like steamy brunettes,” he said. Then he went and married a blonde who wouldn’t remind him of the girls with whom he’d sown his wild oats. Big mistake. I never wanted him to marry that woman. And now he’s been married for twenty years and he’s at that dangerous age, the mid-forties, and …
Do I hear the Devil knocking at the door?
Triple-hell! Alice will have to go. The situation’s too dangerous. I know it’s too dangerous, but how will I ever convince Nicholas? He’ll
think I’m just a nutty old coot, paranoid about women. Damn it, he’s already accused me of demonising Francie!
I mustn’t rush this. I’ve got to take my time and tread very carefully.
Dear little Alice, what a shame. I’m really very fond of her …
Friday, 18th November, 1988
: I was going to write
PUSSYFOOTING
WITH
VENETIA
at the top of this entry and underline it in red ink to mark my joie de vivre. I was looking forward so much to doing that. I was looking forward to doing so many things, few of them realistic. Well, we all have our dreams that can never come true.
I don’t want to record what happened but I know I’ve got to try. I always regard writing this journal as a form of therapy. There’s a healing dimension to it. Or there can be, if one’s not feeling too beaten up to be healed. So …
I meet Venetia at the Hilton, as arranged. She looks very smart in magenta, hips curving, legs flashing, Medusa locks spun around her head in rakish, snakish coils. Diamonds everywhere as usual. Eyelids sagging with false eyelashes. In other words she’s looking exactly what she is: a true British eccentric.
I lurch in bumpily on my crutches and probably look like a centenarian escaping from an old people’s home. I’m also in some degree of pain—not arthritic pain, thank God, but the pain of using muscles which have become unfamiliar and a hip which doesn’t yet seem to belong to me. I don’t mind the pain but I do mind the lurching. I mind it very much.
“My God!” exclaims Venetia appalled. “Was the retreat rather more than you bargained for?”
“I suppose it was. I kept wishing you were there with twigs.”
She laughs before demanding: “What happened?”
“I hope that one day I can tell you the whole story, but meanwhile—alas!—my lips are sealed.”
“How very inconvenient when you’ve come here to drink! Should I arrange for the pussyfoot to be administered intravenously?”
“I’ll unseal a crack for the straw.”
She laughs again and I order the pussyfoots, but I’m enormously relieved she asks no further questions. I know now I’ll never tell her about the hospital. Why bore her with geriatric tales of hip replacement? It would only underline the fact that I’m sixteen years her senior and vilely, terminally old.
After a while she says: “You seem rather
piano.
Are you sure you’re okay?”
I say: “Absolutely! Ignore outward appearances,” and chatter brightly for a while about nothing.
However, soon another pause develops and I suddenly realise I’m not the only one having trouble relaxing this evening; she’s uneasy too. “What’s up?” I say, dreading some tale of an alcoholic binge, but that’s not the problem at all. In fact there’s no problem. She’s just uneasy because she can’t quite work out how to tell me how magnificently her rehabilitation’s coming along; it’s coming along so magnificently that already she’s beginning to see a constructive, interesting future for herself. She tells me that once her first tranche of therapy comes to an end she wants to leave London and all her alcoholic friends and begin a new life elsewhere—on her own.
“I want to spend time in Cambridge,” she says, not looking at me as she fidgets with the ashtray. “I want to try and get that degree I passed up when I was young. It all began when you said: ‘It’s never too late.’ That was when I saw I shouldn’t settle for less than what I really wanted, and when I discussed the idea with Robin he told me about the Lucy Cavendish College which is specifically for women older than the normal undergraduate. So I wrote off and got all the information and …”
She’s going to read theology. She has to take an entrance exam, but she’s had an interview with the principal and she thinks she has a good chance of making the grade. She was interested in theology long ago, but after that rogue cleric of a heartbreaker wrecked her she shied away in revulsion from anything to do with religion. Now it’s time to make good that damage, time to get in touch with what really interests her, time to grapple with reality instead of running away from it.