Authors: Susan Howatch
In short the letter stank. I hated myself for driving her to write it. I hated myself for what I’d done. I knew that by repenting and confessing to a priest who had given me absolution the spiritual slate had been wiped clean, but I still felt soaked in grief, guilt and shame. The absolution had no psychological reality for me yet. And it wasn’t the only thing my psyche was finding hard to grasp. As a new wave of grief swept over me I found the aftermath of the rape was providing me with a reality which was almost unendurable. I thought: this can’t be happening to me. I’ll wake up soon. For by this time it had occurred to me in horror that not only was I in shock but that I was behaving as if I’d lost Rosalind for ever. Although of course I hadn’t. I’d get her back. Eventually. But meanwhile …
Meanwhile it was as if the marriage had died and I was grieving over the corpse, but that wouldn’t do at all and I had to pull myself together. With determination I shredded Rosalind’s letter and dumped it in the swing-bin, but afterwards I found I was unable to rest until I’d scooped out the shreds and burnt them in the sink. The letter, that terrible reminder of the true state of my marriage, had to be wholly annihilated. Only when the ashes had been washed down the drain did I go downstairs and pretend to eat lunch.
After five minutes I went to my study, shut the door and prayed hard for a while. Nothing happened except that I shed a few more tears of self-hatred. I went on grieving for Rosalind, missing her, mentally pawing over the damaged structure of our marriage. How was it going to be mended and redeemed? But perhaps my best hope of staying sane now was not to try to visualise the future but to move on doggedly, taking one day at a time, and always fighting any desire to abandon hope.
Deciding to begin this fight I dragged myself over to the Centre to attend to some paperwork. Despairing priests could never face
paperwork. Therefore if I could face it, I wouldn’t be in despair. My morning appointments had been taken by Lewis, who had a flexible schedule designed to cope with emergencies, and my afternoon appointments had been cancelled by him. But the committed workaholic can always find something to do, even if his colleague has decided he’s unfit to work. On arriving at my office I embraced the paperwork with relief and felt almost normal again.
I dictated some letters to Joyce, my secretary, but she kept having to correct me and the letters sounded jerky when she read them back. Finally I dismissed her and started filling in a form relating to a diocesan enquiry, but I changed my mind so many times about what to put down that in the end I tore up the form and binned it. Let them send another.
By this time it was four o’clock. To kid myself I was still at work I picked up some brochures left by the computer salesman and told Joyce I was retiring to my study at the Rectory to read them. I was wondering if Rosalind was back, but there was no one in the flat. However, her coat had been dumped on Benedict’s bed. So she was back but somewhere else. Still clutching my brochures I padded downstairs again to the study and began to fidget with my computer.
The Applemac was new. Benedict had taught me how to use it. It had finally given us something to talk about. Benedict was a brash, unreflective young man who was unable to bear either silence or solitude. Recently I had read an article about public school lager louts and had realised that Benedict was a prime example of this species. I found it hard to believe we were related—but perhaps we weren’t. Perhaps my wife had been unfaithful to me for longer than she had chosen to admit. Maybe my happy marriage had been one long grand illusion.
Hadn’t really forgiven the adultery, of course. I’d said “I forgive you” and I had indeed wanted that statement to be true, but the forgiveness proclaimed so nobly had had no psychological reality. It was a tricky thing, this business of the psychological reality being at odds with the proclamations of the intellect and the will. I’d often witnessed the phenomenon in my clients and now I was seeing it happen in myself. In this case my battered psyche hadn’t caught up with the demands of my Christian conscience. The psyche was lagging behind, bruised and bloodied, still screaming silently with the pain of damage sustained and loss endured.
Drained of energy by this new insight I abandoned my computer
and began to thumb through the brochures for the new Psion Organiser, the all-in-one alternative to diaries, filing systems, calculators and address-books at a price of £195.95, but in the end I had to abandon even this stimulating technological diversion. The pain was so stupefying, shredding my thoughts and stirring up profound feelings of rejection and failure. I was trying not to think of my mother and all the grief which had followed her death, but I could still feel those old scars breaking open and bleeding all over my mind. Love had been lost. Security had been wiped out. Chaos had been enthroned. And now it was all happening again—except that of course this time, with Rosalind still alive, I’d beat back the chaos, recapture the love and security and win through. But meanwhile …
Meanwhile I was thinking that huge personal disasters, striking at the root of one’s stability, had a way of escalating until they terminated in catastrophe. My mother’s death had had a variety of consequences for both my father and myself, but the most serious had been the removal from our lives of someone who personified normality. If she’d lived I wouldn’t have become such a troubled, oddball loner in adolescence, and if I’d been able to rely on ordinary social skills in order to make friends I wouldn’t have wound up abusing my psychic powers to impress people and becoming the paranormal pet of that fast set which had adopted me when I was barely out of my teens. My father had tried to set me straight but he’d been too old and hadn’t been able to cope. In the end I’d almost wrecked my chance of being ordained. If Lewis hadn’t intervened …
But it was better not to think of the catastrophe which had lain at the end of that escalating disaster. It was enough to recall that I was bucketing around, out of control, a wonder worker who allowed himself to be used and bruised by the powers of darkness, until the inevitable day came when I made the wrong decision and was almost wiped out. That certainly taught me a lesson. Maybe all arrogant, know-it-all, bone-headed young idiots, psychic or otherwise, should have a short, sharp brush with death to bring them to their senses. It certainly brought me to mine.
After Lewis had saved me he trained me. I owed everything to him. In 1983, when he wound up dead drunk on my doorstep, Rosalind could never understand why I’d bent over backwards to rehabilitate him, but then Rosalind had never understood how far I was in Lewis’s debt. She thought I would have pulled myself together anyway after the crisis which nearly destroyed me in 1968. But she was
wrong. Without Lewis I would have gone under. God had worked through Lewis to haul me back from the abyss, I saw that now, but I’d been lucky. I was well aware of how fortunate I’d been, and ever since then I’d lived in dread of the disaster which escalates, the disaster which the powers of darkness use as a surfboard to surge all the way up the golden beach into the heart of the kingdom of light.
No good talking to Rosalind in that kind of mystical language. She couldn’t relate to it. I’d tried to explain to her that metaphor, symbol and analogy can convey truth which can’t be expressed adequately in straightforward language, but she hadn’t really understood. She preferred plain, factual statements. It interested me that although she loved flowers, what she loved best was the mechanics of selling them at a profit. Fair enough. Capitalists have their own language and their own world-view, just like any other group, but I did wish more of them could believe their language wasn’t automatically superior to any other language which was on offer.
I suddenly realised I was staring at the Psion Organiser brochure, discarded earlier and now lying in my “pending” tray. I was also still shuddering with pain. Obviously I needed to move before I started banging my head against the wall. Leaving the study I headed for Lewis’s bedsit to wait for him to return from work, but as I crossed the hall I saw Alice working in the kitchen. At once I knew that in her presence I would find peace and a respite from pain.
I veered away from the bedsit.
No moth could have headed more rapidly to the light.
III
Alice
was rolling pastry. I was informed that we were going to have steak-and-kidney pie that night with potatoes and cabbage. Belatedly I remembered to tell her that Rosalind and I would be present for dinner but Alice said fine, no problem, she’d do extra vegetables for the second helpings. Sitting down at the kitchen table I began to watch her while she worked.
After a moment the cat sprang onto my lap and finally succeeded in making himself comfortable after much revolving and stamping and pawing. He was growing fast. Neutering loomed on the horizon. Lewis and Stacy, who knew nothing about cats, were emotionally opposed to this operation but Alice and I knew better. Tomcats have a
terrible life in cities if they’re left to the mercy of their sex-drive. They’re perpetually exhausted, both by copulation and by fighting, and they can get badly injured, particularly if they pick up infections from dirty claws. That kind of chaotic existence shortens the life-span and makes the cat mean. What was the point of James having a full set of sex organs if he died young with one ear missing and his tail bitten off as the result of a violent and smelly career? Lewis said he recognised himself in this description and would still elect to be fully equipped. Stacy objected that Lewis was too old to die young. Alice, sensible as always, pointed out that Lewis wasn’t a cat. Meanwhile James, ignorant of his approaching fate, was enthusiastically chewing our shoelaces under the table.
I stroked his fur now as I watched Alice work, and listened to his purring. Alice was very good at silences. Happiness emanated from her as the pie took shape. She was centred, focused, serene.
I sat motionless, the wounded healer, and soaked up the wordless comfort she offered.
“When you came to work here,” I said at last, “you used to behave as if you could hardly believe that Lewis and I, the healers, had done you such a favour—and perhaps in our arrogance we too saw ourselves as doing all the giving, providing healing for you in various ways. But that wasn’t God’s purpose at all, was it? We may originally have been sent to you, but then the tables were turned and you were sent to us. It’s
you
who’s now the real healer at the Rectory, Alice.”
She paused in her task of fluting the pie-crust. The pie was enormous, sumptuous, resplendent. Gazing at it reflectively she was too shy to look me in the eyes.
Alice was thinner now, still plump but the plumpness had an acceptable pattern. She was no longer an elongated lump with various thick appendages; she was a series of generous curves. Lewis, I knew, liked them and had remarked more than once to me recently how good it was to see Alice acquiring what he called a “non-repulsive shape.” I’d agreed, although I’d never thought much about Alice’s physical shape because I was so entranced by the shape of her psyche. Alice had the most beautiful psyche, supple as an athlete’s body and glowing in richly patterned strands of warmth, compassion and understanding. I’d been aware of it as soon as we’d met, although at the time it had been disfigured by so much anxiety and pain. The extreme beauty of this aspect of Alice, an aspect invisible to the eye, was why I’d taken such a special interest in her. I had never admitted this
to Lewis, but no doubt he had long since guessed what was going on. He himself would have been aware of Alice’s psyche, although not nearly so aware as I was. Lewis always had trouble perceiving women accurately. He wasn’t incapable of a clear perception but the process took him longer because he had to battle away against his hang-ups.
I suddenly realised Alice was speaking, responding to my comment that she was the real healer at the Rectory. I heard her say: “If you believe that, then I suppose it must be true, although it seems fantastic and I can’t see why you should think such a thing. But thanks anyway. It’s a wonderful compliment.” She smiled at me briefly and for a second our eyes met. Then she returned to her work on the pie.
I noted that Alice did not ask why the residents at the Rectory needed healing. I assumed she had sensed the changes of atmosphere and the profound unhappiness which was now flowing like an underground river beneath the deceptive normality of our daily routine, but she always knew when to speak and when to be silent, when to ask questions and when to avoid comment. She was particularly clever with Lewis, who had previously terrorised all the domestic help and had at first opposed the idea of her living in at the Rectory.
Alice stroked Lewis on a psychic level and calmed him. She cooked him his favourite English dishes. She introduced him to rum raisin ice cream. She admired the photographs of his grandchildren. She visited him in hospital. But she never gushed over him or became intrusive. She just cared for him without ever striking a false note. Lewis had made a joke of identifying himself with James, but there’s many a true word spoken in jest, and when I saw how deftly Alice dealt with him I was reminded of a gifted cat-lover looking after a battle-scarred old torn who had never quite recovered from being kicked as a kitten. “Dear little Alice!” Lewis would sigh, tamed and tranquillised. “I’m very fond of her.”
She was equally successful with Stacy, and he had soon become confident in her presence. Non-threatening and non-possessive, she wanted only to be kind and helpful. She taught him how to use the washing machine without breaking it. When she saw the state of his underclothes after they emerged from the dryer, she offered to buy him a new set of everything at Marks and Spencer. She baked him his favourite biscuits. She introduced him to rum raisin ice cream. She praised the pictures of his sister Aisling’s wedding. She showed him the best way of mending his cassock whenever the hem fell down and would certainly have mended it herself if I hadn’t insisted that Stacy
was to take care of his own clothes. On weekends, her official time off, she would find the time to drink cups of tea with him while he talked endlessly about Liverpool and football and his family. He never talked so freely either to Lewis or to me.