Authors: Susan Howatch
“Good!” I said cheerfully. “I’m always telling him he should socialise more with the London clergy! I’m delighted that he finally took me at my word.”
Lewis drank deeply from his glass of claret and made no reply.
But by this time I didn’t need one because I’d worked out what had happened at Sion College on Monday night. Stacy knew I was keen on Benedictine spirituality, but he’d probably decided to attend the lecture not just to impress me but to follow my advice about socialising. A fair number of priests always attended the Sion College lectures. I could picture Stacy arriving on his own, shy, a little hesitant; I could also picture Gil, who had become better acquainted with Stacy as the result of the AIDS seminar, catching sight of him and waving, just to be friendly. And finally I could all too easily picture Stacy relaxing at the sight of a familiar face and plonking himself down without a gay thought in his head among Gil and his friends.
Well, why shouldn’t he sit among the gays if he felt like it?
Weren’t we all followers of Jesus Christ, and shouldn’t we all be concentrating on what united us rather than what divided us? Gil was kind, generous, compassionate. In my opinion he had a well-integrated personality. It was true that in his support for the gay community he sometimes displayed a fanatical streak, but most people are fanatical about something or other—football, the Green Party, the Royal Family, the ministry of healing, flowers, the entire work of J. S. Bach—and a fanatical streak isn’t necessarily incompatible with being a good Christian. I was quite certain Gil would have had no sinister purpose in befriending Stacy that night. But Lewis, of course, would have seen them sitting side by side and instantly imagined them conspiring to hit every gay bar in town.
After dinner I retired with him to the bedsit and said: “Lewis, I know this is hard for you, but do try and see Gil Tucker as a real person instead of a stereotype labelled
GAY ACTIVIST.
I assume your confidential conversation with Stacy on Monday night stemmed directly from the fact that you caught him sitting with the gays, but all I can say is that if you seriously think Gil’s now going to start preaching to Stacy about the wonders of gay sex—”
“Activists always proselytise. They can’t help themselves.”
“Look, is it really helpful to make these sweeping generalisations? If you could only discard those blinkers of yours and see Gil Tucker in more than one dimension—”
“It’s you who’s in blinkers, Nicholas! The truth is liberals like you can never bear to see anyone in the round—it destroys too many of your cosy, soft-hearted ideas about human nature!”
“I work at the cutting edge of reality. I don’t deal in fey ideas about the human condition. Nor do I consider myself a liberal in the pejorative sense you’ve just defined—”
“I know you don’t. That’s the problem.”
“There’s no problem! Like you I’m dedicated to pursuing the truth. Like you I believe that all truth is from God and that we must therefore pursue it to the best of our ability—and that’s exactly why I don’t believe in making sweeping generalisations about any group of people, particularly a group as diverse as homosexuals! Sweeping generalisations distort the truth!”
“But the truth’s still there beneath the distortion, isn’t it? For example, the British are a very diverse race. But it’s perfectly possible, as foreigners never tire of showing us, to make some generalisations about the British which are both sweeping
and
accurate. They may
not be very kind but they hit the mark because they contain a core of truth. I’m sorry, I know you think I’m just a tiresome reactionary, but—”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s stop right there. This isn’t a profitable conversation. We’ve wandered off course. Now if we can get back to the subject of Stacy—”
“No, Nicholas. You’re creating another huge diversion for yourself because your own problems are so painful that you can’t bear to concentrate on them. Let me repeat what I said earlier after our discussion of Francie: withdraw, rest, pray, recover your spiritual strength.”
I gave up and wandered away.
VI
I couldn’t
face going upstairs to the flat. I couldn’t face the possibility of finding that Rosalind had retired early to bed in Benedict’s room and again locked the door to protect herself from me. I felt now that she hadn’t believed I had been sincere in apologising to her, and that this was why she had made such an unsatisfactory response. Or could she have accepted my sincerity but for some reason found the apology meaningless? I replayed the scene again in my memory but found myself unable to imagine what the reason could have been.
By this time I was back in my study. Slumped in the chair at my desk I forced myself to continue focusing on my problems; perhaps I was driven by some obstinate desire to confound Lewis, who had said I was too debilitated to concentrate on them. I tried to recall the questions Clare had posed, and the next moment I heard her say: “What is the significance of Bear?”
Rosalind had talked of Bear in the scene prior to the hypnosis. “You were peculiar about him …” I could clearly remember her saying that, but what had she meant? I hadn’t been peculiar about Bear at all. A lot of small children are seriously attached to their teddy-bears. My devotion to Bear had been normal. Besides, he’d been the most beautiful bear, golden-fleeced and supple-jointed, his glass eyes very knowing, his black-thread mouth turned down in a subtle expression of melancholy wisdom. How I’d loved him! Even when I’d outgrown my toys I’d never been able to face giving him away. He still lived in comfort in the attic at Butterfold Farm, dressed in his
best pullover knitted long ago by Nanny, and kept safe in my old school tuck-box from the ravages of moths.
“You want to shut me up in a box like Bear!” Rosalind had screamed. I was even sure she had made not one but two references to being shut up in a box. What was going on? Without doubt she’d been furious at the time and probably not thinking too clearly, but why had she linked herself with Bear like that? It was true that Bear was shut up in a box. But a lot of people kept stuff from the past shut up in boxes. It wasn’t unusual. Families hoarded the most extraordinary things in attics. That wasn’t unusual either. So why was Rosalind implying Bear was a symbol of kinkiness and why was Clare endowing him with a weird significance?
It occurred to me that in my distraught state I might have failed to explain to Clare that the mention of Bear in those circumstances wasn’t so weird as it might seem. Of course two adults in their mid-forties didn’t normally waste time chatting about teddy-bears, but Rosalind and I had been discussing our shared past, and in the shared past of our kindergarten days Bear had loomed large. It was natural to talk about him in that context. Nothing weird about it at all.
I was just heaving a sigh of relief that I had reached such a satisfactory conclusion when a very disturbing thought struck me. I was almost sure that when Rosalind had first introduced Bear into the conversation we hadn’t been talking about the past. But perhaps my memory was playing tricks. I tried to rerun the scene more accurately but the harder I tried the hazier my memory became. Could my subconscious mind be at work, trying to blot out this fact which destroyed my comfortable theory that the mention of Bear had been wholly natural? I decided I was being melodramatic. The most likely explanation was that my middle-aged memory wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, and the subject of Bear had arisen, just as reason and logic suggested, from our nostalgic conversation about the past.
To distract myself I turned to my computer and allowed my fingers to do a short tap-dance on the keys. I typed
BEAR
, and then remembering how Clare had switched from talking about Bear to asking after James I typed
CAT.
I sat there, gazing at the screen and thinking of animals. The next moment my fingers were tapping out: “One may lead a
HORSE
to water, Twenty cannot make him drink.”
Not quite automatic writing. But something was bubbling purposefully down there in the unconscious mind. I wiped the screen, abandoned the computer. Now there was just me and that other computer,
my brain. I suddenly realised it was saying: Clare led you to the water. Now for God’s sake do yourself a favour and drink.
Couldn’t shut down this particular computer, that was the trouble. Very inconvenient.
Aloud I said briskly: “Right!” and allowed my memory to go into free-fall in the hope that it would trigger some crucial knowledge that I’d repressed. Had to show Lewis I wasn’t quite such a basket-case as he thought. Had to show Clare I was the horse that was willing to drink. Had to show myself I wasn’t some spaced-out weirdo fixated on a soft toy.
I thought of going to kindergarten for the first time and taking Bear with me for company. Nothing weird about that. I was four years old. Four-year-old kids did that kind of thing. I took Bear everywhere because he made me feel secure. On my first day at kindergarten the other children, nasty brutes, tried to grab him but I shouted: “No one plays with my bear except me!” and fought them off. I didn’t like other children. I was the only surviving child of my parents’ marriage and all the adults I knew treated me as if I was immensely special. My parents weren’t around much but I was able to console myself for their absence by savouring the fact that I was unquestionably wonderful. Then came kindergarten which confirmed my worst fears, acquired previously at various children’s parties to which I’d been dragged by Nanny: I wasn’t so special after all. There were a lot of other people my size in the world. Worse still, they didn’t think I was unquestionably wonderful. Innocence was over. Real life had begun.
It was easy now to look back with a smile at the bruising of my very inflated infant’s ego, but at the time it had been far from funny. My whole sense of self had been undermined and I’d been convinced that some huge hostile force was trying to annihilate me by destroying my identity. As soon as I returned home from kindergarten after that first day I’d had a psychic attack, seen all the other children as hobgoblins, and screamed until I was blue in the face. Nanny thought I’d gone mad, but my father had soon sorted me out. He had made the hobgoblins vanish; he had rolled back The Dark; he had enabled me to feel safe again. But nevertheless I had refused to go back to school.
Then after a couple of days this little girl was produced for me to play with. I’d seen her around at the tea-parties and I knew she had been at kindergarten too although she’d kept in the background. She
was very shy and seldom spoke. I liked that. She also understood about Bear and never touched him unless I gave her permission to do so. I liked that too. Eventually it was suggested to me that I might like to go back to school because Rosalind had no special friend there and was longing for someone to look after her. I agreed to go back, the Prince rescuing Goldilocks. I walked into the playground with Bear under my arm and as I let go of my father’s hand I announced: “No one plays with my bear except me and Rosalind Maitland!” Rosalind went pink with pleasure, overwhelmed by the honour I’d done her. I took her hand and felt strong, safe, normal. I now had a friend, just as all the best children did. I was also protected from the hobgoblins because she made our classmates see me not as a hostile thug but as an ordinary kid capable of joining in the playground games. Rosalind was my passport to normality. After a while I became so normal that I even left Bear behind in the nursery when I went to school. But I didn’t need Bear to make me feel safe and secure any more, did I? I had Rosalind.
I sat in my study, a man of almost forty-six, and stared for a long time down the tunnel of memory to the muddled, frightened, lonely little boy who stood facing me at the far end.
Finally I thought: so Bear made me feel safe and secure and Rosalind made me feel safe and secure. But what’s the big deal about that? It’s just one of the many reasons why Rosalind is the most important person in my life and I love her and come hell or high water I’m never going to let her go.
I shivered suddenly. Didn’t know why. It was as if something had frightened me. Didn’t know what. Maybe it was the idea of letting Rosalind go—except that I wasn’t going to let her go, couldn’t, we were too deeply connected. I knew we had little in common, but so long as I knew she was safe at Butterfold, tucked up in her box … But of course that was Bear, not Rosalind. Rosalind had a sociable life in her own form of community, the Surrey village, and she wasn’t in a box at all. So why had she said … And why had Clare signalled …
Another part of my brain cut in, terminating this irrational nonsense by making me aware that I wanted to go to the lavatory. What a relief to think of a simple task like urination! Almost gasping with pleasure I tramped across the hall to Lewis’s bathroom, formerly the cloakroom, and relieved myself. But afterwards I was afraid I might start thinking irrational nonsense again and trying to kid myself I was
on some sort of trail to the truth, so I went to the kitchen in search of Alice.
No luck. She had cleared up and retired to the hell-hole. I wanted to go down and knock on her door, but that was impossible. Distances had to be kept. Boundaries had to be observed. Alice was very important to me. I didn’t want to crash around like a wonder worker again in a new bout of destructive self-centredness.
Yet at that moment I longed for Alice. Nothing to do with bed. I just wanted to sit with her and feel enfolded by that most beautiful, most elegant psyche. Rosalind and Lewis would never have understood. Rosalind, reflecting the spirit of the age, thought all love between an unrelated man and woman was accompanied by torrid sexual urges, and Lewis, reflecting his hang-ups, thought that fornication was always just around the next corner, but Alice and I knew better. Alice quite understood she would never go to bed with me. She quite understood how devoted I was to Rosalind. She quite understood that distances had to be kept and boundaries had to be observed.
Alice understood.
That was the point. And because she entirely accepted that our relationship could only be conducted along certain lines, she wasn’t living in a hell of jealousy and frustration. I would have known if she was secretly seething with misery. But she wasn’t. She was radiant, glowing, serene. No wonder I sought her company! On the level where our minds met, her love, non-possessive and utterly unselfish, lit up the landscape where I had lived so long in isolation and banished the shadows I’d begun to fear.