Mystical Paths

‘Katie,’ I said, looking straight into her eyes and putting considerable emotion into my voice, ‘you did your best to be a good wife and we can never do more than our best. Set aside these bad feelings about yourself. If you did do something wrong, it’s obvious you repent with all your heart and that means you’re forgiven.’

‘But –’

I piled on the emotional pressure by leaning forward and tightening my grip on her hands. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m not Christian. I can’t be him saying: “I forgive you.” But I can be me saying: “You’re forgivable.” That’s because you loved him and love generates forgiveness, it’s automatic, it’s assured, it’s built into the system.’

‘But I feel my love was such a failure – I feel I’m such a failure –’

‘Absolutely not. You loved him devotedly, with your whole heart – and that makes you a success, a great success, the greatest success you could possibly be.’

‘Oh Nick, you’re being so kind, so –’

‘A beautiful woman capable of a deep, unselfish love – of course Christian would forgive you if he were with us now! Any man would forgive you. I forgive you.’

The next thing I knew I was kissing her and her arms were sliding around my neck. This was hardly what I had intended to happen, but I knew how important it was to restore her self-esteem. Christian had destroyed her sense of her own worth, I could see that now, but if I could give her back her faith in herself and in the power of love … I was dimly aware of my feet leaving the floor as my body arranged itself on the bed beside her.

She said in a low voice: ‘You’re standing in for Christian, aren’t you? Maybe the séance worked after all and he’s speaking to me through you.’

I couldn’t answer. I just thought: a couple more kisses, then I stop, no harm done, total cure.

‘Tell me again you forgive me.’

‘I forgive you, Katie,’ I said, saying Christian’s lines for him. ‘I promise.’

Immediately she clung to me with great passion.

Funny how difficult it was not to be passionate in return. No, it wasn’t funny at all. And it wasn’t just difficult either. It was quite impossible not to return that passion, especially when her fingers encountered the zip of my jeans. Her fingers? My fingers? The terrible part is I don’t remember. No, they were her fingers, must have been. Mine were already unbuttoning her blouse.

Her last words before we copulated were: ‘I feel forgiven now.’

Pathetic.

I can hardly bring myself to admit this, but I still honestly believed I was healing her.

Game, set and match to the Devil.

What a catastrophe.

V

In my rational moments, as I’ve already noted, I wasn’t attracted to underweight women who looked fragile enough to break during intercourse. But this was not one of my rational moments. The obsession to achieve a healing had unplugged my brain.

She didn’t break during intercourse. It was afterwards that she went to pieces.

As soon as she could speak she said in a shaking voice: ‘You’re not standing in for Christian at all. You couldn’t. You’re quite different.’

‘It’s okay, Katie, it’s okay –’

But of course it wasn’t.

‘I never realised how different it could be – I thought all men made love in the same way.’

‘Look, don’t be upset, I –’

‘I’ve betrayed him. And you’ve betrayed me!’

‘No, no – honestly – just think of it as a kind of therapy –’

‘Therapy? My God, how utterly revolting!’

‘But Katie, I didn’t mean –’

‘You’ve deliberately taken advantage of my grief – you’ve cold-bloodedly exploited me –’

‘But all I wanted to do was help you!’

‘You think that could help? You deceived me into thinking you could stand in for Christian and then raped me when I was in no fit state to fight you off!’

‘It couldn’t have been rape. Raped women don’t have orgasms.’

She hit me. I gasped. ‘Katie, for God’s sake –’ She hit me again. ‘Get away from me!’ she said revolted. ‘Never come near me again! I hate you, I hate you, I HATE YOU –’

I grabbed my clothes and fled.

In my sitting-room I found I couldn’t recite the Jesus prayer to calm me down, couldn’t even remember it. I buttoned my shirt wrong, nearly fell over as I pulled on my jeans, and all the while I was becoming aware that the room was a shambles, the fallen chairs and smashed glass creating the impression of a violated space. The chilly air had a peculiarly desolate quality, and as I shuddered I at last remembered the mantra.

‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’

Never had the prayer seemed more appropriate.

In the bedroom Katie began to scream for Marina.

I shuddered again and knew I was in hell.

VI

Marina returned ten minutes later. As soon as I saw the car I went to the bathroom, where Katie had barricaded herself, and told her the good news. She ran downstairs sobbing. Outside the two women embraced before Marina guided Katie into the car and drove away.

Leaving the landing window I stumbled downstairs. Sounds in the dining-room indicated that the members of the Community were having lunch. No conversation was permitted at meal-times but Dorothy the ex-missionary was reading aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress. Silently I slunk into the kitchen and swiped the brandy bottle, which was kept in the house for medicinal purposes. It lived under the sink next to the spare bottles of lavatory-cleaner, a home reflecting the contempt with which the Community regarded alcohol. I had a swig straight from the bottle. My tastebuds felt as if they’d been mugged but within a minute I felt steadier. Burying the bottle in the cupboard again I rinsed out my mouth with water and set off rapidly through the back garden to my father’s cottage in the woods.

VII

I knew I could tell my father only a highly censored version of what had happened, but nonetheless I knew I had to see him. Whenever I was in pieces there was only one person who could weld me together again.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said my father as I entered his cottage. ‘Thank goodness. I had the feeling you were troubled in some way, perhaps even a little frightened.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you switch off sometimes? I’m sick and tired of you invading my privacy with your ESP!’ Of course I was terrified how much he had intuited.

My father’s grey eyes filled with tears. He was very, very old now, almost eighty-eight, and he moved slowly. His great height had been reduced by a stoop. He was still compos mentis but his body was wearing out. Eight years after his successful prostate operation he was suffering from bladder problems again, and although tests had revealed there was no cancer the pain and difficulty continued. His digestion, which had always been excellent, had begun to cause trouble. He vomited, suffered headaches. The doctor continued to prove there was no cancer and in despair prescribed some tranquillisers which my father, much insulted, flushed down the lavatory. Now something had gone wrong with his hands and he refused to see the doctor at all. He made his own diagnosis, eczema, and rejecting all offers of help from Rowena, Agnes and Dorothy, he somehow managed to bandage the hands himself. Mark and Luke, the ex-monks, and Bob, the ex-naval-chaplain, spent hours arguing about the dermatitis entry in the medical dictionary but came to no conclusion. Morgan, the ex-pop-star, had left the Community long ago after abandoning his attempt to write an opera about God, and Theo, the ex-ordinand who thought he was being persecuted by Buddha, was now in a mental home. The Community had been reduced to six.

‘Oh Father, I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to yell at you like that …’ I couldn’t stand it when his eyes filled with tears. This tendency to weepiness was new, another result of extreme old age. He couldn’t control his emotions as well as he used to, and his psychic powers, once so formidably disciplined, were now more erratic. I was sure he hadn’t deliberately tried to tune in to my activities; the tuning in would have been a mere reflex, triggered by his anxiety.

Hating myself for losing patience with him I said: ‘As a matter of fact you were right in sensing that I’ve been having an awkward time.’ Picking up Whitby, who was skulking around my ankles, I dumped him in my father’s lap. I did this not just to give myself a chance to review the censored story I had prepared but because I thought it was once more time Whitby earned his keep by having a tranquillising effect on those nearest and dearest to him.

I stroked the striped fur. So did my father. Whitby tried to knead my father’s knees but collapsed in ecstasy seconds later. The sonorous rise and fall of his purring thrummed around the room.

Having reviewed my story I took a deep breath and said: ‘I’ve just had a very disturbing visit from Marina and Katie. They wanted me to hold a séance but of course I told them that was out of the question. However, when I realised Katie wanted to make contact with Christian in order to obtain his forgiveness, it occurred to me that this was a pastoral situation where I could be of use. I thought that if we all prayed together … the grace of God … love and peace … well, I might have been able to alleviate this mysterious burden of guilt, mightn’t I? It really did seem as if I could be of use.’

‘Nicholas, you’re not yet a priest. And you’re certainly not a doctor. If Mrs Aysgarth was in such a troubled state, you should have advised her to seek professional help.’

‘Yes, of course. However –’

‘Very well, tell me the worst. What happened?’

I prepared to skate on thin ice. ‘We sat down at the table in my sitting-room and I led them in prayer. I wanted to convey that Christian was at peace with God, so I prayed that we might be allowed to experience that peace. I didn’t pray for his soul – I thought non-church-going Protestants might have balked at prayers for the dead – but I thought that if we simply remembered him before God … well, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

‘No, but what exactly was your motive here, Nicholas? Did you act solely out of a desire to help Mrs Aysgarth or were you perhaps attracted by the chance to adopt a powerful role in the presence of two beautiful and charming young women?’

‘I most strongly deny –’

‘Yes, of course you do. But Nicholas, even if your motive was as pure as driven snow, this apparently harmless attempt at prayer could still have been dangerous. If someone’s emotionally disturbed – and in particular if they’re haunted by guilt – any psychic activity, even prayer, can trigger an unpleasant reaction.’

‘But this was worse than just an unpleasant reaction from Katie! There was an interruption by a discarnate shred.’

‘Are you quite sure you weren’t conducting a séance?’

‘Oh no, Father! That was why I was so surprised when –’

‘I too find it surprising. An emotional disturbance from Mrs Aysgarth is easy to explain: the psychic activity of prayer might have caused her to break down as she sensed the opportunity to express her grief and guilt – she could easily have had hysterics or possibly even a psychotic episode if the channel of prayer wasn’t wide enough to contain her emotions. But I wouldn’t have expected an infiltration of the scene by a discarnate shred unless you were actively trying to align yourself with the dead.’

‘Father, it wasn’t a séance. Honestly. It was just a pseudo-séance. I –’

‘You appal me.’

‘But Father, listen –’

‘Did you all hold hands and deliberately try to align yourselves with the spirit of a dead man?’

‘Yes, but since Christian’s at peace with God, surely an alignment could only be beneficial?’

‘How do you know he’s at peace with God?’

‘Well, I –’ I stared at him. Then as my scalp prickled I stammered: ‘I assumed – I felt sure – I mean, I just knew, it was “gnosis” –’

‘Don’t you dare use that word to me!’

‘I’m not using it as a Gnostic – I’m using it as a Christian who needs a code-word for psychic certainties –’

‘There are no psychic certainties.’

‘But Father –’

‘Be quiet. Now listen to me. Never try to communicate with the dead, even those likely to be at peace with God, because even a seemingly harmless attempt to align yourself with a departed soul can have a profoundly disturbing effect on the living.’

‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why what happened did happen. The discarnate shred was malign – I mean, it was very malign, it was driven by the most tremendous power, and in the end I realised that this power could only have been generated by –’

‘I should think it most unlikely that the Devil could have been bothered to drop in on your shoddy little séance. It’s much more probable that you lost your nerve and began to fantasise once the energy disturbances spiralled out of control. I assume that there were, in fact, energy disturbances?’

‘Yes, and Katie was in a sort of coma, moaning and groaning as if she were possessed –’

‘Rubbish, of course she wasn’t possessed! She was merely manifesting her deep psychological troubles. Did you hypnotise her?’

‘No, Father, certainly not.’

‘It would explain the appearance of coma. How on earth did you regain control of the scene?’

‘I shouted to the Devil: “In the name of Jesus Christ, Satan, be gone from this room!” and all the glass in the picture-frame shattered as he went out of the window.’

‘Nothing went out of the window, Nicholas, except the vibrations of your guilt and your panic’

‘But Father, that force I experienced – okay, maybe it wasn’t the Devil himself, maybe it was just a malign shred acting alone – well, whatever it was, it came from without. It wasn’t welling up from within.’

‘How did you experience it?’

‘As a mounting pressure on the psyche.’

‘Exactly. It was a pressure exerted by your unconscious mind – which in your panic would have seemed quite external to your ego.’

‘But Father –’

‘All right, Nicholas, calm down. I think our disagreement is an illusion created by the fact that we’re mixing up two different languages, the religious language employing symbols such as “the Devil”, and the scientific language which employs concepts such as “the unconscious mind”. Why don’t we try to produce a version of your story in each language so that we can see we’re talking about a single truth? Then perhaps we won’t get so cross with each other.’

I was hooked, just as I always was when religion and psychology were seen not as mortal enemies – the grand illusion of so many people – but as complementary approaches to a multi-sided truth. I gave Whitby another long, lingering stroke. Then I said to my father: ‘Okay, go on.’

VIII

‘Whichever language we adopt,’ said my father, ‘it’s safe to say that some very unpleasant forces were on the loose in that room. It’s also safe to say that Mrs Aysgarth was in a highly disturbed state and that you too became disturbed when you found the scene was moving beyond your control.

‘Very well, let’s express ourselves in religious language first. We can say that something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth; we can describe it by a symbol and call it the demon of guilt. When you finally saw how horrific that demon was, your psyche was opened up by your understanding with the result that the demon was tempted to move from Mrs Aysgarth to you. You experienced this demon as a strong pressure on the psyche. However, you then repelled this demonic invasion by calling on the greatest exorcist who ever lived and who we believe is living still; by invoking his name you aligned yourself with his power and succeeded in expelling the demon from the room.

‘So much for the religious language. By the liberal use of important symbols we’ve created a true description of what happened, but there’s another way of expressing the truth and it doesn’t diminish the religious description; it merely complements and confirms it. Let’s now turn to the verbal symbols of psychology.

‘Something was infesting Mrs Aysgarth, we said. We can express that in the other language by saying that she was suffering from a neurosis – obsessed by a sense of guilt. This neurotic guilt is rooted in her unconscious, but has recently begun to break into her conscious mind and lead to an impairment of her health. When you interfered, conducting this séance and subjecting her to psychic manipulation, the control normally exercised by her conscious mind was removed with the result that the darkest and most chaotic emotions began to rise out of the unconscious and manifest themselves in a variety of frightening ways.

‘Mrs Aysgarth may not, medically speaking, have been experiencing a psychotic episode, but I suspect her behaviour had the same effect on you as if you’d been witnessing the behaviour of a violent schizophrenic: you were terrified of what was going to happen next and your terror combined with your guilt that you’d induced such an appalling state of affairs. This made you unusually receptive to the guilt now spewing out of Mrs Aysgarth’s unconscious mind, and when her guilt merged with yours the merger appeared to you as a highly dangerous invasive force. In an instinctive gesture to repel the invasion you invoked the name of Our Lord – which is the point where the two languages meet. The invocation gave you the confidence to regain control; or in other words, the invocation resulted in an outpouring of grace which enabled you to triumph over the evil.’

My father paused for a moment before concluding: ‘So the disaster can be accurately described in both languages and there would appear to be no mystery at all about what happened, but I confess there’s one feature which still puzzles me: Mrs Aysgarth’s guilt. It must have been very extreme to create such a disturbance. Indeed it hints at something grossly abnormal.’

I said cautiously: ‘Afterwards she revealed to me that even though she’d tried her hardest to be a good wife the marriage had been in bad shape.’

‘That would explain the existence of some degree of guilt on her part, certainly, but I’d suspect there was more she wasn’t revealing to you – much more. Tell me, was she difficult to hypnotise?’

‘No, she –’ I stopped. He’d caught me. Clever, cunning old –

‘So you did use hypnosis. I’m outraged, Nicholas, absolutely outraged. I’ve told you time and time again –’

‘I know, I know, I’m sorry –’

‘And how dare you lie to me about it earlier! Did you seriously think you’d take me in? As Father Darcy used to say –’

Here we went again. I knew what was coming. Father Darcy had said to anyone who he judged was making an unsatisfactory confession –

‘– “You’re saying the words you want me to hear but I hear the words you can’t bring yourself to say,”’ quoted my father, and added: ‘You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully, and when I think that in a few weeks’ time you’ll be ordained I feel quite ill with despair.’

‘I’ll drive over to Starwater straight away – see Father Peters – make my confession –’

‘Yes, do all those things – and in future stay away from poor Mrs Aysgarth, who quite obviously needs medical help as soon as possible. Which reminds me, how did you deal with her once you’d brought her out of the hypnotic state?’

‘Oh, I just talked to her, held her hand for a bit, calmed her down –’ By this time I was on my feet and hurtling from the room.

‘If Father Darcy were here,’ said my father, intuitive powers now working full blast, ‘I think he’d demand a somewhat fuller explanation. In fact if Father Darcy were here –’

But he wasn’t.

I flung open the door and fled.

IX

I staggered across to the chapel, which stood near my father’s cottage on the floor of the dell. A hundred yards away I could see the wall which surrounded the grounds of the Manor, and I could also see the door there which the members of the Community used when they brought provisions to my father. It was easier to park the car beyond the wall and walk the few yards up the track to the cottage than to carry the shopping-bags for ten minutes along the meandering path from the main house, and in those days, before crime became a problem even in rural areas, my father kept the door in the wall unlocked during the daylight hours.

I was in such a state that I nearly bolted straight down the track to the road and hared to the village pub for another shot of brandy, but the chapel exerted its familiar magnetism and I headed across the floor of the dell instead. The chapel was young, about a hundred and twenty years old, and had been built in the style of Inigo Jones with such panache that it never seemed like a pastiche of his Palladian designs. It was small but perfectly proportioned, austere when viewed from the outside but fussier when viewed from within. This fussiness arose from the fact that my father had been unable to resist decorating the interior with various sumptuous Anglo-Catholic aids to worship. They formed a bizarre contrast with the plain, stark beauty of the altar’s oak cross, made by him before he had left the Order.

There were candles everywhere – my father was mad on candles – candles on the altar, candles to the side of the altar, prickets for the burning of votive candles at the back behind the pews. There was a holy water stoup by the door. Another candle (no electricity; that would have been cheating) burned before the Blessed Sacrament which was reserved (of course) in a pyx. The whole place reeked of incense but I didn’t mind that; I’d grown up with it, and a strong whiff of the Fordite Special always made me feel relaxed and at home. What I minded were the pictures, florid representations of biblical scenes which in turn represented my father’s uncertain taste in art. This uncertainty found its most embarrassing expression in a sentimental plaster statue of the Virgin and Child, vulgarly coloured and placed to the right of the altar on a fake-jewelled plinth. This had been installed after my mother’s death. My mother, a Protestant who had loved my father not because of his Anglo-Catholicism but in spite of it, would have booted that statue out of her ancestors’ chapel in no time flat.

It interested me that my father, who was extremely ascetic in so many of his habits, should choose to worship in this particular way. Ritualism does tend to be attractive to mystics because it’s designed to express those mysteries which are beyond the power of words to describe, and indeed I believed my father when he said a rich liturgy infallibly created for him a deep sense of the numinous and a consciousness of the presence of Christ in the mass. Yet now that I was older I thought there was also a psychological reason for his attraction to this lavish, extravagant classical ritualism which had been such a daring liturgical fashion in his youth. He had had a sedate upbringing in a little Victorian villa where money had been far from plentiful, and this had given him not only austere tastes but an inverted snobbery about the luxuries money could buy; he always had to pretend he hated luxury, but I think deep down he found it attractive and the only way he could give vent to this attraction was in his religious life. That somehow sanctified the illicit passion which could never be consciously acknowledged, and becoming an Anglo-Catholic had been his way of escaping from the emotional constipation and straitened circumstances of that Victorian middle-class upbringing.

But I hadn’t had that kind of upbringing, and now that I was old enough to think for myself, I felt increasingly confused about Anglo-Catholicism. It was well over a century since the Oxford Movement had relaunched the Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the ageing of a once dynamic movement was becoming all too apparent. Undermined by Vatican II which (so the traditionalists said) had Protestantised the Church of Rome, the Anglo-Catholics had been left high and dry with a bunch of rituals which were going out of fashion not only among the Romans but among the Anglicans. The new trend towards a weekly parish Eucharist, that watered-down version of the mass, now made the Anglo-Catholic services look archaic and – that most damning word of the 1960s – irrelevant. And the majority of English churchgoers – the Protestant majority – hated ritualism anyway.