Mystical Paths

Finally I drew the curtains. There was still plenty of light in the room afterwards and we could see one another clearly, but the fractional dimming was another device aimed at helping the girls relax.

‘Okay,’ I said, sitting down with them at the table, ‘let me explain what I intend to do. Forget all the junk you may have read in books. I’m not going to grunt and groan and speak in a strange voice and say I’m the spirit of Tutankhamen, specially sent with a message from the astral plane. Nor am I going to conjure up mysterious tappings which spell out the letters of the alphabet. We’re going to keep this very straight, very orthodox – no frills, no fancy touches, no Mumbo Jumbo.’

I paused. They were enrapt. So far so good.

‘First of all,’ I resumed, ‘we’ll all hold hands while I say a prayer. After that we’ll keep holding hands as we remember Christian in silence; we’ll picture him as clearly as possible and pray that we may share with him the peace which he now experiences as a departed soul enfolded by the love of God. We’ll be silent for approximately five minutes. That’ll probably seem a long time to you, but keep picturing and keep praying. Then I’ll end the silence with another spoken prayer which will reinforce our silent prayers by asking for God’s love to flow into us so that we may be at one with Christian’s spirit. You’ll know then,’ I said directly to Katie as I put the full force of my personality into my eyes, ‘that you’re with Christian and he’s with you because you’ll feel this great peace and love … peace and love … peace and love.’

I saw her eyes film over as her will knuckled under to mine. Easy. Emotional, romantic, very feminine women are never a problem to hypnotise. They like to be dominated by men. I glanced at Marina. Her blue eyes were round as saucers. I wondered whether to put her under too but decided against it. No need. Katie was the one who required healing. Marina, a far tougher personality, had survived her bereavement with her psyche scarred but unsplit.

‘Are we ready?’ I said. We were. I took Katie’s right hand in my left and Marina’s left hand in my right while the girls’ spare hands touched and clasped. Then I said in my best priestly voice: ‘Almighty and Most Merciful Father, have pity, we beseech Thee, on Thy servant Katherine in her grief. Grant that she may accept her severance from her husband in this life so that she may now experience through Thy Grace the peace and love in which Thou enfoldest him. Help her to understand that this peace and love is eternal and that when we share in it, no matter how briefly, we are united with those who have gone before us into that world beyond time, beyond space, beyond the scope of our minds to conceive. Almighty Father, we make these requests in the name of Thy Only Son, Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who healed the sick and gave peace to those in torment. Lord, have mercy upon us and hear our prayer. Amen.’ I paused before saying with great care and clarity: ‘And now let us remember Christian in silence and pray again that we may share with him the peace he experiences as a departed soul enfolded by the love of God.’

When I stopped speaking they started picturing Christian and exuding the silent yearnings which approximately reflected my suggestions to them, but I embarked on a mental recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. I did this to keep at bay any discarnate shreds of former personalities who might have been attracted to the psychic activity and tempted to participate in it. I didn’t want any uninvited guests muscling in on the action – or, to put the problem in modern terms instead of old-fashioned picture-language, I didn’t want any irrelevant clutter stirring in the inaccessible realms of our unconscious minds and rising to the surface with bathetic results. This invasion from an unknown world would have corresponded to the point in a traditional séance where King Tutankhamen can drop in to say he’s frightfully worried about the papyrus which fell in the Nile and he’d simply adore a spot of tea to soothe his fractured nerves.

‘Our Father,’ I recited silently, ‘Which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us; lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from –’

Katie moaned just as the word ‘evil’ was projected from my brain, and at once my concentration snapped. It was an odd moan, not right, by which I mean off-key, not the kind of moan you would expect from a contralto like Katie. It was high-pitched, soul-less, abnormal.

‘Lead us not into temptation,’ I repeated aloud, automatically trying to will her back on course, ‘but deliver us from evil –’

Above the mantelshelf the engraving of Starbridge Cathedral fell with a crash to the floor.

As Marina screamed I thought: bloody hell! Not the best of expletives for an ordinand, but I was very rattled. However I knew what was happening. It wasn’t King Tut muscling in on the action. It wasn’t even an anonymous discarnate shred. It was Katie’s disturbed psyche generating a level of energy that I hadn’t anticipated. I’d been prepared for the odd breeze or two, but only a hurricane could have driven that carefully-adjusted picture clean off the wall. Obviously she was too far under and I had to yank her upwards in order to put her back in control of her mind.

‘It’s okay,’ I said swiftly to Marina, ‘nothing to worry about, just a bit of energy on the loose.’ And to Katie I said: ‘Up – you’re coming up – you’re waking up – up – up –’ I paused but nothing happened. She merely moaned again and her eyes remained closed. Instantly I thought of Debbie sunk in that trance I had been unable to break. But that had been in my younger days. Flexing my will, I steeled my psyche and tried again, doing my best to ignore the fright that was now crawling around the pit of my stomach.

‘Katie, open your eyes. Wake up. Katie, I say to you in the name of Jesus Christ, open your eyes and –’ She opened them. Thank God. ‘Katie, you’re all right, you’re fine, you just got diverted. Now think hard of Christian again –’

‘Christian,’ she whispered. ‘Christian.’ Her lips were almost bloodless and her skin had a greyish tinge.

‘Yes, that’s it, think of Christian and I’ll say the next prayer,’ I said, curtailing the allotted five minutes of contemplative silence, but then I found myself distracted by the wall where the fallen engraving had been hanging. The picture-nail, though still attached to the wall, was pointing downwards. Maybe the incident had had nothing to do with an explosion of kinetic energy but had been caused instead by the collapse of the nail, an event which would have happened anyway, no matter what was going on in the room. Glancing at the engraving on the floor I was astounded to see that the glass in the frame was intact, and at once this survival seemed far more freakish than the fall of the picture.

‘Let us pray,’ I said, recalling my attention with an effort, but then Katie started to weep and immediately I broke off the prayer because I knew I had to put her under again. If I didn’t she’d never experience peace and then the whole healing session would have been a failure.

‘It’s all right, Katie,’ I said. ‘You’re all right now, Christian’s at peace, you’re at peace, you’re both at peace, both of you …’ She was under. Instantly I wrapped my psyche around hers to stop it sinking too far through her subconscious mind, but this was a mistake. I should have been concentrating on the prayer to God, not taking time out to play the hypnotist, and the result was we had now reached a stage where no one was praying; I was channelling my power in another direction, Katie was too unbalanced to focus and Marina was too worried about Katie to remember what she was supposed to be doing. Then the inevitable happened. I suddenly became aware of a discarnate shred elbowing its way into our circle, and it certainly wasn’t King Tut turning up for tea. I experienced the shred as a strong, sinister pressure on the psyche.

Automatically I said: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

The pressure eased, but I had relaxed my psychic grip on Katie and she was giving that eerie moan again. Hell. Had to control Katie, had to control the shred, had to control Marina who was now on the brink of panic, had to control, control, control –

The table started to rock.

Marina screamed again.

Bloody hell, what was happening – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God – ‘It’s okay, Marina!’ – have mercy on me, a – yes, that was better, I’d got the table back on its four legs and now all I had to do was calm down. Katie had been shooting off a gale-force blast of energy again, that was all, it was just an inconvenience, no reason for panic, but why couldn’t I imprint the words PEACE and LOVE on her mind, why could I now make no contact with her whatsoever? It was as if during that moment of chaos someone had bolted and barred her psyche against mine – as if the sinister discarnate shred, repelled from my mind by the Jesus prayer, had slid sideways into hers and –

I suddenly realised the shred was closing in on me for another attack.

I could feel the pressure mounting, I could feel the power behind the pressure, and the next moment I knew that beyond the power, blasting it forward, was –

I leapt to my feet, my chair flew backwards and simultaneously the glass shattered to pieces in the frame of the fallen engraving. I had a fleeting glimpse of Marina’s terrified face, and then as I slammed my psyche shut against the Dark by a colossal act of will I heard myself shout out: ‘IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, SATAN, BE GONE FROM THIS ROOM!’

The curtains billowed violently by the open window and Katie slumped forward across the table in a dead faint.

III

‘Marina, get some water – bathroom across the passage – tooth-mug by the basin –’

She obeyed me instantly. No idiotic questions. Admirable. Gathering Katie in my arms I tried to revive her by patting her cheeks and calling her name, but I was so frightened that I might have driven her over the edge of the abyss into insanity that I hardly knew what I was doing.

Marina rushed back with the mug of water. I pressed it to Katie’s lips but she was still unconscious. ‘Throw it over her,’ said Marina tersely. That too was admirable. Nothing’s more helpful than a strong dose of common sense when one’s scared out of one’s wits. I threw the water. Katie moaned and her eyelashes fluttered. Thank God.

‘Wake up, Katie,’ I repeated, trying to wipe out both the hypnosis and the mental disturbance. ‘You’re all right now. Wake up.’

She murmured our names.

‘Yes, I’m here, darling,’ said Marina, grabbing her hand. ‘It’s all right – it’s over.’

‘What happened?’ Her voice was louder, clearer, almost normal. I felt sick with relief.

‘We made contact with a hostile force,’ I said glibly, ‘but that had nothing to do with Christian. He’s at peace with God, Katie, I promise you, and now that you know he’s at peace you’re at peace too.’

‘I don’t feel at peace,’ she whispered.

That disturbed me very much. She was supposed to wind up calm, serene and strengthened, not shattered, shocked and more tormented than ever. My attempt at healing by hypnosis coupled with prayer seemed to have been a complete failure, but the hypnosis should at least have had a temporary calming effect even if the prayer had failed to produce a permanent improvement. ‘Marina, fetch some more water,’ I said, trying not to sound as baffled as I felt, ‘and bring a towel from the bathroom so that she can mop herself up. Katie, you must lie down on my bed in the next room. No, don’t try and get up – I’ll carry you.’

She was as light as a famine-victim, and when I became aware of the weight-loss which the cut of her suit had concealed I realised her mental disturbance had affected her physical health. I knew then I should never have meddled with her. She needed a doctor, not an ordinand playing the wonder-worker, and as this stark truth ploughed through my mind I felt overpowered by my guilt and my shame.

‘Couldn’t find a towel,’ said Marina, reappearing with the refilled tooth-mug. ‘There was nothing on the rail.’

Laundry day. I’d forgotten. I’d turned in my towel after breakfast. ‘I’ll get one from the airing cupboard – hang on, Katie – this way, Marina,’ I muttered, grabbing her wrist and drawing her out of the room. In the corridor I said rapidly: ‘Listen, I’ve got to talk to you, got to explain what happened so that you can understand what’s got to be done. All those disturbances were caused by her. When a psyche’s under extreme stress it can generate the paranormal happenings we witnessed just now when objects appear to move by themselves. The phenomenon’s sometimes called poltergeist activity – it comes out of the unconscious, out of something we don’t understand and don’t normally have access to. When I said just now that we’d made contact with a hostile force, that was just old-fashioned picture-language – like talking about poltergeists. What we actually encountered was a violent emanation of psychic energy from Katie’s unconscious mind.’

‘Then why did you yell out that command to Satan?’

‘Oh, forget that, it was just a safety precaution. What I was really doing was gaining control over the emanations.’

‘But –’

‘Look, just concentrate on the facts: Katie’s disturbed. It’s not the kind of disturbance that can be put right by prayer and meditation. She’s got to see a psychiatrist.’

Marina was shocked but remained well in control of herself. My admiration for her deepened. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll wheel on the big guns of Harley Street, but meanwhile how on earth do I get her home?’

‘I’ll fix her up, no need to worry, just give me an hour. Go for a drive.’

‘But what are you going to do?”

‘Talk to her, make her some tea, try anything that’ll get her back on her feet, but it’s better if you’re out of the way. Then I can focus on her without distraction.’

‘Okay, I understand.’

‘And as soon as you get her home call a doctor.’

‘Right.’ She glanced at her watch and walked briskly off down the corridor towards the main staircase.

I waited till I heard the front door close far away in the hall. Then I took a clean towel from the airing cupboard and returned to Katie.

IV

She was crying. She lay face down on the bed like a discarded doll and her body shook with sobs. As I came in she raised her head from the pillow and turned over to lie on her back. Her eyes were swollen, her skin looked like parchment, her hair was matted. I barely recognised her.

‘I feel so guilty,’ she whispered.

I made what I prayed was the right response: wordless sympathy. Sitting down on the bed beside her I took her hand comfortingly in mine.

‘I failed him somehow,’ she said. ‘I loved him so much but it wasn’t enough.’

She was putting us both in the confessional – which meant I was being given the chance to behave like a priest instead of a psychic maverick. Desperate to redeem my catastrophic error I said earnestly: ‘I know you loved him,’ and I clasped her other hand so that a symbolic double-lifeline was established. Then I tried to concentrate on supporting her damaged psyche. The image of the discarded doll was helpful; I pictured an imaginary china doll, very beautiful but chipped and cracked; then I visualised myself sealing up the cracks, painting over the chips and attending to each detail with immense care.

‘In books love conquers everything,’ she said, ‘but it’s not like that in reality. My love didn’t conquer everything. My love ended in failure.’

I had to be very cautious here. Some kind of reply was required but I was afraid of uttering a sentence which might be either a banality or simply untrue. I raised a metaphorical aerial to improve my reception of her thoughts but sensed nothing I could readily interpret. It was her guilt that interested me. I knew a surviving spouse could feel overpoweringly guilty – my father had been a classic example of that syndrome – but why Katie should be so full of guilt when she had done her best to be a model wife was not easy to perceive.

‘I know he was disappointed when Grace and Helen were born,’ she said, sparing me the need to reply as she spoke of her daughters, ‘but I did put everything right in 1965 when John arrived and Christian had the son he’d always wanted. I was so happy. But then it began all over again.’

‘What began all over again, Katie?’

‘It. I don’t know what it was. But something had happened to Christian. Something had gone terribly wrong.’

After a pause I said: ‘When did this begin?’

‘Oh, ages ago, but it didn’t become chronic until about six months before he died. I think it started in 1961 when Helen was born. “You name it,” he said as if he couldn’t have cared less. Oh, how I cried! But then he recovered and was nice again … for a while. By 1963 I was in despair – but then the miracle happened and Marina joined us.’ She withdrew one of her hands from mine in order to wipe her eyes, but the tears had stopped and I knew that by listening I was helping her.

I made a small noise indicating intense sympathy and deep interest. Then I reclasped her hand.

‘I love Marina,’ she said. ‘She’s such a wonderful friend. Christian loved her too because she was so bright and amusing and she never bored him. “If Katie were as bright and amusing as you are,” he said to her in 1963, “she wouldn’t be driving me up the wall.” “You absolute pig!” said Marina. “How dare you be so beastly about darling Katie!” I was terrified when she said that, but do you know what happened? He laughed. He actually laughed – and then he apologised to me and said sorry, he knew he’d been a bastard but he was going to reform. Of course that was when I realised we had to have Marina in our marriage.’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound as if she had made an unremarkable observation. On an impulse I added: ‘How very perceptive of you.’

‘Well, she had such a wonderfully benign effect on him, you see, and she was so devoted to both of us. We’d known her for a long time – that grandmother of hers living almost next door to my in-laws – but because she was so much younger than we were we didn’t start to meet her at social occasions until about 1962. And then in the May of 1963 she gave that wonderful party at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close … you were there, weren’t you? I can remember you dressed in jeans and eating a sausage roll –’

‘– and I can remember Christian being on edge with you.’

‘Yes, he was – and that was when Marina made her stunning intervention and I realised we had to have her in our marriage … Of course sex didn’t come into it at all.’

‘Ah.’

‘No, Marina finds sex repulsive, but Christian quite accepted that it wasn’t on offer – in fact he liked that, found it original. Women were always throwing themselves at him, just as men were always throwing themselves at Marina.’

‘Sounds as if they were made for each other.’

‘Oh, we were all made for each other! It was quite perfect … for a while. But in the end, in 1965, not even Marina could stop him going off every weekend with Perry to that bloody boat at Bosham.’

‘How did you feel about Perry Palmer?’

‘Jealous. Funny, wasn’t it? You’d think I’d have been jealous of the woman and tolerant of the man, but it was quite the other way round.’

‘Was Christian as close to Perry as he was to Marina?’

‘Oh, closer, because of their long shared past. But the relationship was certainly similar. Of course sex never came into it at all.’

‘Ah.’

‘No, Perry’s no more interested in sex than Marina is, and anyway Christian was never drawn sexually to other men. My brother Simon used to say that Christian was very middle-class about sex,’ Katie added, unintentionally revealing her upbringing in an aristocratic world where sexual permutations failed to raise eyebrows, ‘but that was just because Christian found smutty jokes boring and immorality an unintelligent waste of time and energy. Christian was actually a very moral man. It was the clerical background.’

As I knew so well, a clerical background was no guarantee of moral behaviour but I understood what she was trying to say: a clerical upbringing at least makes one acutely aware of morality even if one fails to wind up as a replica of Sir Galahad.

‘What’s Perry’s background?’ I said, more to keep the therapeutic conversation going than to satisfy my curiosity.

‘His father was some military VIP in India. Wealthy family but new money,’ said Katie, again offering a glimpse of a background where respectable fortunes had to be at least three hundred years old. ‘His grandfather manufactured something in Lancashire, a sort of hip-bath it was. Perry has a picture of the original drawing in his lavatory at Albany.’

‘I think I remember it. When exactly did Perry meet Christian?’

‘On their first day at Winchester when they were both thirteen. I didn’t meet Christian till much later, and we didn’t marry till he was nearly thirty. Sometimes I feel I never caught up with Perry … oh, how baffling it all seems in retrospect! The truth is that at the end it was Perry he turned to, but why the marriage was disintegrating I don’t know. I just feel increasingly sure that it was all my fault, and I’ve reached the stage where I don’t know how to bear either my guilt or my ignorance.’

‘I understand,’ I said at once. But did I? One could say that she was being haunted to an abnormal degree by her unhappy memories, but beyond this dramatic symbolic language it seemed to me that a very commonplace situation was being described: a man had fallen out of love with a woman, got bored and hadn’t quite been able to figure out how to extricate himself from the relationship. Love affairs disintegrated in that way every day, and so did marriages – although of course the disintegration of a marriage would usually be a more complex matter. It would be rarer too because in marriage friendship was supposed to take over when the sexual excitement had expired, but supposing one woke up one morning and realised that not only was desire dead but that even the possibility of friendship had fizzled? Inevitably one would toy with the idea of divorce, but divorce might be undesirable for a number of social, professional and financial reasons. In such a jam what could be more natural than to escape from home as often as possible in order to relax with one’s best friend? That all made sense. But it also made sense to note that none of this marital distress was necessarily the wife’s fault. She could have been a model wife and still have induced boredom. The real difficulty almost certainly lay in the fact that the marriage had been based on illusions which time had mercilessly exposed.

I said with care: ‘It certainly seems that Christian had a problem which was putting a strain on the marriage, but that problem needn’t have been connected with you.’

‘If he had a problem,’ she said at once, ‘I should have been told about it. The fact that he couldn’t confide in me just underlines how deeply I failed him.’ And she added in a rush: ‘You do see now, don’t you, why I wanted to contact him at the séance? I wanted to tell him I was sorry for whatever it was I did wrong, and I wanted to hear him say: “I forgive you.”’

The words ‘repentance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘absolution’ and ‘salvation’ flashed across my mind in an automatic clerical reaction to the pastoral challenge which now confronted me. I had been about to draw the conversation around to the subject of seeking help – I had already phrased my opening remark on the prolonged physical stress which could result from the mental torment of guilt – but now I suddenly thought: maybe I can still fix this. And I felt driven to wipe out not just the fiasco of the séance but my guilt that I had only exacerbated her grief.