Читать книгу Auto Da Fay - Fay Weldon - Страница 21

My mother was losing interest in worldly matters. She had seen angels in Hagley Park: where once I had held my father’s hand and seen a parachutist floating down from a clear sky, now she saw, floating down, pillars of light: the light spoke to her, reassured her; she was in despair at the time, she said, as to what her life had come to, and ill, and anxious as to how to keep us, but they told her all would be well in the end. She was special to them.

I read a description in C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra of just such pillars of light: he too described them as angels. They too appeared at a time of crisis. Such visions are both transfiguring and dangerous: the Church is suspicious of them (Joan of Arc ended burned at the stake) and psychiatrists spend a lot of time and energy trying to explain them away, as they do point-of-death-experience. Some neural disturbance, some hormonal imbalance, they claim. But I don’t think so, I think she did see angels: and after that nothing that happened, nothing she did or saw, seemed quite real to her again, as if she was living in shadow, waiting for the sun to return.

Visions came to her from time to time, as if the sun came briefly out from behind the clouds. She described a vase of flowers to me, once, as it suffered a sea change into its proper self, floating with an intensity of being and beauty, before returning to its everyday self. She had glimpsed what Plato would describe as the perfect form, of which all mundane things are the shadow: it was the heaven even the nuns had spoken of, when it is enough just to gaze and adore in the Light of the Lord.

For all my bouncy practicality I was the one she talked to about these things. Others were embarrassed. Angels! Mystical experiences! In Hagley Park of all places! Floating vases of flowers? You’re joking! Jane would walk out of the room if my mother tried to talk about it: her friends thought she was a little touched; the local vicar didn’t want to know. I was perfectly prepared to believe in them: I was well aware by now there was more to our existence than meets the eye. My mother wrote to Gerald Heard, a religious leader who lived in a community in California, where later Aldous Huxley was to take mescalin and write The Doors of Perception.