Читать книгу Glamorous Powers - Susan Howatch - Страница 55

I was now convinced that Francis was determined to reduce my call to a delusion by burying its spiritual dimensions beneath the rubble of a garbled psycho-analysis. I could see all too clearly the theory which he was developing. Deciding that I was a masochist who had finally exhausted the potential for suffering offered by the monastic life, he was toying with the idea that Father Darcy’s death had been the mythical ‘final trigger’ which had sent me over the edge of sanity. Having suffered the delightful humiliation of being rejected by my mentor and the exquisite pain of failing to become the Abbot-General, I had realized that the Order now offered me nothing but an intolerably pain-free life at Grantchester, and unable to face a monastic future without my favourite sadist I was chafing to return to the world where with any luck I might acquire a wife who would beat me every night. How delicious! All I would have to do would be to buy a whip and a chain or two and then I could live happily ever after.

This atheistic vision of a maimed psyche so appalled me that I even wondered – and this was the final horror – if there could be a grain of truth in it. Surely if the theory were quite inapplicable I should be laughing at its absurdity? But my whole future was at stake. How could I laugh when the future I knew I had to have was now threatened with abortion? Indeed all thought of both present and future had suddenly become so agonizing that instinctively I took refuge in the remote past. Closing my eyes I reached up to clasp my mother’s hand as we walked down the garden to find Chelsea, serene elegant Chelsea who washed her paws so fastidiously before the sitting-room fire on the long winter evenings when my father read his books and my mother sewed in silence and I sat listening to her thoughts.

‘You and your cats!’ said my father to my mother. ‘In the old days you’d have been burnt as a witch!’ And the high clear voice which had belonged to me long ago said in panic: ‘They won’t burn her now, will they? I don’t want her dying and going away.’

My memory shifted. I felt Martin’s small sticky hand in mine and heard him say: ‘I don’t want you going away any more.’

I said aloud in 1940: ‘Martin –’

But then the light was switched off in my memory and stripping off my habit I went to bed and willed myself into unconsciousness.