Читать книгу Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch - Страница 11

‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father said to me years later before I went up to Cambridge. ‘Those psychic powers which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!’

This warning I wrote off as an exaggeration, a typically Victorian piece of melodramatic tub-thumping. More fool me. Having noted the psychic affinity which formed the bedrock of my relationship with my father, I must now sketch my disastrous career as a psychic.

I followed in his footsteps by reading divinity up at Cambridge, but after my finals I decided not to proceed immediately to theological college to train for the priesthood. This decision arose out of a conversation I had with Christian and I shall describe it fully later, but at present it’s sufficient to say that at twenty-one I was tired of living in all-male ghettos and hankered to experience what I called ‘The Real World’. In consequence I wound up doing voluntary work in Africa, but within months I got in a mess with a witch-doctor and had to be flown home.

My father begged me to proceed without further delay to theological college, but I was determined to complete the two years I’d set aside for voluntary work; I felt the need to wipe out the failure by being a success. Accordingly I took a job at the Mission for Seamen, fifty miles from home on the South Coast, but again disaster struck: two sailors got in a fight over me and wrecked the canteen. In vain I protested to my supervisor that I wasn’t a homosexual and had given neither sailor encouragement. I was judged a disruptive influence and asked to leave.

Despite my father’s renewed pleadings I still refused to abandon my two-year plan but my third job also ended chaotically. I started work as an orderly at the Starbridge Mental Hospital, but before long a schizophrenic girl fell in love with me and slashed her wrists when I explained to her (kindly) that I was unavailable for a grand passion. She survived the slashing, but I was very upset, particularly when I realised the doctors were looking at me askance. Worse was to follow. Plates began to be smashed mysteriously in the empty kitchens at night, and when the senior psychiatrist asked with interest if I had ever been involved in the phenomenon popularly known as poltergeist activity, I decided it would be smart to resign before I was sacked.

At that stage I realised I had to do something drastic before my father expired with worry, so I headed for Starwater Abbey where I had been a pupil at the famous public school. Standing in the Starbridge diocese not far from my home at Starrington Magna, the Abbey was run by Anglican-Benedictine monks from the Fordite Order of St Benedict and St Bernard. My father had been a Fordite monk once, and as the result of his special knowledge of the Order he had arranged for Starwater’s resident expert on the paranormal to keep an eye on me during my schooldays. It was to this man that I now turned.

Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.

At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’

‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’

‘Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’

‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’

I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.

Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an over-strained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.

But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.

‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.

‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.

‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’

‘Nicholas –’

‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’

Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.

Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.

Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.

‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside ‘– that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the abuse of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’

This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities – and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket – he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called ‘wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.

‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of –’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century ‘-psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’

We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’

‘Hm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.

‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong …’

Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.

It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.

Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?

In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.

By that time she had stopped talking and evolved into a zombie, eyes open, responsive to my commands but unable to communicate. I panicked, terrified by the thought that I had produced permanent mental impairment. Having manoeuvred her into my car I headed for the emergency department of Starbridge General Hospital, but then I suffered a second bout of panic. Supposing they thought she was traumatised as the result of a sexual assault? Supposing a scandal aborted my career as a priest before it had even begun? Bathed in the coldest of cold sweats I drove past the hospital and fled home with the zombie to my father.

He asked me only one question. It was: ‘What’s her name?’ and when I told him he took her hand in his and said: ‘Debbie, in the name of JESUS CHRIST I command you to return to your body and reclaim it.’ The cure was instant. There was no permanent mental impairment. But I never went to bed with her again. She wanted me to; she cried, she pleaded, but I couldn’t. I’d seen the Dark. I’d felt the Force. It had been shown to me very clearly how vulnerable my psychic powers made me to demonic infiltration, and in my revulsion Debbie now seemed fatally contaminated.

‘You used that child,’ said my father, hammering home the truth with a fury which failed to conceal his terror that I should be so vulnerable. ‘You exploited her in order to satisfy your curiosity about a psychological mystery which has been adopted by those who believe in the heretical doctrine of reincarnation. You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully and I’m ashamed of you.’

Strong words. I hated myself. Worse still, the temporary withdrawal of his love made me more aware of my vulnerability than ever. I saw that even though I was now a grown man of twenty-three I still had to have his powerful psyche enfolding mine in order to keep the Dark at bay.

‘I shan’t comment on the sexual relationship which you’ve obviously had with the girl,’ said my father. ‘You know exactly what I think of young men who are too selfish and immature to do anything with women but exploit them. Please don’t attend mass until you’ve made a full confession to Aelred Peters.’

This was the final horror. I couldn’t bear the thought of Father Peters knowing how I’d behaved. ‘You hear my confession,’ I begged my father, but he refused.

‘Confessing to Aelred would be a real penance,’ he said. ‘Confessing to me would be a soft option. Off you go to Starwater.’

Away I sloped to the Abbey, but cowardice overwhelmed me as soon as I crossed the threshold, and although I told Father Peters about the psychic disaster I was unable to speak of the sexual relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.

‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’

‘Well, my theory is …’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.

This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. Anglo-Catholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.

‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.

‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’

There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.

God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.