Читать книгу Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch - Страница 32

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.

‘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.