Mystical Paths (20 page)

‘Screw normality. What gets me,’ 1 said,’is that all you Aysgarths behave as if your father’s a fragile little flower who would wilt at the first whisper of unwelcome news, yet he’s quite obviously as tough as a tank.’

‘He can give the impression of being tough, I agree, but underneath he’s so sensitive, so kind, so good, so idealistic, so —’

‘Yes, it’s a lethal mixture, isn’t it? You love him for all those good qualities, but once he’s tough he’s terrifying. So you’re caught in this emotional bind, slaving away to keep him exuding sweetness and light.’

‘Oh no, you’ve got that quite wrong! How could we be afraid of him when he’s never laid a finger on any of us?’

‘That makes things worse. At least if he bashed you about a bit you could hate him occasionally, vent your true feelings, open the emotional sluice-gates –’

‘But how could we ever hate him? He’s so good, so kind, so sensitive, so –’

‘Oh yeah? But he carved up his entire family when he married Dido, didn’t he? In fact I heard someone say Christian never forgave him.’

‘Oh, I expect he did in the end.’

‘You don’t know for sure?’

‘Why should I? I hardly knew him, he was nearly fourteen years my senior, we were strangers. I only ever received one letter from him. After I got my first in Greats he wrote: "Dear Sandy, How gratifying to know that one day, perhaps, you may be as clever as CHRISTIAN." That was weird, wasn’t it? I thought he was joking but I wasn’t sure – one could never be sure what Christian was really thinking. He talked to Norman a bit, I believe, but not to James – James isn’t very bright. And not to Primrose – she was just a girl. And I was just "the baby", even when I was grown up. When I was in my teens I tried to make friends with him by chatting away in Greek, and he liked that but it didn’t actually get me very far. For some reason I’m not good at communicating with people. Strange, isn’t it?’

‘No, inevitable. No one in your family really communicates at all.’ I stood up, casting around in my mind for a way to end the conversation kindly. ‘I think it was great you had those chats in Greek with Christian, Sandy,’ I said. ‘It suggests you’ve got the potential to be a first-class communicator, original and imaginative.’

‘You think so?’ Sandy brightened.

‘Sure, all you need is practice,’ I said, but in fact I couldn’t see him getting anywhere at Burgy’s. Perhaps I should have advised him to chat up blue-stockings in Oxford. Or perhaps... ‘Sandy, be honest,’ I said. ‘Are you seriously interested in girls? I mean, do you lie awake fantasising about them? Do you have an erection every time you pass a skimpy mini-skirt in the street? Do you ever masturbate and wonder if you’re turning into a sex-maniac?’

‘Oh yes!’ he said, meaning: oh no.

‘Maybe you’re not meant to be married,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re called to celibacy, called to dedicate your life to scholarship without the distraction of female companionship.’ ‘But how can I be called to celibacy?’ said Sandy baffled. ‘This is 1968!’

‘God doesn’t care about time, Sandy. He’s outside it. As far as He’s concerned a call to celibacy is a call to celibacy whether it’s 1968, 968 or 19,068.’

‘But how could I explain that to Father?’

I gave up. ‘It’s a real problem,’ I said, exuding sympathy, and finally managed to escape.

XI As I padded downstairs I became aware that the house was quiet. The Surrey antiques had lurched away to their tarted-up Georgian gems to dream of a Conservative Government; the sheepdog was still out being walked; the minions were apparently speechless with exhaustion in the kitchen – or perhaps the silence in that section of the house meant that they too had lurched away; as I paused in the hall I pictured them watching the Saturday afternoon sport on television in their MerrieEnglande-style council houses.

My one dread at that moment was that I would be collared by Nympho-Elizabeth. My weakness for steamy brunettes coupled with my current feebleness in controlling my sex-life meant that I could all too easily visualise her shedding her knickers in the shrubbery while I busted the zip on my jeans. But such a lapse would inevitably produce a catastrophe. Elizabeth would never keep her mouth shut; she was the kind of girl born to create stormy scenes, and once Dr Aysgarth discovered I’d messed around with his daughter he’d tip off Uncle Charles who would refuse to ordain me.

I was still shuddering as I envisaged this nightmare when I heard Elizabeth calling my name. Instantly I opened the nearest door and hid in the room beyond. It happened to be Dr Aysgarth’s study, but fortunately by this time Dr Aysgarth himself was somewhere else. The room was empty. Nervously I prowled up and down. Again Elizabeth called my name, but when her footsteps crossed the hall without pausing I realised that the study was probably the one room which guests never entered without an invitation.

Heaving a sigh of relief I began to examine the books which lined the walls. Reams of Church history. The usual classic biographies, such as George Bell on Randall Davidson and F. A. Iremonger on William Temple. Hensley Henson’s letters. The peculiarly boring memoirs of that most unboring bishop of Starbridge in the 1930s, Dr Adam Alexander Jardine. The fragment of autobiography written by Charles Raven, the famous Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. And a load of other books by Raven. Raven, Raven, Raven ... And F. R. Barry. We were deep, deep in the country occupied by the old-fashioned Liberal Protestants, all glowing ideals and boundless optimism in a world from which evil and suffering had been mysteriously eliminated. And wait for it – yes, here we went, I might have guessed – Bishop John Robinson’s
Honest to God,
very dog-eared, plus Dennis Nineham’s
Saint
Mark
and a whole slew of supremely clever but starkly unimaginative offerings from radical theologians. The trouble with the Radicals, I always thought, was that they were so painfully restricted by their brilliant intellects. What could it be like to be born not only with no imagination but with no capacity for psychic insight? Worse than being a horse in blinkers. Tragic. I felt sorry for them.

It was strange to see this evidence that the formidable Dr Aysgarth with his chicken-killer’s hands was addicted to theology which was either sentimental, like that of the Liberal Protestants, or unconnected with any transcendent reality, like that of the Radicals. Or was it so strange? Sentimental and unconnected with reality. That exactly summed up the tenor of his conversation before I had started dropping my verbal H-bombs. But yes, it was still strange because he looked too tough to be sentimental and too down-to-earth to be adrift from reality. It was as if he were two men in one – which meant three people: person A, person B and person AB which produced the Dr Aysgarth personality, the personality which had tied his children up in such convoluted emotional knots.

I was still pondering with deep interest on my host’s complex psyche when the door of the room opened and Dido zipped in.

‘Ah, there you are, Nicholas, I knew you must be hiding in the one place where nobody would dream of looking for you –’ She closed the door with a bang – and so naturally I came straight here because I’ve just spoken to Stephen and it’s quite obvious that you need someone to talk to you candidly – and since I’ve always prided myself on my candour, I’ve elected myself to do the talking. Now –’

Stephen was Dr Aysgarth. His real name was Neville but she had renamed him. She was that kind of woman, autocratic and anarchic, and suddenly I found myself wondering why that very masculine man, who had such set ideas about women, should have wound up with an eccentric who was obviously far beyond playing a conventional feminine role. Then in a moment of revelation I saw that this marriage was no mere intriguing little mystery but a profound enigma which had proved a malign force in Christian’s life. How had it happened? What mysterious psychological drives had possessed Dr Aysgarth and produced this extraordinary result? Why had he rebounded from the memory of his perfect first wife, grabbed this severely imperfect replacement and, as Norman had put it, carved up his whole family? I had no answers to these questions, of course. I could only think what a mystery life was, how little we can understand anyone, and how only God can know the whole truth of any given situation. All we have are partial glimpses of the truth, little fragments of a vast, multi-sided reality.

‘– are you listening to me, Nicholas? You’re looking very dreamy! You don’t take drugs, do you?’

‘Certainly not!’ That was clever of her. She had stung me into paying attention, and I realised then that this woman communicated – even if it was only by putting people’s backs up. ‘What is it you want to say, Mrs Aysgarth?’

What’s all this about Christian committing suicide?’ ‘I’d heard a rumour –’

‘Well, it’s absolute balderdash and you should never have repeated it, least of all to my husband. Christian’s death devastated Stephen, utterly devastated him, he adored that boy, worshipped him, he was so proud of Christian’s brilliant academic success and his dazzling marriage – and personally I’ve always liked Katie better than Cynthia who struck me right from the start as dreadfully vain, and I’m not surprised she had a dotty child because everyone knows there’s insanity in that family, that’s the hazard of marrying into the aristocracy, you simply never know what congenital horror’s going to surface next. And talking of dottiness –’

‘I thought no one knew what causes autism.’

‘My dear, that’s not autism, that’s congenital syphilis. And as I was saying, talking of dottiness, what’s all this about Katie and Norman being haunted and you being called in to exorcise them?’

Well –’

‘I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life! Katie’s nerves are bad and Norman drinks like a fish, but they don’t need an ordinand waltzing around mouthing nonsense, they need professional medical help!’

This impressed me. Here at last, apparently, was someone with a good grasp of reality.

‘I agree with you,’ I said, ‘and I’m only trying to find out more about Christian’s death because I want to help them in a conventional clerical way. When I used the word "exorcism" to your husband, I didn’t mean to imply –’

Well, Christian didn’t commit suicide. You don’t kill yourself when you’re being worshipped by everyone in sight. You get restless enough to look for new thrills, perhaps, but death isn’t a thrill, it’s a bore.’

Where did he look for new thrills?’

‘Oh, in the last months of his life he was always running away to sea with Perry Palmer. Sometimes I think Englishmen never grow up. "Let him go, my dear!" I said to Katie. "If you want to keep him, don’t cling – let him come and go as he pleases!" Men prefer women who don’t put them under emotional pressure – which is why Christian liked Marina. Being a lesbian she didn’t wear him out with emotional demands, and I must say that if I were Charles Ashworth, which thank God I’m not, I’d be very worried about my son marrying Marina Markhampton, although God knows Michael’s such a rake his father can probably only heave a sigh of relief that he’s trying to be respectable at last.’

‘What makes you think Marina’s a lesbian, Mrs Aysgarth?’

‘Oh my dear! The real action in that triangle was always between Marina and Katie. Everything else was just a fairy-tale. No wonder Christian wanted to go off with Perry all the time! No action there, of course. Perry’s a eunuch.’

Oh yes? How do you know?’

My dear, he’s never been sexually interested in anything, that’s why Christian found him so restful. Oh, I understood all about Christian and Perry! Christian was born normal but unfortunately he fell deeply in love with his mother – so clever of Freud to realise that this always has a disastrous effect on young men! – so he turned out to be rather peculiar with women and only comfortable with eunuchs. All that’s been patently obvious to me for years, but I could never say so because poor Grace’s name is never mentioned in this family, too upsetting for everyone, so sad her dying like that, although actually she was the most unsuitable wife for an ambitious clergyman, she came from Manchester and had no clothes. Well, as I was saying –’

‘Mrs Aysgarth, if you had to sum up Christian in one sentence, what would you say?’

‘He was a pain in the neck,’ said his stepmother.SEVEN

‘There is, as a result of the loss of touch with God, a deep frustration and fear, often subconscious and always divisive in its effects upon man’s soul.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-1974
Canterbury Essays and Addresses
I

‘
It was an open secret,’ said Dido, ‘that Christian and I didn’t get on, but of course we always kept up appearances so as not to upset my husband. Darling Stephen, being the most romantic idealist who ever lived, always wants to believe everything in the garden’s lovely, and since he worshipped Christian and adored me he naturally longed for us to be devoted to each other. I’m sure he knew we weren’t; he’s no fool, but the point is he never saw any unpleasantness which would have upset him. Being a hard-bitten realist and famed for my candour, I’m always ironing out any little difficulty which Stephen would find upsetting, but I must say I was at my wits’ end to keep Christian well-ironed because — poor boy! — he was so dreadfully neurotic.’

‘He was?’

‘My dear, what else can one expect when a man’s fallen irrevocably in love with his mother? The truth was he simply couldn’t bear being touched by any woman but her — at least, not in his younger days, the days before he gritted his teeth, dragged himself to the altar and married Katie in order to disguise how deeply peculiar he was.’

‘When you say "touched", do you mean —’

‘Embraced with genuine but asexual affection by a member of the opposite sex. I first found out about this phobia of his — no, let’s be quite frank and say his really
kinky
maladjustment — in 19
₄
8 when he was twenty-one. I’d been trying for ages to have another baby — my first son was stillborn in 1946 — and suddenly in 1948 I succeeded in getting pregnant, thank God, so when I whirled home from my doctor in Harley Street with the marvellous news that Elizabeth was on the way I was feeling utterly euphoric and bursting with
joie de vivre.
"Christian darling!" I screamed when I opened the front door and saw him in the hall — he was down from Oxford for the Long Vacation — "Isn’t life simply too divine? I’m having another baby!" And I threw my arms around him and gave him an ecstatic hug — and my dear! He looked like a woman who’d been sexually assaulted — dead white he was, dead white and sweating, and he was shaking from head to toe. "You bloody bitch, keep your filthy hands off me!" he snarled and bolted up to his room. Obviously he thought I’d made the most obscene pass at him.’