Mystical Paths (28 page)

III

‘Take a deep breath,’ said Martin, ‘and then expel it very, very slowly. Meanwhile I’ll fight off any men in white coats who arrive to whisk you away to the nearest lunatic asylum.’

‘I’m serious, Martin!’

‘That’s what terrifies me. Dear boy, it’s a wonderful script, but are we really due for a remake of
The Prisoner of Zenda?
’

‘
Look, I’ve heard from an eye-witness that Christian had obtained two false passports. He –’

‘One false passport I can take,’ said Martin, ‘but two false passports suggest you’ve been talking to someone who was doped up and seeing double. Who exactly is this witness of yours?’

‘Dinkie. But the story’s true, Martin!’

‘My dear Nicholas, it couldn’t come within a million light years of being true!’

‘But that’s the show-stopper,’ I said. ‘It does. She said the passports were made out in the names of Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland.’

°This is Frederick Lonsdale’s territory, surely? Two characters in one of those rather brittle drawing-room comedies he wrote in the 1920s –’

‘Martin, these were real people, distinguished men, but they’re only famous to those who know the history of the Church of England. Charles Gore –’

‘Wait a minute, I think on reflection that even I’ve heard of Charles Gore. Bishop of Oxford, wasn’t he? One of Dad’s Anglo-Catholic heroes.’

‘That’s the one. He and Henry Scott Holland were big-time churchmen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – they were two of the contributors to a book of essays called
Lux Mundi,
a landmark in the development of Anglican thought –’

‘Hardly Dinkie’s literary beat!’

‘Of course it isn’t! Martin, it’s inconceivable that she could have invented that pair of names and I find it impossible tobelieve she would have run across them before. So that means she really did see those two false passports, and –’

‘But for God’s sake, why two?’

‘I don’t know.’

We stared at each other. Finally Martin took several gulps of tea and reached for the teapot again. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Christian had two false passports. That could certainly be construed as evidence that he was planning the big drop-out, but it’s not evidence that he’s alive today. He could still have died accidentally.’

‘Yes, but see the passports in their context,’ I persisted. ‘Some time towards the end of 1964 or possibly the beginning of 1965, Christian started to swing out of control and his behaviour became increasingly bizarre. In fact Venetia went so far as to say he behaved as if he’d been taken over by someone else – which to me suggests –’

‘Dear God!’ muttered Martin in a stagey aside. ‘He’s going to talk about possession!’

‘Possession’s actually a very interesting subject. According to Jung –’

‘No, don’t get side-tracked by Jung and don’t, I
implore
you, Nicholas, get bogged down in paranormal speculation. My nerves couldn’t stand it.’

‘Okay, let’s just say his behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He treated his wife outrageously, quarrelled with Marina, messed around with you and Dinkie and bucketed through Europe on a weird trip with Perry during the course of which he played the oddest prank on his brother James.’

‘Colonel Blimp? What happened?’

‘He and Perry took James to a transvestite bar. Then Christian told James to get him a gun and threatened to smear him with buggery allegations if he refused.’

‘How very baroque! Why did he want a gun?’

‘He said he wanted to go into a supermarket and shoot everyone in sight.’

‘I know the feeling, but obviously one can’t quite believe he was serious.’

‘The point is that he didn’t need to extort a weapon from James. Perry could
_,
have got him a gun.’

‘I’ve often wondered if Perry does more in the FO than organise the canteen. However if Christian had obtained false passports —’ .

‘The whole incident with James was like a prank played by a schoolboy who wants to shock everyone in sight — and in fact Perry did try to brush it off as just a rag. But since it was clearly an example of disturbed behaviour I asked myself what the talk of mass-slaughter indicated about Christian’s subconscious mind and how much significance there was in the fact that the scene took place in a bar where people had transformed their given selves into chosen selves.’

‘The infant phenomenon’s picking up steam!’ mused Martin, addressing the teapot. ‘But what on earth’s the little love going to come out with next?’

I ignored this. ‘Christian said that after he’d mown down everyone in the supermarket he’d shoot himself,’ I continued, ‘and at first I thought this was clear evidence of a desire to commit suicide, but I now believe I was wrong. Christian was talking in symbolic terms. It wasn’t himself he wanted to kill; it was his way of life. And he didn’t want to kill the people in the supermarket either; he just wanted to blot out everyone who inhabited his old world. Then he could move into a world that was entirely new.’

‘The chosen life substituted for the given life?’

‘Exactly. Or in other words, I think Christian became drawn to the idea of a
psychic
suicide, the death of the "persona’” which was Christian Aysgarth and the birth of someone who accurately reflected his true self.’

Martin had abandoned all attempt to tease me. Now it was his turn to say: ‘Go on.’

‘My theory is that he became increasingly obsessed by the desire to disappear and he took Perry into his confidence because he couldn’t have disappeared without Perry’s help. He needed not only the false passports but the boat for the fake-drowning — and he probably needed money too to keep himgoing while he was establishing a new life. So that spring and early summer they worked out their plan, sailing regularly to France and rehearsing every step of the disappearance .. . Don’t you see how it all hangs together?’

Martin absent-mindedly ate the last fragment of angel-cake on his plate and allowed a pause to develop. Then he said: ‘Yes, I do see. But it’s nonsense.’

I stared at him. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just a Boys-Own-style ripping yarn. It wouldn’t happen in real life.’

‘I disagree! Thousands of people go missing every year!’ ‘Yes — and they do it all on their own without Perry Palmer’s help! Nicholas, if I were going to disappear for good by staging an accidental death, I wouldn’t confide in anyone, not even my best friend. Much too dangerous, and anyway in my opinion Perry isn’t as essential as you seem to think. Why engineer a fake-drowning on a boat? Why not just leave some clothes on the nearest beach? If you had no capital of your own you’d need to raise money, I realise that, but you wouldn’t have to rely on a rich friend. Over a period of months you could build up a nest-egg by unobtrusively tapping various sources — you could filch fractions of your wealthy wife’s capital, for instance, or siphon a bit here and there off your current account at the bank — or possibly you could even take out a discreet little overdraft if you were friendly with your bank manager. I don’t regard either Perry’s boat or Perry’s money as crucial here.’ ‘What about the need for a false passport?’

Why the need for any passport? Why go aboard? Why nOt vanish into somewhere like Doncaster, where no one would ever dream of looking for you, and sign on the dole as an immigrant Irish labourer? I’m not sure how much documentation you’d need, but since the Irish come here
en masse
to work, it can’t be difficult to get established without English credentials.’

‘But can you honestly see Christian posing as an Irish labourer?’

‘All right, let’s take him out of Doncaster and put him in a white-collar job in Dublin. No passport needed for British subjects going to Ireland, and at least the Irish speak English. Personally I have trouble imagining Christian in a non-English-speaking environment — and not just because of his xenophobic streak. Being cut off from his mother-tongue would have cramped his genius.’

‘Maybe the false passports were merely to enable him to lie low on the Continent until all the fuss had died down.’

‘Much simpler just to pop over to Ireland. And why on earth have more than one false passport?’

‘I agree that’s odd, but —’

‘And let me ask you another unanswerable question: what’s in all this for Perry? If I had a best friend to whom I’d been devoted all my adult life, would I really be content to bend over backwards to help him disappear for good?’

Well, I admit that’s a bit of a riddle, but —’

‘It’s all a riddle. And tell me this: how does Christian avoid terminal boredom in a run-of-the-mill white-collar job?’ ‘Obviously he’d get something more stimulating later.’ ‘How? You can’t present yourself for any worthwhile inter- view without references and some sort of past history.’ Well -’

‘Face it, Nicholas. It’s not just the false passports that don’t add up. It’s everything else as well.’

I could only say obstinately: ‘He’s alive. I’m sure he’s alive. I’m convinced of it.’

‘You make me extremely nervous! I have a feeling that at any moment you’re going to claim you have some special psychic knowledge.’

‘You bet I am!’ I shouted. ‘I know Christian’s alive, I
know
it, it’s "gnosis’”!’

Martin carefully began to stack the china on the tray. Then having arranged the teapot and the milk jug to form a symmetrical pattern with the pile of cups, saucers and plates, he said in his kindest voice: ‘May I make a suggestion? You run off and have one of your leisurely baths. After that I’ll take you out to dinner at a nice little hotel nearby where the restaurant’sopen on Sunday. And after
that,
cleansed, watered and fed, you may with any luck revert to a state where you can think rationally.’

‘I can think rationally now. Martin, Christian told Venetia that he dreamed of escaping into a world where no one knew him and where there were no women. Assuming you’re right about his need to remain in an English-speaking culture, where could he hope to live a secluded life and obtain interesting work without ever having to produce his Christian Aysgarth credentials?’

‘Bearing in mind our father’s extraordinary career, I find the answer to that question so obvious that I’m surprised you bother to ask it,’ said Martin. Where else but a monastery? And the swankiest monasteries in the Church of England — just right for an élitist like Christian — are the houses of the Fordite monks. Maybe he’s now running around in a black and white habit, calling himself Brother Cuthbert, or something equally quaint, and having a whale of a time with no sex, no television and first-class Anglo-Catholic stage-shows every few hours in the chapel. My God, how attractive that sounds! Maybe I’ll try disappearing myself. In fact next time I see Perry I’ll ask him to produce a couple of fake-passports and arrange a fake-drowning just as soon as
The Rivals
has finished its run.’

And having taken the tray to the kitchen, he returned to the living-room, produced a pair of spectacles and began to read the arts pages of the
Observer
.

IV I lay soaking in the bath.

But although my body was inert my thoughts were sweeping along at the speed of light because I knew that in Martin’s words, spoken in jest, there lay the truth which fitted all the baffling facts of Christian’s last months: I had finally realised that Christian’s bizarre behaviour could be explained as the run-up to a profound religious conversion.

I lay limply in the warm water while my brain charted his course with a cool, crisp logic. Christian had been brought up in a religious home by doting parents. Assuming he had had an affectionate relationship in the pre-Dido days with the father whom he resembled, I felt it was not unlikely that he would have considered following Dr Aysgarth into the Church, and this deduction was supported by Dr Aysgarth’s conviction that Christian had had a call to the priesthood which he had later rejected.

I now reviewed the circumstances which had triggered the rejection. The first Mrs Aysgarth had died; Christian had suffered such an emotional upheaval that he had wound up far off-course, and his father’s crass involvement with Dido had ensured that Christian had never recovered his spiritual bearings. That didn’t mean the call from God had ceased to exist. It merely meant that Christian had been too maimed to respond to it. Instead of responding, aiming to express the blueprint of his personality in a life which fulfilled all his God-given potential, he had turned aside, driven on by his erratic, damaged ego, and invested many years living what he had at last come to realise was an inauthentic existence, a life which divorced him from his true self. It would have been at this point that he would have become aware of the force pressing on his psyche, the force which wanted to unite him with his true self, the force which was the immanent God whose spark lay buried deep in his unconscious mind.

The unconscious mind is uncharted territory; we know it · exists but most of the time we only know a fraction of what goes on there and it takes a great deal of time and effort, as all psychoanalysts know, to try to discern more than this dimly glimpsed fragment. Yet when our conscious minds are troubled we know we must try to perceive this uncharted territory more clearly – and this axiom of modern psychology isn’t so innovative as most people think. The medieval mystics were well aware that the way to control the dark forces of the unconscious was to expose them to the light of knowledge; they knew as well as any modern psychoanalyst that the road to spiritualand emotional health begins with the task of knowing oneself – and knowing not just the ego but the inner self beyond.

‘Swink and sweat in all that thou canst and mayest,’ wrote the anonymous fourteenth-century author of the spiritual classic,
The Cloud of Unknowing,
‘for to get thee a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou art. And then, I trow, soon after that thou wilt get thee a true knowing and feeling of God as He is.’

That writer certainly realised that the quest for God is a quest for psychic integration, a wholeness which allows the ego to be subjugated, the true self to triumph and the entire personality, conscious and unconscious, to be open to and at one with God’s will and God’s love. This wholeness, as I had tried to explain without success to Norman, was the unique feature of Jesus Christ. He had achieved perfect integration, something not possible in this world for human beings doomed to be imperfect; all we can do on this side of the grave is embark on that road to fulfilment and hope to travel as far as possible, but Jesus had already arrived. He was all-of-a-piece. His psyche was entirely harmonised, the ego seamlessly interwoven with his inner self. He was, as the religious language puts it, ‘wholly at one with the Father.’