Mystical Paths (35 page)

XI

It was so hard to find the right words.

‘It was okay,’ I said. ‘I was all right. I had Nanny. I was always loved and looked after. But it’s true my parents were very busy. The problem, my mother used to say when she was explaining why my father wasn’t around, was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day. I saw more of her than I did of him. I minded her dying when she did. I’d have liked to know her better. I couldn’t talk about her to my father once she was dead, of course. He got too upset.

The worst part of her death was the effect it had on him. I know I’ve already told you he was ploughed under, but that was an understatement. I just can’t describe ... no, wait a minute, maybe I can. Maybe you’ll understand what I mean if I say his psyche was one long scream. I used to hear it at school. It used to get to me at night. I’d wake up — or rather, not wake up — and —’

I broke off. Couldn’t admit to somnambulism. Not now, not after telling the lie about it. I waited, staring down at the surface of the table as I tried to decide where to go next.

Opposite me Lewis never said a word.

At last I said: ‘My father felt so guilty. That was the problem; his grief was so muddied with guilt. I said to him: "But she understood. She knew there were only twenty-four hours in a day." That nearly killed him. He said: "I neglected her and I’ve neglected you too." I thought he might commit suicide because his guilt was so unbearable. He swore he wouldn’t, but then I thought he might go into a decline anyway and die of natural causes.

‘I don’t know what happened with the marriage. They did love each other, I know they did, but something wasn’t right. My mother used to get so upset sometimes. She was looking forward to his retirement, but he wouldn’t stop working and when he retired he became busier than ever ... Why did he keep working so fanatically? Of course he was so famous, so sought after, so successful ... but it wasn’t right. Okay, the Church needed him, but we needed him too. "Why do I always have to come second to the bloody Church?" I heard my mother yell at him once. But he did love her. It was just that he ... well, what was it?

‘Sometimes I think that although he himself became convinced that he’d been called from the Order to run that College in those chaotic, demanding years after the war, it wasn’t the kind of work he enjoyed best. He was good at administration, good at leadership, good at teaching — he’d proved all that as a monk — but what he really loved was being a spiritual director, not just giving straightforward advice on prayer but helping people overcome the problems that were cutting them off from God. Father Darcy had always approved and welcomed his development as a spiritual director, but even so my father had had to put other work first: teaching the novices at Ruydale, running the community at Grantchester ... And then finally, when he was seventy, he found himself in a situation where he didn’t have to put other work first; he found he could devote himself entirely to spiritual direction, and his delight was so great that my mother and I got lost in the clouds of euphoria ... Or at least that’s how it seems to me sometimes, but I do now wonder if that was just one aspect of what was really going on.

‘Sometimes I think the age-gap might have begun to bother him. When he was seventy, my mother was forty-two, and perhaps he felt he had to go on being dynamic for her sake in order to keep old age at bay. My father wasn’t very good at becoming old. He adjusted to it in the end — no choice — but he didn’t like it. It offended his pride. My father knows holy men should display humility, but he’s not actually very good at being humble himself ... In fact there are a number of things he’s not very good at, but because he’s so charismatic people tend not to notice his shortcomings. Well, you wouldn’t notice them unless you actually had to live with him. But if you do live with him you ‘ realise eventually — and I suppose this is the rock-bottom truth — that family life isn’t quite his scene.

‘He’s not very clever at being married, you see. It’s not that he dislikes family life. He just doesn’t understand it. I think he had a rather peculiar life as a child with his parents not communicating and no one ever saying much to one another, with the result that the three of them wound up living separate lives under one roof. He seemed to regard my mother and me as rewards sent to him by God to compensate him for having to leave the monastery, but I’ve wondered in retrospect if he was ever sure what to do with us.

‘He missed the Order a lot. Still does. He’d never admit it to me, of course, but the happiest days of his life were spent as a monk. The Order was really the kind of family he preferred, I can see that now. Lots of brothers, giving emotional support. No women and children making emotional demands. My father’s so gifted at dealing with other people’s problems, but he has to operate from a very clear, emotionally uncluttered base. That’s why a life without women and children suited him so well.’

I sighed as I reflected on my father’s peculiarities, but then concluded: ‘I couldn’t be a monk, but that’s all right because he knows no one can be a monk without the strongest possible call, and if I don’t have the call, that’s God’s decision and there’s nothing to be done about it. So all I have to do now is be a priest and marry a nice girl — which reminds me, I forgot to tell you about Rosalind, my fiancée. She’s the grand-daughter of old friends of my mother’s. My father’s very pleased.’

Lewis at last spoke. Having allowed himself to look politely interested in the existence of Rosalind he said: ‘How’s your father’s psyche at the moment?’

‘Screaming. I have to keep tuning him out. But he can’t help himself, he’s so old and he can’t control his powers as he used to.’

Why’s his psyche screaming?’

‘Worried about me. Can’t think why. I’m fine.’ I glanced restlessly around the room. ‘Well, I know I have one or two minor problems,’ I said, ‘but I’m coping, I’m functioning, I can manage.’

Silence fell again.Well,’ I said, rising at last from my chair, ‘that’s it, that’s my autobiographical thumb-nail sketch — although we seem to have spent a lot of time on digressions which are hardly relevant to 1968. Have you any more questions? Because if you haven’t —’

‘I’ve no more questions,’ said Lewis, ‘but I’d like very much to do some more listening. Can you tell me a little more about your brother Martin?’

I sank slowly back in my chair.

XII

Truculently I said: What do you want me to say?’ ‘Oh, anything’ll do. I’m very easily pleased.’

‘Balls! I know exactly what you want me to confess!’

‘You do?’

‘Yes, you want me to say I’m jealous of him, but I’m not.

You’re thinking I’m bound to be jealous of him because he’s so good-looking and successful whereas I’m just an obscure misfit of an ordinand, but you’d be wrong because I’m not jealous of him at all. Why should I be jealous of an elderly queer?’

‘No idea. But I’m intrigued by how deeply you dislike him.’

‘I know what you’re thinking!’ I cried. ‘You’re thinking — following Jung — that we project on to others what we hate and fear in ourselves. You’re thinking I hate Martin because I’m a repressed homosexual!’

‘What a deduction!’ said Lewis admiringly. What ruthless self-analysis! But I think it’s more likely that you’re being abusive about Martin not because you’re a text-book homophobe but because it gives you relief from some very deep-seated rage. After all, Christian’s homosexuality doesn’t seem to have bothered you.’

Well, of course that never happened.’

‘No?’

‘No, that was just Martin hamming it up — converting his unconsummated yearnings into a grand passion. Don’t forget, he never actually admitted to me that he’d gone to bed with Christian.’

‘But didn’t he nonetheless give the unmistakable impression —’

‘I tell you, that was just Martin hamming it up. Christian was one hundred per cent heterosexual. Had to be.’ ‘Why did he have to be?’

Well, he just was, that’s all, I knew he was, it was "gnosis" ... What’s all this about me having a deep-seated rage?’

‘Maybe I’ve got it wrong. How would you yourself describe this powerful emotion which surfaces in your conversation whenever Martin’s name is mentioned?’

‘Dislike.’

‘All right,’ said Lewis. ‘I accept that. For all I know he may be thoroughly dislikable. But what about poor little Gerald? I thought I detected the same deep-seated rage there, but he never lived long enough to be either pleasant or unpleasant.’

‘I didn’t dislike Gerald. I just disliked the Gerald cult.’

‘The Gerald cult provided a focus for your anger, but why were you so angry in the first place?’

‘I didn’t see much of my parents when I was a child and I resented them paying attention to a dead baby when they could have been paying attention to me. It was the same with Martin. He was always muscling in and grabbing my father’s attention.’

‘Yes, but that was when you were a child. We can certainly allow you a little commonplace jealousy of your siblings when you were in the nursery, but surely now that you’re twenty-five —’

‘Don’t adults ever get jealous?’

‘Of course. But the interesting question here is: what do you now have to be jealous about? After all, you discovered in adolescence that you were the special one, the son your father saw in his vision. Why aren’t you now saying indulgently: "Poor little Gerald — what a pity I never knew him!" And more baffling still, why aren’t you saying: "Funny old Martin, what a character, I’m really rather fond of the old boy!" As I see it, you can afford to be generous. You’re alive — unlike Gerald. And you’rethe apple of your father’s eye — unlike Martin. So what’s the problem?’

‘It must be the aftermath of the childhood jealousy.’

‘Must it? Then answer me this: you dislike that Community too, don’t you — the Community which runs your home. In Session One when you mentioned the set-up at Starrington Manor you spoke of the members with a contempt which again seems to mask some very profound rage. Yet why should that be? Your father surely can’t prefer their company to yours!’

Why can’t I be allowed a little simple dislike? Why are you so busy ferreting for a complex explanation?’

‘Because your dislike strikes me as being violent enough to be irrational, and yet I believe you’re essentially a rational man. I had a case once,’ said Lewis, lighting another cigarette, ‘in which an apparently rational young man was quite irrational about his twin brother who had died at birth. He came to me saying that his brother was resentful that he hadn’t been allowed a crack at life, so resentful that he had decided to infest the living twin.’

I forgot to be truculent. Instantly I said with interest: ‘How did you interpret that old-fashioned picture-language?’

‘The old-fashioned picture-language, as you call it, was a perfectly valid way of describing his feeling of being mentally oppressed by unpleasant emotions which he connected with his dead brother, but there was more going on than he was initially prepared to admit. It turned out that he had a difficult private life with a very demanding mother — in fact it was so difficult that he felt envious of his dead brother for being lucky enough to escape it. The envy festered and gave rise to complex feelings of guilt and anger — guilt that he should resent his innocent little brother, and anger that he couldn’t control the resentment. This seething mass of emotions eventually tied him into such a knot that he began to feel haunted by them, and in the heart of the seething mass, as he well knew, was the memory of his brother. That was why he became convinced he was infested by his brother’s spirit.’

‘How did you heal him?’

‘By listening, by prayer, by counselling. Working with a psychotherapist I took the patient through the relationship with the mother, which was at the bottom of the mess, and eventually got him to the point where he could try to forgive her, forgive his brother and forgive himself – the point where, in other words, he could start a new life unburdened by the pressures which had been distorting his personality. Then I turned back to the religious language: we prayed that the spirit of his dead brother would depart and find peace at last with God. After that the patient still needed regular psychotherapy to assist him in the new relationship he was forging with his mother, but the demons of hatred and jealousy had been exorcised.’

I savoured this satisfying conclusion. Then before I could stop myself I was saying: ‘I’ve always wanted to be a priest in the ministry of healing, but I can’t be because my father says it wouldn’t work. It didn’t work for him so it couldn’t possibly work for me.’

Another silence began. I knew what Lewis was thinking – I knew what I was thinking – but such thoughts were so difficult, so dangerous, that it seemed impossible to articulate them. I traced a cross with my finger on the table, and concentrating hard on that invisible drawing I began to answer the question that Lewis had not asked.

‘I can’t go against my father’s wishes,’ I said. ‘He mustn’t be upset. He’s so old, so fragile, that in order to keep him alive I’ve got to do exactly what he wants. And he’s got to be kept alive because if he dies ...’

My voice trailed away. I started to trace the four points of the cross again. Reality is quaternal, Jung had written. Reality is fourfold.

‘Life could be a little awkward for me without my father,’ I said at last. ‘That’s why I have to do everything I can to keep him alive. But recently no matter what I do it doesn’t seem to be enough, and I can’t understand it. He’s just getting sicker and sicker, and sometimes I feel so angry,
so angry,
because here I am, making all these sacrifices for his sake, yet he justrefuses to get well.’ Dimly I realised I was sounding petulant and selfish. Hastily I tried to backtrack. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m glad to make sacrifices for his sake. I mean, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? To sacrifice my own needs so that I can live his life for him all over again.’

‘No,’ said Lewis flatly.

TWO

‘Jung was very conscious of the mysteriousness of the human personality and the difficulty of penetrating the outward appearance and discovering the real individual.’