Mystical Paths (8 page)

‘Father, it’s no use you saying: "I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right." I
know
I’ve got it right, I know I have –’ ‘You "know" no such thing! You’ve just jumped to a con- clusion. Do please try not to be so arrogant, Nicholas!’ ‘I’m not being arrogant!’

The generation gap began to yawn between us again.

‘Can we both make an effort to keep calm?’ said my father. ‘If we start upsetting each other we’ll get nowhere. Now let’s review your story carefully. You say that the Devil was infiltrating Christian — or perhaps you would be using the traditional language more accurately if you said that Christian was being attacked by demons who were paving the way for their master to take possession of his soul. Very well. But this is a big claim to make and it would be wise to proceed with considerable caution before reaching such a diagnosis. Remember that the gift for recognising the presence of either God or the Devil — the charism of the discernment of spirits — is seldom granted to someone of limited spiritual experience.’

Obstinate old fogey. I tried to be patient. ‘But I can pick up the vibes in my psyche and then I
know,
it’s "gnosis".’ My father began to get upset again. ‘That’s a delusion. That’s the Gnostic heresy in its most insidious form — the belief that you’re one of an élite which has special access to God and special knowledge of spiritual mysteries. You’re confusing psychic power with spiritual power, Nicholas, but it’s quite possible to be psychically strong yet spiritually weak. Psychic powers must always be the servant of the personality, never the master, and all such powers should be offered with humility to God, not flaunted to boost one’s self-esteem.’

‘I know all that, Father —’

‘You’re not behaving as if you know. You’re being very proud and wilful, Nicholas.’

Wilful! Another of those awful Victorian adjectives. I wanted to bang my head against the wall in exasperation. ‘Okay, okay,
okay!
’
Mustn’t upset the old boy. He might die. Taking a deep breath I grasped my knees so tightly that my knuckles ached and said in my most soothing voice: ‘You tell me what really happened during that scene with Christian.’

My father sulked for a moment but then said evenly enough: ‘First of all I would survey the background, and the first fact I notice is that he’s taking an interest in you. Why? Possibly it’s because as an Oxford don he deals with many young men of your age and he’s intrigued because you’re unusual. This is the most obvious explanation, although one could be more cynical and theorise that he wanted to see me and realised that cultivating you was the best way of getting what he wanted. Perhaps originally both explanations were true. Now, this second reason for his interest might be classified as self-centred, even ruthless, but I certainly wouldn’t call it demonic, and since he’s still willing to be friendly to you even though I’ve refused to see him, his interest at present would appear to be wholly benign.’

‘Yes, but —’

‘Wait. Let’s -take this one step at a time. The next thing I notice is that he makes a most interesting suggestion: he proposes that you should do the Christian equivalent of National Service before you proceed to theological college. If you did want to do this, I must tell you that I certainly shouldn’t oppose it. I firmly believe that the more experience young priests have of the world the better, and I often think, looking back, that I was ordained too young. Of course I should miss you dreadfully if you were away for a long time, but that’s irrelevant. It would be very wrong indeed if I selfishly kept you hanging around here with the result that your growth to maturity was impeded. You’re got your own life to live. You must live it.

‘Very well — where have we got to? We seem to have concluded that Christian’s behaviour towards you has been not only genuinely friendly but unexpectedly helpful. But then we come to his final question: "Are you sure you really want to be a clergyman?" and immediately your psyche soars on to a very odd plane indeed. But why? This is a good question of Christian’s and one which you should, in fact, be periodically asked.’

‘But Father —’

‘Sometimes when a young man chooses to follow in his father’s footsteps, it’s a way of evading the difficult task of deciding what he’s really called to do, and I for one don’t want you falling into that particular trap. We’re not all called to serve God as priests and I fully accept the possibility that He may wish you to serve Him in some other way.’

‘But if I’ve been designed by God to be specially like you —’ ‘He may still call you to serve Him in a different field. Of course it’s very gratifying to me that you want to be ordained but you don’t exist to ensure my selfish desire for gratification. You’re here to serve God, not your father.’

Nowadays my father regularly felt compelled to deny his desire for a replica, but since I had long since decided this denial was a mere formula to soothe his conscience, I never took the slightest notice. ‘So what you’re really saying,’ I said after he had finished his new attempt to brainwash himself, ‘is that Christian was sanity personified and I reacted like a lunatic.’

‘Not like a lunatic – that seems a little harsh! – but I see no sign of the demonic in this conversation, and I’m wondering if you projected on to Christian a particularly oppressive anxiety which you normally keep buried deep in your unconscious mind. Maybe you should interpret the scene not as a demonic manifestation – and certainly not as a sign that Christian was being infiltrated by the Devil – but as a hint from God that you should re-examine your call to be a priest.’

‘But that’s all –’ I bit back the word ‘balls’. If there was one certainty in my life, it was my call to the priesthood. I had wanted to be a priest ever since I had learnt in my early childhood about Jesus the healer and the exorcist, the hero who always triumphed over the Dark.

Making a new effort to hold on to my patience I said to my father: ‘Your explanation’s so far from what I actually experienced. I
know
the Dark was there, billowing around Christian and seeping into him through all the cracks in his personality, so your whole interpretation of the scene falls as flat as a pancake.’

My father then became very angry. ‘You understand nothing,’ he said.
‘
Nothing.
And what’s worse, you don’t want to understand, you refuse to be taught, your pride’s convinced you that you know everything there is to know. But I tell you, Nicholas, that if Father Darcy were present in this room –’

I somehow managed to stifle a groan. It really was awful how old people repeated themselves. Cuthbert Darcy, who had once been the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks, was my father’s hero. In fact I had been brought up on the extraordinary memories Father Darcy had left behind him. My father would reminisce about this peculiar old cove at the drop of ahat. Sometimes I felt I had heard each Darcy story at least twenty times.

‘But Father Darcy isn’t present in this room,’ I said. ‘Father Darcy’s been dead for over twenty years.’

‘More’s the pity – if only he could be here to train you as he trained me! Psychics have to be trained. When I think of the appalling messes I got into before I met him – and I didn’t meet him until I became a monk at the age of forty-three –’

‘I know, Father, I know, you’ve told me a million times –’ ‘Then you’ll understand why I pray constantly that you’ll meet your own version of Father Darcy very soon – and sometimes when I pray I feel he’s quite close – or is it that he
will
be quite close? I’m not sure, but what I know for certain is that Aelred Peters is no longer right for you and you’ve got to have someone much tougher.’

‘But I like Father Peters! We get on.’

‘You mean you’ve reached the age when you can manipulate him. You need someone very strong, Nicholas, strong psychically and strong spiritually. Father Darcy ...’

The reminiscences began. I stifled another groan.

‘... and he had the toughest psyche I ever encountered, strong as steel yet so extraordinarily flexible – like a magic rope his psyche was, I can see it quite distinctly in my mind’s eye even now after all these years – forty years it is since I met him, imagine that! What a priest he was, so perfectly trained and disciplined, his psychic powers so striking yet so wholly under control, so entirely devoted to God’s service – oh, I can see that first meeting of ours in 1923 as clearly as if it were yesterday ...’

I picked up Whitby who had wandered over as if to sympathise with me. Lucky old cat, unable to understand my father’s monologues.

‘... and there I was, six foot three, and there was he, no more than five foot nine, but within seconds I felt like a dwarf and he seemed seven foot tall. And all he did was look at me. He had very dark eyes, rather sunken, set in shadowed sockets ...’

My father droned on but I switched off. The truth was that Cuthbert Darcy had been a monastic thug. Their first meeting had resulted in the thug beating him up. I never pretended to understand any of it. After that they had enjoyed a love-hate, father-son relationship for seventeen years even though they had never lived beneath the same roof. (My father denied any father-son relationship, of course, since this type of attachment was forbidden in the cloister, but it was obvious to me that Darcy had had all the spiritual glamour and psychic understanding which my Grandfather Darrow had lacked.) My father had spent some years at Ruydale, the Fordites’ estate in Yorkshire, before he was appointed Abbot of the Grantchester house near Cambridge, and throughout this time Father Darcy had remained at the Fordite headquarters in London, the tarantula at the centre of the web. In consequence the two men had seldom seen each other. Initially they had met once a year, when the Abbot-General made his annual visitation. Later they had met twice a year, once during the
_,
visitation and once six months afterwards when my father was summoned to London for what was described as a ‘spiritual spring-cleaning’. But despite the rarity of the meetings there had been copious correspondence. Apparently the strong psychic affinity between the two men had generated an interest powerful enough to overcome their temperamental incompatibility.

This exceedingly weird relationship should have served as a text-book example of how not to conduct an association arising from spiritual direction, but my father always said that Darcy had been the one spiritual director who had succeeded in keeping him on the rails. Indeed my father in old age was lyrical on the subject, and the saga of how the renegade psychic had been rescued, dusted down, shaken up, taught, trained and saved had now acquired the golden sheen of heroic legend. The darker side of this off-beat monastic
pas de deux –
all the bouts of unChristian dislike, anger and truly scandalous violence — had long since faded away, obliterated by the rosy glow of my father’s unflagging nostalgia.

.. so Father Darcy said to Francis ...’ My father was stilldeep in his Fordite reminiscences. ‘... and then Cyril said to Aidan ...’

I decided it was time to haul him back to 1963. ‘Can we return to Christian for a moment?’

My father recalled himself with an effort and said politely: ‘Of course.’

‘Are you saying I was completely deluded?’

‘No. I’m not doubting for one moment that you experienced a dark force that frightened you. All I’m saying is that you may not only have misinterpreted this force but mislocated it as well. You’re so young, you see, Nicholas, and you’re not trained. If only we could find you your Father Darcy –’

Off he went again. Hopeless. I gave up, muttered some excuse and slipped away.

VI

I came down from Cambridge in the summer of 1964. I hadn’t seen Christian again. Eventually I came to accept my father’s opinion that Christian’s attitude to me had been wholly benign, but I couldn’t forget my impression that something was far out of alignment in his psyche, and this dislocation, hinting at a personality being eroded by the Dark, made me unwilling to seek him out by attending Marina’s parties. Declaring that I was wholly preoccupied with swotting for my finals I refused every Coterie invitation that came my way.

However the Dark seemed to be waiting for me wherever I went in those days. It was certainly waiting for me when I blazed off to Africa to work for the Christian Trail Scheme which encouraged young people to bring the skills of the advanced countries to small rural villages in the Third World.

I was in such a bad state after I got in my mess with the witch-doctor that I had to be sent home. I thought I could handle the bastard by performing a simple exorcism, but I was far, far out of my depth. He put a curse on me. I began to feel ill. I knew the illness was psychosomatic and idiotic, but that made no difference. I wilted. Then I panicked. I flew home thinking the plane would crash. My father had been driven to Heathrow airport to meet me by Martin, who was in the midst of making a new series of his TV comedy ‘Down at the Surgery’, but I barely saw Martin. I just staggered into my father’s arms and stuck there, once more transformed into the little boy, temporarily autistic, who had screamed in terror until his father had turned up to put things right.

As soon as I was alone with my father I said: ‘I’m never leaving you again, I can’t live without you being nearby to save me,’ and I began to sob. Total regression. Pathetic. I’m almost too ashamed to admit it, but I was so frightened that I couldn’t sleep at the house and had to camp at his cottage. Apart from the bathroom and the kitchen there was only one room but I slept in a sleeping-bag on the hearth with the cat. Whitby the Fourth, all furry warmth, exuded comfort. Funny how well animals can relate to humans. I stroked and stroked that cat so often that it was a wonder all his fur didn’t fall out. My father talked to me, prayed with me, helped me to be calm. Eventually the nightmares stopped and I no longer felt the Dark was trying to press through the huge cracks in my psyche. The cracks healed up, welded together by the Light which exuded steadily from my father.

‘No demon can withstand the power of Christ,’ said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality.

‘Maybe you should forget about doing further voluntary work and go to the Theological College this autumn,’ said my father when I was better. I think he believed I’d meet my Father Darcy at the Theological College, but at that point my pride staged a resurrection and I said no, that would mean the witch-doctor had won some sort of victory, and no one, least of all an old bugger of a witch-doctor, was going to deflect me from my chosen course.

But I didn’t go far away again. The Mission for Seamen, scene of my next attempt at voluntary work, was fifty miles away in the port of Starmouth, but I had a car which enabled me to bolt for home on my days off. After that job too ended in chaos I moved even closer to my father, but I didn’t start work at the Starbridge Mental Hospital until 1966. It was in the summer of 1965, when I was at the Mission for Seamen, that Christian drowned in the English Channel off the Isle of Wight.

He had been sailing with Perry Palmer. Perry kept a boat at Bosham, near Chichester, and they had formed the habit that summer of sailing every weekend. The catastrophe was caused by a freak wave which had flung Christian overboard; the theory was that he had hit his head and lost consciousness before he had even entered the water, for he had apparently made no attempt to swim for survival. The incident was reported in the national press not because it was an unusual sailing accident but because any event touching the life of Marina Markhampton was judged to be fodder for the gossip columns.

The story ran its course. Eventually the tragedy was allowed to fade from the public consciousness and the newspapers stopped photographing Marina and Katie weeping into black handkerchiefs.

The body was never found.