Crooked Vows (20 page)

Thomas feels the familiar prickle of embarrassment at the back of his neck.

‘A hair shirt is something that some people—holy men, I suppose I'd call them—used to wear next to the skin. They were made out of coarse, prickly hair—goat hair I think it was. So that they would feel scratchy and uncomfortable.'

‘I see. Now what would be the point of it?'

Macpherson's mouth is twisted just a little, in an expression suggesting amusement? Distaste? Thomas can't decide.

‘It was an act of penance. Self-denial. Mortification of the flesh.' He listens to the stock phrases emerging from his mouth, wondering how they will be understood, and adds, ‘Some of them—the saints, I mean—vowed when they put their hair shirts on that they would never take them off.' He worries instantly about why he added that piece of information. What will Macpherson make of it?

The older man's expression surely has a touch of distaste about it now.

‘I see. That's interesting. Another form of self-inflicted torture I'd have to call it, I suppose. As an aspect of saintliness. If they stayed on permanently they must have ended up in a thoroughly unsavoury condition, the saints and the hair shirts both. The hair shirts probably came to be more alive than the saints.' The shape of his mouth suggests a swing from distaste to amusement. ‘As for inheriting one that had been on somebody else for twenty or thirty years—no wonder the poor fellow didn't survive for long after that.

‘There was something else about last week's saint that caught my attention. It was to do with the relics. As far as I could make out these were parts of his body. Have I understood this properly, that they sometimes dismembered the corpses of holy men and parcelled out the body parts to places here and there that had a claim to a piece?'

Thomas is aware of something much sharper than mere curiosity behind the question. He answers cautiously.

‘This used to be done centuries ago. As far as I know, nobody does it now.'

‘I would imagine not. But apparently people still venerate the ancient body parts. Still hope for miracles from them as if there's some magical power embedded in them. To me, you know, this all seems quite macabre.'

Thomas shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He hesitates, unsure how to respond.

‘Relics like those—and the miracles people pray for, Catholics aren't obliged to believe everything like that.'

‘I would hope not.' Macpherson smiles. ‘Anyway, how can anyone oblige you to believe anything? Don't you believe on account of the reasons? The evidence? Rather than because someone tells you to believe.'

Thomas is floundering, drowning in all these questions, these challenges. They come from another world. His neck feels sweaty inside the rigid clerical collar. He realises that his hands are clenched into tight fists and tries to relax them. He can find no response. For half a minute or so neither man speaks.

Macpherson brings an end to the silence.

‘I've been doing a little reading of my own about the saints. Just for background. I've worked through twenty-five or thirty of them but I haven't found one yet who lived anything like what I'd call a normal human life. How do they get to be considered saints?'

Thomas shifts uncomfortably in his chair, hesitates before answering.

‘Their lives have been examined. People are canonised on account of the holiness of their lives, basically.'

‘That doesn't help me a lot. I don't have a sense of what you mean by holiness. If you told me that a holy person has to keep away from lying, cheating, malice, selfishness, cruelty, and so on, I would have some grasp of what you mean. And the point of holding them up as models. But the saints I've heard and read about, their qualifications for the position are completely different. They seem to have got the job mainly by giving up the most innocent pleasure, and even basic comfort, turning their backs on sexual activity even in the most proper context, having nothing to do with reproduction and family life, and even close personal relationships generally. If that is what makes for holiness, then I don't see the point of it, or the point of admiring it.

‘Well, never mind. I was wondering, you see, whether there were any saints who lived ordinary lives, as sons or daughters, husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, and so on, but did it all particularly well. I mean being especially kind, unselfish, honest, responsible. Qualities that everyone admires. Do you see what I mean? Saints who were simply thoroughly decent, normal human beings living normal human lives, instead of all this pain-worship, this masochism.' He shuts his mouth decisively, as if he has to bite off the rest of what he was going to say. Then continues, ‘But I see that I was mistaken to let my curiosity carry me away.

‘We've heard a lot about pain in your book, and I've had rather a lot to say about it myself. We can't get through a life without pain, of course. We need it to tell us to take a hand off the hot stove, or to rest a sprained ankle. And there's another sort of pain that we feel when we lose someone we love. We wouldn't choose not to feel it, even if we had the option, because if we felt nothing, that would strip the meaning from our lives. But we don't cultivate that sort of pain for its own sake. It's just an inevitable part of the normal pattern of human life. It's bound up with love. There's enough pain in the ordinary way of things that can't be avoided, without inflicting it on ourselves deliberately.'

He pauses. Thomas looks up for a moment. The older man's face is turned aside, as if he is trying to hide the intensity of a feeling that he is struggling to control. Thomas looks at his averted face, wondering about the source of this feeling, beyond anything in his own experience.

Macpherson seems to recover his composure and goes on.

‘The worship of a God who is supposed to look favourably on all of this—pain, and blood, and withdrawal from normal human relationships and feelings and obligations—if I had any use for the word
blasphemy
, I'd say this was blasphemous. But I suppose I'd have to be a believer to talk about blasphemy. Leaving any God out of it, to me a great deal of this is incomprehensible. There's an inhuman streak in it. And sometimes, I have to say, perverted.' The Scottish rolled
r
comes through very strongly in that last word, giving it even more emphasis.

Thomas listens in silence, sitting rigidly upright on the edge of that awkward chair. He is astonished at the power of feeling in the outburst he has heard. And yet why is it that he can say nothing in response? He struggles without success to think of any saint who was canonised for the qualities Macpherson admires—as he pointed out, qualities that everyone admires. He sits silent, trying to close a door on the questions, shut them into a space at the back of his mind.

Macpherson runs the fingers of both hands through his hair and sits back in his chair.

‘I probably ought to apologise. As I've understood my profession up until now, a psychoanalyst is not expected to behave like this. We're supposed to maintain a detached, objective attitude as far as possible. I've never reacted like this before—not in twenty-five years. I shall have to think about why I've lost my detachment. There may be something else going on that I haven't thought out properly. It's possible that I'm coming to think that it's not realistic to avoid judgment regardless of what comes to light. Maybe even my calling has room for a little blaming on occasion, when the situation cries out for it. Perhaps I can find a use for the idea of sin after all. Or
wickedness
might be a better word; it's less ecclesiastical.

‘This doesn't sit well with what I was taught—what I've believed myself until now. But we all have to take a hard look occasionally at what we've been taught, what we've believed until now. Including myself.'

The older man flexes his shoulders, stretches his arms up and to the side, bends his neck left and right, and smiles at Thomas.

‘I obviously need to loosen up a little. That's more than enough about me. And probably about your Church, too. We need to get the focus back onto you. The drowning of that young lady down on the south coast—it must have been a terrible experience for you to witness that. And to be unable to do anything about it. The plane crash too. The horror of it all would be enough to account for your memories being shut away, but something else might have been at work as well. I wonder whether those experiences sparked some ideas in you that you were not quite ready to deal with consciously, because they had the potential to disrupt the existing shape of your life. Repressed memories and ideas are still there, in some way, and they tend to come out in disguise, in dreams.

‘As you were telling the story last week, what struck me most was your inability to act decisively. It would have been a difficult situation for anyone—to try to help or not. I don't know what I would have done. I'm not suggesting that you made the wrong choice, as I said earlier. But as you described the situation you couldn't choose at all: couldn't make a decision one way or the other. So the events just swept on past you. Is this the way you would see it?'

Thomas considers, nods agreement, recalling vividly the sensation of paralysis, physical and mental, the fruitless churning of his thoughts, as the tragedy unfolded in front of him.

Macpherson nods too.

‘Yes. While I was absorbing that part of the story I thought about the dreams you have described to me over the last few weeks. I'd like to put some ideas to you about them—ideas about a more general problem you might have in dealing with decisions. These are not for you to respond to now—just to take away and consider whether they make any sense to you.

You told me about two dreams that were very similar in some ways. You were floating in water in both of them, and the water was carrying you along with it, though you had no sensation of moving until you looked around at the surroundings. In the first you were floating along a narrow channel between high banks. In the second it was a wide open expanse of ocean that you were drifting across. The central thing that struck me in both of them was that you were not in control of the situation. You weren't so much moving, as being moved by a force outside you. What do you think lies behind these dreams? To me they suggest that you have a concern, below the level of your conscious thinking, that your life is not under your control—that you are not making decisions about your pathway through life—just drifting, following a course set for you by other people. That is, in the first of them. In the second your direction was not hemmed in by high banks, but you still had no control over it, and no idea where the drift was taking you.

‘Then there's your dream about the high hedge along the seminary boundary, and your finding an old gateway entangled in it: a gateway that you hadn't noticed before. And it's so overgrown with shrubbery that it's almost impassable. It seems to me that this dream has strong links with the other two. What does it suggest to you? Could the overgrown gateway symbolise the possibility of other paths through life that might open up on the other side? An unconscious wish to explore other ways, other sorts of experience that have been shut off to you?

Putting these dreams together, do you think they might give a hint that, deep down, your view of your future is not as clear as it used to be? And that, on the same deep level, you have a subconscious sense that there might be some decisions you need to make about the shape of your life?'

Macpherson sits back in his chair. He looks to Thomas to be more relaxed.

‘I have presented you with some questions about your whole life that I know could possibly be as confronting for you in their own way as the memories that you have recovered over these months. And I've asked you to take these questions away and think about them. You may find this a seriously disturbing task, on top of coping with the memories that are bound to keep recurring. You are welcome to come back to me if you feel the need to talk over the issues that I think are facing you. And while I began this afternoon with some rather intemperate talk, I hope that you won't entirely forget what I said then.'

He looks directly into Thomas's eyes.

‘Finally, if we don't meet each other again, I wish you good luck in your calling. Whatever it might turn out to be, in the end.'

Walking out to the street, Thomas turns over in his mind Macpherson's final words.
His calling, whatever it might turn out
to be, in the end
. He wonders whether this man can see something looming in his future that he himself is at present unable to imagine.

15

Revelation

Thomas steps off the bus and checks his watch. Thanks to the shorter consultation he'll be back a good hour earlier than in the previous weeks. He steps out briskly on the twenty-minute walk. It's a cooler afternoon; autumn is setting in at last.

He thinks about that outburst of Macpherson's about the church—intemperate, he had called it himself. The thought brings out a flock of questions that he had tried to cage at the back of his mind. They circle around inside his head. What
is
the reason for admiring a man who wastes an apple rather than eating it or giving it to someone else? Or another who refuses to visit his mother because he is so busy at the Lord's work. Is it possible that the Lord would have been better pleased with him visiting his mother? What would Thomas's own mother have thought about it? And why would we believe in a God who is gratified to see people suffer—at the hands of other people or at their own hands. Hair shirts, and fasting nearly to the point of starvation. And worse. Whips: self-flagellation, not unknown among the saints. Not uncommon, in fact. Not all of it in the ancient times, either.

And what would Macpherson say if he heard the story of the local priest who was found when he died, so it is said, to have a small wooden cross nailed to his back? In place for a long time. Old ulcers, probably stinking. Perhaps that is what killed him. The cross is rumoured to be stored somewhere in the diocesan archives waiting to be produced as a valuable holy relic when the man is declared a saint. The story has been passed around locally for years among the most devout, with a sense of wonder at the thought of treading the same ground that has been trodden by a holy man whose life was lived in the tradition of the saints of ancient times.