Glamorous Powers (60 page)

Absorbed by these thoughts I at first forgot Francis’ information that Romaine had witnessed my breakdown at the chapel, but even when I remembered I felt no embarrassment. Possibly this was because by then I could think of nothing except Anne’s crisis, but possibly too it was because Romaine, unlike the Maitlands and the Aysgarths, showed no embarrassment himself. As a healer he was far too busy being concerned for my welfare.

‘I’m sorry we should meet under such difficult circumstances,’ he was saying, ‘and I’m even sorrier to have to tell you that your wife’s miscarrying. Let me say straight away that I don’t anticipate unusual complications and I expect her to come through safely, but of course it’s not a good situation and I’m afraid it’ll be some time yet before it’s over.’

His quiet authority was so reassuring that for the first time I allowed myself to believe that Anne might survive. I heard myself saying urgently: ‘Can I see her?’

‘You could. But whether you should is a different matter. You’re quite understandably very upset and it’s important that she should be surrounded now by people who are very calm, people she doesn’t have to worry about.’

I saw the good sense of this. ‘I don’t want her to worry about me. I’ll wait here,’ I said, but as soon as the words had been
spoken I was plunged into terror again. My voice said: ‘I’ve got to be told if she’s dying. Supposing she died and I wasn’t there?’ I suddenly found I had to sit down. Sweat was trickling down my forehead and my heart was hammering in my chest.

Romaine said at once: ‘Of course you’d be summoned if things went wrong.’

‘You’re just saying that to calm me down. You don’t really mean it. You’d forget all about me and then only remember when it was too late.’ I was losing control of myself. In desperation I turned to Francis. ‘I can’t find any more words. You tell him. Make it absolutely clear that
I’ve got to be there when she dies.’

Francis immediately stepped forward. ‘My name’s Ingram,’ he said to Romaine. ‘I’ll look after him. I’m sure you want to get back to your patient.’

But Romaine sat down beside me; Romaine took my hand in his as if we were old, old friends, and Romaine said to me in the gentlest possible voice: ‘You’ve lost someone before in tragic circumstances, haven’t you? And you’ve never forgiven the person who failed to summon you to her bedside when she was dying.’

There was a silence broken only by the visitors murmuring on the far side of the room. I was dimly aware that Francis was transfixed as if he had received some electrifying revelation, but my eyes could see only Romaine. I said: ‘So long as you understand, that’s all right. I’ll wait down here.’

Francis said to Romaine: ‘Is there a place where I can sit quietly with him and drink some tea?’

‘Go down to the end of the hall, turn right and keep going.’ Releasing my hand he stood up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be constantly on my mind,’ he said, ‘and I give you my word that no matter what happens I shan’t forget.’

Francis led me to the hospital canteen, an even larger, drearier cream-painted room where we drank strong tea out of squat white cups at a secluded table. For a while he waited for me to talk but I was too absorbed in my anxiety, and eventually when he realized that I had failed to grasp the magnitude of my
revelation he said: ‘It’s curious, isn’t it, how often we think we know the truth about a person and then suddenly we make a discovery which puts all the familiar facts in a different light. I remember you said to me once that exploring a personality is like peeling an onion. You have to strip off layer after layer of skin before you finally reach the core.’

I nodded but I was still thinking only of Anne.

‘I always did think it was strange,’ said Francis, ‘that a young man from your very respectable background should have sampled such a variety of women so speedily once he had escaped from both his home and his boarding-school, but now for the first time I believe I understand what was happening. You weren’t just nailing around in an unsuccessful attempt to find a woman who matched up to your mother, were you? You were trying to work out how you could relate to the opposite sex without laying yourself open to pain. Hence the brevity of your affairs; you knew you had to leave your girls before they could leave you.’

It began to dawn on me that he was saying something important. My worry about Anne was temporarily displaced.

‘And of course I see your marriage in quite a different light now,’ I heard Francis say. ‘You didn’t just marry for sexual reasons. It was all far more complicated than that. You married a woman you didn’t love because you knew that if she left you, you wouldn’t care enough to suffer as you’d suffered once before.’

Instinctively I clung to the last layer of the onion-skin. It was a reaction I had seen so often in those I had counselled. The thought of an unhealed wound being exposed to the cold air of truth is very threatening to a disturbed psyche.

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said, but he only answered: ‘I should have guessed earlier. Almost your first words when you awoke this afternoon were: “Has she left me?” You’re afraid that any woman you love will abandon you, and it was this irrational fear which lured you into cutting such a dash with your powers. You felt you had to keep your wife spellbound in order to ensure she didn’t go away.’

I said: ‘When I was healing none of my fears mattered any
more.’ Then I said: ‘I’m so old and she’s so young,’ and rubbed my eyes. Finally I whispered: ‘I’m a dull sort of person really, not sociable in the accepted sense, absorbed in my work, obsessed by ideas which are unfashionable among the younger generation. Anne didn’t know me when she married me. She just saw me as a mysterious, alluring ex-monk. I was so afraid she wouldn’t want me any more if she found out I was just a dull difficult tiresome old man. That’s why I had to go on being mysterious and alluring. That’s why I took up the healing. It was so glamorous. I dazzled her. She loved it.’

‘At first, perhaps, but later? Why do you think she turned to me for help? Because she saw you not as an alluring ex-monk nor – heavens above, what unprecedented humility! – as a dull, difficult, tiresome old man but as a much-loved husband whom she intends to stand by “till death do you part”.’

‘Yes, but … one never quite knows. Someone may say: “I shall never leave you,” and yet –’

‘But she didn’t mean to leave you, did she?’ said Francis, and I knew we were no longer talking about Anne. ‘She didn’t desert you voluntarily.’

‘No, but all that mattered was that she wasn’t there. The pain was indescribable. There was no one else who understood, you see; no one else with whom I could communicate on a psychic level.’

‘I quite see it would have been a devastating bereavement.’ Francis allowed a pause to develop before adding: ‘You must have felt angry later.’

‘Eventually, yes.’ I thought carefully, viewing the extreme past from my remote position in the present, and was relieved when I felt no emotion. Emotion might have detached the last layer of the onion-skin. ‘I wanted to blame someone for the catastrophe,’ I said, ‘but don’t misunderstand – I didn’t wind up hating my mother and turning against all women. After all, as you pointed out, she didn’t leave me voluntarily. And I couldn’t wind up hating God either; even at the age of fourteen I was too much aware of his reality to believe he was just a cross old tyrant with a cruel streak, and in fact it was my awareness
of God’s reality which enabled me to survive that terrible time. I knew he understood me even if no one else did, and eventually I came to accept that the suffering was his way of making me the man he wanted me to become.’

‘So if you couldn’t be angry with God,’ said Francis, ‘and you couldn’t be angry with your mother –’

‘It was all very awkward,’ I said as if we were discussing some embarrassing breach of social etiquette. My psyche was still clinging fearfully to the last layer of onion-skin. ‘I wasn’t allowed to be angry with anyone else. Nobody ever got angry in our house, you see. Nobody ever complained.’

‘Ah!’ said Francis. ‘So I got it wrong. This story isn’t about your mother after all.’

And then at last after its long imprisonment in the darkest corner of my psyche my father’s memory, complex and multi-faceted, began to move steadily forward into the light.

‘My father’s name was Jonathan Darrow,’ I said, and as I spoke I knew Francis’ understanding was generating the trust which would finally enable me to let go of the truth. ‘My mother called me Jon to distinguish me from him, but my father always called me by my full name. Jonathan. I hated it. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all. It was him.

‘My father wanted a replica. He wanted another Jonathan Darrow, just like him, to live the life he’d never managed to lead. That makes him sound like a monster, but he wasn’t. He was … But how can I describe him? I realized just now when I met Romaine how hard it is to convey the essence of a personality in words. I told Anne my father was a good man with a gift for teaching, and that was true. I told you that he was quiet and scholarly and a little afraid of me when I was grown up, and that was true too. Yet those descriptions convey the impression that he was essentially a nonentity, and he wasn’t. Not my father. He wasn’t a nonentity at all.

‘He was a
proud
man. That was the essence of his personality. He was very, very proud, far too proud to admit he’d made a mess of his life with that socially disastrous marriage which had blighted his career as a schoolmaster. My father never complained not because he wanted to be saintly but because he wanted everyone to believe he had no regrets. His pride was such that even the most genuine compassion would have been intolerable to him.

‘So there he was, good, kind and decent, never complaining, but as I grew up I realized that underneath all this sweetness and light there was a powerful, intimidating personality. It was his other self, his true self, the self that came alive whenever he taught. I was very much afraid of this hidden self when I was a child; all the pent-up emotion, the dense invisible ball of anger and frustration, generated a frightening psychic aura, and I lived in terror of displeasing him. Whenever he was displeased with me the kind gentle mask would slip to reveal the fierce stranger beneath, but as I grew up I realized that the way to keep the mask permanently in place was to be the replica, the son who would live his life over again for him and wind up the headmaster of a famous public school.

‘At first it wasn’t too difficult to be a replica. It simply meant getting good reports at school and taking a precocious interest in Shakespeare. Then the going got harder. He recognized the psychic affinity I shared with my mother and started to worry about me being “odd”. For years she and I concealed my developing psychic gifts from him, but shortly before she died I had my first vision and then no concealment was possible.

‘The mask slipped. He was outraged. First of all he thought I was lying. Then he thought I was going mad and it took a Harley Street specialist to convince him that there was nothing wrong with me. But all the time my mother and I knew that the real problem, the problem that bothered him most of all, was that I wasn’t behaving like a replica. He worked himself into a frenzy, and I became so distressed by his inability to accept me as I was that my mother finally turned on him. “Why should you assume everyone else is as limited as you are?” she
said. “You yourself may be obliged to wear spectacles, but you’re hardly so stupid as to believe this means everyone has defective sight!” It was the only time I ever heard her speak harshly to him, and of course he was much too proud to answer back. He simply preserved a dignified silence, and with my psychic eye I saw him nailing the mask back in place. Later he just said: ‘This incident is never to be referred to again and we’ll treat Jonathan’s aberration as if it had never happened.”

‘I might have been seriously disturbed by this hostile attitude to my developing psychic powers, especially as I was at such a vulnerable age, but fortunately my mother was there to put everything right. She said to me: “You mustn’t be frightened by the vision. It’s part of nature and nature is in the mind of God. The vision was God’s thought, flashing in your soul.” Then she found a faith-healer who gave me lessons in controlling my psychic energy, but we never told my father about him because my father wouldn’t have understood.

‘After we found the faith-healer I said to my mother: “I’m finding it more and more difficult to be Jonathan, but I can’t tell Father because he’d be so disappointed.” Of course she understood exactly what I meant. She said firmly: “You must be yourself. How else can you fulfil God’s purpose for you?” And then to my great relief she added: “When the right moment comes, I’ll deal with your father.” I was so grateful that I exclaimed: “What would I do without you?” and she answered with a smile: “You’ll never have to do without me. I’ll always be here.”

‘She died a month later. It was typhoid. I was away at school. Typhoid’s a long illness and in her case the crisis didn’t come until the third week. My father had ample time to send for me but he never did. He said he hadn’t been able to believe she’d die. Then he said he hadn’t wanted to upset me. Then he said he was sorry, he realized he’d made a mistake. I looked at him. I just looked at him. I was much too angry to speak. I could only hate him and wish he were the one who had died – but then I hated myself for thinking such an evil thought, and the guilt made me more miserable than ever.

‘My father didn’t understand how miserable I was, how
desolate, how absolutely alone. He just said: “You’re being very brave, old chap. I’m so proud of you.” And I said sweetly: “You’re being very brave too, Father” – but-all the time I was shouting in my head: “You don’t care she’s dead! You don’t care that I’m in hell!” And I hated him more deeply than ever. My poor father! Of course he cared in his own way, but I was too young then to understand that and I felt quite cut off from him.