Glittering Images (43 page)

Darrow leant back in his chair. ‘Very well, now can you tie up the last loose end and tell me how you view your relationship with Jardine as you look back through the strait gate from the narrow way?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said and once more paused to collect my thoughts, but this time they proved uncollectable.

‘Never mind,’ said Darrow. ‘I wasn’t really expecting you to expound on Jardine tonight.’

‘I know what I want to say but I can’t quite –’

‘You’ve done extremely well, but now you need to rest. Get a good night’s sleep, Charles, and tomorrow I think we’ll finally succeed in putting the Bishop in his place.’

‘So far as I can make out,’ I said after a sleepless night, ‘there are two aspects of my relationship with Jardine. First of all I seem to see him as an exceptionally compelling father-figure.’

Darrow nodded. ‘Can you see why he should have this exceptional appeal?’

‘I need older men to give me the approval my father withholds and Jardine entered my life at a time when I was completely estranged from my father.’

‘Yes, but what made Jardine more compelling than, for example, Dr Lang?’

‘Well, I can see now that as far as I’m concerned Lang and Jardine aren’t so unalike as they seem to be,’ I said with reluctance. ‘They’re both eminent churchmen and they both have glamour.’

‘Ah, now we’re progressing.’

‘Lang seems … well, it sounds unkind but he seems like a worn-out gramophone record now, a pompous stagey old bachelor who has no message for me any more. But certainly when we first met I thought he had great glamour. Jardine, on the other hand, not only has glamour but he’s far from being a pompous old bachelor; he’s a racy married man who has problems with women. I not only liked him but I came to identify with him – and that brings me to the second aspect of our relationship: I came to regard him as a double.’

‘Before we deal with that, tell me why you’ve chosen father-figures who are glamorous and clerical.’

‘I suppose I’m rebelling against my father who hates clerics and despises glamour. He thinks Lang’s hopelessly theatrical and if he were ever to meet Jardine he’d say, “Fellow’s not quite a gentleman. Bit too flashy with the vintage port. Bit of a bounder with the ladies.”’

‘All right, so far so good. Now let’s take a look at this curious
doppelgänger
situation. Can you explain how you came to regard Jardine as a double?’

‘This is where I get into difficulties. As far as I can make out –’ I stopped. Darrow waited. In front of me on the table my hands began to twist in their clasp. ‘As far as I can make out,’ I forced myself to say, ‘this is the part where I went stark staring mad.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Darrow casually. ‘Were you violent – physically violent, not merely verbally abusive?’

‘No.’

‘Were you performing bizarre acts, like taking off your clothes in public?’

‘Good heavens, no!’

‘Did you hear voices, see visions and think that little green men were out to kill you?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘Well, you could have been mad, I suppose,’ said Darrow, ‘but you certainly weren’t stark staring mad, and personally I doubt whether we can convict you of anything worse than emotional stress. What I suggest is that we now put aside for a moment this thesis that you were stark staring mad and take a look at what was actually going on. Exactly when did you start doubting your sanity?’

‘It was during that last scene with Jardine, the scene where he made his speech –’

‘Ah yes, the speech he made when he should have been listening! However I’m sure it was an oratorical masterpiece. After all,’ said Darrow expressionlessly, ‘if there’s one thing we all know about the Bishop of Starbridge it’s that he has a very powerful and persuasive tongue.’

It was as if a spell had been broken. ‘He could make you believe black was white,’ I said, and suddenly I found I had the courage to look at the memory without flinching. As my hands stopped writhing in front of me I leant forward on the table and began to describe how Jardine had laid waste my equilibrium.

‘… and I know I’m not describing this well, Father – it’s so hard to find the words – but Jardine made me feel my whole identification with him was a grand illusion.’

‘Obviously he was very convincing. But how did he raise the possibility that you were deluded?’

‘He said I was using him as a mirror – only he didn’t use the metaphor of the mirror. He talked of a blank screen and a magic-lantern. He said I was imposing on him – projecting on to the blank screen – feelings and situations which existed only in my mind.’

‘The Bishop seems to have been reading Feuerbach. But go on.’

‘He said that in my mind I’d picked him to be my hero and was justifying my own bizarre behaviour by saying I was only following his example.’ I shuddered at the thought of Loretta. ‘There was some sort of horrible truth in that –’

‘Projection theories always seem difficult to rebut until one realizes that the whole truth has failed to be projected. We know now that your behaviour, bizarre or otherwise, didn’t arise solely from a desire to mirror Jardine; we know that you were driven by a variety of other factors including your estrangement from your father and your wife’s death. However let’s go on with this thesis of Jardine’s that you were the magic-lantern projector and he was the blank screen. Did he actually say that the resemblances between you were nonexistent?’

‘He said that I’d imagined him and that the man he was had nothing to do with the man I thought he was – and that’s madness, isn’t it, when one can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion? He made me feel as if I’d imagined the entire Starbridge mystery, he made me feel –’

‘Yes, try and say it out loud –’

‘– rejected. It was as if a door had slammed in my face. I felt as I’d felt during that last row with my father when he’d slammed the door of his study and locked it, but this was infinitely worse because in addition to feeling rejected I also felt stark-staring –’

‘Were you aware of his eyes while this was going on?’

I was abruptly diverted from the nightmare of insanity. ‘
His eyes?’

‘Think carefully. Were you looking directly at him?’

‘Yes.’ I shuddered at the memory but managed to add, ‘His eyes are light brown but he can make them glow until they seem amber. They were amber then.’

‘And was there a point in the conversation when he repeated a phrase several times, a phrase such as “listen to me”? Or was there a point when he repeated your name perhaps three times in one sentence to secure your attention?’

I said slowly, ‘Yes, there was. At one stage I said, “I refuse to listen to this,” but he said, “You will – you will, Charles, you will. Sit down, Charles – sit down and listen to me – listen to me, Charles – ”’

‘Ah yes,’ said Darrow nonchalantly as if we were discussing behaviour which was commonplace. ‘I thought so. He was using a hypnotic technique to heighten the power of his charism – a technique which can occasionally be useful but which is always fraught with danger. I believe I now understand what happened. A charism which manifests itself in oratory can operate like a wireless, and Jardine had not only switched on this wireless but turned up the volume knob as high as it would go. The effect would be unusually devastating because you were drunk and in a severely weakened state, but Charles, now that you’re stone-cold sober and in a far stronger frame of mind you should have no trouble turning down the volume knob and finally switching the wireless off.’

I was greatly intrigued but all I could say was, ‘I can’t quite find the volume knob.’

‘It’s his assertion that you imagined the resemblances. All you have to do is explode it.’

‘But how?’

‘Make a list of the apparent resemblances and we’ll see whether or not they’re valid.’

I said cautiously but without difficulty, ‘The wife who got so depressed that she had to go back to her parents for a while – that was what Jane threatened to do and what Carrie Jardine actually did. The wife who was dutiful about sex – although this didn’t stop the marriage from running into problems. The Jardines’ period of childlessness followed by the birth of their dead baby, a period which corresponds to my years of contraception followed by the loss of the unborn child. Jardine’s aversion to the celibate life, an aversion he confessed to Loretta, which corresponds to my own feelings about celibacy.’

‘Admirably put. There you have several genuine resemblances between you and Jardine. Can you see any more?’

I said with growing confidence, ‘Jardine comes from a lower social class than I do, but his long climb to the top of the social tree has resulted in him winding up with two personalities – a fact which suggests that like me he has trouble preserving a unified identity. He himself admitted to me that Alex is the glittering image and Adam is the man beyond, the man he likes to keep secret because Adam’s made so many mistakes. Like me he normally doesn’t talk about his past – and in particular he doesn’t talk about –’

‘Yes? Go on, Charles –’

‘His father,’ I said. ‘His father.’

‘And there you have the most dramatic resemblance of all.’

My confidence was now complete. ‘His father problem was on the surface very different from mine,’ I said, ‘but in essence it was the same. Jardine had felt unloved and rejected by his father until the old man was near death.’ I paused as I remembered my nocturnal talk with Jardine in his library. ‘It was strange how Jardine sensed I had problems with my father,’ I said. ‘I merely pursued my usual policy of reticence but unlike everyone else Jardine had the personal experience to know what that reticence meant.’

‘In other words he saw himself in you – the identification process was working in reverse.’

‘Yes, I’m sure now that this was why he didn’t throw me out of the palace when he discovered I was Lang’s spy – I intrigued him so much that he couldn’t resist the urge to let mc stay on so that he could get to know me better and later, after he had confided in me about his father, I became convinced that he was the only man I knew who had the experience to look beyond my glittering image and sympathize with the man I really was. That was why his rejection at the end was so terrible to me.’

‘In other words,’ said Darrow, ‘the psychological recognition was mutual and real. The resemblances between you were not only numerous but striking. So much for Jardine’s accusation that you were projecting a fantasy.’

The relief was so overwhelming that it was some time before I could say, ‘How could I have believed him?’

‘You were hypnotized into believing you were mad and then you were too terrified to confront the memory to realize his thesis was false.’ There was a toughness in Darrow’s voice but he eradicated it. Without expression he added, ‘Clearly the charism was abused.’

Having, finally faced my memory of the scene I was able to voice the most sinister possibility of all. ‘Could he have deliberately sent me over the edge in order to protect himself?’

‘He could,’ said Darrow, ‘but on the other hand if he saw himself in you it seems unlikely that he would have been deliberately destructive. The most likely explanation is that in the distress caused by his involvement with you he lost control over the charism.’

‘But surely his use of hypnosis can only be sinister?’

‘Not necessarily. He may well have resorted to hypnosis with the best of intentions – to calm you down. However where he made his big mistake was to assume that if he confronted you with certain realities you’d be able to pull yourself together. From a counselling point of view, as I told you earlier, this was quite the wrong approach, and the error was compounded by his lurid presentation of what he believed those realities to be, but Charles, let me stress that despite the abysmal mess he made of the scene there’s still no proof that he was engaged in covering up an affair with Lyle. All the disaster proves is that even an experienced bishop should never attempt to counsel someone when all his better instincts caution him against it.’

There was a silence while I digested this truth but finally I said, ‘At least I can now see the scene in its true colours. I can’t tell you how much better I feel.’

‘I’m very glad, but don’t start relaxing too soon because we’re not quite home yet. We’ve established that you should on no account think you were mad just because you identified yourself with Jardine. But what happened when you pursued this identification to its limits? Can you take another look at that incident with Loretta?’

‘I suppose this is where I convict myself of being emotionally disturbed even if I wasn’t certifiably insane. I wanted him to be guilty of adultery. When I found he hadn’t penetrated her I felt cheated. And in the end I wanted him to be sleeping with Lyle – I wanted it even though the thought was unendurable.’

‘And why did you wish these sins upon him?’

‘I felt that if he could be guilty and still be a brilliantly successful churchman, then I could too. I thought … I was so afraid …’

‘Yes? You’re almost there, Charles. One last hurdle –’

‘I was so afraid my vocation was breaking down and I couldn’t bear to think of it. All I want is to serve God in the Church but everything seemed to be falling apart – my celibacy, my career, my whole life – and in those circumstances Jardine became – Jardine symbolized –’