Mystical Paths (55 page)

XI

The years of the twentieth century cascaded at random around me like the cards of a loosely shuffled pack. I looked at the door of the room and was no longer sure it opened on to the grounds of Starrington Manor. I looked at my father and for a split second saw him as a man in his forties. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at ... whoever it was, but out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the flash of rubies in the Abbot-General’s pectoral cross.

I rubbed my eyes with my hands.

‘Oh, do stop treating me as if I were senile, Nicholas!’ my father was saying crossly. ‘Of course I know he’s Lewis Hall, but I’m not confined to 1968 as you are and I don’t see why I shouldn’t roam around the century psychically if I please! What we’re really talking about here is the saving power of the Holy Spirit which flowed through the channel of Cuthbert Darcy, whom I met in 1923, and which is now flowing through the channel of Lewis Hall, whom we’ve both met in 1968. The channels are as one in their dedication to God – which means that in the light of the Holy Spirit those psyches can be seen as identical. The Holy Spirit is, as you well know, timeless, and insofar as those identical channels convey the power of that Spirit, they too are beyond time. 1923 –1968 – it doesn’t matter. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and for ever, and our selves – our
real
selves can never be the prisoners of either time or space.’

He stooped to pick up Whitby, who had finally dared to venture from the kitchen. Then he commanded: ‘Nicholas, help me to stand!’ and after I had eased him to his feet, he tucked the cat in the crook of his left arm before holding out his right hand to Lewis.

‘Goodbye, Father,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re a very busy man, but I hope you’ll find time to come back here soon. Between four and five is a good hour to visit me, and you’ll find the door in the wall will be unlocked.’ He glanced down at the cat again and smiled. ‘Fancy you remembering Whitby’s name!’ he said enchanted. ‘Dear old Whitby, what a character he was! By the way, talking of Whitby, I think I’ve finally managed to forgive you for – but no; we won’t talk of the past any more now. Poor Nicholas finds it embarrassing.’

Lewis laughed, shook hands with him and said: ‘God bless you, Father. I’ll come back soon, I promise.’

‘Why aren’t you calling me Jonathan? You called me Jonathan during the healing – well, of course you did, you always called me Jonathan, everyone in the Order had to call me Jonathan, you insisted on that even though I hated the name and wanted to change it! Do you remember how I asked if I could choose John as my monastic name and you refused point-blank because you didn’t want to pamper me?’

‘How very cantankerous!’

‘No, you weren’t cantankerous in those days, just tough. You only became cantankerous later when the arthritis gave you so much pain in your hip." He opened the front door and stood aside to let us pass. ‘Nicholas, come back later, after evensong.’ ‘Okay.’

No race is more hopeless than the English in emotional moments. We looked at each other, tried an awkward, untidy hug — Whitby yowled in fury as he was shoved against my father’s chest — and parted in relief with our upper lips impeccably stiff. All I said was a gloomy: ‘I suppose you’ll still go on worrying about me to some extent.’

‘I shall always worry a little,’ said my father. ‘That’s natural for a parent. But the crucified days are over. And that’s as it should be. God bless you both,’ he concluded serenely, and stood there smiling, healed at last, with his tabby-cat purring in his arms.

XII

‘
Lewis —’

‘I know what’s coming.’

‘We don’t really believe in reincarnation, do we?’ ‘Certainly not!’

‘So you’re not really Father Darcy, are you?’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

‘Then how do you explain yourself?’

Having paused by the chapel to light a cigarette, Lewis now blew smoke at the sky and made an indeterminate growling noise in his throat.

‘Lewis?’

‘Nicholas, I’ve been having an unusually active day and I’ve now reached the stage where I’m too weak to be cross-questioned. I need a stack of sandwiches and another pot of tea immediately. Keep your mouth shut and provide them.’

We staggered on towards the house.

XIII

‘
I think I’m ready for an infusion of alcohol,’ said Lewis as we stepped into the hall. ‘Can you produce that bottle of brandy again along with the tea and sandwiches?’

I raided the kitchen and eventually retired upstairs with a large tray loaded with food and drink. Lewis was waiting for me in my sitting-room. He was lying flat out on the sofa but the sight of the tray revived him.

I somehow managed to contain my curiosity until the last sandwich had been consumed. Then I said: ‘Can I start asking questions again?’

‘Yes, but I don’t guarantee to answer them. What time’s evensong?’

‘Six-thirty.’

‘Good. That allows us a little time to rest before we embark on the exorcism of the chapel. We don’t want to wind up being carried away from here on stretchers.’

But I was barely listening. Having taken a deep breath I announced: ‘Lewis, I’ve been analysing the mystery you present, and I’m now more convinced than ever that there really is something very odd going on.’

°That sounds more like psychic "gnosis" than rational analysis, and I assure you there’s nothing odd going on at all. Do you remember me saying to you once: "When dealing with the paranormal, always consider the normal explanation first because nine times out of ten the normal explanation will be the correct one?"‘

‘This could be the tenth time. Okay, put your cards on the table. What’s your connection with Cuthbert Darcy?’

‘Oh, I’m a clone. He grew me in a test-tube at the Fordite HQ.’

‘Lewis!’

‘Well, since you seem to have reached the stage where only a fantastic explanation will satisfy you —’

‘Don’t try and tell me there’s no connection between the two of you,’ I interrupted, ‘because I shan’t believe it. I know we can write off my father’s peculiar behaviour towards you as senility, but there are other mysteries which can’t be so easily dismissed. For instance, you never actually said when you met Darcy, and I assumed the first meeting came when you were a pupil at Starwater and he made his annual visitation; but how did you get into Starwater after your expulsion from Charter-house? A school like Starwater Abbey doesn’t take rejects unless someone in authority pulls some very
strong strings.’

I paused but when Lewis remained silent I added: ‘Then there’s the second mystery: how did you come to know so many of the top men in the Order — and know them so well that you picked up information which normally someone outside the Order would never hear? You knew exactly what kind of relationship my father had with Darcy, and that certainly wasn’t public knowledge.’

Again I paused but still Lewis remained silent. ‘And finally there’s the third mystery,’ I pursued. ‘I’ve got a hunch you knew about Whitby — the original Whitby, the house-cat up at Ruydale. When I first told you what my father’s present cat was called, you reacted with something which could be described as a double-take, but it’s unlikely you ever saw the original Whitby during a visit to Ruydale because he died in 1930 when you were still a child. So that means you must have heard about him on the Fordite grapevine, but the gossip about Whitby — the Whitby affair — was so scandalous that the likelihood of an outsider hearing about it would have been almost non-existent. The poor cat got mixed up in a bout of witchcraft hysteria, and ... But I don’t have to tell you, do I? You already know, but
how
do you know? I know because I have a special connection with the Order: I’m Jon Darrow’s son. But you —’

‘Quite,’ said Lewis. ‘Very closely reasoned. But don’t, I beg you, now start speculating that Darcy tiptoed out of his monastery in 192o, ravished my mother in the nearest moonlit rose-garden and sent a silver spoon to my christening in 1921. Leave that kind of fiction to Sir Walter Scott.’

‘Truth is stranger than fiction —’

‘Not this truth.’

‘I just can’t understand why you’re so reluctant to speak of him!’

‘My dear Nicholas,’ said Lewis, rising to his feet, ‘isn’t it patently obvious by this time that I’m hopelessly and hellishly hung up on the subject of that monstrous old monastic maverick?’ And leaving me open-mouthed on the sofa he retired abruptly to the lavatory.

XIV

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ said Lewis on his return. ‘Think of all I’ve done today! I’ve rescued my daughter, disposed of a corpse, healed a couple of ailing Darrows — but that’s all easy, no problem, I sail through the morning on a tide of brandy and sweet tea. Yet the moment you start questioning me about Cuthbert Darcy I start to fall apart at the seams.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you upset —’

‘Oh, don’t start waving that word U-P-S-E-T in my face or I swear I really will start to climb the walls! Darcy spotted my potential, Nicholas, when I was just an adolescent mess, and unlike anyone else I’d ever met he decided he was called to do something about it. You’re right in thinking I knew him before my Starwater days, but he wasn’t interested in children. He wasn’t much interested in adolescents either, but after I was expelled from Charterhouse and my uncle refused to have me in his house and my mother ran off to Paris with her latest lover, the old boy thought he’d take a look at me, and what he saw so horrified him that he decided to keep me at the Fordite HQ while he straightened me out. I was treated rather like a destructive puppy who required strict house-training; Francis Ingram was even assigned to take me for daily walks in the park ... But Darcy succeeded in saving me, Nicholas, and I suspect that the training he gave me was the main reason why I seemed so familiar to your father; I was reflecting all the Darcy techniques, even the flamboyant and unorthodox ones which I’m sure other priests prefer not to use.’

‘But why are you so hung up about him?’

‘Because I owe him everything and I’m haunted by the thought that I’ve let him down.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He told me I should be a monk. He said I’d never make a success of marriage. He said I’d never be able to endure a conventional ministry. He insisted I wasn’t cut out for a big ecclesiastical career. He warned me that unless I served God in a monasteny I’d wind up perpetually on the brink of scandal. Nasty old brute, I thought after his death when I was at the sex-mad, know-it-all age of nineteen, I’ll prove him wrong even if it’s the last thing I ever do – and of course all I managed to do was prove him right. Oh, the horror of it! The horror of realising I was unsuited to marriage, the horror of being a priest with a wife bent on divorce, the horror of telling that conventional parish, where I’d been so miserable, that my marriage vows had gone up the spout, the horror of being cut dead by the ecclesiastical establishment which had once fawned on me, the horror of trying to lead a celibate life before I received the call which made celibacy possible – and worst of all, the horror of remembering how proud of me the old monster had been and what high hopes he had held for my future .. .

‘It was a nightmare. I was beside myself, couldn’t stop thinking about him, he began to haunt me day and night. "Cast him out!" I begged my spiritual director. "Cast him out!" All guilt, of course, but no other demon has a better record for driving people nuts. I only broke free from the nightmare and hauled myself back from that particular hell when I embarked on my ministry of healing. No more constant preoccupation with myself; just constant preoccupation with others. Excellent. A God-given Christian solution. He would have approved.’

‘But surely then you were at peace with him at last?’

‘Depends what you mean by peace. I stopped sitting around thinking of him and feeling guilty; I just sat around thinking of him. And now I don’t even sit around, I just think. I think: what would he do in this situation, what would he do in that, would he think I wasn’t acting with sufficient humility, wouldhe tell me to make my confession more often, would he .. . The questions go on and on. I still discuss him endlessly with my spiritual director – but I must discuss him no more with you. Just remember, Nicholas, that we all have our hang-ups, and that the archetypal figure of the wounded healer is by no means confined to the pages of myth.’

Cautiously, anxious to show sympathy but acutely aware I might say the wrong thing out of sheer inexperience, I commented: ‘My father told me once that all successful healers have to have been wounded at some time or other, because only through suffering can they develop the breadth of understanding required for healing others.’ Then on an impulse I added: ‘But Lewis, in view of all you’ve said, how traumatic it must have been when my father started treating you as if you were Darcy! How did you keep so calm?’

‘Oh, but I
was
him then, of course,’ said Lewis vaguely. ‘He’d taken me over.’ Glancing at his watch he rose to his feet and added: ‘We must go.’

But I remained transfixed on the sofa. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute. Are you saying ... no, you can’t be ... or are you? Lewis, are you trying to tell me –’

‘Time for your next lesson,’ said Lewis. ‘Now, this’ll be really big news to you. In fact you may even find it highly disturbing.’ ‘What’s that?’

‘Not all mysteries can be solved by rational analysis. Let’s go and exorcise the chapel.’

XV

He moved with precision, just as a priest should when conducting an important ritual. Words can be tossed off rapidly, but symbols need time to reverberate in the mind.

First he filled a bowl with water from the tap in the vestry and placed the bowl on the altar where he blessed the water and allowed a minute of silence. The psychic atmosphere in the chapel still recalled images of sewage and offal, and as I prayed during the silence it was hard not to despair.

But once Lewis began to work I soon noticed the improvement. Using the water he made the sign of the cross on the doors and the pews, and I became increasingly aware of the image of a powerful solvent, fracturing the putrefaction so that it could be easily washed away. Lewis moved to the altar. Having anointed the wooden cross he finally traced a large cross on the floor where the body had fallen and we knelt there to pray in words; he asked that Perry’s soul as well as Christian’s might rest in peace with God, and he called on the Holy Spirit to cleanse the chapel by pouring its healing power through the channels marked out by the water.

The images of sewage and offal, already faint, faded away altogether; the atmosphere was now no longer reminiscent of the slaughter-house but of the operating theatre, scrubbed down with disinfectant. I waited, still kneeling, still praying but knowing no polluted corner could survive.

At last Lewis rose from his knees, took the wooden cross and raised it high above the altar as he rededicated the chapel to Christ. The sentences were short, his voice firm. After he had set down the cross he allowed another silence for prayer but at last he said: Now we celebrate mass,’ and as an afterthought he added: ‘I always celebrate mass if a ghost has actually been seen.’

‘But was a ghost seen?’

‘You saw Christian in Perry and sensed his presence. And don’t you remember your father saying he thought there might have been three people with you at the altar?’

I shuddered, but long before Lewis had reached the end of the service the image of the operating theatre had disappeared and I knew my chapel had been restored to me. Opening my eyes I found that the late afternoon light was slanting through the west window, and that I could now smell the furniture polish and incense which mingled with the mustiness resulting from innumerable damp winters. This was the chapel’s special smell. I looked around. The brass tablet which commemorateda Barton-Woods who had died in the Boer War was gleaming. So were the silver candlesticks on the altar. The embroidery glowed on the altar-cloth. The chapel’s special emanations, special beauty and special holiness were once more unmistakably present, and I knew that on a psychic level everything was shining.

I sat down in the front pew, and when Lewis joined me I said: ‘What really goes on during the exorcism of a place? Does the exorcist set tormented souls at rest and cast out the pollution they leave behind? Or does he set free the living by willing away the shadows the dead leave on their subconscious minds?’

‘It’s not a question of "either/or".’

‘But you said the acid test of the exorcism I performed this morning was the psychological effect it had on me. That rather implies, surely, that exorcism’s really just a method of triggering a healing in the living.’

‘I certainly didn’t mean to imply that and I certainly don’t believe exorcism’s "really just" anything; the moment you try to simplify it you cut back on your ability to understand a very complex phenomenon.’

‘So you really do believe that exorcism affects both the living and the dead?’

‘Yes, but of course we can’t directly see the effect on the dead. That’s something which can only be psychically intuited, but what we do see, often very clearly, is the effect of the exorcism on the living who have been reflecting the dead person’s torment. The phenomenon’s similar to that psychic connection I mentioned earlier between the viewer and the viewed in paranormal puzzles.’

I remained silent, considering what he had said, but eventually I accepted that it hardly mattered how the exorcism had worked. All that mattered was that I knew my chapel had been cleansed and healed. Then I thought again of Lewis saying: ‘It’s not a question of "either/or",’ and it seemed to me I was being given another glimpse of the multi-faceted diamond which was truth.

‘Truth is certainly more complicated than a lot of people think it is,’ said Lewis when I had put my thoughts into words, ‘but I think if I were to use the metaphor of the diamond I’d make it clear that some facets glitter more brightly than others.’ ‘You mean some truths are more truthful than others?’

Well, aren’t they? Isn’t orthodox Christianity, for example, closer to the spirit of the Eternal Christ, than Christian Gnosticism, which leans so heavily on the idea of a spiritual élite? Orthodox Christianity may not be the last word in truth — God is always the last word, not the Church — but maybe it’s the last word in facets. For the time being.’

‘Uncle Charles behaves as if the Church is the last word in everything,’ I said, ‘and I don’t think he’d approve of those words "for the time being" at all. He always talks of the "absolute truths", and insists they never change.’

‘Your Uncle Charles always strikes me as being a great deal more subtle than his public reputation, and I suspect his talk of "absolute truths" is merely his private shorthand for those facets which he regards as essential for a Christian life.’

‘Like chastity and continence.’ I shuddered again before saying rapidly: ‘If he knew the whole truth about what I’ve been doing during the past week, he’d refuse to ordain me.’

‘I agree it’s best Ashworth never knows about your recent activities,’ said Lewis, ‘but I say that for the purely pragmatic reason that Perry’s death has made all disclosures relating to the Christian Aysgarth affair very dangerous; I’m not saying it because I think Ashworth would refuse to ordain you.’

‘But put yourself in his position, Lewis! Would you ordain me if you were a bishop?’

‘Of course,’ said Lewis surprised. ‘You’ll be a much better priest now than you would have been if all this hadn’t happened. You’ll be a real priest, not a replica-priest, a man experienced in horror and suffering, not a mere boy who’s spent his life wrapped in cotton wool.’

‘So you’re saying that out of all that tragedy and death —’ ‘— will come life and truth.
Your
life, Nicholas, and
your
truth. And in your life and in your truth, Christian’s tragedy will be redeemed.’