Mystical Paths (56 page)

XVI

That dialogue would end my reminiscences neatly, but life is far untidier than a smoothly-rounded memoir. The police saw no reason to disbelieve our professed ignorance on the subject of Perry’s death even though the Community produced the information that Perry had phoned the Manor on the crucial morning and asked for me. (This was something we’d forgotten amidst all the horror.) Remembering that Rachel and I had been alone in the house when Perry had phoned the vicarage, I at once said that I had never heard from him; I then suggested that having been obliged to abandon the idea of an impromptu visit to the Manor he had decided not to interrupt my visit to friends by calling at the vicarage; possibly too he had had no wish to waste his day in the country by spending time in Starbridge’s nearest approach to a city slum, Langley Bottom.

The police said yes, that all made sense, and went away to think again.

So far so good. But just as we thought all the fuss was dying down the police horrified us by arresting a vagrant for the crime. Fortunately they had to release him almost at once for lack of evidence, but there was a moment when we thought we might have to confess in order to save an innocent man. However, that crisis passed and eventually Perry’s death became a mere unsolved murder in the police files.

The next agonising time came when Perry’s flat passed to a new occupant. Would he or wouldn’t he modernise the kitchen, and what would be discovered when the coal was finally removed? Eventually I heard from Marina that, a friend of a friend of her brother’s had moved in and had been permitted by the authorities to embark on a modest programme of refurbishment. ‘My dear, the sacrilege!’ wailed Marina. ‘He’s cleared out the coal and turned the historic masterpiece into a wine- cellar!’ This information made me feel very queasy, but no police descended on Albany and no corpse was found. It was essential that Christian’s body remained undiscovered because it would have linked me too closely with Perry. Everyone knew I had been asking questions about Christian’s death. If the police turned up evidence that Perry had murdered him, they could easily have theorised that I had found out too much and that Perry had driven to Starrington to silence me. Then indeed I would have had a hard time convincing the police that Perry had abandoned his hope of seeing me when he had visited the Starbridge area that morning. They might never have proved a theory that he had been killed in self-defence, but the scandal attached to ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ could well have finished me.

I went to Perry’s funeral, just to keep up appearances, and found to my relief that there was no religious service at the crematorium. It made the ordeal easier to survive because without the need to concentrate on prayers I could just switch off and think of something else.

Katie was not among the mourners as she was still at Banbury, but the next day I wrote to her to say I had become convinced that Christian had not committed suicide. ‘He wanted to go on a journey,’ I wrote, ‘and the last thing he would have welcomed at that stage of his life was death.’ Then after considerable thought I wrote: ‘Sorry I can’t explain further and reveal my sources, but I give you my word that the above sentence is true.’ It was hard to know how to end the letter but finally I put: ‘Sorry, Katie, sorry for everything, NICK.’

I expected and received no reply but at least I felt I had made some attempt to excise the dread of suicide from her mind. Marina told me the attempt had been successful and demanded to know more details, but I said I was bound by the rules of the confessional. ‘I suppose he was planning a second Continental jaunt with Perny,’ she said, hoping I would at least either nod or shake my head, but I made no more disclosures and eventually she went away.

Soon afterwards Katie became well enough to leave thenursing-home and resume her life in Oxford, but she never remarried.

Rachel married, of course, and she certainly didn’t wait till she was thirty, as she had sworn she would. She waited only till she had graduated from university and recovered from her traumatic experience in the chapel. But Rachel was resilient; those extroverted types seem better equipped to withstand trauma than people who are prone to introspection. I assume she told Charley everything eventually, although he never mentioned the matter either to me or to Lewis. Being Charley, a good man but with an increasingly ambitious and sophisticated streak, he probably thought it was much wiser simply to pray for us.

The wedding took place after various stormy scenes involving Mrs Hall who was livid that Rachel was marrying a priest and determined to proclaim that it would all end in tears. At one stage Lewis was so furious that he even accused her of being jealous of Rachel’s success in finding a good man who loved her, and Mrs Hall tried to assault him with a gin bottle. However Charley eventually ironed out his warring in-laws. He told me once with a radiant smile that he just loved a good pastoral challenge.

He and Rachel now have four children who are all wonderfully clever, wonderfully good-looking and wonderfully charming (or so Grandfather Lewis always insists on telling me after an extra glass of whisky). Occasionally nowadays I bump into Charley (swarming rapidly up the ecclesiastical ladder of preferment) and ask politely how his family’s getting on, but everything’s always unbelievably wonderful. In fact sometimes I wish the children would wind up drug-addicts and/or pregnant out of wedlock, but that’s hardly a very Christian thought so I always do my best to suppress it. Once in a while I think of Rachel tossing off Grand Marnier soufflés, raising four perfect children, running a huge ecclesiastical home, being the ideal clerical wife and working on her doctoral thesis — all with one hand tied behind her back — but the thought’s too exhausting to sustain for long. She would have worn me out in no time, I can see that now. Lewis always realised that, always knew he had merely witnessed a sexual attraction between two people who were radically dissimilar, but I still sigh occasionally when I think of her. She’s such a very outstanding steamy brunette, and one doesn’t meet even run-of-the-mill steamy brunettes every day.

‘Better to sigh for her than live with her,’ said Lewis dryly once, and he was right. So when I’m sighing I thank God she’s living with Charley, the best possible husband for her – though he’s not quite my sort, but I fear that’s my problem, not his.

His brother Michael married Marina, as planned, and for some time they had a most peculiar marriage, very 1960s, but now it’s lapsed into a conventional success. Venetia said Marina always became a devoted friend of any mistress of Michael’s who lasted longer than six months, but Venetia was drunk at the time she made that statement, so she was probably exaggerating. Venetia’s husband died not long after she and I sipped champagne together, but like Katie she never remarried.

Now, in 1988, Marina and Michael are about to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary and I’ve just received a card inviting me to the inevitable orgy. Marina’s scrawled on the bottom: ‘This is the successful marriage that no one,
not
even my Soothsayer,
predicted!’ I’m tempted to send her a card saying: ‘I CAN
BE WRONG.
’

How ironic it is that I should find Michael so much more congenial than Charley! You’d think I’d have more in common with a Christian zealot than with an agnostic who’s mixed up about religion, but perhaps I empathise with Michael’s tormented streak which drove him to escape into wild behaviour when he was young. And Michael’s the one who reminds me of Uncle Charles. Those two certainly had problems back in the 1960s, although by the time Uncle Charles died Michael was mature enough to get on well with him. Sometimes I think Uncle Charles used to look at Michael’s dissolute behaviour and see the shadow side of himself that he repressed. But perhaps I’m being too Jungian. All I can really state with certainty as the result of various heart-to-heart talks with Michael overthe years, is that Uncle Charles had a very curious family in some ways, but that, as they say, is another story.

That other curious family, the Aysgarths, bucketed along in their usual wild style. Cynthia recovered from her breakdown but Norman never beat the drink. He’s dead now. He died in ... Can’t remember. But it was after his father. Dr Aysgarth died in 1975; he had a good innings, tough, sentimental old brute. Dido’s still around, talking continuously. Nymphomaniac Elizabeth became Dipsomaniac Elizabeth, following in the family tradition. Sandy eventually got married, although I’m not sure he knew what to do with his wife afterwards. James is still soldiering on in darkest Surrey. Little Pip passed up the Church and went to work for the classical division of a big record company; I’m glad he stuck to his music in the end. But Christian’s sister Primrose was the real success of that family. She’s a big wheel now in the Movement for the Ordination of Women. Uncle Charles could never stand her, but he could never really stand any of the Aysgarths and he was too much one of the old school to approve of women’s ordination. He outlived his old enemy Dr Aysgarth. I used to see Uncle Charles regularly in his final years, but my abiding memory of him is not of the tranquil retired priest, but of the courageous bishop who proclaimed his ‘absolute truths’ in the 1960s when relativity and relevance were the idols of that Devil’s decade.

I’ll always remember Uncle Charles proclaiming his absolute truths. Nothing rocked him, and the only time I ever saw him disconcerted in public was at Charley’s wedding. Charley declared at the end of his speech: ‘And now I want to pay a very special tribute to my father, the best father any man could wish for ...’ And when I looked at Uncle Charles I saw he was overcome, quite speechless, and the tears were shining in his eyes.

It’s strange how weepy men get when they grow older. But in my ministry I see men of all ages weep.

I was ordained as planned in 1968 and somehow survived two years of conventional parish work as a deacon and curate.

Lewis was a great support to me and kept me going whenever I became frantic. I worked near Starbridge, partly to be close to him but also to be close to my father, now enjoying a new lease of life. Eventually I embarked on a chaplaincy at Starbridge General Hospital and life became simultaneously easier (because I enjoyed the work) and harder (because the work was very demanding).

On June the twelfth, 1972, the fifteenth anniversary of my mother’s death, my father died in his sleep.

I took over Whitby but he pined and died soon afterwards. I lived.

I can say no more about my father’s death. I give thanks for his life and remember him by striving to be the man God created me to be. That’s what he would have wanted. That’s what I do.

Desmond Wilton retired a year later and I was given the chance to be vicar of St Paul’s, but Lewis and I concluded that I would get too involved in the healing centre with the result that the parish would suffer. So I continued my chaplaincy at the hospital, but in the early 1980s after a similar chaplaincy in London, I applied to be the rector of one of the Guild churches, St Benet’s-by-the-Wall. The Guild churches of the City of London open their doors from Monday to Friday for all those who work in the area, but the doors are closed on weekends when the City becomes deserted. Each church has different affiliations, different specialities. I made St Benet’s a centre of healing.

There’s a big rectory attached to it, but Rosalind decided straight away that the City was an unsuitable place for children, so she lives in one of those fake-farmhouses in Surrey and I go down at weekends. This suits me rather well. I don’t have either the time or the energy for family life during the week. Lewis (now very cantankerous) doesn’t approve and says it’s not a marriage, it’s a liaison. But Rosalind and I understand each other. I don’t have to explain myself to her or make excuses; she just accepts me as I am, peculiarities and all, and makes the best of me. At least I haven’t made the mistake my father madetwice – marrying a fascinating stranger – but I know now I’m very different from my father in some ways. And of course Rosalind’s not an old boot. She’s a pair of extremely elegant, handmade shoes, the kind that never give a moment’s discomfort.

We have two sons whom I can’t connect with at all. They say they want to be accountants, drive Porsches and make loads of money. Rosalind says they’ll grow out of it. I wouldn’t know. Meanwhile Charley’s two sons are already talking of being priests, but then Charley’s sons would be. Lewis says I should stop being a weekend father and order Rosalind to London. I don’t know what century he thinks he’s living in. Nobody orders women about these days. Anyway the boys are away at school most of the year now. I do go down to Starwater regularly to see them but whenever I turn up they whine that the Abbey’s boring and that they want to go to Rugby. Rosalind says they’ll grow out of that. I wouldn’t know. Meanwhile Charley’s two sons are doing brilliantly at Westminster, both of them happy as larks. Sometimes I wish I had a ... no, not a replica, God forbid that I should ever hanker for a replica, but a daughter who shared my interests would be very far from unwelcome. However, Rosalind says she can’t face a third pregnancy. Lewis says that’s rubbish and I should take no notice. Quite what he means by that, I don’t know. Obviously he’s not sanctioning rape. I think he just wants to express solidarity with me. Meanwhile Charley’s two daughters are preparing to embark on their schooling at Cheltenham. But then Charley’s daughters would be.

Lewis has been with me for five years now. He turned up on my doorstep one evening in 1983 and asked if he could stay the night. It turned out he’d got in a mess with some woman and the new Bishop of Starbridge had given him the sack. Poor Lewis. He was drinking too much, eating too much, saying that his career as a priest was finished and that the Devil had finally won.

I said: ‘The Devil never finally wins,’ and devoted myself to the necessary rehabilitation. The key to a new life was the licence to work as a priest in the diocese of London. Lewis said I would never be able to obtain the licence for him, but I went to the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks and together we won over the Bishop. Once Lewis had the prospect of working again, pouring out his exceptional gifts as a priest, he soon succeeded in embarking on a new life. He cut back on the drink, put himself on a diet (this was hell for us both) and emerged streamlined and bursting with energy three months later. How I ever managed without him at the Healing Centre I have no idea. He not only assists me in ways too numerous to mention, but he holds the fort whenever I’m called out to deal with paranormal phenomena. The paranormal’s a growth industry at the moment; I’m a consultant to several dioceses now.