The High Flyer (47 page)

X

That night Alice went to bed early but I lingered in the living-room while I reviewed all that had been said to me that day. It came as a most unwelcome surprise to realise that although I had a better intellectual grasp of what had happened to Kim my emotions were still in chaos. No matter which professional language one used to explain Kim’s behaviour and no matter how well these explanations chimed with the reality I had experienced, I still felt as if my ability to love and trust had been slaughtered with a sledgehammer. I began to feel the comforting talk of a “real” Kim was illusory and pointless. All that mattered was that I had wound up trashed, and how could I forgive either the real Kim or the monster for that? It occurred to me that I had forgotten to ask Lewis directly about forgiveness. I knew he had mentioned it somewhere but only as something which would happen in the distant future as the result of rebuilding my life, and at that moment the idea of rebuilding anything seemed inconceivable. I felt too butchered.

Fleetingly I longed for a dose of Tucker’s deadpan humour, but the next moment I was shuddering at the thought of him. How could I be sure he too wouldn’t turn into a monster? I felt I had had enough pain from an intimate relationship to last a lifetime, and as for sex . . . I could only recoil. I was sure I would never again be able to go to bed with a man without remembering Kim suggesting intercourse behind that locked door at Oakshott. In fact the very word “intercourse,” crammed with images of emotional closeness, made me feel nauseous, and even the thought of hearing anyone saying “I love you” froze me to the bone. Love meant being trashed and being trashed meant horror, pain and nightmare.

Moving to my room I found my bag, extracted the letter from my father and tore it to pieces without rereading it. My father, with his contemptible addiction, would now always remind me of the monster, addicted to his “hobby.” I wanted nothing more to do with a man like that. He could rot for all I cared.

I knew that I was profoundly wounded, just as I now knew my intellect was powerless to save me from this emotional agony, but I could do nothing to heal myself. I had thought that by applying reason and logic to all the testimonies I had heard that day I would be able to rearrange my memories in a satisfactory pattern, a pattern I could live with, but all I had done was prove I was moving through a dimension of reality where reason and logic failed to run. I was being mangled by the Powers again, that was the truth of it. I felt as if some savage beast had sunk its teeth into my neck and was shaking me systematically before tearing me to pieces.

I was in such a state by this time that I could only slump down on the window-seat and clutch the new little cross Lewis had given me to replace the one abandoned at Oakshott. There were no words. I wanted to summon Lewis for help, but I was so shredded that I could not even summon the strength to use the intercom. All I could do was shudder and sob.

Then I thought of him saying at the Savoy: “You’re going through your Good Friday, Carter,” and the moment those words flickered through my mind my unseen companion slipped alongside me again, not to part the darkness this time—the darkness was too intractable—but to share the pain.

“I don’t want you sharing it,” I said. “I don’t want anyone caring as much as that.” But he knew about dereliction and despair, so he merely accepted the words, drawing them into himself and transforming them so that they became not a rejection but a cry for help. Then gradually, as he stayed on, the quality of the darkness too was transformed because the Powers were powerless to evict him, and in his silent presence, devoid of aggression, lay the strength which I knew would finally force them to let me go.

I said: “What exactly
is
this power you have?” but all I could hear was Robin talking of the integrating principle while Lewis was saying that love was the most powerful integrating force on earth—and the next moment I was with my dolphin again and I loved him and the monster was quite blotted out.

“Hold on to that dolphin!” cried my companion suddenly, and as I held on I knew that at that moment not one of the Powers of Darkness could have prised my fingers loose. Then he said: “You asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love.”

So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain.

After a while I remembered how I had longed for a Rambo-type guard on the night of the melt-down but had received an unarmed guide. Now I had wanted an unarmed guide to part the darkness but had been given this passive sufferer. Whatever this image was in my mind, it was not generated by wish-fulfilment. I found myself theorising that he was not an auditory hallucination but, as Nicholas had put it, a psychic reality—although this psychic reality was obviously on a different level from all the paranormal rubbish—and the next moment I clearly saw how most instances of psychic phenomena were very low-grade experiences of no real value; they were merely items from a kind of junk-heap in the shallows of consciousness, leeches which could cling to a personality as barnacles cling to the bottom of a ship. But the deeper one moved into the oceanic depths of the mind the more profound the psychic realities became until one found at last in the very heart of consciousness—

My brain flaked out, but the complexity of reality hit me afresh. I started to marvel at all the mysteries of the mind beyond the area devoted to reason and logic, that neat little garden which I had so carefully preserved and tended. Yet reason and logic, I saw now, were not meant to be penned up in a neat little garden, and if I were to send them out to earn their living in the world beyond the garden fence they might one day enable me to say with a humility born of truth instead of an arrogance generated by my fear of disorder: “I’m confronting mysteries. I don’t know all the answers. I must believe in order to understand.”

I suddenly realised the darkness in my mind was breaking up. I held my breath, listening for my companion, but he had slipped away. Scrubbing the tears from my face I went to the kitchen, found the notepad which Alice used for her shopping lists and drew a dolphin on the top sheet of paper. Then I took the drawing back to the window-seat in the living-room and sat down again as I added a few more details with my pencil. My dolphin was now frolicking in a wide, wavy sea . . .

Or was he?

The next moment I was remembering Lewis saying: “Scots Calvinism is very strong on hell and the Devil,” and at once I knew that this sentence had the power to reduce me to rubble again. I tried to dwell on the memory of Lewis assuring me that Kim was “with God” (whatever that meant) who would “do what was necessary to heal him,” but the second this image formed in my mind of Kim being fixed by God, I knew there was no comfort for me after all in this idea. For how did God fix a person who had regularly behaved like a monster? Vile images of incineration scorched my brain. I found I had to pace up and down the room in a futile attempt to ease my distress. Once more I knew myself to be on the brink of despair.

Lewis had been right to assume I had picked up a certain brand of religious hearsay in Scotland. Memories of religious horror stories, acquired from one of my grandmothers, now surged to consciousness from some forgotten corner of my mind and told me that both “the real Kim” and the monster would without question be consigned by God to the fires of hell.

My fingers were still clinging to my dolphin but my horror was weakening their clasp. I needed to believe I still loved someone who had been worthy of saving despite all that had happened, someone who had always been present in my marriage and whom even the monster had been unable to destroy. This belief exonerated me both from the charge that I had committed a huge act of folly by marrying him and from the charge that I had connived at the wrecking of my life by welcoming a monster into my home; the belief made it possible for me to hope that I might one day be able to forgive myself for making such a mess of my personal life. I still couldn’t imagine forgiving him for choosing a corrupt life which allowed the monster to wreck us both, but at least I could imagine forgiving myself. My self-esteem depended on me being forgivable, and I needed self-esteem in order to believe myself worthy of any kind of bearable future. Without that hope I could see myself sliding rapidly into breakdown.

However, the religious horror stories suggested that God would see only the evil deeds perpetrated by an entity called Kim Betz, and pass judgement accordingly. No distinction would be made between “the real Kim” and the monster because the evil deeds were too evil and the wrong choices too deliberate to permit the judge to take any but the hardest of hard lines—and this in turn meant everything Nicholas and Lewis had said about no one being beyond redemption had been just clergyguff designed to cheer me up. The truth was “the real Kim” had been worthless and I had been merely a pathetic bag of hormones so desperate for marriage and motherhood that I’d ended up with an obscene villain.

Painful tears, now fuelled by physical weariness and emotional exhaustion, sprang back to my eyes, but I found I was no longer grieving for my shredded self-esteem. I was grieving for my dolphin, for the love which I had tried to hold on to but which was now being ripped from my hands. I couldn’t bear to think of him being burned. I wanted him to be saved and healed and kept in a safe place where he wouldn’t have to suffer. I couldn’t endure the thought that he had escaped at last from the torments of the Powers only to be tortured by that terrifying judge waiting for him on the far side of the grave.

I told myself fiercely that I refused to believe in God but that failed to shift the image of the implacable judge from my mind. Then I told myself I refused to believe in Christianity, but I had a horrible feeling it was all true, even the ghastliness of life after death when one fell into the hands of a sadist. The tears were now streaming down my face as the Powers made their final devastating assault on me, but just as I was about to cry out to my unseen companion: “Why did you desert me? Why have you gone away?” I heard the stairs creak as someone crept up to the landing outside the front door of the attic flat.

XI

My first thought was that it was Kim’s ghost. I had been remembering him so vividly amidst such agonising emotional stress that I felt his return as a psychic presence was almost inevitable. Then I remembered that the footsteps of ghosts made no noise; Sophie’s approach had been soundless as she crossed the marble floor of that hall in Oakshott. That meant my late-night visitor had to be a living person and this in turn meant the visitor was either Nicholas or Lewis, but whoever it was, why was he tiptoeing up the stairs on the wrong side of midnight?

I decided that this was a mystery but not a mystery which I should be too afraid to solve. Brushing the tears from my face again I called sharply: “Lewis?” and at once the creaking stopped as Nicholas called back in a low voice: “No, it’s me.”

When I opened the front door I found he was holding the teddy-bear in his arms. “I was going to leave him outside with a note,” he said awkwardly as I boggled at this outstanding example of eccentric behaviour. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“But why on earth are you abandoning that poor animal here?”

“I suddenly realised you were the owner he’s been waiting for. You liked him but weren’t sentimental.”

“You mean you’re giving him to me?”

“Consider it a gesture symbolising my gratitude.”

“
Gratitude?
”

“I’ve been wanting to thank you for some time.”

“Wait a moment, let me make sure I’ve got this right. You, Nicholas Darrow, are thanking
me
?”

“You’ve been extraordinarily helpful to my ministry ever since you came to stay here—in fact my spiritual director says you’re a real gift from God.”

“She’s got to be kidding!”

“No, Lewis and I may have been sent to help you, but it’s clear now that you’ve also been sent to help us. I’ve been shown that I can’t split my private life off from my professional life and pretend this has no effect on my work as a healer, while Lewis has been shown that modern women aren’t all as intolerable as he wanted to believe they were. So I really do think it’s time that at least one of us said thank you.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

He held out the bear.

Accepting it wordlessly I cradled it in my left arm as I ran the fingers of my right hand distractedly through my hair. The scene was faintly reminiscent of a Victorian melodrama where the wronged woman, complete with illegitimate child, turns up on the doorstep of the cad who has ruined her and mutely hands over the innocent result of their doomed union.

“I was going to give him to you tomorrow,” said Nicholas, “but suddenly I had this feeling that I had to bring him upstairs tonight.” He paused before adding: “I get these feelings sometimes.”

Cautiously I said: “ESP?”

“Not necessarily. In this case I probably felt concerned because of something Lewis said earlier—he was speculating that you might have been influenced when you were young by a particularly severe strand of Christianity which can be upsetting to many people, particularly at a time of bereavement—”

“You’d better come in,” I said, and pulled the front door open wide.

XII

“Lewis said you had a good talk together at the Savoy,” said Nicholas, ambling into the living-room and parking himself in front of the unlit gas fire. “He didn’t go into detail; no doubt he felt most of the conversation was confidential, but when he theorised that Calvinism had played a part somewhere in your cultural background, it occurred to me that you might not quite understand that Calvinism isn’t the only form of Christianity on offer. There are—and have been almost from the beginning— many Christianities, but this is much less peculiar than it sounds because no great religion is an unchanging monolith. If it flourishes, it’s bound to be diverse and dynamic—which means the basic truths will stay the same but they’ll always be subject to reinterpretation as time passes and the world moves on . . . I’m sorry, you’re probably too tired and stressed to connect with all this right now, but—”

“Don’t patronise me.” I placed Mr. Bear in the best armchair, adjusted his legs to a sedentary position and propped him up with a small cushion so that he was sitting alertly on the edge of the seat. “The law too expresses basic truths,” I said, “and the law too is diverse and dynamic, subject to reinterpretation and remodelling as time passes and the world moves on. You think I can’t understand the concept of development?”

“No, no,” said Nicholas hastily, “of course not. Then you’ll understand that sometimes a theological belief—a latecoming variant on some traditional theme—can become obsolete. Or it may survive but become unfashionable—or even intellectually untenable. Or it becomes not actually wrong but superseded by an idea which is closer to being right. An outsider might find all this dynamic evolution chaotic, but—”

“—but there are careful rules about updating.”

“Exactly. Well, what I’m trying to say is that in Christian theology the concept of judgement hasn’t remained unchanged. Many people do still favour the idea of hellfire and damnation, but although I respect their veneration of a certain past tradition, I can’t go along with it.”

“But who are you to chuck out tradition?”

“I’m not chucking it out. I’m just choosing to emphasise an older, more biblical tradition. And I’m not alone. I’m just reflecting modern research and scholarship.”

He finally decided to sit down. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra seconds to work out what to say next. “A lot of the talk about hell isn’t very scriptural,” he said apologetically as if he feared I might consider him personally responsible. “A lot of the images of damnation only go back to the Middle Ages, and I doubt if Jesus would have favoured those medieval scenes of torment which show a Grand Inquisitor tossing people into the flames. Jesus seems to have been more interested in speaking clearly about a shepherd who went out of his way to search for a lost sheep . . . and that brings me to the story I wanted to tell you about the sheepdog trials.”

He paused again, and suddenly I realised he had ceased to irritate me. I sat down opposite him. He was quite still now. He had one leg crossed over the other and had interlaced his long fingers which he was now watching intently. In a flash of understanding which mesmerised me, I knew he was psyching himself up. He was like a mountaineer manoeuvring himself into position by a series of elaborate, high-risk moves to rescue the damaged climber wedged helplessly in the rock-face. Indeed his concentration on this intimidating task which required all his skill was now so great that within seconds I was no longer seeing the classic image of the mountaineer which symbolised the fight against adverse forces; I was remembering how I had watched the Wimbledon championships on television and seen the extreme concentration shown by a great tennis player who, after four sets riddled with errors, clawed his way back to level-pegging in the final set before miraculously raising his game to win the match.

“Surely the truth is this,” he said to his interlaced fingers. “You can’t talk about judgement without talking about justice—and justice is the other side of love. If we love someone we want justice for them. We don’t want them to be treated unfairly; we want them to be treated with love and understanding. People so often think of judgement as something severe, but a great judge will weigh up the good points as well as the bad; a great judge will see that
real
justice is done—or so my father said once in a sermon he preached about some sheepdog trials.”

He unlocked his hands and began to examine his thumbnail as if he had never seen it before. Each word was now being carved laboriously from his vocabulary. I could almost see him sweat over the choosing and the extraction. I could almost hear him pant over the extreme effort required to form each sentence. Yet the sentences when they emerged were smooth and fluent, spoken in a calm, unruffled voice.

“You know what I mean by sheepdog trials, don’t you?” he said. “They’re open-air exhibitions of the skills dogs show when herding sheep, and the judge has to decide which dog is the most skilful. Well, once upon a time, my father said, a man and his small son were on holiday in the Lake District and they saw a sign directing them along a road to some sheepdog trials which were being held on a nearby hillside. The little boy said: ‘Oh, I’d like to see a trial!’ so his father agreed to take him, but when they arrived at the scene the little boy was very disappointed. He said to his father: ‘But where’s the jury? And where’s the judge in the black cap, like the judge at the Old Bailey who sentences murderers to hang?’ (This was long before the abolition of capital punishment.) Then the father had to explain that it wasn’t that kind of trial. No dog was going to be condemned to death or sentenced to prison. Every one of them was there to be affirmed and valued and encouraged, and if some of them didn’t come up to the mark they were always told they were welcome to come back later on when they had learned how to be more skilful.”

My eyes once more filled with tears but even as I dashed them away Nicholas looked straight at me and said simply: “Kim will be all right now, Carter. He’ll be shorn at last of Mrs. Mayfield’s ‘Jake,’ because in the end we all belong to God, not to the Powers, and God is like the judge of the sheepdog trials, not like the judge in the black cap at the Old Bailey. So mourn for all the happy times you and Kim had together, grieve for all the suffering you both had to endure, but then have the courage to let him go to be loved and healed by his maker—because nothing in the end can separate us from the love of God, nothing, of that I’m quite sure.”

He stood up suddenly, not waiting for my reply, but instead of moving to the door he walked to the window, drew back one of the curtains and stared out into the dark night. “Yet sometimes it’s not so easy to let a spouse go, I realise that,” I heard him say. “No matter how much went wrong with the marriage there was still that profound commitment in the beginning, and how very sad it is, isn’t it, to be forced to witness the painful death of so many cherished hopes and dreams.”

There was a long, long silence.

Then I rose from my chair and moved to his side to comfort him.