Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch

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СКАЧАТЬ Nearby I spotted pâté de foie gras, Gentleman’s Relish and – yes, Rose’s lime juice. Grabbing the bottle I helped myself to a spare sliver of Stilton before moving to the table to replenish my glass.

      Perry clattered down the stairs just as I was diluting the juice with water. He had an empty jug in his hands and Christian at his heels. ‘… playing with fire,’ he was saying as I tuned in to the conversation in mid-sentence. ‘Marina may be all talk and no action, but –’ He saw me and broke off.

      ‘Nick!’ exclaimed Christian in delight.

      ‘Hi!’ I said pleased.

      ‘Sorry, Nick – I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Perry, setting down the jug on the table and extracting some ice from the bag in the refrigerator. ‘Glad you found the lime juice. Would you like to see my coal-cellar?’

      ‘It’s a land-mark,’ said Christian, preparing to exhibit it to me. ‘The last full coal-cellar left in London. He shows it to everyone.’

      ‘Groovy,’ I said, feigning ignorance of the phenomenon and taking a peek. ‘But why all the coal?’

      ‘I made a mistake with the coal-merchant just before the smokeless zone was declared. Pass that bottle of gin, would you, Christian?’

      The doorbell rang in the distance.

      ‘You answer that,’ said Christian to him. ‘I’ll mix the jungle juice.’

      ‘It’s probably my neighbours complaining about the noise …’ He clattered back upstairs.

      ‘How are things going?’ said Christian agreeably to me as he poured a huge slug of gin into the jug.

      ‘Okay.’ Awkwardly I edged closer to him. ‘Sorry about my father,’ I said, ‘I really busted a gut trying to get him to see you. I hope you didn’t feel I’d let you down.’

      ‘Of course I didn’t!’ He gave me his warmest smile. ‘He wrote a most helpful letter, so you needn’t think you pleaded my cause in vain … All set for your final year at Cambridge?’

      ‘Yep.’ I watched with amazement as he added liquid from three other bottles to the gin in the jug and then topped off the poison with Schweppes bitter lemon.

      ‘I suppose you haven’t been seduced since I last saw you by the current fashion among undergraduates for travelling around America once their finals are finished? I’m told that travel on a Greyhound bus is guaranteed to broaden the mind.’

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Sounds a bit tame, if you ask me, but then I speak as someone who did two years’ National Service in the army. Now, there was an experience that broadened the mind! I enjoyed that escape into a different world.’

      I had never before thought of National Service in a positive light. I had just assumed it would be boring and I had heaved a sigh of relief when it had been abolished, but the word ‘escape’ in Christian’s last sentence was now reverberating compellingly in my mind. I heard myself say: ‘I wouldn’t mind getting away for a while. But my father would worry about me if I went off into the blue on my own, and I’d worry if I knew he was worrying.’

      ‘Obviously in that case the travel would need to be structured in some way which would win his approval and enable him to relax. How about doing voluntary work overseas for a Christian organisation? You’d be in the company of responsible people, and he’d recognise the work as useful experience for someone who planned to be a clergyman.’

      This struck me as such a brilliant suggestion that for a moment I was speechless with excitement. A vision of change blazed through my psyche. No more living with the Community and enduring their prim piety. No more feeling tethered to Starrington Manor. I could take two years off, just as if I were doing National Service, and work for a Christian organisation in … The word ‘Africa’ floated across my mind. Exotic, exciting Africa which I had longed to visit ever since I had seen Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines. Distant Africa, where no one would have heard of Jonathan Darrow, the famous spiritual director, and Martin Darrow, the famous actor. Africa, Africa, Africa … I could almost hear the drums beating to lure me on my way.

      ‘That’s cool,’ I said to Christian. ‘A great suggestion. Thanks.’

      He finished stirring the new batch of sea-green poison and smiled at me. Then he said idly: ‘Beware of getting too tied up with that father of yours. Are you sure you really want to be a clergyman?’

      Instantly the Dark began to creep into the room. It appeared stealthily, eerily, billowing around Christian so that he became a shadowed figure, sinister and subversive, a skeleton cloaked in black, a nightmare from some medieval vision in which ‘The Dark’ appeared not as a poisonous cloud but as a horned creature bent on destruction. I saw no horned creature but I felt that poisonous cloud, and as soon as I felt it I knew what it was, I just knew, I experienced ‘gnosis’, the knowledge that was special.

      I stood facing Christian across the kitchen table while the party roared above us, and as the moment of ‘gnosis’ hit me I knew there was something very wrong with him, I knew that his psyche was far out of alignment, utterly dislocated, and that the Dark was streaming into him through every fissure of his personality. Yet never had Christian seemed kinder to the man so many years his junior, and never had his words seemed more charming and benign.

      The Dark was now a huge pressure on my psyche and I knew I had to blast myself free. ‘Yes, I do want to be a priest,’ I said. ‘I want to serve Jesus Christ –’ Instantly the pressure eased as I opened up the scene to the Light ‘– and nothing on this earth is going to stop me.’

      ‘Well done!’ said Christian at once without a trace of condescension. Moving away from me with the jug of poison in his hands, he began to mount the stairs. ‘In that case I can only wish you the best of luck and every success in the Church.’

      In silence I followed him upstairs, the glass of lime juice still clutched in my sweating palm.

      V

      ‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right,’ said my father when I returned home and confided in him. Any manifestation of the Dark was always so horrifying, reeking as it did of death and disintegration, that my strongest instinct was still to seek sanctuary in his cottage, and as usual in such circumstances my father moved to reassure me by speaking very calmly. ‘I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right …’ He often said that, but now I found the words not soothing but irritating. I didn’t want my judgement queried. I knew what had happened. Having recognised that the Devil was infiltrating Christian I wanted to know how to deal with this knowledge. How could I get Christian to an exorcist? How could I dare to face him in future? How could I be sure that the Devil wouldn’t send a demon to infest me as the result of the scene in the kitchen when I’d defied him by declaiming the name – and thus invoking the power – of Christ? (I should perhaps apologise at this point for using old-fashioned picture-language, but some realities are almost impossible to express verbally without the liberal use of symbols.) All these questions seemed to me to be very urgent, yet as far as I could see my father was far from brimming over with the desire to answer them.

      ‘Father, it’s no use you saying: “I’m not at all sure you’ve got this right.” I know I’ve got it right, I know I have –’

      ‘You СКАЧАТЬ