Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch

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СКАЧАТЬ powder-blue mini-skirt, a clinging black sweater and a silver zodiac medallion. Her legs were encased in black stockings and her face was smothered in trendy make-up: white lipstick, black eyeliner and so much mascara that her eyelashes seemed to droop. Her natural blonde hair was very long and looked as if it had just been ironed.

      We got on better now that we were older and could regard each other as people rather than accessories. When I started seeing her again after Christian’s death it occurred to me that our friendship had endured because of a certain ineradicable compatibility, even though we had at first been too immature to do more than strike poses in each other’s presence. I found her intelligent and pragmatic; beneath all the society gush there was something tough about Marina, the toughness of someone determined to survive no matter how adverse the circumstances. From a material point of view survival was hardly difficult for her. She was rich. But not all deprivation is financial.

      I think she liked me because … well, why was it? Perhaps I represented reality amidst the phoniness of her society life. Or perhaps I represented safety in a world where most men were panting to bed her. Or perhaps I represented nothing at all but appeared to her as someone who (on his good days) could be just as intelligent and pragmatic as she was, one of those rare people in whose presence she could cast aside her affectations and be herself.

      ‘Nick, I’m terribly worried about Katie,’ she said as we sat down with our mugs of coffee. ‘She’s gone so peculiar.’

      Automatically I murmured: ‘The effects of a bad bereavement –’ but Marina interrupted me.

      ‘It’ll be three years this summer since Christian died and she’s not getting better, she’s getting worse. She’s started dabbling in spiritualism.’

      This did indeed sound tricky. ‘Dabbling?’

      ‘Buying books about it. Seeking out people who go for it in a big way. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not particularly anti-spiritualism, there may well be something in it, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it’s a field stuffed with con-men who’d think nothing of exploiting a young widow who’s slowly going crazy with grief.’

      ‘Obviously she needs professional help. Perhaps her doctor could recommend –’

      ‘My dear, we’re well past doctors, she’s turned against anything orthodox, she’s way out there on the nutty fringes. Now look, Nick. She’s determined to try to contact Christian at a séance – and don’t tell me I’ve got to stop her because I know damn well I can’t. That’s why I’ve come to you for help.’

      My heart sank. ‘But Marina –’

      ‘You’ve got to be the medium, Nick, got to be. You’re the only psychic I trust.’

      I opened my mouth to say: ‘I don’t mess around with my psychic powers any more, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous, it’s asking for trouble,’ but the words which came out were: ‘Okay, where and when?’

      I needed to be shaken till my teeth rattled.

      The Christian Aysgarth affair had begun.

FOUR

      ‘[Man’s] failing has been the pride and egoism with which he aggrandizes himself, using his powers with aggressive or complacent self-assertion instead of using them in humble dependence.’

      MICHAEL RAMSEY

      Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974 Canterbury Pilgrim

      I

      I should never have involved myself in Marina’s plan, but I felt so sure that for once I could use my powers with benign effect. After all, I was no longer an undergraduate messing around with ouija boards – or even an innocent abroad locking horns with a witch-doctor. At twenty-five I thought I could give myself credit for some degree of maturity, but what I could never acknowledge was that in psychic matters I was no better than a precocious child who could recite the alphabet but who had never been taught to read and write.

      There are basically two problems with séances. First, most dead people can be assumed to be at peace with God, in which case efforts to contact them are futile, and second, if the dead people aren’t at peace with God, the most sensible thing one can do is to leave them well alone because lingering shreds of discarnate spirits, as my father had often told me, are either trivial or demonic. I had no doubt that Christian was now at peace with God. It was true he had died ‘unhousel’d’ and ‘unanel’d’, cut off from life by a violent death when he was possibly not in a state of grace, but during his life he had been a good man – or as good as most men can hope to be – and I had no doubt that since his death various people had prayed that he might rest in peace. Why shouldn’t God have responded by exercising a loving forgiveness, healing those deep fissures which I had been so sure existed in Christian’s personality, and finally enfolding his soul? It seemed a reasonable assumption to make in the circumstances.

      From that reasonable assumption it followed that the chances of making contact with Christian were nil. What was much more likely to happen in the séance was that Katie’s acute emotional distress would be projected from her psyche and cause havoc. That was why I planned not a séance but a pseudo-séance, a rite which might appear designed to contact Christian but which was in fact merely designed to help Katie. I thought that provided I kept my mind closed against any discarnate shreds of former personalities that happened to be floating around, I would be dealing not with the dead but with the living because what was really required of me in this situation was to be not a medium but a healer.

      This attracted me, and was almost certainly why I had agreed against my better judgement to take part in Marina’s plan. Even now, when my head was stuffed so full of theology that I could have written a thesis about the transformation of the historical Jesus into the Eternal Christ of the Church, I felt irresistibly compelled to look straight past that multi-symbol image to the charismatic Galilean wonder-worker who had healed the sick and raised the dead.

      ‘I want to be a healer-priest when I grow up,’ I had announced at the age of eight after an enthralling game in which I had resurrected my tin soldiers, but my father had replied firmly that if I wanted to heal the sick I should train to be a doctor.

      ‘It’s true all priests are involved in the healing of souls,’ he had said, ‘but a ministry which centres on healing the physically and mentally sick is so extremely difficult and so fraught with danger that only priests with the strongest possible call to heal should attempt it.’

      It was not until later that I found out about his brief, unsuccessful attempt to be a healer. Naturally he had assumed, since I was so like him, that if I tried to be a healer I would fail too.

      But the fascination with healing had persisted, and now, years later, I found myself seduced by the challenge of restoring Katie Aysgarth to full mental health. The result was that I planned the pseudo-séance in a haze of euphoria.

      Disgusting. No wonder my father prayed daily for another religious thug like Cuthbert Darcy to knock the hell out of me. I was like one of those typhoid carriers who bounce through kitchen after kitchen and leave a trail of disaster in their wake.

      God knows how anyone I met ever survived.

      II

      The СКАЧАТЬ