I had previously paid little attention to the Rectory of St. Benet’s either. Its high handsome Georgian façade was familiar to me but I had thought the house merely contained the offices of some old-fashioned firm willing to endure the inconveniences of an antique building. I looked at the house now with new eyes as Tucker halted Gilbert’s car in the forecourt and switched off the engine.
The time was almost eleven, but I still felt I was travelling in a dimension where the ordinary rules relating to time had blurred. For a moment I remembered my life-plan, mapped out in the days when the past could be ignored, the present was under control and the future was always subject to the power of my will, and as I saw how efficiently this vision had been hacked to pieces I wanted to scream with rage and despair.
“Okay, Ms. G?”
“No, but never mind.”
“Want to fluff out against my chest again?”
“Maybe I could save that for later. I feel in urgent need of something to look forward to.”
He laughed as he unbuckled his safety belt, and I groped my way out of the car.
Nicholas Darrow, the pale, bony, smooth-talking item who was currently giving that nice Alice such a tricky time, opened the door before we could ring the bell. Evidently he had been watching out for us from his study, an austere room into which he ushered us as soon as we entered the house. I was surprised to see a computer standing on the modern desk; I had assumed all clergymen would still be living a pretechnological existence.
The study walls were painted an unpleasantly stark shade of white and there were no pictures, only a modern crucifix quite different from the one in Gilbert’s reception room. This one looked as if it had been specially commissioned from a talented artist; carved out of a single piece of wood it was all flowing lines and unusual angles, rather like Nicholas himself. As my gaze returned to his face I tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
“Lewis has gone to fetch Alice,” he was informing us, “so why don’t you stay until they get back, Eric? Carter, take a seat in this chair here”— I was installed in a tub-like arrangement of hard wood laced with foam rubber—“and, Eric, if you want to bring that chair closer . . .”
I was so glad to be in the presence of the necessary expert that I was prepared to be uncharacteristically meek, but there was something about this man which set my teeth on edge. It was perhaps unfair to label him arrogant; he was merely exuding the self-confidence which all successful professionals display when in action on their own turf, but nevertheless he had the air of a man who deep down thinks himself the cat’s whiskers. I still did not find him attractive, but I could see now that he had the kind of off-beat sex-appeal which would keep the females mewing in the pews if not raving in the nave.
“Let me just touch on a couple of practical details before we go any further,” he said, sitting down near me at his desk and swivelling his chair so that he was directly facing the tub where I was installed. “Gil mentioned that your flat was currently uninhabitable, so I want to offer you the option of staying here tonight. That’s why Alice is coming—to be with you in the flat at the top of the house if you want to stay. Of course you may prefer to go to a hotel, but you’re very welcome to stay here if you wish.”
I realised he was trying to beat back his natural bossiness and avoid imposing solutions on me; this was good. But the idea of him being able to summon Alice so easily from Clerkenwell at such a late hour was one which made me want to hiss; this was bad. Instantly I found it much harder to suppress my twinge of hostility.
“How kind of you,” I said, very cool. “I would indeed like to stay. But I’m sorry Alice has been inconvenienced.”
“Oh, she’s more than capable of saying no to me, I assure you!” he replied at once. “But you made a big impression on her recently, and she said she’d be only too willing to help.”
This was a slick sentence but it had the ring of truth, and when I allowed myself to look mollified he gave me a brief professional smile as if he quite understood that I was not the kind of female who would ever mew in a pew. “The next practical matter we need to touch upon,” he said, “concerns your husband. As you’re on your own I assume he’s engaged elsewhere this evening, but when is he due to surface? He’ll want to know where you are.”
This was certainly an angle I had failed to consider. I stared at him as I tried to work out how to respond.
“It’s not urgent,” he said as he saw I was baffled. “If you told him you were going to be out for the evening he’s not going to start worrying about you just yet. On the other hand, if you disappear for the whole night without warning—”
“Yes.” I could see the problem but the solution still eluded me, probably because I was finding it increasingly hard to cope with the thought of what Kim might have been doing.
“Do you have an answering machine?”
“I do, yes, but I can’t think what message I could leave on it.”
“Oh, I’ll leave the message,” said Nicholas. “No need to worry about that. Would you object if I were to tell him where you are?”
“Uh . . .”
“Has he been showing a pattern of violent behaviour?”
“Oh no!” I said at once. “He loves me!” But then the words “violent behaviour” sank deeper into my mind and I remembered Sophie’s crumpled body. “Oh my God,” I heard myself mutter. “Oh my God . . .” Tears began to stream down my face again.
“Eric,” said Nicholas, “pass that box of Kleenex, would you? Thanks. Now Carter, we’ll get to all the tough stuff later when Lewis returns, but meanwhile let’s just focus on clearing up this practical detail. As I see it, this is the situation: you don’t have to talk to Kim at this point and you don’t have to see him, but I do think it might be a good idea to feed him some basic information. Otherwise even if he doesn’t call the police to report you missing, he’s going to be angry and upset tomorrow morning, and angry, upset people are always harder to deal with than people who are merely puzzled and concerned.”
“Yes. Right.” I could understand this. “Okay.”
“Shall I make the call?”
“Please.”
“Number?”
“Oh God, I can’t remember, I’m so banjaxed—no, wait a minute, it’s coming—” I reeled off the numbers and he started to dial.
As the machine picked up the call he said neutrally: “Mr. Betz, this is Nicholas Darrow, the Rector of St. Benet’s Church in Egg Street. I’m calling to let you know that your wife’s safe and that she’ll be staying tonight with Alice Fletcher here at my Rectory.” He gave his phone number, repeated it and hung up. “Now on to the next question,” he said to me. “When did you last eat?”
“I think I had lunch. Or did I? I can’t quite—”
“Have you had any alcohol during the last twelve hours?”
“Yes, but that was ages ago.”
“How much did you have? I’m sorry, that sounds as if I’m about to criticise you, but I’m not—I’m just trying to get an accurate picture of your physical condition.”
“I drank two double vodka martinis. I’d had the hell of a shock, and—”
“You don’t need to justify yourself. What you do need to do is eat. When Alice arrives—”
A car door slammed outside.
“Good timing!” said Tucker wryly, and went out into the hall to open the front door.
VII
Alice came right up to me and said: “I’m so sorry if things are awful for you at the moment, Carter,” but I could only grab her hand to signal my thanks. Meanwhile Nicholas was saying: “Alice, Carter needs to eat. Maybe some cold meat—a bit of salad—nothing too heavy—”
“Leave it to me.” She withdrew just as Lewis Hall, the silver-haired tiger-thumper, cruised into the room.
“I told you, didn’t I, Ms. Graham, that we’d meet again,” he said as soon as he saw me, “but I’m sorry the circumstances apparently leave so much to be desired . . . Good evening, youn
g Tucker! How very stimulated you look—playing the white knight evidently agrees with you!”
Tucker shifted uneasily from one foot to the other but said with the air of a man determined to hold his ground: “I know the interview’s about to become confidential, but I thought I’d wait in the kitchen in case I’m needed later.”
Hall merely turned to his colleague. “Do we need a white knight in the kitchen at this point, Nicholas?”
“I think not,” said Nicholas, completing the mopping-up operation, “but thanks for your help, Eric. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.”
This dismissal was accepted without protest but as Nicholas sat down again in his swivel-chair and Hall began to clear a space amidst the files and books which were stacked on the round table in the centre of the room, Tucker moved over to me to signal his reluctance to leave. “If you want me,” he said, slipping a business card into my hand, “just whistle.”
Hall cleared his throat. “Nicholas, do you have a block of A4 I could use?”
Nicholas extracted the notepad from a drawer of his desk and handed it over without a word. Neither of the clergymen looked at me, and I realised then, as Tucker left the room, that they probably knew rather more than I did about that past of his to which he had alluded at the end of our champagne session, the Bohemian past in which he had bobtailed around with married women after yawning himself loose from all the fluffettes.
I glanced at the business card. Gilbert’s printed details had been crossed out, and on the back below a handwritten telephone number Tucker had scrawled: “MY PRIVATE LINE,” and underlined the words three times.
“While we’re waiting for your food to arrive,” said Nicholas, as I slid the card into the back-pocket of my jeans, “let me just take a moment to give you an idea where we’re coming from and how we operate. Do you know anything about my ministry at St. Benet’s?”
Sinking back again into the tub-chair I said cautiously: “I know you operate something called a Healing Centre.”
“In that case let me put the Healing Centre in its context before you start worrying that we’re quacks operating a medical rip-off. St. Benet’s is one of the City’s Guild Churches, a fact which means we’re open during the week and closed on weekends. Many of these churches have special ministries, and when I took over St. Benet’s in 1981 I was already a specialist in the Christian ministry of healing. Christians have traditionally been interested in healing not just because Jesus was a very great healer but because the importance of healing and wholeness in body, mind and spirit is implicit in his teaching about how to get a top-quality life. This means I work alongside a doctor, because I see my ministry as complementing orthodox medicine and not acting as an alternative to it. The Healing Centre’s in the crypt of the church. I also work there with a psychologist, and we have access to other medical specialists.”
He paused as if to allow me the opportunity to voice objections but when I remained silent he added: “One of the most reassuring facts, some outsiders find, is that there are a number of checks and balances in place to make sure I don’t turn into a phoney wonder worker who gets his kicks out of manipulating people. If I turn dishonest, the medical profession withdraws its support, the Bishop’s troubleshooter drops down on me like a ton of bricks and the trustees of the Healing Centre, which is a registered charity, demand my resignation.”
As I at once thought of Mrs. Mayfield I heard my voice repeat: “A phoney wonder worker . . . manipulating people . . .”
“I’m afraid the whole field of healing is rife with fraud, so let me explain what I mean by dishonesty. If I’m dishonest I forget I’m here to serve people, not to dominate or exploit them. If I’m dishonest, I lose sight of Jesus Christ who preached a gospel of faith, hope and love, not a manifesto of power and profiteering. If I’m dishonest I forget there’s no place for self-centredness in a Christ-centred ministry of healing. The healer’s got to be a person of integrity whom people are justified in trusting.”
He paused again. This time I managed to say: “I think I should tell you I’m not a Christian.”
“I appreciate your honesty, but in fact we have no policy of exclusion here. We operate on the principle that every individual is created by God for a purpose in his scheme of things, and that therefore every individual should be treated with respect and cared for accordingly.”
“Sometimes,” said Hall, “we have to deal with troublemakers who try to infiltrate the Centre, but we never turn away those in genuine need.” He was now sitting at the round table with his notepad open in front of him, and as he spoke he began to doodle on the blank page.
“We get all kinds of cases, of course,” said Nicholas, “including the kind of case which I believe you yourself are presenting . . . Now, Gil didn’t go into detail about what kind of paranormal problem this is, but let me reassure you by saying that although the media love to hype up paranormal incidents and deck them out in all kinds of fancy trimmings, the reality is usually far less preposterous and far more interesting than the media would have us all believe.”
“All we’re really talking about here are unusual pastoral situations,” said Hall, doodling away busily. “That’s why priests get involved. The majority of cases involve distressed people who need pastoral help.”
“Or in other words,” said Nicholas, following on so smoothly that the dialogue began to seem like a monologue, “the paranormal is usually grounded in the normal and remains closely linked to it—one can even say that it’s just a level of the normal which we don’t often encounter.”
“Like a whistle pitched so high that only a dog can hear it,” said Hall helpfully. He began to draw a dog on his notepad. “The whistle exists in reality but humans can’t hear it unless their normal hearing is somehow enhanced.”
“I think it’s also worth pointing out,” remarked Nicholas, “that there’s nothing particularly spiritual about the paranormal. What we’re really talking about is a phenomenon of consciousness which produces mysteries, but these mysteries can usually by solved by a combination of reason and logic allied to insight and experience.”
“The symptoms of the disorder can be extremely disturbing, of course,” added Hall, “but once the underlying disorder is treated the symptoms soon disappear, so—”
“—so the important task for us now,” said Nicholas, again producing a seamless follow-on, “is to try to uncover the basic problem which is generating the unpleasant symptoms. That’s why I’ll need to ask you questions about your background so that I can get a full picture of what’s been going on. Lewis will be taking notes because in this sort of case I always work with someone who can take a careful record of the evidence; it protects the client and it protects me too. I promise you we’re scrupulous in applying security procedures—the notes will be kept under lock and key—but if at any stage of your story you want Lewis to stop writing all you have to do is say so.”
“Normally Nicholas works with a layman on these cases,” said Hall, who by this time had given the dog a clown’s hat and was busy sketching in a circus background, “but since Gilbert Tucker mentioned that clerical confidentiality was essential here I decided to fill the role of note-taker and corroborating witness. I hope that’s acceptable to you. I’m very old but not, thank God, senile.”
“He’s still only sixty-nine,” said Nicholas to me, “but for some reason he often talks as if he’s ninety-six.”
I had just managed to stop myself trotting out that 1960s’ mantra: “Sixty-nine is Divine,” when Alice re-entered the room with a tray of food.
VIII
“Now,” said Nicholas, pouring out a cup of tea for me as I began to nibble a raw carrot, “let’s make a start on your story while you eat. I’m hoping that the more you unburden yourself the more you’ll feel like eating.”
Alice had withdrawn again after telling me she was going upstairs to prepare our bedrooms. Meanwhile Hall had stripped the top sheet from his notepad to expose a blank page and was m
aking a heading in a handwriting which was too eccentric for me to read from where I was sitting.
Returning to his swivel-chair Nicholas added: “Before I ask you questions about the background, would you like to have a shot at summarising in a couple of sentences what the paranormal trouble is? It might help to ease the stress, but on the other hand if you feel this is too difficult at present—”
Waving this sentence away before he could finish it I said rapidly: “This evening my flat was disarranged—it keeps getting disarranged, but this time no one could possibly have done it. And I saw a ghost. And— am I allowed a third sentence?”
“By all means.”
“I keep having hellish thoughts about throwing myself off my thirty-fifth-floor balcony because a psychic healer planted the idea in my mind this afternoon and now I can’t get it out again.” I faltered but managed to add: “I don’t know whether this balcony phobia is paranormal activity or just me going nuts, but my husband’s mixed up with this woman—she’s determined to break up our marriage, and—” But at this point I was unable to continue.
At once Nicholas demanded: “What’s her name?” and as I answered: “Mrs. Elizabeth Mayfield,” I saw both men wince before they looked at each other in silence.
ELEVEN
When someone has compassion on us we find ourselves really seen, heard, attended to . . . If someone’s attention is genuinely compassionate it does not stop at attentiveness:he or she is willing to speak, act and even suffer with us and for us. It is in such passivity, as we receive their compassion, that the most powerful dynamics of our own feeling and activity are shaped. Amazed gratitude for such compassion can last a lifetime.
The High Flyer Page 24
