The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “Lewis,” said Nicholas, “you worked for several years in a mental hospital. Would you care to comment on Carter’s question?”

  “The possibility of mental illness has to be considered, of course,” said Lewis, busily sketching a cat on his notepad, “but in the absence of florid ramblings and other bizarre behaviour, and in the presence of careful narration coupled with an exhausting preoccupation with rationality, I suggest we can only declare the lady sane.” The cat he was sketching had turned into a tiger with a curvy body and bared teeth.

  “But surely,” I argued, “seeing a ghost must be classified as a hallucination?”

  “Not much of a hallucination, was it?” said Lewis unimpressed. “All you saw was a woman in a royal-blue coat. If she’d been foaming at the mouth, waving an inverted cross or dancing stark naked with a brace of satyrs, I’d be more inclined to take your claim of a hallucination seriously.” He had begun to draw a caveman standing over the tiger with a raised club.

  “May I,” said Nicholas courteously, “intervene? Carter, you’re in difficulties here because you’re asking yourself the wrong question. The question is not whether or not you saw a ghost; we know you saw one. But why did you see it? And what does this experience mean?”

  I said confused: “You both think this wasn’t a hallucination?”

  “I prefer to use the word ‘hallucination’ when mental illness is present. In a case like this I would call the incident a ‘sighting,’ and I think you yourself stumbled across the key to the mystery earlier when you talked of being in an altered state of consciousness as the result of your fear and stress. Normally in the Western world we associate an altered state of consciousness with drug-taking, but in certain circumstances the brain itself can generate the chemicals which heighten perception and enable an unusual level of reality to be experienced.”

  “It’s as if you hear the whistle which normally only a dog can hear,” said Lewis, now working on a background to his sketch.

  “It doesn’t make the experience less real,” said Nicholas carefully. “It just means that the experience is different from an everyday experience. It’s also different from a hallucination, which would draw heavily on the imagination and usually include bizarre features. In this case your mind was drawing on an incident which actually took place—this was your memory of Sophie as she looked in the supermarket. But why was your unconscious mind serving up this memory in such a very vivid and frightening way?”

  With great reluctance I had to admit I was intrigued. “But surely,” I said, trying hard to remain rational, “in scientific terms this was nothing but a psychological projection?”

  “Scientific reductionists would indeed say that, just as religious reductionists would say it was nothing but a departed soul detained on its journey back to God. But I’m always very suspicious of ‘nothing but’ theories because I think life is a good deal more complex and subtle than they allow. It was certainly a psychological projection in the sense that it was a memory projected from your mind, but I think it was a long way from being ‘nothing but’ a psychological projection. That’s why we have to ask the questions which fall outside the provenance of science, the questions relating to meaning and value, because only then, in my opinion, will we reach the truth about what happened here.”

  “I agree,” said Lewis, shading in the vegetation he had drawn around the tiger, but before I could comment Nicholas added swiftly to me: “The point to grasp is that although this psychological projection served up an image which the rational side of your brain knew to be impossible, this is actually no big deal. This is just you operating in an altered state of consciousness and seeing a psychic level of reality.”

  “You saw a ghost,” said Lewis, effortlessly reactivating the double-act. “But so what? Lots of people see ghosts. There are even lots of different kinds of ghost which people see. Some are ghosts like your ghost, some are place-ghosts, some are—”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Fine,” said Nicholas. “In that case let’s—”

  “What’s a place-ghost?”

  “There!” said Lewis smugly. “I knew you’d never be able to resist your feminine curiosity in the end!”

  “And I might have known you’d never be able to resist a tigerthumper’s put-down!”

  “Surely it should be ‘tigress-thumper’? Why are you desexing yourself ?”

  “The feminising of male nouns by the addition of the letters E-double-S has been classified as representing an unjust discrimation against women by a patriarchal society.”

  “Well, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything!”

  Nicholas said: “I hate to interrupt when I can see you’re both busy enjoying this curiously old-fashioned repartee, but can I just answer Carter’s question about what a place-ghost is? It might provide a breakthrough about what happened tonight.”

  “Go ahead,” said Lewis, “but whatever you do don’t call the ghost a ghostess.”

  “A place-ghost,” said Nicholas before I could draw breath to hiss, “is, as the name implies, a ghost attached to a certain place, and it tends to go through the same actions again and again, like a short video which gets repeatedly replayed. It’s quite harmless and seldom interesting, and it can be seen either by one person or by a group of people, none of whom necessarily has any connection with either the ghost or the place. Now obviously Sophie wasn’t a place-ghost, because she had no connection with your flat and she wasn’t performing any routine action. If she was going to be a place-ghost she’d be seen at the house at Oakshott.”

  “So what kind of a ghost did I see tonight?”

  “Well, I’m bound to say,” said Nicholas, “that this sounds like a bereavement ghost. When people suffer a bereavement—and particularly a bereavement which is a great shock—they sometimes do experience, very clearly, the presence of the person they’ve lost. They don’t always see the dead person, but visual projections are far from unknown, and unlike the place-ghost this phenomenon always reveals a powerful connection between the viewer and the viewed. How did you really feel about Sophie, Carter? Beneath all the shock, what emotions did you experience when you found her dead?”

  Tears again began to stream down my face.

  VI

  I heard myself say: “I’d been such a shit to her. I thought she was just a brainless old cow mainlining on an outdated morality, but she wasn’t like that, she was dignified and intelligent—and sort of brave and committed—a woman of principle—and I was just a rude, arrogant, ignorant coward, always running away from her and never having the guts to face up to what she represented—and what she represented was that I’d been bloody to another woman—me, with my belief in showing solidarity with the sisterhood! Okay, I’m not really an activist who gets high on spouting feminist nutterguff, I admit I had my tongue in my cheek just now, but if some woman’s being rubbished by a man I like to show sympathy because God knows I get plenty of men trying to rubbish me, but there was Sophie, being rubbished by this man I’d nicked from her, and I treated her as if she were trash. I can’t believe I behaved like that. It was vile.

  “I didn’t set out to nick him from her. He told me the marriage was over, but maybe that was just another lie. Certainly if I’d believed that the marriage was still viable I’d have settled for a one-night stand. My last lover junked me for a nineteen-year-old fluffette. I wouldn’t have wanted to do to any woman what that flea-brained fluffette did to me.

  “If only I’d wised up earlier, but I was always in denial where Sophie was concerned, and it wasn’t until Mrs. Mayfield gutted me that I had any real insight into how Sophie must have been brutalised by Kim’s association with that hag—so brutalised that she’d wanted to stop me being brutalised too. Talk about feminine solidarity! Sophie knew what all that was about, but I knew less than a tiger-thumper, I can see that now.

  “So when I got to Oakshott and found her in that disgusting house I . . . well, I couldn’t believe she
was dead—oh, I went onto autopilot and did what had to be done, but part of my mind was sort of bleeding, I thought no, no, no, she can’t be dead because I have to talk to her—and I had to talk to her not just to find out the truth about this shark who’s bedded down in my flat but to say to her: ‘I’m sorry. I was a real slag. Please forgive me.’ But then she wasn’t there so I couldn’t say that and I couldn’t bear not being able to say it, and all the way back to London there was a part of my brain saying: ‘Come back, Sophie, I want to say I’m sorry. Come back, Sophie, I want to ask you to forgive me. Come back, Sophie, I need to talk to you, I need to hear what you have to say. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,’ this voice in my head was saying, ‘I’ve got to see you, I’ve got to see you, I’ve got to see you . . .’ ”

  VII

  I destroyed the last Kleenex. Immediately Nicholas reached down into the bottom drawer of his desk and produced another box. As I mopped and snuffled I kept thinking how furious my mother would have been with me. She had never shed tears, no matter what my father had done. Tears were for women who deserved to be losers. “Big girls don’t cry,” she had said whenever I had started to whimper, yet now here I was, shaming her by being so feeble . . . I somehow got the tears under control.

  “Sorry about that,” I said at last. “You must be thinking I’m pathetic.”

  “On the contrary,” said Nicholas. “I was thinking how brave you were, able to face up to such hard painful truths in the presence of strangers.”

  I repressed the urge to weep all over again and somehow succeeded in whispering: “If only I could feel that Sophie would have forgiven me.”

  “I’m sure she would have wanted to. Possibly she might not have succeeded straight away—you might have had to allow her time to be angry—but Christians make a practice of praying for the grace to forgive those who have wronged them.”

  “It’s part of a spiritual dynamic,” said Lewis, who had lit another disgusting cigarette. “We need to forgive others as we need to be forgiven ourselves . . . Nicholas, should we take a break here to allow Carter more time to recover?”

  “I don’t need more time,” I said, snapping back to normal in a flash, “and why are you asking Nicholas a question which should be addressed to me? Why are you treating me as a non-person who can be organised without her permission?”

  Lewis said to Nicholas: “The lady’s clearly recovered. Shall we proceed?”

  “How do you feel about that, Carter?” said Nicholas, asking the right question.

  “Oh, for God’s sake let’s go on,” I said irritably. “I’m afraid of Kim arriving before we’ve discussed Mrs. Mayfield.” But the next moment I was asking stricken: “Will I be likely to see the ghost again?”

  “I don’t believe so,” said Nicholas firmly. “Now that you’ve vented your grief and guilt, your psyche is unlikely to serve up Sophie in the form of a bereavement ghost. There’s still a possibility that her journey back to God has been delayed, particularly if she was murdered, but if that’s the case she’d appear at Oakshott.”

  “She could appear there as a place-ghost,” said Lewis briskly, “or she could appear as another type of ghost, the ‘unquiet dead’ type. Unlike the place-ghost, this type can interact with humans and isn’t confined to a video-replay form of routine.”

  “The dead person doesn’t have to have been murdered,” added Nicholas. “Any sudden death might have the same effect, because what we’re really talking about here is unfinished business. Sometimes the dead don’t find it easy to move on—particularly if the living are trying to hold them in place.”

  I opened my mouth to say I did not believe in any kind of afterlife, but then realised I would sound exactly like a flat-earther busy asserting her convictions to two sailors who had circumnavigated the globe. Instead I mumbled: “Are you saying my flat will be all right now?”

  “I think we need to reclaim it formally for you,” said Nicholas, sounding more businesslike as he switched from commenting on ghosts to outlining a plan of action. “May I make some practical suggestions?”

  “Please.”

  “The trouble is they probably won’t seem practical to you, but I promise they’re usually effective. What I’d like to do, with your permission, is to go to your flat with you and Lewis at, say, nine o’clock tomorrow morning. We’d straighten everything out and then I’d bless each room before celebrating mass on the spot where Sophie appeared—I always believe in celebrating mass when a ghost has been seen. We’d pray for Sophie, of course, and for you too. Now, you needn’t join in; I respect the fact that you have other beliefs, but if you could be there as a benign presence this would be helpful.”

  “But as I’m not a believer, how will all this make a difference to my feelings about the flat?”

  “That’s a good question, but God’s healing activity isn’t dependent on whether or not you believe in him.”

  “All healing comes from God,” murmured Lewis. “What Nicholas is really saying, Carter, is that you can’t limit the power of God by your unbelief.”

  “But why should I believe that statement?”

  “All right,” said Nicholas quickly, “let’s try and meet you where you are—let’s try to explain the rationale behind my proposals without mentioning God at all. This is the way I see it: as far as the ghost is concerned, I think you’ve now got your conscious mind around this phenomenon, but the ritual and the prayers will be helpful in speaking to your unconscious mind—they’ll allow your confession about Sophie to be processed there in a non-verbal form so that you can finally come to terms with her death and be healed of the psychological pain you feel in relation to her. So in my opinion you won’t need therapy afterwards to help you overcome this particular trauma; the prayers and ritual will complete the progress you’ve already made.”

  “You’re saying they’re for ironing out the unconscious?”

  “I’m saying they should help you assimilate the experience in a positive way. Please note that I’m not guaranteeing a cure, but usually some form of healing is possible.”

  “Nicholas’s job as a healer is to line himself up with God through prayer and the sacraments,” said Lewis, who apparently had no inhibitions about reintroducing God into the conversation. “The aim is to allow the healing power of God to flow as effectively as possible into the situation which requires healing, but although the power can override your unbelief, there’s always the chance that the power may be withheld, either wholly or partially, and that’s why we never promise miracles.”

  “But if all goes well I’ll get a ghost-free flat without having to bat around with a therapist?”

  “Yes, but don’t forget we’re not writing off therapy as a useful tool in the healing process. Once we turn to the poltergeist activity—”

  “Let me make it clear that Lewis and I could be wrong about our poltergeist diagnosis and you could be right about your conspiracy theory,” interrupted Nicholas. “We don’t yet have enough information to come to a firm conclusion, but this much at least seems clear: whatever the explanation is, you need counselling to deal with the extreme stress of your current situation.”

  “If Nicholas and I are right,” resumed Lewis, “the poltergeist activity will now go into abeyance. By the very act of confiding in us you’ll have ‘lanced the boil,’ as it were, and relieved the intolerable tension which was generating the energy. But unfortunately the tension will only build up again unless the root cause of the problem is tackled.”

  Nicholas added before I could comment: “The psychologist who works with us at the Healing Centre has a lot of experience in counselling City executives who are under stress. Do you think Kim could be persuaded to join you in some counselling sessions here?”

  “Good God, no!” I said automatically, but again Nicholas remained tranquil.

  “That’s a pity,” he said, “because there’s no way Kim can be detached from this problem. He’s probably under heavy stress himself, he’s certainly contributed to
your own stress, and we know his past troubles are seriously interfering with his present life. So—”

  “I’m not saying he doesn’t need counselling,” I interrupted hastily. “If you ask me, he needs a psychiatrist. But what I’m saying is that Kim would never, never cross the threshold of anything which calls itself a Christian Healing Centre.”

  “Back we come to Mrs. Mayfield,” murmured Lewis, and picked up his pen again.

  VIII

  “How long has Kim been anti-Christian?” asked Nicholas neutrally after I had talked for some time about the deterioration of my relationship with Kim as the result of the miasma generated by Mrs. Mayfield.

  I thought hard. “When I first knew him,” I said at last, “he seemed reasonably tolerant of Christianity—he certainly made me conscious of my ignorance about religious matters and gave me the impression that Christianity was a belief system which only the ignorant slagged off.”

  “And later?”

  “Later . . . after he started seeing Mrs. Mayfield again . . . yes, he was actively hostile.”

  “I’m afraid that’s a sign that he’s drifted back into her control.” Unexpectedly he swivelled his chair to face the computer. “Let’s see what the latest update is on her activities.”

  I was amazed. “She’s on your computer?”

  “There’s an organisation which makes a study of all these cults and groups, particularly the ones which can be destructive to the personality and result in mental breakdown. It’s an organisation we work with closely—they keep us abreast of the latest developments and we pick up the casualties they uncover.” He typed in an order while adding: “The occult scene is fragmented—there’s no great overarching organisation complete with master-mind, but some of the individual manipulators can do a lot of damage, particularly to poorly integrated personalities.”

  I heard my voice ask: “What exactly is the occult?”