The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “Uh-huh. And what do the Christians have to say about that?”

  “Oh, they’re very sentimental! They believe the body is the temple of the indwelling Holy Spirit and as such should be treated with reverence!”

  “You’re saying they don’t approve of sexual abuse.”

  “I—”

  “That’s sentimental?”

  “What I meant was—”

  “Sure. By the way, I’m getting sceptical about your alleged non-use of drugs. I’d have thought drugs were essential in this kind of mind-expanding get-together.”

  “I repeat: we’re not talking about mindless hedonism here. This is a serious society dedicated to spiritual enlightenment, and no matter what may go on in lesser occult societies I can tell you that Mrs. Mayfield is very opposed to drugs being used.”

  “Because she’s keen to operate within the law?”

  “Another important reason is that drugs always wind up affecting sexual performance—if not in the short-term, then in the long-term. Look at the havoc alcohol can cause! I’m not saying I’ve never seen drugs taken at the meetings, but the serious spiritual seekers will prefer to get high on their own adrenaline. Mrs. Mayfield always says that the chemicals the body manufactures are far more potent than anything a chemist could concoct in a laboratory.”

  “Cheaper too. But let me ask you this—and I apologise if it seems a dumb question: what’s so bloody spiritual about all this sex, with or without drugs?”

  “The theory is that you satiate the body to keep it quiet. Then the mind is liberated. The unconscious is opened right up, and all the archetypes become accessible, moving in patterns which can be understood and mastered—”

  “I’m sorry, can you just run all that past me again?”

  “Forget it. All you need to understand is that the society gave me a map in my quest to stitch up the split in my consciousness.”

  “What split?”

  “The one the Powers were always trying to get through to destroy me. I always felt so dislocated . . . alienated . . . restless . . . But the society helped me, it gave me an intellectual framework to operate in, it made me feel more in control of the Powers—”

  “Just by having sex?”

  “Well, of course there was more. There were psychic procedures, rituals—but I’d better not go into detail. I’ve taken a vow of secrecy, and you wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  “But are you still an active member?”

  “Not sexually active, not since we met. But I’m still a member because I’ve never been able to work out how to sever my links without suffering reprisals. Lewis says the people at St. Benet’s would give me every support, but—”

  “Why wouldn’t the members of the society just accept your resignation?”

  “Because I’m too damned important to them! I not only look after the society’s finances but I bring in rich contacts, people who have considerable power and influence. If I try to resign I’ll be subjected to heavy psychological pressure, and although I’m attracted to Lewis’s offer of help I don’t feel strong enough right now to cut myself loose.”

  “Would they try to blackmail you?”

  “If you mean in the strict legal sense of extorting money, no. As you just said, Mrs. Mayfield aims to keep within the law.”

  “But does she always succeed? What about all this sex?”

  “I promise you children are never involved. Mrs. Mayfield screens out the paedophiles.”

  I found I dared not pause to ask myself if he was telling the truth. Nor could I pause to ask him about other illegal activities. I could only blurt out: “Don’t the other members object if you don’t take part in the sex-stuff ?”

  “They believe I’m going through a phase and they’ve decided to allow me a certain amount of leeway. Mrs. Mayfield’s told them the problem’s my marriage but it’ll inevitably break up.”

  “God . . . But if you abstain, don’t you miss out on all that mind-expansion which turned you on?”

  “To be honest, I’d lost interest in that even before I met you. And after I met you, of course, all I wanted to do was abstain.”

  “So while the sex-stuff was going on, you just—”

  “Watched.”

  I found I had to press him again about the activities; I had to test his veracity by probing further. “But what did go on? Just what were these sexual rituals?”

  His self-control cracked. In a sudden burst of despair he exclaimed: “Sweetheart, surely all you need to know is that I’ve been faithful to you since we met? Surely all that matters is that I’ve never, never involved you in any sex which isn’t thoroughly acceptable and normal? Okay, I know that on that last occasion I let out the throttle, but everything was still on the right side of the line, wasn’t it—although to be honest I did feel afterwards that I’d gone too far. I’ve got a horror of doing with you anything which would trigger the wrong memories and make me relive some of the shit I waded through with those people—”

  “Yes, I see. Yes, I understand.” My self-control was cracking too, and in an effort to maintain my grip on it I backed down from demanding graphic information. Instead I said shakily: “If you saw Mrs. Mayfield regularly at these society meetings, even after we were married, you’ve been lying in saying you were estranged from her.”

  “No, it was the truth—we weren’t on speaking terms. I did see her but there was no communication.”

  “But if she’s the boss and you’re the finance manager—”

  “She’s not the boss. She’s a consultant. The chief executive is someone else, and she advises him. He’s the one I report to at the inner circle meetings, not her.”

  “Excuse me . . . Did you say ‘inner circle’?”

  “I meant the management committee. But Carter, when I contacted her to ask for her help in defusing Sophie, I assure you it was the first time we’d been in direct communication since my marriage. So when you first brought up the subject of Mrs. Mayfield, I really did feel justified in saying: ‘Oh, she’s someone I don’t see any more’—all right, I admit I couldn’t have said anything else then, since I didn’t want you to know about the society, but—”

  Unable to bear this hair-splitting I interrupted: “How much did Sophie know?”

  “We had a big showdown at the time of the blackmail. I admitted my involvement in the occult and told her about my association with Mrs. Mayfield, but I didn’t go into detail about the society and I gave the impression that both the involvement and the association were recent.”

  I was confused. “But you still haven’t told me what this blackmail was all about! Did one of the members try to blackmail you about your behaviour at the meetings—the general meetings where the sex-stuff went on?”

  “No, the actual incident which gave rise to the blackmail had nothing to do with the society and nothing to do with Mrs. Mayfield.”

  I felt more confused than ever. “Then what was it all about?”

  “It arose out of a hobby I used to have.”

  Seconds slipped by. At last I said: “Hobby?”

  He drank a third glass of champagne straight off but afterwards muttered: “God, I’d better go easy on the drink! I’m forgetting I’m not used to it.” Abandoning his glass he moved restlessly to the far end of the room again before saying: “In the end I found I couldn’t control the Powers after all—they bloody nearly destroyed me. I suppose that was when I became disillusioned with the society; I was already disillusioned before I met you.” The tension emanating from him by the time he finished speaking was so acute that I could almost hear the air crackle.

  “Kim—”

  “I had this hobby,” he interrupted, staring out of the window. “I’d had it all my adult life. I had it long before I met Mrs. Mayfield, and I kept it up until the time of the blackmail. It was just something I did occasionally, not often, just every now and then—I was like a drinker having a binge, seeking refuge in something which would relieve the tension and ease
the split in my personality. To be honest it worked better than the occult practices, better than the sex therapy groups, but Mrs. Mayfield always said I had to try to find an alternative way to heal the split because the hobby was too damn dangerous. And she was right.”

  I tried to speak but failed. I could only listen as he added: “It was such a shock. I never thought I’d ever be blackmailed because I was so discreet, so careful.”

  I put out a shaking hand. I raised my glass and drank. Only then was I able to say neutrally, the model lawyer handling the client with kid gloves: “And the hobby was—?” I paused, waiting.

  “I liked to screw men,” he said, and after that there was a silence which lasted for a very long time.

  XI

  “You’ll note I used the past tense,” he said at last, still not looking at me, still staring out over the garden. “All the sexual methods I was driven to use to try to integrate myself—to try to heal the split in my personality and make me feel less dislocated—that whole way of life became redundant when I met you. That’s why I’ll do anything to keep you, anything, even make this very painful and difficult confession.”

  I answered: “I see.” But I barely knew what I was saying.

  Rapidly he said: “What I used to do was this: I’d spend the evening in London, pick up someone in a gay bar and . . . well, it was nothing, just a brief anonymous episode. And let me make it clear that I’m not a homosexual. I like to live with women, I like to make love to women, I’ve never had any doubt about my sexual orientation. Screwing men was just something I did to jack up the adrenaline and blot out the dislocation— in fact I often felt the activity didn’t have much connection with sex. It wasn’t desire that switched on the adrenaline. It was rage.”

  “Rage?”

  “Yes, but that’s all gone now, along with the dislocation. Never mind that. Let’s focus on the blackmail.”

  “The blackmail, yes—”

  “What happened was this. Around two and a half years ago my luck ran out and I picked up a man who happened to be a very professional extortionist. I then compounded my bad luck by making a big mistake: I went back to his flat. Normally I always hired a room in a cheap hotel, but on that occasion I was at the other end of Soho, the man said his flat was in the next street and I just thought: why not. He did tell me he worked in the security business, but I assumed he meant he was some kind of guard. Bloody stupid of me. It turned out he had a shop which sold all kinds of surveillance equipment and his bedroom was stuffed with micro-cameras, the kind you can’t see unless you’re looking for them with a magnifying glass. I was using a false name and I thought I was carrying no identification, but as I said, this was a real professional.

  “My clothes for the evening were off the peg—no Savile Row gear for that particular game—but I was still wearing my handmade shoes from Blaydon’s, and when I was in the lavatory the bastard checked all my clothes, realised he’d hit pay-dirt with the shoes and noted the maker’s name. Then the next day he went to Blaydon’s and spun some story about how he’d met me at a party and admired my shoes and I’d told him to visit their shop in St. James’s—he couldn’t quite remember my name, but . . . Of course Blaydon’s had no trouble identifying me from his description, and he had no trouble milking them of the information which enabled him to track me down. Three days later I received a letter which said . . . But you can guess the gist. God, I’ve got to have another drop of champagne even though I’ve now had my half of the bottle— I’m running out of courage. How about you?”

  “No more at the moment, thanks.”

  “I mean are you still there, still hanging in?”

  “Apparently.” Making an enormous effort I tried to help him along by adding: “I’m grateful to you for being so honest. I really admire your guts.”

  “You’re the one with guts, I think.” He attempted a smile before refocusing on the narrative. “Well, the next disaster was that Sophie found out. He sent her a couple of photographs to show me he meant business. His big threat was to fax the pictures to all the members of the board of my last company . . . I was scared shitless, demented with anxiety. Of course I paid up to keep the bastard at bay while I worked out what the hell I could do, but eventually I swallowed my pride and went to Mrs. Mayfield. That was more of an ordeal than you might think. She’d always condemned the hobby as too risky and I’d sworn to her that I’d given it up.”

  “Was she angry?”

  “Furious. But I knew she’d have a strong motive to help me out—I was too valuable to the society to be allowed to go down the tubes. When I asked her what the hell I was going to do she said straight away: ‘You’re going to get lucky again. I see him lying on a railway line.’ ”

  “Are you trying to tell me—”

  “The next day we went into action. I managed to find my way back to his flat. Then once we had his address Mrs. Mayfield made contact, put a curse on him, predicted his death on a railway line and finally called the society together to visualise and will the death into being.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I knew you’d say that, but all I can tell you is that influencing people by the power of the group-will is a psychic procedure which the society regularly practises—”

  “As a matter of fact the St. Benet’s psychologist told me there are cases recorded of people being willed to die.”

  “You can will people to do almost anything if you go about it in the right way.” Suddenly and most unexpectedly he shuddered. “It was bloody odd in the flat during that final scene,” he said. “I believe the reason I went to pieces as the scene progressed was because I felt Mrs. Mayfield was threatening me.”

  “You? But it was me she was trying to drag onto the balcony!”

  “That was what was ostensibly going on. But I began to feel she was saying to me: ‘I can break your wife in pieces and I can break you too!’ Remember what I said earlier? When I was telling you about my headaches I said I was worried that after this latest bout of trouble Mrs. Mayfield would decide I’d finally become more of a liability than an asset.”

  “But at the end of that repulsive scene at the flat she made it clear to Nicholas that she wanted to keep you!”

  “Well, of course she didn’t want me to fall into the hands of the enemy and spill my guts out about the society! But she was bargaining with Darrow as if I was just an object, wasn’t she? Somehow that seemed to reveal all her malevolence towards me—I felt all her malevolence, and then it was as if I really did become just an object, subhuman. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even put down that knife—and I certainly couldn’t react fast enough when Tucker cannoned into me . . . Carter, I know you must have wondered if I deliberately harmed that man, but believe me I didn’t want any more trouble at that stage. Supposing he too had died by accident—and so soon after Sophie? How would that have looked to the police? Anyway, I didn’t want to kill Tucker, I just wanted to take a swing at him. But that stabbing . . . it was really Elizabeth’s fault for mentally zapping me like that—and I know she did zap me, I know she did . . . And when I started getting these headaches I thought: bloody hell, she’s got the society exercising the group-will to make me think I have brain cancer, and then I’ll want to kill myself, I’ll want to go back to that flat and go out on that balcony and—”

  “Kim—”

  “Okay, okay, I’m being neurotic, I’ll stop. The doctors say I don’t have brain cancer. Fine. But if Elizabeth’s decided I’m expendable, she could still get to me. Why else should she have hammered away about the balcony if she hadn’t wanted to demonstrate—”

  “Kim, it was me she wanted to wreck, not you! And besides, I don’t see why she should feel you’d become expendable. Surely—”

  “She skewered that image of the balcony into my brain, I absolutely felt it going in—”

  “No, I’m sure you’re imagining that. Listen, Lewis will help you, I know he will—he helped me live with that image of the balcony.
I still can’t go to the flat, but at least I can sleep at night and I’m not afraid I’m going to hurl myself out of the nearest upstairs window.”

  But he could only shudder. “How typical of Elizabeth,” he said, “to choose the image of the big fall to zap us. Every high flyer fears that.”

  I realised that he had stopped calling her Mrs. Mayfield but I realised too this was a sign of his stress and I knew I had to steer us both away from the subject of the balcony. “I assume the blackmailer did die on a railway line,” I said, “but how did the information reach you?”

  “The society has its contacts. We asked to be informed of all the fatalities on the Underground. The man was dead within two weeks of hearing Elizabeth’s curse and prediction.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he spoke and I knew we were still on shaky ground. I tried to move the narrative on.

  “And this was two and a half years ago, you said. So you weren’t blackmailed for years and years.”

  “No, I originally told Sophie that because I saw at once it was a good way to explain my lack of capital. I knew by that time the marriage was doomed and I’d have to declare all my assets when the divorce settlement came around. I could have blamed my loss on the crash of ’87, of course, but it might have seemed implausible as the market recovered so well.”

  “Where did the money go if it didn’t go to the blackmailer?”

  “Mrs. Mayfield and the society. I thought it was money well-spent. I would have done anything to ease that dislocation, but of course Sophie didn’t understand. When we had our big showdown after the blackmailer sent her the pictures I did try to explain how my hobby, my involvement with Elizabeth and my membership of the society were all part of my search for healing and integration, but she couldn’t cope, didn’t want to know. That was when I realised we’d reached the end of the road.”