The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  Outside I cannoned straight into Tucker.

  TWENTY-ONE

  There comes a point where the questions change. Then we no longer ask about how to avoid a particular suffering or even why it is happening to us. Instead, all our resources are focused on how we might come through it, and our ultimate question becomes: what is it for? The basic trust is that suffering, evil and even death do not have the last word about life.

  DAVID F. FORD

  The Shape of Living

  I

  “Ms. Ashy Phoenix, I presume.”

  “Oh my God—”

  “How are you doing, Ms. Ash?”

  “Badly, but I’m trying to improve.”

  “Gil told me the funeral was—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I lit an extra candle for you this morning.”

  “Ah, Tucker . . .”

  “I’ve temporarily shelved the novel in order to light candles for you. I’ve become an arsonist fixated on wax. Whenever I see a wick I’m immediately seized by this ungovernable urge to—”

  “I hate to interrupt you when you’re on the subject of ungovernable urges, but aren’t you supposed to be befriending people?”

  “I’m befriending you, Ms. G.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’m going back to the salt-mines next week to give my bank balance a make-over. Let me take you out to lunch tomorrow with my last twenty-pound note.”

  “I seem to have given up eating.”

  “Oh, it’s fun, you’ll like it!”

  “Tucker—”

  “Okay, forget lunch, how about a tankard of the Widow at the Lord Mayor’s Cat? I can’t believe you’ve given up champagne!”

  “I—”

  “Think about it. Call me,” he said, and veered away to give the receptionist a hand as two drunken yuppies started to wail that with the loss of their jobs their lives had ended at the age of twenty-two.

  I groped my way back to the Rectory.

  II

  On the ground floor’s hall table I discovered some letters addressed to me and realised that Alice had been back to the flat that afternoon to collect the post. Among the usual bills and junk mail I found a letter written on prison stationery. My heart sank. My first reaction was to shove the envelope deep into my bag but then I found I had to know what my father had said. Dumping my bag on the table I extracted his letter and broke the seal.

  “Sweetheart,” my father had written, “let me say straight away that I’m not asking for money. I just want to tell you how great it was to see you so unexpectedly. You looked beautiful. I felt so proud. I should have written before but I didn’t like to in case you thought I wanted something. Then the other day the chaplain said: ‘How will she know what you’re thinking if you don’t tell her?’ so I’m hoping you won’t be cross if I write to tell you this: I’m thinking I can’t wait to get out of this place. I’m thinking I’m never coming back here. I’m thinking it’s only the thought of you that keeps me going. Please send me a postcard to let me know you’re okay and not annoyed with me for bothering you. I love you, sweetheart. I want to turn my life around, I promise. Take care, DAD.”

  I muttered a curse and rammed the letter back into my bag, but before I could begin the long climb up the stairs to the attic flat the front door of the house opened as Lewis returned home from the church.

  III

  “How are you?” he said neutrally.

  “In dire need of a triple vodka martini.”

  “Excellent! I feel like drinking too. Let me take you to the Savoy.”

  I was so startled by this lavish invitation that I was at a loss to know how to decline it. Then it occurred to me that a complete change of scene might do me good and that I had been so rude to so many people that day that a touch of politeness now would hardly go amiss. “Thank you,” I said, but knowing nothing of Lewis’s financial situation I felt obliged to add: “We can go to a local wine bar if you’d prefer.”

  “I detest wine bars,” said Lewis acidly.

  “Oh good.” I assumed that this lofty dismissal of plebeian watering holes hinted at the presence of a private income.

  After he had changed from his cassock into a clerical suit, we set off for the Savoy in his car. In keeping with the anti-luxury bias of his calling, this heap was a very noisy, very old Volkswagen Beetle but he drove it as if it were an Aston Martin. By the time we had parked on Savoy Hill I felt more in need of a drink than ever.

  In the main lounge we settled ourselves at a corner table which afforded us privacy, and a waiter immediately arrived to take our order.

  “Two pussyfoots, please,” said Lewis before I could draw breath to speak, “and two ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread, not toasted—and make sure the cheese is very mature Cheddar.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” I exclaimed stupefied, but the waiter was already speeding off into the distance. Swivelling to face Lewis I demanded outraged: “What’s going on?”

  “It’s time you rested your liver, my dear, and it’s certainly time you ate something nutritious. Take Uncle Lewis’s advice, be a good little girl and don’t even think of throwing a tantrum.”

  I said: “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “I enjoy buying attractive women pussyfoots,” said Lewis complacently, “and since I’m sure you wouldn’t want to deprive an old man of a little innocent pleasure, why don’t you abandon the feminist fury and tell me how you’ve been getting on?”

  I did think of walking out but the chair was too comfortable, and the Savoy, enfolding me like a luxurious fur coat, was too soothing. It occurred to me that I had been through hell that day but I was now being offered a little visit to heaven to help me along.

  I stayed.

  IV

  “It wasn’t Nicholas’s view of evil which drove me up the wall,” I explained in between bites of my sandwich. “I found that convincing in its own modern, liberal way, but it didn’t strike me as being spiritually robust and when he failed to mention either God or Jesus Christ I just wanted to slap him. Was I being unreasonable?”

  “Absolutely not!” said Lewis.

  “And anyway, how can a clergyman talk of evil without mentioning the Devil?”

  “How indeed! But if you want spiritual robustness couched in good, old-fashioned religious language, I’m without doubt your man.”

  “Great! So was Kim totally evil or wasn’t he? Did that subpersonality you mentioned earlier mean he has to be classified as evil after it took him over? Could the subpersonality ever have been evicted or was it there for ever, and if it was there for ever, could he have got it under control and lived a normal life? Robin approved the parallel with a recovering alcoholic and said—”

  “Well, if we’re going to bandy metaphors and analogies around,” said Lewis, starting to enjoy himself, “let’s go all the way and talk of a mind infested by demons. What does this strange phrase mean, you ask? I’ll tell you. When I say ‘demons’ I don’t mean amusing little creatures with horns and tails. I mean psychic entities, forces which flow directly from the malign archetypes which lurk in the collective unconscious of the human race—but psychological language is so often lugubrious, using twenty words when one will do, and the one word which will do nicely here is ‘demons.’ So let’s use it.

  “Similarly when I say ‘infested’ I don’t mean that amusing little creatures with horns and tails were swarming over Kim’s personality like an army of lice colonising a head of hair. I mean that those psychic entities, the demons, took root in him by latching on to one of the subpersonalities which lay buried in his unconscious mind, and dragging it to consciousness so that ultimately the subpersonality was able to take control of the ego. (We all have a variety of subpersonalities but usually, if our minds are working healthily, we’re unaware of them.) Well, here again you have the psychological language huffing and puffing to say something which the old-fashioned religious language expresses in thr
ee words: demons infested him. Let me just add that the psychological language doesn’t ‘explain away’ the religious language or vice versa. They’re simply two different ways of describing the same spiritual landscape.

  “You want me to be spiritually robust? Then let me give you robustness par excellence by saying that demons are the Devil’s cohorts! You might well have heard this blood-curdling phrase used in Scotland when you were a little girl, because Scots Calvinism is very strong on hell and the Devil. Without tangling again with psychological jargon, I can tell you that the Devil is the dark, messy side of creation. (Jung got it slightly wrong when he said the Devil was the shadow side of God.) Eventually God will reach the point in his creation where he’ll bring the dark, messy side under control, but meanwhile we’re staggering around in all the mess and being mangled by the demons—or, as Kim would have said, by the Powers, the Powers of Darkness. In short, we’re being mangled by evil. But we don’t have to be destroyed by all this terrifying chaos. And by hooking ourselves up to the Light instead of the Dark we don’t have to become evil ourselves.

  “Got it? Are you with me so far? Well done—we’ve reached the point where we can say that Kim, by hooking himself up to the Dark instead of the Light, paved the way for his own demonic infestation. But let me now make one thing crystal clear. His true self, which was crushed and battered but still there under the poisonous and bloated subpersonality, was not evil—repeat, not evil. It couldn’t be. That’s because our true selves are made in the image of God, the image of the benign force which created us. What Kim needed was deliverance from the infested subpersonality which had corroded his soul—he needed deliverance so that his true self could have the chance to regain its rightful place in the centre of his personality.

  “So Kim wasn’t totally evil. But did he do evil deeds? Of course! Murder is hardly in the same league as earning a parking ticket. And while considering his evil deeds we can’t overlook his appalling abuse of Sophie and the acute mental suffering he inflicted on you as he destroyed your trust. There’s also the matter of all the homosexuals he picked up before he met his nemesis. Can we read between the lines of his confession and deduce he was into sado-masochism? Maybe—and no, that’s not incompatible with the blackmailer wanting to come back for more. You wouldn’t believe what gluttons some masochists are for punishment! When I was a chaplain at that mental hospital all those years ago . . . but I mustn’t digress.

  “Can we excuse Kim by saying he was sick? Absolutely not! Whether he was sick or not is a matter of medical—or possibly legal—definition, but we shouldn’t use sickness here to obscure the issue and let him off the hook. You don’t catch spiritual sickness like a common cold anyway. It’s the result of bad decisions, not bad luck. I’ve met young people who come to the Centre in dire distress and moan: ‘But it wasn’t my fault, it was just my bad luck that the Ouija board did this, that and the other!’ Stuff and nonsense! What were they doing messing around with the Ouija board in the first place? If you mess with the occult, the occult will mess with you. If you live by the sword you die by the sword . . . and so on and so on.

  “But let me return to Kim. Was he beyond redemption? Certainly not! No one is, because thanks to the love of God, the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit—the Forces of Light which can outplay the Powers of Darkness—we can reactivate our true selves, no matter how maimed and mangled they’ve become, and achieve healing.

  “Could Kim have been cured? At St. Benet’s we draw a distinction between a cure and a healing, and the example of the recovering alcoholic illustrates that even when a permanent cure can’t be guaranteed a very high degree of healing is still possible. But in spiritual terms we have to remember that perfection, in the form of a total cure, isn’t available to us in this life; no matter how far we manage to become our true selves we’re always vulnerable to sin and temptation. But the point is: we don’t have to be destroyed by our vulnerability! Spiritual health can be recaptured, nurtured, maintained and buffed to a high lustre to ward off all those soul-poisoning demons—and yes, of course priests should mention God to atheists! They should mention every member of the Trinity! Atheists not only expect that but long for it because it gives them the chance to spring passionately to the defence of their own beliefs! Atheists are such religious people, I always feel . . .

  “Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, healing Kim. Well, some Christian healers would have just waded in and commanded the demons to come out of him, but I don’t work that way. I prefer the deliverance rite to be very carefully prepared, and with someone like Kim I feel there has to be a long lead-in period in which the healer gains the confidence of the sufferer, first of all simply by being there and offering sympathy. One prays for the sufferer as much as possible, day by day, and hopes that the opportunity for offering deliverance will come, but it’s no good forcing the pace.

  “I know I got somewhere with Kim. I didn’t get as far as I would have liked, but I got the message of hope across and I believe I convinced him that he could succeed in embarking on a new life if he rejected the Devil and turned to Christ. (Translation: if he’d rejected Mrs. Mayfield’s false attempts to heal him and embraced the correct integrating principle.) If that had indeed happened, then he would have been on the road to recognising the demons and longing for them to be cast out. (Translation: ceasing to be ‘in denial’ and facing up to his problems in order to conquer them.) Then the rite of deliverance would have been appropriate; it would have ratified the progress already made and taken the healing forward into a new stage. Rites and rituals are very important, as I’ve said to you before. They take over the task of expressing truth when mere words are inadequate.

  “Following the deliverance rite, Kim would have needed a great deal of aftercare, not only from a psychiatrist and a priest but also from a Christian community who could enfold him with love and provide the necessary framework for his new life. Love is very important in this sort of case, because the sufferer has usually been deprived of it at a crucial stage of life—indeed you can argue that all addictions are fundamentally attempts to find the peace and ease and happiness which genuine love provides.

  “This leads me to tackle the question which I know tormented you even though you knew this man had done terrible things: could your love have saved him? Well, that question should really be: could you have saved him if you’d played the last scenes at Oakshott differently, submitted to his advances, and entered into a relationship where you would have been constantly lying to suppress your fear, anger and revulsion? Carter, no one could have expected you to follow such a course, even if your motive was to assist his healing—and besides, since healing has to be built on truth, not lies, you actually wouldn’t have assisted his healing at all. Quite the reverse. If you’d faked a reconciliation, my guess is he would have washed his hands of the healing process, gone off to New York as he planned and then resumed his old habits when the marriage inevitably broke down. And let’s be honest about this: could you really have played those last scenes at Oakshott differently? I think not.

  “Perhaps it might help you if I point out that healing’s usually a team effort. You made your vital contribution to Kim’s healing when you came into his life and showed him that a well-integrated, far happier existence was still possible for him, but even if Kim had lived and continued with the healing process, it might not have been in your power to help him further. God used you to show him what salvation could look like. But others might have been chosen to travel with him along the future road to health and wholeness.

  “So (I can hear you thinking) this vain old boy thinks he was personally chosen by God to lead Kim along the primrose path to heaven! He thinks he had the case sewn up and now can’t resist patting himself on the back for the healing he’s sure he would have achieved! Not so. The part I played in Kim’s healing might also have been near its end, and even if it wasn’t—even if I had been called to go further—I might not have had the case sew
n up. And even if the case had ended well, I could have claimed no credit because I myself wouldn’t have healed him. The healing would have come from Christ the Healer, working either through me or in spite of me. Christian healers always have to remember that, because pride is an occupational hazard and one needs to fight against it day in, day out . . .

  “Well, at least Kim doesn’t have to cope now with either me or the white-coated wonder-boys at the hospital. He’s with God and God will do what’s necessary to heal him—oh, and death isn’t the end, of course. That’s so obvious that I hardly like to mention it, but young people get such strange ideas into their heads nowadays and you’re young enough to be no exception. People don’t understand either that death is a part of life, and in a life lived as a journey there must be many endings and beginnings . . . and of course God told us what he thought of endings and beginnings when he gave us Easter. You’re going through your Good Friday, Carter, but never forget that we look back at Good Friday in the light of Easter Day.

  “Well, the next question you want to ask, of course, is—but no, you’re looking a little white around the gills, perhaps you didn’t realise that my spiritual robustness would be quite so robust! Can I offer you another pussyfoot?”

  “Thanks. I’ll have it with a double brandy on the side.”

  He flagged down the waiter, ordered another round of pussyfoots and to my fury substituted Perrier water for the brandy.

  V

  “Lewis!” I got the order cancelled by accusing him of intolerable bossiness and saying one pussyfoot was more than enough for anyone, but he was unabashed.