Heartbreaker (57 page)
Authors: Susan Howatch
Tags: #Psychological, #Romance, #Suspense, #General, #Fiction
IX
We waited until Susanne returned. Lewis forbade any comment on the scene while we were still in the house, but as soon as we had set off in his car I exclaimed in fury: “Those parents of his! How could they have made him feel so unloved and unwanted?”
“That’s the big question. I suspect they got bogged down in the bereavement process, but—”
“That’s no excuse!”
“—but there has to be more going on than that.”
“I blame the father, browbeating Gavin out of his career choice and then making no effort to stop Gavin doing medicine when he was obviously unsuited to it!”
“But maybe Dr. Blake was right to think Gavin was unsuited to be an architect, and maybe he honestly believed Gavin was capable of being a doctor.”
“But—”
“Anyway, fathers often try to throw their weight around like that, it’s not unusual. Far more significant, I felt, was that Gavin never mentioned his mother.”
“Obviously she was hopeless, and I still think both of those parents must have behaved monstrously!”
“Well, if that’s true, he’s certainly made them pay.”
“By disappearing, you mean? But that wasn’t revenge! He disappeared because he couldn’t go on!”
“True. But a disappearance is like a suicide. There can be a lot of hidden aggression going on.”
“Well, I think in this case the aggression was deserved! Why did they never try to trace him?”
“Maybe they did.”
“But they could trace him now as the result of the trial!”
“You mean his mother could. His father’s dead.”
“All right, forget the father, but why isn’t the mother beating a path to his door?”
“Perhaps she needs a little time to recover from hearing what her son actually did choose to do with his life.”
That silenced me. It took me a full minute before I was able to say: “Sorry, I’m rushing to judgement, let’s move on to something else. What did you make of all the Hugo stuff? Did you think Gavin was behaving like a nutter?”
“On the contrary, I thought he was making an excellent attempt to describe an unusual reality which is hard to put into words.”
I made another big effort to rein myself in. “I hear what you’re saying,” I said, “and thanks to your help in 1990 I know ghosts are a psychological phenomenon often generated by guilt and grief—I know they should be accepted as a form of reality not normally accessible to us—but you don’t seriously believe, do you, that Hugo’s ghost has now taken up residence in Gavin’s head?”
“If Hugo’s ghost represents a psychological phenomenon, where else is it going to exist?”
“Yes, but—”
“Carta, we have to accept Hugo’s reality here. He’s very real for Gavin and therefore he should be very real for us as we try to help. My guess, based on experience, is that he’ll also be very real when I pray with Gavin later and help Hugo relax his grip on Gavin’s psyche. It’ll be as if a real person departs and Gavin will be changed.”
We drove on in silence as I considered this assessment but finally I asked: “How long will it take to separate them?”
“A couple of months, perhaps. It’s a question of how easily Hugo can be brought to consciousness after being a repressed memory for so long, but thanks to you I think Gavin will now feel encouraged to recall him.”
“Thanks to
me
? But all I did was build a bridge which you could scramble across to begin the healing!”
“My dear,” said Lewis, “it was you who began the healing. You enfolded him in unconditional love so that he trusted you enough to want to confide. You succeeded where Nicholas, Val, Robin and I had all been failing.”
I stared at him. “You’re saying I was accidentally lined up just right with God so that he was able to use me even though I’m spiritually stupid?”
“No, I’m saying that God is love and that you were able to present that fact to Gavin in a way that was crucially meaningful to him. Carta, isn’t it time to abandon your spiritual inferiority complex?”
Not for the first time I thought how kind he was to pretend my spiritual side was other than minuscule, but I made no attempt to argue with him. After my success with Gavin—all due, of course, to the accident of my being in the right place at the right time and somehow managing to say the right thing—I didn’t want Lewis to feel his flattering words had been a mistake.
Crossing the border into the City at last we headed for my house on Wallside.
X
As I opened my front door Eric emerged from the upstairs living-room to greet me. “Not working?” I said delighted, hoping that his current draft of the new novel was complete. I was much looking forward to his next lucid interval.
“I had an important phone call,” he answered, smiling at me as he clattered down the stairs into the hall, “and I knew I had to be at home when you got back.”
I was intrigued. “Good news?”
“The best!” He swung me off my feet, spun me around and kissed me very smoochily on the mouth. When I came up for air I said: “Snogheaven. Mad about it,” and kissed him very smoochily back. I felt as if I were in the final reel of a Hitchcock film, the one where the cool blonde melts into the arms of the sexy hero and the train thunders into the heavily symbolic tunnel.
“The latest trend in high-powered eroticism: Marriage is the new Cohabitation!” declared Eric, quoting imaginary headlines. “But don’t you want to hear my stunning news?”
“I’ve guessed it!” I said, rapidly updating Hitchcock to the late twentieth-century world of potential scientific horrors. “You’re pregnant!”
“Help! Do I have that radiant oestrogen look?”
“Don’t worry, darling, I’ll take care of you. But seriously—”
“Seriously, there’s terrific news and it’s waiting for you in the living-room.”
“What form does it take?”
“It’s six feet tall and wears a clerical collar.”
“Nicholas? Oh my God,
Alice
must be pregnant! How absolutely—”
“No, it’s better than that.”
“It couldn’t be.” I pounded up the stairs and erupted into the living-room with such speed that Nicholas jumped. He had been standing by the window but now he drifted towards me as if determined to appear the last word in nonchalance. Only his eyes betrayed him. They were a brilliant grey-blue, signalling that he was bursting with excitement. In his hand were two slips of paper.
“These arrived by special messenger at the Healing Centre an hour ago,” he said casually. “I thought you’d like to see them straight away.”
I took the two slips of paper.
One was a cheque drawn on the charities fund of RCPP, and the other was a cheque drawn on the personal account of Sir Colin Broune.
Each one was for fifty thousand pounds.
CHAPTER SIX
Gavin
Some clergy have also found the study of a family tree to be a useful means of discovering broken relationships, traumatic events and family traits as well as disowned, lost, forgotten and unmourned relatives . . . Many have found that such prayer for the healing of the past and for the peace of [the] departed . . . can bring a sense of release from oppressive influences.
A Time to Heal
A REPORT FOR THE HOUSE OF BISHOPS
ON THE HEALING MINISTRY
A psychiatrist once suggested that healing involved a “restoration of the capacity to love.” He might have added, the capacity to receive and accept love.
Mud and Stars
A REPORT OF A WORKING PARTY CONSISTING
MAINLY OF DOCTORS, NURSES AND CLERGY
Colin’s finally coughed up. Talk about being anally retentive! What’s that kind of money to him? Small change.
I’m not taking that job he’s offered me, and Susanne’s not surprised. “Imagine old Moneybags saying you need never meet him again!” she comments. “Once you were in RCPP he’d take a peek and once he’d taken a peek he’d want to go all the way down memory lane!”
As it happens I’m not at all sure she’s right, but I do know that if I worked for Colin I’d always be dreading this scenario. Playing devil’s advocate I say: “It’d solve the job problem,” but she answers: “What’s the point of solving one problem only to end up with a bigger one?” and she reminds me that at present I don’t need to worry about being unemployed. Her own job means there’s money coming in to boost the income from what’s left of my savings. We can tick over if we live quietly, and at present living quietly is all I can do. “You have to wait till the nervous breakdown’s finished,” says Susanne, making it sound like an unmissable show on TV.
The wonderful thing about Susanne is that she never doubts that I’ll get better. She did, so she figures I will. Another wonderful thing is that she never complains. When I’m first unable to go out she just says: “Thank God I had time to get a driving licence. I wouldn’t fancy doing the shopping by bus,” and when the final horror of the breakdown slugs me—impotence—she only remarks: “Well, I suppose it’s not surprising that your cock decided it needed a rest.” But the impotence crushes me. Sex is the only thing I’m good at, and now the main routine’s been taken away.
“I could do injections,” I say, but I know I can’t. I can’t do any of those things I did in the Life, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t . . .
I’m panicking. I know there’s more to sex than just getting it up and sticking it in, but I panic anyway. That’s what happens when your brain goes on the breakdown blink. It’s all anxiety, fear and despair.
“How can you take this so calmly?” I yell at Susanne, but she wipes the panic off the map by shrieking: “Because I know life can be a bloody sight worse!” In a normal voice she adds firmly: “Now think, pinhead,
think.
We’ve got our own home, all paid for, we’ve got enough to eat and we don’t have to have sex with smelly, revolting people in order to make a living. We’re the luckiest ex-hookers in London! So why don’t you stop whingeing and start being grateful for this fantastic new life we’ve got?”
I make a mental note to talk to Lewis about this insight. Trust Susanne to cut through all the crap and see the situation as it really is.
Some time before Carta’s Great Visit, Lewis starts turning up at the house twice a week and staying for fifty minutes. Susanne says this is like a therapist’s appointment where an hour is set aside but five minutes is allocated at each end for arriving and departing. He says straight away at the start of this routine that we don’t have to make conversation. He likes silence, feels at ease with it, and if I can’t talk he won’t mind. So at first we just loaf around listening to music and nothing much gets said. He makes it clear I don’t have to see him, but I always do. He’s my link with the real world which I hope to get back to one day. And soon I find out he knows a lot about music. He brings me little pieces of Bach’s cantatas on tape like a parent-bird producing food for the oversized fledgeling who can’t bring himself to leave the nest.
After a while I find I’m talking about my nest, the house. I explain that the furniture’s just a load of flatpack specials to tide us over till we can choose something better. I tell him how much I liked fixing up the house before I got ill, and how depressed I feel because I can’t face doing anything now. I even tell him that when I was a kid I used to design houses which I planned to build when I grew up. Of course I wouldn’t want to be an architect now because I’d probably wind up having to design things like offices, but I still like the idea of designing and building a house—or a boat. I loved my father’s boat. I loved the way every inch of precious space was used so creatively. I do mention to Lewis how crazy my father was about his boat, but at this point—and it’s before Carta’s Great Visit—I don’t want to talk about my family so I quickly change the subject back to music.
It occurs to me early on during my sessions with Lewis that he’s the same age as my father would have been if he’d lived. They were both born in 1921, over seventy years ago. I’m also reminded how like my father Lewis sounds. That old-fashioned public-school accent’s identical and so’s the timbre of his voice.
Every time Lewis visits me we take great care to avoid all possibility of physical contact. The thought of even an accidental brush with a male body reminds me of the Life and I can’t bear it, I can’t—if I think of what I allowed those blokes to do to me all that time I’ll go mad, I’ll cut myself and cut myself, I’ll slice off my equipment, I’ll—
Mental. I know I’m being mental, and that means I’m not so bad, doesn’t it? If I was really ill I wouldn’t know how mental I was. So I can tell myself it’s no big deal, it’s just a breakdown and I’ll get better. I haven’t got a mental illness where the prognosis is poor.
But sometimes it feels as if I have. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get better. Sometimes—
“You’ll get better,” says Lewis on one of his early visits. When he was young he was a chaplain at a mental hospital so he knows about mental illness. It doesn’t faze him.
I
don’t faze him, even at our first session when I say straight out: “I don’t want to talk about religion.” I’m afraid he might go all fundamentalist on me and spout stuff about the blood of the Lamb, but as soon as the sentence is out of my mouth I panic. Supposing Lewis decides I’m not worth visiting? Supposing the St. Benet’s team loses interest? Supposing my one link with Carta gets wiped? (Can’t ask her to visit when I’m such a mess.)
But Lewis puts everything right. He says: “We don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. I haven’t come here to dictate to you. I’m here to serve. That means listening when you want to talk, responding when you require a response and praying with you if you should wish me to do so. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a therapist, I’m a priest.”
I’m reassured. I don’t want a doctor and I don’t want a therapist. I’m too scared they’ll say I’m mad and need to be locked up so that my head can be rearranged and the real me destroyed. But Lewis is non-threatening. And beyond Lewis, as I gradually realise, is The Bloke, a positive force battling with the negative forces which are keeping me sick.
“I don’t believe in dogma,” I say to Lewis as I try to explain how negative I feel about religion. “I just believe in The Bloke because he actually lived and made a difference.”
Lewis says that maybe I’m a mystic. They tend to sit lightly to doctrine, he says, and illustrate that there are all sorts of ways to be religious. A great religion, he says, is never a monolith but a bunch of diverse groups catering for different psychological temperaments. Christianity caters well for mystics, although too often people in the West behave as if mysticism’s only available in Eastern religions. Mysticism, I learn, means a direct knowledge of God—or a direct experience of The Bloke—or it can mean an experience, impossible to describe concisely, of the splendour of the world despite all the suffering, a sense of the overarching unity of all things. Anyone can have a mystical experience, says Lewis, even people who pride themselves on their rational, analytical minds (I think of Carta) but those more inclined to approach religion as mystics are less likely to suppress their mystical experiences and are more drawn to the challenge of exploring them.
“If mystics can tune in without any help from the Church,” I say, “why bother with the Church at all?”
“Good question!” says Lewis approvingly as if I’d displayed a dazzling intelligence instead of a basic curiosity. “And the answer is we need the Church as a framework to stop us getting so pleased with ourselves that we go over the top into egomania and start thinking we ourselves are God. That attitude’s characteristic of religious corruption, and the dangers of corrupt religion, as Mr. Asherton showed us, are very great.”
I shudder at the memory of Asherton, but to my surprise I feel better after this conversation. I feel I’ve got a new interest, particularly when Lewis (who’s obviously a mystic himself ) begins to talk of meditation. In a burst of optimism I even decide I’m well enough not to make Carta recoil in horror, and when I tell Lewis I want to see her he reports back that by coincidence she has a pressing reason for wanting to see me. He discloses no details on the phone, but it turns out she wants to deliver Colin’s letter offering me a job.
Carta creams in for Her Great Visit, the goddess from another dimension. I’m pleased to see her because I know then she really cares about what’s been happening to me, but at first the scene goes badly wrong because I wind up crying in front of her. Pa
thet
ic! But she was sweet and hugged me. I loathe that word “sweet” but that’s what she was—and shit, I never even got an erection! Hugged by a goddess and my equipment stays deader than chopped wood! But here’s the truly amazing part— I mean, more amazing than the hug: despite the water-fairy stuff, she even . . . no, skip that. No wait a minute, I’ll say it. She
even
—yes, I know this sounds like a fantasy, but I swear it’s true—
she even said she loved me.
Of course she doesn’t really, how could she, but she cared enough to want me to believe she does, and that’s almost as good. I wanted to shout: “I LOVE YOU TOO!” but of course I couldn’t, it would have turned her off, she’d never have come near me again.
Anyway, the bottom line was that she was sweet and she cared—and yes, I know that sounds sick-making but, as I now realise, it’s a miracle. It led directly to the next miracle: I began to talk about my family at last, and this marked the beginning of my big effort to get sorted.
So Carta’s alongside me again. The journey continues. But surely she herself has “come home” now? If coming home to your true self means being set free to realise your full potential, what can possibly be restricting her freedom now she’s finally come to terms with the past? Can’t imagine, she seems so together—together enough to make her Great Visit, although I don’t want to see her again until I’m sure I won’t cry in her presence.
Meanwhile Nicholas has been to see me, and I appreciate this as I know how busy he is, but I’m happy so long as I have Lewis. As the result of the Great Visit, Lewis is developing a plan that’ll evict Hugo from that crevice in my mind which he’s occupied for so long. It’s all part of my rehab, part of ensuring that I’m no longer just an unintegrated mess, lying, role-playing and brutalising myself.
I think about rehab. This, says Lewis, is The Bloke’s primary job— The Bloke’s not only a symbol of integration but he
is
integration, the force working to make everything whole in a world of broken fragments. God’s fighting away in the chaos to bring his creation under control, says Lewis, and The Bloke is God’s way of manifesting himself to show us he’s not just sitting on his backside drinking Australian lager (as I’ve suggested) while the work-in-progress is such an unfinished junk-heap.
Eventually everything will be made good, says Lewis, even the dark vile bits, but meanwhile (as I’ve already worked out) it’s important to line yourself up with The Bloke, the integrating force, so that you can give him a helping hand instead of being just a waste of space and/or a dark vile bit. That’s where prayer and meditation come in. You’ve got to be lined up right with the force, you’ve got to journey inwards to find the right position, you’ve got to find the centre of yourself—your real self—because that’s where God exists as a spark, and then once you’re hooked up to that spark within, says Lewis, you can connect with the God without—you can turn outwards to face the world and live dynamically as part of the integrating force: a worker on the rehab job, a soldier on the Operation Redemption front, a contributor to the make-it-all-come-right side of God’s huge creative splurge.
That’s why it’s so important to be your true self. How can you find the centre of yourself if you’re busy being someone else? And even if you’re trying to be your true self, how can you make progress if your mind’s littered with a series of roadblocks? No, you’ve got to get yourself sorted—
I’ve
got to get myself sorted—which is why I’ve agreed to tackle Hugo again even though the prospect makes me shit-scared.
Supposing Hugo gets murderous? Supposing he decides to drive me totally insane? Supposing he makes me top myself?
I want to bang my head against the wall.
Lewis calms me down. He says I can forget all the blood and thunder because we’re just not moving into an adversarial situation. We have to put Hugo in the right frame of mind by befriending him. That’s not going to be easy because Hugo’s so angry, but it’s hard to stay angry for ever, particularly if one’s approached with sympathy and respect.
Lewis says we should start by reviewing the happy memories of the past, so slowly I pluck them out and hold them up to Hugo for inspection. Hugo likes this. He’s surprised, of course, and suspicious too but he soon gets interested. In the end he doesn’t even mind when I recall the childhood memories which aren’t so good, because Lewis helps me set these in a friendly context. So when I recall Hugo clobbering me in the nursery for overworking his fire engine, Hugo refusing to let me ride his new bike, Hugo yelling at me when I forgot to feed his guinea pig, Lewis and I take a moment to reflect that possessiveness about toys is common, little kids shouldn’t mess with bikes that are too big for them, failing to feed guinea pigs is unacceptably absent-minded. Hugo finds these judgements very fair. “In other words,” I say to him, “you could be a bruiser sometimes but it wasn’t often and you were never a bruiser without provocation.” And he finds this a reasonable judgement. As I say to Lewis, Hugo was basically a good bloke and the older he got the nicer he was to me. We usually played together without fighting, although that was probably because I’d discovered that the way to have a quiet life was always to let him take the lead. But then he was older and knew how.