Kitabı oku: «Mystical Paths»

Susan Howatch
MYSTICAL PATHS

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Extracts from The River Within and Jung and the Christian Way by Christopher Bryant published and copyright 1978 and 1983 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. Extracts from Canterbury Pilgrim and Canterbury Essays and Addresses by Michael Ramsay published by SPCK. All reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992, then by Fontana 1993 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1992

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006496878

Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007396405

Version: 2018-10-08

PRAISE

From the reviews:

‘Arguably no one writing today can equal Howatch’s ability to write compelling novels that combine theology and psychology in a complex, fast-moving plot offering beautifully delineated characters and the suspense of a mystery thriller’

Publishers Weekly

‘A fascinating, mind-bending exposition … Howatch wins out’

Sunday Times

‘Taking on the style of a psychological thriller … Mystical Paths covers in a profound and theologically thoughtful way the powers of light and powers of darkness … Her success should not go unrewarded’

Catholic Herald

‘Howatch writes thrillers of the heart and mind … everything in a Howatch novel cuts close to the bone and is of vital concern’

New Woman

‘Susan Howatch … is writing for anyone who can recognise that mysterious gift of the true storyteller’

Daily Telegraph

‘One of the most original novelists writing today’

Cosmopolitan

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Mystical Paths is the fifth in a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. Each book is designed to be read independently of the others, but the more books are read the wider will be the view of the multi-sided reality which is being presented.

The first novel, Glittering Images, was set in 1937. Glamorous Powers, narrated by Jon Darrow, opened in 1940, Ultimate Prizes was narrated by Neville Aysgarth after the war, and Scandalous Risks viewed the Church in 1963 through the eyes of Venetia Flaxton. The sixth and final novel, Absolute Truths, will take place in 1965, three years before the main events described by Nicholas Darrow in Mystical Paths, and Charles Ashworth, the narrator who opened the series, will narrate the novel which brings the series to a close.

The ecclesiastical era of Nicholas Darrow’s youth was dominated by ARTHUR MICHAEL RICHARD RAMSEY, who was born in 1904. While still in his thirties he became the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham and a Canon of Durham Cathedral. Two years later he married. A short period as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge preceded his appointment as Bishop of Durham at the age of forty-seven, and his ascent to the top of the Church’s hierarchy continued to be rapid: by 1956 he was Archbishop of York, and in 1961 he became the one hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury.

Ramsey combined a first-class intellect with a striking appearance and a considerable degree of eccentricity and originality in his speech, manner and dress; a member of the Catholic wing of the Church, he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to adopt the uniform of a purple cassock instead of the traditional frock-coat and gaiters. The combination of eccentricity and a deep personal holiness made him seem a remote figure to some in the turbulent days of the 1960s, but others appreciated his traditionalism at a time when all traditions were coming under attack. Hostile at first to the outbreak of radical theology he later adopted a more flexible approach, recognising that the widespread questioning of both Christianity and the Church needed careful answering, not instant condemnation.

‘It may be the will of God that our church should have its heart broken,’ Ramsey said before his enthronement at Canterbury, and this proved a prophetic statement. During the secular triumphalism of the 1960s, the Church suffered a loss of confidence and a numerical decline, but Ramsey provided the spiritual leadership needed to sustain it during the dark days of demoralisation, and to lead it towards more fruitful times.

Having retired from Canterbury in 1974, he died in 1988 in the midst of an era very changed from the one over which he had presided twenty years before.

The thought of Jon and Nicholas Darrow reflects the work of CHRISTOPHER BRYANT, who was born in 1905 and ordained not long after he had graduated, like Michael Ramsey, from Cambridge University. In 1935 he became a professed member of the Society of St John the Evangelist, known as the Cowley Fathers, which is the oldest religious community for men in the Church of England. For almost all of the next twenty-five years he was based at the Society’s house in Oxford; he became first novice guardian, then assistant superior, and it was here that he began to make a special study of psychology.

In 1955 he was put in charge of St Edward’s House, the Society’s London home, and he became increasingly famous as a spiritual director. As he approached seventy his writing career began: he embarked on committing to paper the insights into religious belief which he had obtained from studying Jung’s psychology. The book failed to find a publisher, but another religious community came to the rescue and published it under their own imprint as Depth Psychology and Religious Belief. His other books, however, found favour with a well-known religious publisher and all his work came to have a wide readership. The River Within, The Heart in Pilgrimage and Jung and the Christum Way were published before his death. Journey to the Centre was published posthumously. He died in 1985

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART ONE THE JOURNEY AROUND THE CIRCLE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

PART TWO THE JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

PART THREE SELF-REALISATION/ETERNAL LIFE

ONE

TWO

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY SUSAN HOWATCH

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PART ONE
THE JOURNEY AROUND THE CIRCLE

‘Amidst the pressures and strains of life there is the longing of the self to realize itself by escaping from the dominance of the environment. There are many cults which offer such an escape, with an experience of a heightening of the faculties and a realization of the self in greater power of its own or of something beyond the self. But it is important to ask what is the reality which is experienced, and what is the effect not only upon the sensations but upon the life and character of the person who has had the experience. There is an old story of a man who was had up for being drunk. The magistrate asked, “Why do you get drunk like this?” and the man replied, “You see, your worship, it’s the shortest way out of Manchester.” Alcohol, drugs, the mystical techniques of various religions, may be the shortest way out of Manchester … But it matters very much where you get to, and what you are like when you come back.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY

Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974

Canterbury Pilgrim

‘God acts upon us inescapably through the people who touch and influence our lives.’

CHRISTOPHER BRYANT

Member of the Society of St John the Evangelist 1935–1985

The River Within

ONE

‘More than in the past, the young are striking out into intellectual independence and revolt against tradition.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY

Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974

Canterbury Pilgrim

I

I had just returned from an exorcism and was flinging some shirts into the washing machine when my colleague entered the kitchen. He was wearing his cassock and carrying a bottle of whisky. Beyond the window caked in city grime, sunlight blazed upon the battered dustbins in the back-yard.

‘How was the Gothic mansion haunted by the ravishing young ghost?’

‘Non-existent. The trouble was in a council house where the previous occupant had overdosed on heroin in the lavatory.’

‘Ah well, that’s 1988 for you … Drink?’

I declined but passed him a glass from the draining-board rack before I set the dials on the washing-machine. Meanwhile the electric kettle was coming to the boil. Absent-mindedly I reached for the teapot. ‘What’s new?’

‘Absolutely nothing. A drunk disrupted the lunch-time Eucharist, the Gay Christians demanded that we stock their literature on AIDS, and some neurotic female from the Movement for the Ordination of Women threatened to picket the church unless you sacked me – oh, and talking of neurotic women someone called Venetia telephoned twice to say she had to talk to you. She sounded like a nymphomaniac.’ He drank deeply from his whisky before adding: ‘Now why should the name Venetia remind me of the 1960s?’

There was a silence broken only by the click of the kettle as it switched itself off. Then I said: ‘She was a friend of Christian Aysgarth’s.’

‘Ah yes,’ said my colleague, suddenly motionless. ‘The Christian Aysgarth affair. 1968. Crisis, chaos and the Devil on the loose.’

The phone rang. Moving to the extension, which hung on the wall by the dresser, I unhooked the receiver and said neutrally: ‘St Bent’s Rectory.’

‘Darling!’ It was Venetia. ‘I thought I’d never get past that crusty old curate you keep!’

‘He’s not my curate. He’s my colleague at the Healing Centre.’

‘Well, chain him up somewhere, I can’t bear misogynists. Now darling, I know you were terribly sweet and madly keen that I should visit you for a little professional chat, but –’

‘– you’ve got cold feet.’

‘Slightly shivery, yes. When I awoke this morning I began to wonder if a Healing Centre was really quite my scene, and –’

‘Nobody’s asking you to fall in love with it. Just think of it as a back-drop. I’m the scene.’

‘Oh yes, lovely, simply too thrilling – but I can’t bear that word “counselling” – quite ruined by the 1980s – all those wild-eyed social workers descending like vultures on disaster-victims –’

‘I’m neither wild-eyed, nor a social worker, nor a vulture, and I’m not going to counsel. I’m going to listen.’

‘Oh, but I shall make a mess of talking – I make a mess of everything – I shall wind up totally speechless –’

‘Fine. Then we can sit in silence and soak up the vibes.’

‘Soak up the vibes! Oh Nick, how that phrase takes me back! Do you know it’s twenty years now – twenty years – since you came to see me about Christian? That mysterious quest of yours! You never did tell me the whole story, did you?’

‘“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”’

‘No, don’t try and wriggle off the hook by quoting Wittgenstein! Look, let’s forget my visit to the Healing Centre – come and dine with me instead and tell me exactly what happened in 1968. I always found that official version curiously unsatisfactory.’

I realised it was time to take a firm line. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t dine out during the week and I’ve no intention of forgetting your promise to visit the Healing Centre. I’ll see you on Thursday at eleven as we arranged yesterday in Starbridge.’

‘My dear, how masterful! Why is it I always find you so utterly impossible to resist?’ said Venetia crossly, and hung up.

Turning my back on the phone I found that my colleague had made the tea for me. ‘That’s the only woman I’ve ever met,’ I said, sitting down opposite him at the kitchen table, ‘who can recognise a quotation from Wittgenstein.’

‘She sounds extremely dangerous. Do be careful, Nicholas.’

I smiled at him. Then I drank my tea, stared into space and mentally turned back the clock to 1968, that demonic year when I had become so obsessed by Christian Aysgarth.

II

For most of 1968 I was twenty-five; my twenty-sixth birthday fell on Christmas Eve. Buried in that first quarter-century of my life were the time-bombs which exploded in 1968 – or perhaps it would be more accurate, though less colourful, to write: weaving through those first twenty-five years were the paths which eventually converged to lead me into the Christian Aysgarth mystery. The first path followed my convoluted relationship with my father. The second path followed my disastrous career as a psychic. And the third path followed my friendship with Marina Markhampton. By 1968 all three paths were running side by side – in fact they had become a three-lane motorway where the words ‘TO HELL’ came up on all the signboards – but in the beginning hell was a long way off and Path Number One led through the idyllic landscape of my childhood.

I was brought up in the country near the city of Starbridge where my father worked at the Theological College in the Cathedral Close. When I was still in the nursery he had been appointed Principal, but he had not been required to live on the premises and I can remember watching him ride off on his bicycle to the station where he would take the train to Starbridge, twelve miles away. If the weather was wet my mother insisted on giving him a lift in the Rolls, but he preferred to be independent. Born in the last century he had never learnt to drive and he regarded travelling by Rolls-Royce as an inexcusable luxury for a priest. But then he became busier as the College Principal; soon the inexcusable luxury transformed itself into a time-saving necessity, and he stopped talking about the corrupting influence of the motor car.

I can just remember my mother’s old chauffeur, who died in 1946. The Rolls, which I can remember clearly, died – or rather, was retired with honour – in 1947. Those were the days of the Labour Government when the rich had to tighten their belts, so my mother economised by replacing the Rolls with a Bentley and not replacing the chauffeur at all.

My mother worked. That was very unusual in those days for someone of her class. She ran the Home Farm which formed part of her estate at Starrington Magna, and every morning she would drive away to her office. I would stand on the doorstep of our manor house with Nanny and wave goodbye. Naturally I had no idea what a privileged childhood I was having, and naturally I took my doting parents and my beautiful home for granted. Nanny tried to bring me up sensibly but I soon mastered Nanny. By the time I was five I had evolved into a miniature tyrant.

This unpleasant phase of my development was brought to an end when I was nearly expelled from kindergarten for fighting over a boiled sweet. I remember it as the first time my father actively intervened in my life. Before that he had merely appeared at intervals and enfolded me in unqualified approval. But now the approval was withdrawn.

All he said was: ‘This won’t do, Nicholas,’ and when he looked me straight in the eyes I suddenly realised that no, it wouldn’t do at all because nothing was more important than that he should remain pleased with me. This insight in turn enabled me to articulate a truth which it seemed I had always known but had never been able to put into words. I said: ‘You’re magic. You keep the bad things away,’ and as I spoke I knew that if he withdrew the protection of his magic anything might happen, anything, hobgoblins could haunt me, a witch could kidnap me, a monster could come down the nursery chimney and swallow me up. So I clutched the pectoral cross which my father always wore and I cried: ‘Save me from the Dark!’ – a plea bizarre enough to alarm my mother, but my father merely wrapped his mind around mine to keep me safe, patted me on the head and said: ‘The word you want isn’t “magic”. It’s “psychic”.’

I liked this word but my mother didn’t. She said sharply to my father: ‘Don’t put ideas into his head!’ but my father answered: ‘They’re already there.’

‘Nonsense!’ said my mother, and when she abruptly walked out of the room I realised that ‘psychic’ could be a dangerous word, risky, not acceptable by some people, definitely not a word to be used with no thought for the consequences.

I tried the word out on Nanny and received the firm response: ‘That’s not a nice word, dear, that’s peculiar and we don’t have peculiar things in this nursery.’

At kindergarten we were asked to write a sentence about our parents, and burning with curiosity to test my teacher I wrote: ‘Mummy is a farmer and Father is a sykick who saves me from the Dark.’ My teacher was appalled. In fact she was so disturbed that she even sent the composition to my mother, but my mother only commented briskly to me: ‘Silly woman! She might at least have taught you to spell “psychic” correctly before she had hysterics.’ And to my father she said: ‘I refuse to let Nicholas go peculiar. What’s all this rubbish about the Dark?’

‘It’s his way of referring to malign psychic forces.’

‘Well, I won’t have it, it’s bad for him, it’ll give him nightmares.’

‘But my dear Anne, you can’t alter the way he sees and senses the world!’

A flash of intuition lit up my juvenile brain. ‘I’m psychic too,’ I said triumphantly. ‘I’m just like Father!’

‘Oh no, you’re not!’ said my mother, magnificently normal, superbly sane. ‘One Jon Darrow is all I can cope with. Two would finish me off altogether!’ Then before we could get upset she kissed him, hugged me and declared: ‘You’re Nicholas. You’re not “just like” anyone. You’re you, your special self.’ And to my father she concluded sternly: ‘No replicas.’

I asked what a replica was, and after he had given me the definition my father said: ‘But of course your mother’s quite right and you must become not my replica but the special person God’s designed you to be.’

‘Supposing God’s designed me to be exactly like you?’

‘Impossible!’ said my mother robustly. ‘That would be very boring for God – much more fun for him to create someone different. And Nicholas, while we’re talking of peculiar ideas, I think it would be very clever of you and much more grown up if you kept all psychic talk specially for your father, who understands such things. Other people don’t understand, you see, with the result that they become uncomfortable, and a true gentleman must always do everything he can to lessen the discomfort of others.’

I resolved to be a true gentleman.

And that was the beginning of my tortuous relationship with my father.

III

‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father said to me years later before I went up to Cambridge. ‘Those psychic powers which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!’

This warning I wrote off as an exaggeration, a typically Victorian piece of melodramatic tub-thumping. More fool me. Having noted the psychic affinity which formed the bedrock of my relationship with my father, I must now sketch my disastrous career as a psychic.

I followed in his footsteps by reading divinity up at Cambridge, but after my finals I decided not to proceed immediately to theological college to train for the priesthood. This decision arose out of a conversation I had with Christian and I shall describe it fully later, but at present it’s sufficient to say that at twenty-one I was tired of living in all-male ghettos and hankered to experience what I called ‘The Real World’. In consequence I wound up doing voluntary work in Africa, but within months I got in a mess with a witch-doctor and had to be flown home.

My father begged me to proceed without further delay to theological college, but I was determined to complete the two years I’d set aside for voluntary work; I felt the need to wipe out the failure by being a success. Accordingly I took a job at the Mission for Seamen, fifty miles from home on the South Coast, but again disaster struck: two sailors got in a fight over me and wrecked the canteen. In vain I protested to my supervisor that I wasn’t a homosexual and had given neither sailor encouragement. I was judged a disruptive influence and asked to leave.

Despite my father’s renewed pleadings I still refused to abandon my two-year plan but my third job also ended chaotically. I started work as an orderly at the Starbridge Mental Hospital, but before long a schizophrenic girl fell in love with me and slashed her wrists when I explained to her (kindly) that I was unavailable for a grand passion. She survived the slashing, but I was very upset, particularly when I realised the doctors were looking at me askance. Worse was to follow. Plates began to be smashed mysteriously in the empty kitchens at night, and when the senior psychiatrist asked with interest if I had ever been involved in the phenomenon popularly known as poltergeist activity, I decided it would be smart to resign before I was sacked.

At that stage I realised I had to do something drastic before my father expired with worry, so I headed for Starwater Abbey where I had been a pupil at the famous public school. Standing in the Starbridge diocese not far from my home at Starrington Magna, the Abbey was run by Anglican-Benedictine monks from the Fordite Order of St Benedict and St Bernard. My father had been a Fordite monk once, and as the result of his special knowledge of the Order he had arranged for Starwater’s resident expert on the paranormal to keep an eye on me during my schooldays. It was to this man that I now turned.

Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.

At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’

‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’

‘Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’

‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’

I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.

Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an over-strained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.

But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.

‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.

‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.

‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’

‘Nicholas –’

‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’

Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.

Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.

Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.

‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside ‘– that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the abuse of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’

This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities – and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket – he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called ‘wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.

‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of –’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century ‘-psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’

We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’

‘Hm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.

‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong …’

Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.

It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.

Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?

In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.

By that time she had stopped talking and evolved into a zombie, eyes open, responsive to my commands but unable to communicate. I panicked, terrified by the thought that I had produced permanent mental impairment. Having manoeuvred her into my car I headed for the emergency department of Starbridge General Hospital, but then I suffered a second bout of panic. Supposing they thought she was traumatised as the result of a sexual assault? Supposing a scandal aborted my career as a priest before it had even begun? Bathed in the coldest of cold sweats I drove past the hospital and fled home with the zombie to my father.

He asked me only one question. It was: ‘What’s her name?’ and when I told him he took her hand in his and said: ‘Debbie, in the name of JESUS CHRIST I command you to return to your body and reclaim it.’ The cure was instant. There was no permanent mental impairment. But I never went to bed with her again. She wanted me to; she cried, she pleaded, but I couldn’t. I’d seen the Dark. I’d felt the Force. It had been shown to me very clearly how vulnerable my psychic powers made me to demonic infiltration, and in my revulsion Debbie now seemed fatally contaminated.

‘You used that child,’ said my father, hammering home the truth with a fury which failed to conceal his terror that I should be so vulnerable. ‘You exploited her in order to satisfy your curiosity about a psychological mystery which has been adopted by those who believe in the heretical doctrine of reincarnation. You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully and I’m ashamed of you.’

Strong words. I hated myself. Worse still, the temporary withdrawal of his love made me more aware of my vulnerability than ever. I saw that even though I was now a grown man of twenty-three I still had to have his powerful psyche enfolding mine in order to keep the Dark at bay.

‘I shan’t comment on the sexual relationship which you’ve obviously had with the girl,’ said my father. ‘You know exactly what I think of young men who are too selfish and immature to do anything with women but exploit them. Please don’t attend mass until you’ve made a full confession to Aelred Peters.’

This was the final horror. I couldn’t bear the thought of Father Peters knowing how I’d behaved. ‘You hear my confession,’ I begged my father, but he refused.

‘Confessing to Aelred would be a real penance,’ he said. ‘Confessing to me would be a soft option. Off you go to Starwater.’

Away I sloped to the Abbey, but cowardice overwhelmed me as soon as I crossed the threshold, and although I told Father Peters about the psychic disaster I was unable to speak of the sexual relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.

‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’

‘Well, my theory is …’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.

This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. Anglo-Catholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.

‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.

‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’

There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.

God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.

IV

I must now say something more about my father in order to flesh out this lethal relationship which was developing between us as my psychic career went from bad to worse. This particular path which led to the crisis of 1968 needs to be examined in more detail.

By the time of the Debbie débâcle my father was very old. Born in 1880 he had been sixty-two when I had arrived in the world, and so every year of the 1960s was bringing him closer to his ninetieth birthday. By the time the Christian Aysgarth affair began in the spring of 1968, two years after the mess with Debbie, he was nearly eighty-eight.

Being over eighty was very difficult for my father because he finally had to face up to the fact that he was old. Previously, having excellent health and a strong will, he had avoided this truth by cantering around like a man twenty years his junior, but at eighty he was felled by a prostate operation and although the physical problem was successfully treated the psychological consequences lingered on. Old age now stared him in the face. My father was livid, then deeply depressed, then livid all over again. With his strong will unimpaired and his brain untouched by senility he regarded his body’s enfeeblement as nothing short of traitorous. Looking back I can see he was secretly frightened – not of death, which in his faith he could face with courage, but of dying without dignity. My father was a proud man. He always used to say that his pride was his biggest weakness. The thought of his body decaying in a humiliating fashion while his mind remained sharp enough to suffer every indignity to the full was intolerable to him.

I could sense all these secret fears and hidden rages, but I was too young then to understand the full dimensions of his psychological ordeal. All I could do was make renewed efforts to keep him happy. I had already realised that nothing should be allowed to worry him and impair his health; in consequence as he had wrapped his psyche around mine, keeping the Dark at bay, I had wrapped my psyche around his, keeping the Light alive, and gradually a sinister interlocking had taken place until we were like Siamese twins joined at the psyche. No wonder I now felt I would be unable to survive without him.

I suspected my mother had always feared my father and I might wind up in a muddle, and that this dread had stimulated her robust attitude to our psychic gifts. She was quite prepared to believe they existed, but she was determined that they should never be allowed to triumph over her resolute common sense. Early in their marriage my father had embarked on a short but disastrous ministry of healing, and I think this experience had made her nervous about any exercise of the ‘glamorous powers’, those gifts from God which were so susceptible to corruption.

She had been my father’s second wife, his first marriage having begun and ended before he had embarked on his career as a Fordite monk. This first marriage had been unsatisfactory, but my father’s big love affair with the monastic life had lasted for seventeen years before he had been called back into the world at the age of sixty. My father had been at first ambivalent about this return, but since the call had been judged genuine by his superior there had been no alternative but to obey it. Two muddled years had followed during which he had married my mother. She had eventually sorted him out, and before he had embarked on a successful career in theological education they had produced a son, Gerald, who had died at birth. I had arrived on the scene seventeen months later.

I could never make up my mind whether little Gerald would have been a bigger bore alive than he was dead, but I had no doubt that I resented the effect his memory had on my parents. They were shockingly sentimental about him. There was a grave in the churchyard which had to be visited. His birthday was never forgotten. As a child I thought this behaviour was all quite idiotic and I was very rude about it to Nanny. I liked being an only child. It was bad enough having to share my father with the two children of his first marriage, both of whom were well over thirty years my senior and lived many miles away. To share him with a sibling close to me in age and on the spot would have been intolerable.

Fortunately my parents had no more children after I was born, and by 1945 my father was running the Starbridge Theological College. To cope with the huge influx of ex-servicemen who felt called to train for the priesthood once the war was over, he opened an extension of the College at our manor house in Starrington Magna. I can clearly remember the students – the ordinands, as I soon learnt to call them – pounding across the lawn on the way to our private chapel in the woods. I became their mascot. Some of them even gave me their sweet ration. No wonder I wound up spoilt rotten by the time I was five.

However, all good things come to an end, even life as a pampered mascot. In 1950 when I was seven – eight at Christmas – the last of the exceptionally large intakes of theological students achieved ordination, the College extension at our home was closed and my father, now seventy, retired from his position as Principal. My mother had looked forward to this day because she had cherished the belief that he would then sink into a quiet life and she would see more of him, but she soon discovered that he was becoming busier than ever. As a monk he had won a reputation as a spiritual director, and now that he had fulfilled his call from God to steer the College through the difficult post-war years, spiritual direction reclaimed him full-time. Hordes of people turned up for consultations. He led retreats, wrote copious letters, made himself constantly available to those seeking counsel. My mother and I became somewhat overlooked but we never doubted that he loved us. The problem was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day.

Then in 1957 when I was fourteen, my mother suddenly died. My father was almost killed by guilt. For a long time he could barely speak. His longest silence was: ‘I didn’t make enough time for her,’ and I knew, reading his mind, that in his grief and remorse he wanted to die too.

He promised me that he would never commit the sin of taking his own life but I remained terrified that his health had been fatally undermined. He became a recluse. He did eventually resume his spiritual counselling on a modest scale but he conducted the work almost entirely by letter. Meanwhile I had become what Matron at school called ‘strange’ and my father had to drag himself out of seclusion to make special arrangements for my care. That was when Aelred Peters had been recruited to sort me out. Eventually plates stopped smashing themselves in the Abbey kitchens and inkpots stopped overturning themselves in unlikely places. Staggering home for the school holidays I hoped for further help from my father but instead found myself obliged to grapple with his continuing bereavement.

I would sit with him for short periods of complete silence. Sometimes we stroked the cat together. My father always had a cat and the cat was always a tabby. After the death of my mother’s cat William (annexed by my father after his marriage), he acquired Whitby the Second (died young of a kidney complaint), Whitby the Third (run over aged ten) and Whitby the Fourth. Whitby the First, a companion of my father’s monastic years, had left a potent memory behind him and had been the hero of countless bedtime stories narrated to me by my father in the nursery.

When my father began to talk again it was the cat he spoke about. ‘Whitby’s very fond of you,’ he said suddenly in the midst of one of our long silences. ‘That’s because you’re like me, good with cats.’ Then he paused before adding: ‘You’re really very like me, Nicholas. Very like me indeed.’

Unsure what to say I at first remained silent, but gradually it dawned on me that he was wrestling with some profound temptation. In an effort to be sympathetic and encouraging I then said: ‘Great. So what are you worried about?’

The invisible wrestling-match continued. My father pursed his lips and rubbed his nose and fondled the scruff of Whitby’s neck before he at last managed to say: ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you but Francis always said it would be better for you not to know.’ Francis Ingram, a Fordite monk, had been his confessor.

I never hesitated. ‘But Francis is dead,’ I said, ‘and everything’s changed. You do exactly what you want, Father. You do whatever makes you happy.’

And then he told me the most extraordinary story.

V

He had seen me in a vision well over a year before I was born. He had seen me, aged three or four, in the garden of the Manor and had realised at once that I looked exactly as he had looked at the same age. Afterwards, during his struggle to interpret the vision, he had been tempted to believe God had given him the promise of a replica-son in order to cheer him up for the difficult times he had endured since leaving the Order, but Francis Ingram had later disputed this self-indulgent interpretation, and in fact my father had firmly believed that no parent should expect or desire his child to be a replica.

‘But nevertheless …’

Nevertheless my father, longing for a son who shared his interests, had been unable to stop himself finding the vision irresistibly attractive.

‘And then, Nicholas …’

Then, when I was three and a half the vision had been enacted in reality and my father had fallen in love with it all over again.

‘It was in 1946,’ he said. ‘Neville Aysgarth was visiting the Manor – Archdeacon Aysgarth, as he was in those days. As he crossed the lawn to join us, Nanny called your name from the terrace and you ran away to meet her – and I realised my vision had been replayed. I was so stunned that at first I could hardly hear a word Aysgarth said. I could only think: it’s all come true. I have this son who’s exactly like me and it’s all according to God’s plan. Although of course,’ said my father quickly, ‘I did realise you weren’t a replica. Not exactly. Not quite. But nevertheless … It’s extraordinary how like me you are! I’ve been telling myself I’ve nothing to look forward to now Anne’s dead, but that’s not true, is it? I’ve got you to look forward to, Nicholas. I shall so enjoy watching you live my life for me all over again – that’s to say, I shall so enjoy watching you develop into the man that God obviously wants you to be. You won’t be a replica, of course – never think that I want a replica, but –’

But he did want a replica. I could see he longed for a replica. And what was more I could see the thought revived him, entranced him, gave him not only a new interest but the will to live which would ensure his survival.

‘– but one can’t deny the very exceptional likeness between us,’ he was saying, ‘and why shouldn’t that be a comfort to me in my old age? Francis said I should never tell you about the vision because you might start believing you had to be a replica, but you wouldn’t think that, would you, Nicholas? Francis was wrong. On this point I know best – I know you’ll reverence my cherished vision as a gift from God, just as I do, and so therefore it can’t possibly have a malign effect. I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right. I know it.’

Proud, arrogant, ancient, miserable and misguided, he glared at me in a pathetic plea for reassurance.

Taking his hand in mine I said: ‘Of course you’re right, Father. You always are.’

No doubt my mother would have made some very robust comment at that point.

But my mother was no longer there.

VI

The next holidays I returned from school to find that a cottage was being built for my father in the grounds by the chapel. He said it would make it easier for him to be secluded. Then he said I could visit him whenever I wished because I was quite different from everyone else and he didn’t find my presence a strain. As an afterthought he added that he couldn’t bear to go on living at the main house now that my mother was no longer there; he’d never liked living there much anyway; his middle-class upbringing as a schoolmaster’s son had ensured he had never felt at ease in my mother’s county setting.

I was stunned. My father, educated on scholarships at public school and university, had appeared to fit neatly into my mother’s world. I had had no idea he had such a chip on his shoulder about class. I knew, of course, that his mother had been a parlourmaid, but my own mother had said how interesting that was and what a remarkable woman my unknown grandmother must have been to succeed in marrying ‘above her station’, so I had accepted my grandparents’ mésalliance as merely an unusual piece of family history. Now for the first time I saw that my father also had married ‘above his station’ and it occurred to me that my parents’ marriage too had been, in a less obvious way, a mésalliance which had caused problems.

I was still recovering from the shock that my father had never felt at ease in the home I loved when he began to explain to me his plan for ensuring that my inheritance was properly looked after: he intended to let the Home Farm and found a small religious community which would run the house and tend the grounds.

I disliked this scheme – though I said nothing for fear of upsetting him – but as time passed I realised how clever the plan was. Not only did I never have to worry about the property but I never had to worry that my father was failing to take care of himself when I was away. The members of the Community tended the garden, looked after the house and worshipped my father whenever they weren’t busy worshipping God. Their devotion was my passport to a normal life unburdened by abnormal anxieties.

I finished school, went up to Laud’s, my father’s old college at Cambridge, came down with my degree, dabbled disastrously with voluntary work and dabbled disastrously with Debbie. My father was still living as a recluse in his cottage, but now in 1966, nine years after my mother’s death, he had come to terms with his loss and his biggest problem was the old age he hated so much. But I could see he was looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.

I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin of pride to think I could flirt with the Gnostic heresy and get away with it. In vain I told my tutor that the Light and the Dark were code-names which I used to describe a reality which for me was as true as any reality acknowledged by a logical positivist. My tutor said I should beware of mysticism as mystics so often got into trouble with the Church.

The Church was exalted as a sort of idol. Enormous emphasis was put on teaching what was liturgically correct. Church history was taught in stupefying detail. A heavy-handed, outdated biblical theology still ruled the roost, the academic successor of the neo-orthodox thunderings of Karl Barth. Radical theology was ignored – and this was 1966, three years after John Robinson’s Church-shattering blockbuster Honest to God! But the College refused to admit any shattering had taken place; the idol was not allowed to be chipped or cracked – or even renovated. Robinson was dismissed as ‘misguided’ and ‘no theologian’. There was certainly a case for propounding criticisms such as these, but I thought Robinson’s ideas, misguided or not, should at least have been debated. And I didn’t like this rampant ecclesiastical idolatry. What’s the Church anyway? Just a man-made institution. It’s God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that are important. I’m not saying we don’t need a man-made institution to deal with worldly matters. Obviously we do. And I’m not saying (in defiance of Anglo-Catholic ideology) that the Church has no numinous value and that holy traditions are unimportant. Obviously it has and they are. All I’m saying is that setting the Church up on a pedestal and worshipping it is wrong.

I also took a dim view of the way the College staff played down mysticism as they converted theology into just another academic subject such as history or English literature. Theology ought to be alive, vivid, related to real life, not a system debated by intellectuals. Did the mystic Julian of Norwich have a theology degree? Of course she didn’t. But she knew God. She had ‘gnosis’, special knowledge. She saw visions and she KNEW. But if she’d been unfortunate enough to attend that Theological College in the 1960s, the only vision she would have had would have been a vision of the bliss which marked the end of term.

Of course I couldn’t tell my father what a travesty the College was. Having run the place so successfully in the ‘forties he would have been deeply upset to know how far it had gone downhill. I learnt to keep quiet at College too because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was ‘unsuitable’ and trying to boot me out. One ordinand did say: ‘I think we should have courses on pastoral work and discuss things like sex,’ but he didn’t last long. Sex was the great unmentionable among the College staff because no one had the guts to discuss ethical issues realistically. As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the twentieth century when one of its most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past.

My boredom eventually produced the inevitable result: my interest in sex, damped down by the Debbie débâcle, began to revive.

I may have given the impression that I was formidably promiscuous but in fact by the standards of the mid –’sixties I was almost staid. My habit of going steady with one girl at a time – and usually only seeing her once a week – was my way of paying lip-service to my father’s belief that men should try to be more than mindless animals, so before the affair with Debbie I had changed girlfriends no more than once a year. However now, goaded on by the mind-blowing boredom of College life, I traded them in every six months. Doreen was a waitress at The Copper Kettle, Angie was a salesgirl at Boots and Tracy, like Debbie, was a little dolly-bird typist.

Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.

At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.)

On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.

This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?

Why indeed.

But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.

If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.

I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.

There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double life no longer. The second was that I had begun to suspect my father had intuited what was going on with the result that he was becoming ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant.’ This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.

So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?

The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower-arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.

‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’

Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.

‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’

I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in The Times yet.’

Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.

A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.

At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.

I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.

VII

Bishop Ashworth was the main reason why the Theological College was a dead loss, but in my hour of need I didn’t let that prejudice me against him. In his pre-episcopal days he had been a distinguished professor of divinity at Cambridge. That was the problem. It’s dangerous to let divinity professors out of their ivory towers to roam unfettered through the Church of England; the temptation to convert theological colleges into minor outposts of major universities is apparently irresistible, but theological colleges are supposed to train priests for the priesthood, not intellectuals for the groves of Academe.

To be fair to Uncle Charles I have to admit he was a good bishop, and I have to acknowledge that at least he had had the guts to come out of his ivory tower and shoulder a top executive position in the real world. It wasn’t his fault that he got his kicks out of an academic approach to religion. That was just the way he had been designed by God. The important thing was that this intellectual kink hadn’t prevented him from being a devout Christian who had no hesitation in standing up for what he believed in. I wasn’t sure I believed all he believed in – he was an ultra-conservative wedded to what he called the ‘absolute truths’ – but I respected his courage and I admired him as a good man who had always been kind to me.

He was an old friend of my father’s; my father had been his spiritual director since 1937. There were very few people my father saw any more, but the Bishop was one of them. Uncle Charles kept an eye on my father. He had also kept an eye on me since my mother’s death, and he regularly invited me to the South Canonry, the bishop’s official residence in the Cathedral Close.

During his Cambridge days the undergraduates had nicknamed him Anti-Sex Ashworth because of the hard line he always took against sexual transgression, but I had long since sensed, by that mysterious process so difficult for any psychic to describe, that he wasn’t anti-sex at all but a man of the world who, somewhere along the line, had encountered a sexual catastrophe which had made him feel called to hammer out repeated warnings about how dangerous immorality could be. Seeking help from a conservative bishop tough on sexual sin – the bishop who would shortly be ordaining me – might seem as suicidal as putting my head in a lion’s mouth, but I felt I needed someone morally tough to beat me into shape, just as I needed a priest who could tackle a sex-mess without flinching. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him – obviously the minimum, but how minimal was the minimum? – and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell him anything, but all I knew was that I had to try.

I called him ‘Uncle Charles’ because my father belonged to the generation who thought children should address their parents’ close friends by courtesy titles. When I reached twenty-one the Bishop had invited me to drop the title, but this had proved impossible. He was so formidably elegant and distinguished, and his date of birth in 1900 was so very far removed from mine.

‘Well, Nicholas!’ he said, giving me his best smile as we settled ourselves in his study after the ritual exchange of small-talk. Uncle Charles’s best smile always reminded me of a toothpaste advertisement. It flashed with great effect on television whenever he was hauled on to discussion programmes to oppose the permissive society.

‘Well, Uncle Charles!’ I responded warily, trying to beat back a burst of fright.

‘How are things going?’ enquired the Bishop, laying on the charm with a shovel in an effort to put me at ease.

‘Great!’ I said, feeling more nervous than ever.

‘Splendid!’ exclaimed the Bishop with enthusiasm.

We eyed each other in silence for some seconds while the Bishop kept his smile nailed in place and I struggled to master my panic, but at last I managed to say: ‘Uncle Charles, I wanted to see you because, well, I thought, that’s to say, wondered if you might possibly, sort of, well, you know, help me.’

‘My dear Nicholas, of course!’ said the Bishop, still oozing the charm which was such a famous feature of his public persona, but beyond this routine response I could sense his real self unfolding in a spontaneous surge of concern. The Bishop had an interesting psyche where sensitivity and an idealistic nature were kept under ruthless control by his first-class intellect and his considerable sophistication. Yet this complex personality, which could have produced a divided man, was seamlessly integrated. The glittering public persona was the servant, not the master of his true self beyond; its job was not to impress people but to create a shield behind which his true self had the privacy to flourish.

I hadn’t the experience in 1968 to put this judgement into words, but I did know by instinct that I had to ignore that toothpaste smile and the oozy charm in order to address myself to the genuinely sympathetic man beyond.

‘I’m sort of bothered,’ I said, ploughing on in the incoherent way fashionable among the under-thirties, but then found myself unable to express what bothered me most. With renewed panic I grabbed the next most bothersome subject on my list. ‘I mean, the Theological College seems to be useless to me at the moment, and … well, the truth is I don’t honestly think, to put the matter in a nutshell, it can help me in –’ I hesitated but forced myself to add ‘– in this muddle.’

‘My dear Nicholas!’ said the Bishop again, professional charm still well to the fore but his genuine concern now so strong that he quite overlooked the signpost provided by my last three words. ‘But how can the College be useless? It’s the most splendid place – I’ve entirely preserved it from the decadent spirit of the age!’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles. Excuse me, sir, but I think that could be the problem: it’s so well-preserved it’s dead. Of course I’m not suggesting it should go all trendy and liberal like some of the other theological colleges –’

‘I should think not indeed!’

‘– but I do wish the staff were allowed to talk about relevant things sometimes, I mean things that are relevant to Real Life – like, in a manner of speaking, sex. It seems sort of, well, weird to go on and on about Church history and dogmatics yet never once mention –’

‘Dear me, you young men of today with your passion for “relevance”! But tell me this: what makes you so sure that what you think is relevant isn’t instead just a passing fashion? Who makes the judgement on what’s relevant, and how is that judgement made? Subjective judgements made under the influence of passing fashion are dangerous, Nicholas. One must keep one’s gaze fixed on absolute truths, not relative values.’

‘Sex looks like a pretty absolute truth from where I’m standing, Uncle Charles.’

“Well, of course it does!’ said the Bishop, shifting ground quickly in order to extricate us from the theological quicksands. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young!’ Suddenly he got down to business. ‘Okay, I get the message,’ he said, very trendily for a conservative prelate. ‘Girl-trouble, isn’t it?’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re strongly attracted to a girl and you want to go to bed with her.’

‘Um.’ The situation was now so delicate that I could only hold my breath and pray for courage.

This is a very, very difficult problem,’ said the Bishop, finally casting aside the glittering public persona and speaking straight from the heart with profound sympathy. ‘Far be it from me to underestimate it. As you know, I wholly disapprove of fornication, but I’m also wholly aware how tempting it is to indulge in it. I shan’t regale you with all the familiar arguments because you’ll have encountered them numerous times before – you’ve read Austin Farrer on continence, I assume?’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

‘And Archbishop Ramsey on sex and society?’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

Then since Farrer and Ramsey are better priests than I am I can hardly hope to improve on what they say as they spell out the Christian point of view. So let me take a purely pragmatic – one might almost say worldly – approach. I’ve never been called to celibacy. At various times during my life this has created severe problems for me, but let me now attempt to share the fruits of my experience with you.’

Clever old Uncle Charles, knowing perfectly well that the ruminations, no matter how truthful, of two saints like Farrer and Ramsey were of little practical use to someone battling away against maxi-erections. With bated breath I waited to sample the fruits of his experience.

‘Fornication,’ said the Bishop with superb self-confidence and a total lack of embarrassment, ‘is like Russian roulette – by which I mean it can be tremendously exciting. It gives you all sorts of thrilling delusions about how dashing and masculine you are, but unfortunately the reality is that you may wind up destroyed. Now, that’s not thrilling, that’s not dashing, that’s not even a boost to the masculine ego. It’s just very silly and a tragic waste. Of course you may get away with your adventure; it’s always possible to survive Russian roulette. But why be immature enough to take such a mindless risk once you’re grown up? There’s more to life than getting hooked on adrenalin –’ the Bishop certainly knew how to turn on the trendy vocabulary; moving in the world of television had evidently taught him a thing or two ‘– and smashing up your future for the sake of a night of pleasure just doesn’t make sense, not if you’ve got anything that resembles a brain.’

This was fine but he was only telling me what I already knew. What I really wanted him to tell me was how to muzzle the maxi-erection so that it only occurred with the right girl; or in other words, I wanted to know how I could stop being hooked on Tracy and start being hooked on Rosalind.

‘… and I need hardly point out to a young man of your intelligence,’ he was adding, ‘that fornication is worse than Russian roulette because a person other than yourself is also involved in this potentially suicidal gamble. Don’t risk it, Nicholas. Wait for marriage. It may be the toughest exercise in self-restraint that you’re ever called to make, but very often the most worthwhile things in life can only be achieved with considerable effort by people who have the strength and wisdom to act as mature human beings, not selfish children.’

I nearly tied my tongue in a knot in my haste to say: ‘Right. Actually I’m getting married. In fact I’m unofficially engaged.’

‘You are? But that’s wonderful – how very exciting!’ said the Bishop, sagging with relief. ‘Who is she? Do I know her?’

‘Rosalind Maitland.’

‘Oh, an excellent girl – what a splendid choice! And how pleased your father must be!’

‘Um.’

Wait a minute – you’re signalling there’s a fly in the ointment – ah yes! Now I see what you were driving at: you’re strongly tempted to try a spot of premarital sex.’

‘Well –’

‘No, hang on, I’m on the wrong track again, aren’t I? I’m talking too much – time for me to shut up and listen. Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s bothering you?’

This was the moment I had been dreading. ‘Well …’ But disclosure was now impossible. After his resounding approval of Rosalind I could hardly admit I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been about marrying her. And I certainly couldn’t admit that it was not Rosalind Maitland of Starrington Magna whom I found sexually irresistible but Tracy Dodds of Langley Bottom. A long and desperate silence ensued.

‘I’ve got it!’ said the Bishop suddenly. ‘You’ve sown a few wild oats and your conscience is troubling you. Well, of course young men do sow wild oats, even young men who want to be ordained; we’re all liable to succumb to temptation, even the best of us. You’ll remember St Paul’s words, of course. “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

What you have to do now, Nicholas, if you repent – and I’m sure you do or you wouldn’t be here seeking my help – is to put the wild oats firmly behind you, set yourself a high standard of conduct for the future and ask God’s grace to enable you to be a first-class husband to Rosalind. Getting married to an excellent girl who loves you is without doubt the best possible course you can take.’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

‘Meanwhile I do see you still have the problem of abstaining from sex, even though chastity does become easier when there’s a definite end to it in sight. Of course it would be easy for an old buffer like me to say to a young man like you: “The solution is to take cold showers and work hard.” It would be easy – but it would be wrong. It would imply a view of man based on the Pelagian heresy, the view that man can improve himself by his own efforts without God’s grace. But grace is all. And prayer is vital. I presume the Theological College has at least given you some useful teaching about prayer even if it hasn’t been busy lecturing about sex?’

I seized the chance to race away from the subject of my sex-life. ‘Well, to be honest, Uncle Charles, I’ve found the College’s teaching on prayer a dead loss. It doesn’t connect with anything I do at all.’

The Bishop, who had been so commendably open, now began to close up. He loved that College as a child loves a favourite toy. He had rescued it from the slough of sloth into which it had slumped during the years following my father’s retirement. He had nurtured it, poured his precious time into it, attended every governors’ meeting he could, redesigned its syllabus, basked in the glow of its rising reputation. To hear this cherished fiefdom repeatedly criticised by a mere ordinand was to experience the trial of his Christian patience to its limit. ‘And what, may I ask,’ he said dryly, ‘do you “do” when you pray?’

‘Flip a switch in my head and tune in.’

There was a pause. Then Uncle Charles said: ‘Have you discussed this with your father?’

‘Don’t need to.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s one of the subjects we don’t have to talk about in words.’

‘I think most discussions are more profitable when conducted in words,’ said the Bishop, now speaking very dryly indeed, ‘and since your father’s such a distinguished spiritual director –’

‘He says he can’t be my spiritual director because he’s too emotionally involved.’

‘Ah well, yes, I’m sure that’s right, but nonetheless I’d have thought that on such an important subject as prayer he … well, never mind. Remind me: who’s your personal tutor at the College?’

‘Dr Hallet, but he’s hopeless.’

‘Dr Hallet is the most Christian man!’

‘Yeah, but he’s hopeless. Doesn’t dig the mystics.’

After another pause Dr Ashworth said: ‘Do you still see Father Peters at Starwater?’

‘Yes, but I wouldn’t discuss prayer with him.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s too tied up in Anglican-Benedictine convention, sort of old-fashioned, you know, square. I did try talking in my code-language once, but –’

‘What code-language?’

‘The symbols I use for ultimate reality – for you know, kind of, God. But Father Peters just said what Dr Hallet said – warned me that I was talking like a Gnostic and ought to watch it. Well, so what if I do talk like a Gnostic if that’s the best way I can put my experiences into words – experiences which can’t actually be put into words anyway? Some of those Christian Gnostics in the old days were very good, holy men and I don’t see why we should write them off just because they didn’t quite conform to the Church’s idea of orthodoxy.’

‘The Gnostic heresy,’ said the Bishop, who had written a book on the subject, ‘Very nearly destroyed the Early Church.’

I felt like saying: ‘Too bad it didn’t succeed,’ but fortunately I resisted this temptation to take a swipe at that man-made idol THE CHURCH, and made a mighty effort to rein myself in before Uncle Charles had apoplexy. I knew what had happened. After the conversation about sex, when I had been obliged to remain buttoned up, I was now lashing out in an unbuttoned frenzy at the Theological College and the Church in order to let off steam. Normally I would never have divulged my sympathy with the Gnostics to anyone who wore a clerical collar.

‘Sorry, Uncle Charles, I know you must be thinking I’m a heretic, but –’

‘No, no – just a trifle unusual,’ said the Bishop courteously as he prepared to play the champion of orthodoxy and bring me to heel. ‘Of course,’ he remarked, ‘it’s an axiom of spiritual direction that each soul is different and that each soul must therefore pray in the method best suited to it, but I think you should always bear in mind, Nicholas –’ Here the full episcopal power was switched on ‘– that psychic gifts can be a danger to those following the spiritual way. For example, they tend to foster arrogance. Instead of writing off Dr Hallet as hopeless and Father Peters as old-fashioned, you should approach them with more humility and consider the possibility that they might well have something important to teach you. You should also remember that undisciplined contemplative prayer can be dangerous and should never be undertaken without the guidance of a spiritual director.’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’ Abandoning the incoherent patois of the under-thirties I adopted a crisp, formal tone.

Satisfied that his chilly reproof had had a sobering effect, the Bishop changed gears. The toothpaste smile flashed. Charm started to ooze again. No wonder he was such a success on television. ‘Well, so much for serious matters,’ he said lightly. ‘Now let’s turn back to the very pleasant subject of your engagement – you must bring your fiancée to dinner soon! I’ll ask my wife to get in touch with you about a date.’

‘Thanks – that would be very nice,’ I said, immaculately well-behaved, and parted from him in amity with all my problems quite unsolved.

The next day Marina Markhampton came to see me and the Christian Aysgarth affair began.

TWO

‘Mysticism in the proper sense is an intense realization of God within the self and the self embraced within God in vivid nearness. It is a phenomenon known in a number of religions, and in those religions very similar language is used in describing the experience … Now through the centuries Christian teaching has emphasised that the significant thing is not just the mystic experience but its place and its context within the whole life of a Christian.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY

Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1074

Canterbury Pilgrim

I

I now come to the third path which led me to the crisis of 1968. Running parallel to my increasingly convoluted relationship with my father and my increasingly chaotic career as a psychic was my friendship with Marina Markhampton.

Since Marina was the fiancee of the Bishop’s younger son it was hardly surprising that I knew her; what was surprising was that I had become friends with her well before her engagement to Michael. She was a year my senior, one of those flashy debutantes who are forever having their photographs plastered all over the society magazines, and while still a teenager she had won herself the title of the biggest cock-tease in town. This was not the sort of woman who normally interested me and so there was no obvious reason why we should have continued to wander in and out of each other’s lives, but ever since Marina had decided I should be a member of her famous Coterie I had never quite managed to disentangle myself from her.

Since my mother had come from an old county family I had been automatically granted access to the debutantes’ social events in the diocese of Starbridge, but I had quickly fought my way out of this boring maelstrom and rejected all invitations to similar parties in London. This early antipathy of mine towards conventional socialising explains why I never met Marina until she turned up at my Cambridge College’s May ball in the summer of 1962, six years before my unprofitable interview with Bishop Ashworth and the onset of the Christian Aysgarth affair.

The May ball was one of those rare events which I condescended to attend; as everyone acquainted with Cambridge knows, the May balls are a very big deal indeed and not even an oddball loner dares to miss them. In 1962 I invited Rosalind to accompany me, but unfortunately she was struck down by appendicitis so I wound up going on my own. The ball marked the end of my first year up at Cambridge. I was nineteen. Apart from Rosalind – who in those days was no more than my former childhood playmate – I had no girlfriend of any kind. Naturally, since I was nineteen, I was obsessed with sex, but naturally, given my background, I hadn’t yet succeeded in working out what I could do about it. Alone and innocent I drifted along with mixed emotions (distaste ploughed under by an overpowering sexual curiosity) to the event which all my contemporaries considered to be the last word in undergraduate chic.

By the time I met Marina the evening was far advanced. I had been whiling away the hours by watching and listening and occasionally summoning the nerve to dance with girls who looked nice enough not to reject a very plain teenager who felt like a goldfish marooned a long way from his bowl. These girls all bored me very much. Eventually I confined myself to observing the sultry sirens and wishing I had the guts to whip them away from their preening partners. While all this was going on I drank much more than usual out of sheer absent-mindedness; I was fantasising so hard about the sirens that I forgot to notice what I was pouring down my throat. Finally, unable to stand the frustration any longer, I staggered outside to sample the moonlight, and as soon as I began to cross the lawn to the river I saw Marina lying semi-naked in a punt.

The sight stopped me dead in my tracks. Then it dawned on me that two would-be gondolieri were fighting on the jetty for the honour of wielding the pole which would propel the punt downstream.

Drunk but by no means dead drunk I said to myself: ‘He who dares wins,’ and circumventing the brawling gondolieri I said politely to Marina: ‘May I help you?’

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ and stepping into the punt I picked up the pole.

The gondolieri shouted: ‘I say, hang on!’ and ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ but Marina and I were already gliding away from the jetty. At that moment more opposition appeared: a small wiry figure raced down to the bank and began to bounce up and down in an ecstasy of disapproval. ‘Marina, nudity is not allowed – pull up your dress this instant!’ it thundered, and as I heard that familiar voice I realised this curious creature was none other than the Bishop’s son, not Michael but the older one, Charley. He was at a theological college in Cambridge, but as a graduate of Laud’s he would have had no trouble obtaining a ticket for the May ball.

‘Do you know this girl, Charley?’ I called with interest, sinking the pole much too deep in the mud. My lack of interest in the debutante world and my lack of acquaintance with glossy society magazines had ensured my failure to recognise her.

‘Of course I know her! She’s the grand-daughter of Lady Markhampton who lives in the Close at Starbridge. Marina, for God’s sake –’

Take not the name of the Lord thy God in vain!’ trilled Marina richly. ‘Remember your manners, Charley darling, and introduce me to this divine mystery-man!’

At that moment the divine mystery-man was trying to pull the pole out of the mud. For one agonising second I thought I was about to be dragged into the water, but the pole parted from the river-bed in the nick of time and I regained my balance. Meanwhile the gondolieri had stripped off their clothes and with cries of ‘Whoopee, Marina – we’re coming!’ they plunged into the river.

This is disgraceful!’ shouted Charley, outraged at the sight of more nudity. ‘Absolutely disgraceful!’

‘Oh, buzz off before I order them to drown you!’ exclaimed Marina crossly, and purred to the oncoming swimmers: ‘Darlings, you’re terribly sweet but you’ve missed – quite literally – the boat. Punt on, mystery-man.’

I shot the boat forward. Charley and the swimmers were left behind as I furiously propelled the punt towards the moonlit silhouette of Clare bridge.

‘Stop!’ commanded Marina as we sped beneath the arch. ‘I want to feast my eyes on King’s College Chapel.’

I braked as dexterously as I could and tried to concentrate on drawing alongside the bank without a bump, but I was distracted by the sight of Marina’s unsuccessful attempts to pull up her dress. Something had broken at the low neckline and her breasts kept falling out.

‘I can’t get my bosom to behave itself,’ she said, ‘but you don’t mind, do you?’

‘Not in the least.’

Introduce yourself. You fascinate me.’

‘Nick Darrow.’

‘What’s your connection with that ghastly prig Charley Ashworth?’

‘Our fathers are pals.’

‘Oh God, how awkward for you – I inevitably loathe all the offspring of my parents’ friends. Where do you come from?’

‘A village near Starbridge.’

‘Good heavens – in that case why haven’t we met? I thought I knew absolutely everyone in the Starbridge area as the result of my visits to Granny in the Cathedral Close. Darrow, Darrow, Darrow … No, I don’t know that name. Now extraordinary.’

‘Your grandmother knew my mother. My mother’s maiden name was Barton-Woods.’

‘Ah well, of course I’ve heard that name before – isn’t there a rather heavenly manor house at Starrington Magna? And – gosh, wait a minute! Is your father the holy man who lives on communion wafers in a wood?’

‘He’s a priest who lives quietly in retirement.’

‘Exactly! Granny’s told me all about him. Are you reading divinity in order to follow in his footsteps?’

‘Yep.’

‘How sad – another good man lost to the Church!’

‘Don’t knock the Church too hard,’ I said, trying to work out where I could park the pole so that I could have both hands free to grab her breasts. ‘It could be in your future.’

Instantly she was enthralled. ‘You sound as if you tell fortunes!’

‘Of course I tell fortunes!’ I said, and as I spoke a vision of how I could succeed with the sirens unfolded before my eyes. But still I couldn’t work out where to park the pole.

Meanwhile Marina was stretching out her right hand and demanding: ‘Read my palm!’ as her breasts appeared to float magically towards me in the moonlight.

‘I don’t go in for palmistry,’ I said. ‘I just tune into the vibrations.’ And still clutching the pole with one hand I grasped her proffered fingers with the other. By this time my erection was so uncomfortable that I thought I might have to jump into the river to get my genitals under control.

‘Go on – spill the beans!’ said Marina impatiently. ‘How’s the Church going to be in my future?’

I had no idea but I remembered the grandmother who lived in the Cathedral Close.

‘I see you living in the shadow of a great cathedral,’ I invented, taking care to speak in portentous tones.

‘Impossible! I never stay with Granny nowadays, there’s no time, I simply drop in occasionally.’

‘Nevertheless I see that long shadow cast by the cathedral – and I see a man in your life there.’

‘There are always men in my life everywhere!’ she said fractiously, and as she spoke I detected a touch of boredom with the male sex, perhaps even a trace of disappointment.

‘This’ll be a special man,’ I said, clued in by her tone of voice and deducing that the average panting male left her cold. Really, fortune-telling’s so easy that I can’t think why more people don’t do it. All you have to do is put up a mental aerial to receive the unspoken signals and then wait for the subject to give herself away.

‘The only special man I know,’ said Marina with a sigh, ‘is quite unobtainable.’ And as she disclosed this piece of information the alcoholic fog cleared in my psyche, my metaphorical aerial began to pick up strong signals and I understood that an unobtainable man was, in some mysterious way, exactly what she wanted. I was too young at the time to make the obvious deduction: that a desire for an unobtainable man coupled with a distaste for the men available hinted at a sexual hang-up. I just thought – and when I say ‘I thought’ I mean I knew, it was the special knowledge I called ‘gnosis’: she doesn’t do it. I’m wasting my time.

‘The funny thing is,’ Marina was musing, ‘this man does actually have a connection with the Cathedral Close at Starbridge. But I don’t see how I could ever wind up there living with him.’

‘I didn’t say you would. I said you’d be living – or perhaps just temporarily staying – in the shadow of a great cathedral, and this man would at last be significantly present in your life.’

‘Will I get anywhere with him?’

‘Yes, but not in the conventional sense,’ I said, inventing the answer I knew she wanted to hear, but then without warning I received the print-out that circumvents the ordinary processes of thought, the message that’s hammered directly into the brain from some unknown source and appears instantly on the screen of the psyche. Without stopping to think – because thinking had been by-passed – I said: ‘You’ll be very close to his wife. In fact she’s already a friend of yours.’

‘Glory!’ said Marina astounded. ‘You really are amazing! How could you possibly have known about my new friendship with Katie?’

And that was the moment when I elided the Cathedral Close connection with the wife called Katie and realised that the man we were talking about was Christian Aysgarth.

II

Since I had promised my father not to behave like a shady charlatan by performing psychic parlour-tricks, I felt guilty enough about the punt episode to try to avoid Marina afterwards, but she was like a child with a shrimping-net who had seen an exotic creature swimming in a rock-pool; she found herself compelled to kidnap me for her very own private aquarium.

I was netted, compulsorily enrolled in her Coterie and treated not as a fish but as a very expensive poodle. Marina called me the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence. I hated all this rubbishy behaviour but of course I was flattered to have been singled out by the dazzling Marina Markhampton. Having been unsure how much sex-appeal I had (if any), I liked the way Marina made me feel like Errol Flynn and Elvis Presley rolled into one. No wonder I retained a soft spot in my heart for her afterwards and could never quite bear to sever myself completely from her boring old Coterie.

Ironically, sex was no longer a serious ingredient in our friendship once I’d sobered up. Marina’s persistent pampering was based on the kind of attraction a smart woman feels towards a supremely original fashion accessory; it was covetousness, not lust, which lay at the root of her liking for me, and it was a flattered ego, not a libido in overdrive, which lay at the root of my liking for her. In fact once I was no longer drunk enough to feel like laying every woman in sight, I was surprised to discover how resistible I found her. The Venus de Milo type of torso has never been to my taste, and I happen to be one of those gentlemen who don’t prefer blondes. I like steamy brunettes with large breasts, slim hips and legs that go on for ever. Marina was supposed to be a flawless example of feminine beauty, but I thought she looked like an intelligent sheep, all light, blazing eyes and angular facial bones.

In the May of 1963, less than a year after our first meeting, she went to live temporarily in the Cathedral Close at Starbridge. (This reflects no credit on my fortune-telling skill, of course. My invented prophecy had merely given her an idea about how she could best further her friendship with Christian, and if I’d kept quiet in the punt it would never have occurred to her to offer to house-sit for her grandmother while Lady Markhampton was away in the south of France.)

Inevitably Marina threw a party and inevitably I was invited and inevitably I was afflicted by my usual ambivalence: I felt satisfaction that I should have been included, curiosity to see how the jeunesse dorée lived and annoyance that I was to be trotted out once more as Marina’s psychic poodle. My friend Venetia seemed to think that the Starbridge party was the first occasion that Marina had displayed me as a fashion accessory, but there had been previous occasions in London when to my disgust I had been unable to resist being exhibited.

I now made a new resolution to waste no more time in this idiotic fashion, so I turned down the invitation to Lady Markhampton’s house by saying I was too busy swotting for my second-year exams. Unfortunately Marina refused to take no for an answer. Discovering that I was planning to slip back to Starrington that weekend for my father’s birthday she bludgeoned me again with her invitation and almost before I could say ‘parlour-trick’ I found myself mutinously turning up at the party – the ‘orgy’ as Marina chose to call her parties in those days.

As a gesture of rebellion I arrived late and left early. In fact I behaved very badly, but then so did Marina, introducing me to her current gang as the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence and fawning over me until I wanted to puke. There were about sixteen people present; Marina either gave small parties where couples continually formed and re-formed as everyone tried out everyone else, or she gave big bashes where couples tended to stick together in order to survive. On this select occasion it just so happened that I knew few of the guests, but there was nothing particularly surprising about this. Marina had a vast circle of acquaintances and liked to shuffle them around her guest-lists to keep everyone wondering whom they were going to meet next. The privileged inner circle, which she insisted on calling her Coterie, also varied, depending on who was in favour, and the only people I knew that night were her two closest girlfriends (Emma-Louise and Holly), my friend Venetia and Michael Ashworth, the younger son of the Bishop and the brother of Charley-the-Prig.

Anyway there I was, arriving hours late at Lady Markhampton’s house in the Close, and there was Marina, not just introducing me as the Coterie’s soothsayer-in-residence but even declaiming that I was the brother of Martin Darrow the actor (I’ll get to that creep Martin later). If there was one thing I hated even more than being paraded as a psychic, it was being paraded as the brother of the famous Martin Darrow – who was only my half-brother anyway, the son of my father’s first marriage, and so much older than I was that I felt he should be keeping little Gerald company in the hereafter.

It was before the drug era, so although everyone was stoned out of their minds the culprit was merely vintage Veuve Clicquot. I drank half a glass and asked for a Coke, just to be nasty. Marina gave a little tinkling laugh and said how original I was. Fortunately I discovered some excellent sausage rolls at the buffet. They kept me quiet for a bit. The nicest person in the room was my friend Venetia – Venetia Flaxton she was in those days. I’d met her a month earlier through Charley-the-Prig. It was curious how Charley Ashworth was present when I met both Marina and Venetia. The most unlikely people can turn up at crucial moments in one’s life.

Venetia seemed a lot older than I was then because in 1963 she was twenty-six and I was only twenty, but I always liked her. I specially liked her at Marina’s orgy that night. I could see she knew I hated being paraded as a soothsayer and the brother of Martin Darrow. ‘Give the poor child a chance to merge with the crowd!’ I heard her mutter exasperated to Marina, and the next moment she had swooped to my rescue by leading me to the most striking couple in the room.

The woman was dark, not one of my steamy brunettes but a romantic heroine who looked as if she had stepped out of some Victorian novel where women were idealised as angels – or perhaps out of some Victorian painting where the female figure was supposed to represent Purity in its endless battles against Lust. She had delicate features, pale skin and fine-boned, well-bred hands. I remember thinking: I wouldn’t want to go to bed with a woman like that because I’d be too afraid of breaking her.

The man who had apparently found this purity-on-a-pedestal fragility irresistible was lounging elegantly against the mantelshelf as if he owned not only the room but the house and the entire Cathedral Close. Tall, slim and dark, he coruscated with a glamour enhanced by an air of total self-confidence, the poise of a brilliant, sophisticated man who was well accustomed to the world grovelling at his feet. This aura of extreme worldly success fascinated me. I was also intrigued by the way the sensitivity of his face was marred by a thin, brutal mouth which had already, as if foreshadowing his middle age, begun to turn down slightly at the corners. I was surprised later when women sighed how handsome he was. That mouth ruined the film-star looks, but women, being women, obviously found it so sexy that they were incapable of seeing it as a blemish.

‘… and do you know the Aysgarths?’ Venetia was saying to me. ‘This is Christian – and this is his wife Katie …’

I had heard much about this couple over the years, but I had never before managed to meet them. Christian’s father was the Dean of Starbridge, the priest who ran the Cathedral. A self-made man, he had a considerable reputation as an administrator and no inhibitions about flaunting his powerful personality. My father disliked him but the Dean had many devoted friends and admirers not only in Starbridge itself but throughout the diocese. It was widely noted that the Bishop, like my father, was not among them.

In the early 1940s when my father had first met him, the Dean had been the Archdeacon of Starbridge, but in 1946 he had moved to London to become a canon of Westminster Abbey and an interval of eleven years had followed before he had returned to the diocese to take charge of the Cathedral. His eccentric second wife, Christian’s stepmother, invited me to a few parties at the Deanery because I happened to be only eighteen months younger than Christian’s brother Sandy, but when after one boring visit I consistently refused these invitations she at last gave up issuing them. I didn’t care for Sandy, whose idea of fun consisted of reading Greek poetry – in Greek – and the Dean’s other children were all either much older than I was or much younger.

Christian was fifteen years my senior, a fact which helps to explain why I had never met him before Marina’s Starbridge orgy; by the time his father returned to the diocese in 1957, Christian was a don up at Oxford, and once I had rejected his stepmother’s attempts to draw me into the Deanery’s junior social set, there was no reason why he should ever have encountered me. I did go to the Cathedral Close regularly to see the Ashworths, but since the Bishop and the Dean were constantly at loggerheads, contact between the Deanery and the South Canonry was minimal. Certainly on my visits to the Bishop’s house there was never an Aysgarth in sight.

Christian was the eldest child of the Dean’s first marriage. The second son, Norman, was a barrister who lectured in law; he was also at Marina’s orgy that night. There was a third son, James, whom at that time I had never met, a daughter, Primrose, whom I had glimpsed when Mrs Aysgarth had initially succeeded in dragging me to the Deanery, and finally my contemporary, Sandy-the-Greek-Freak, whose real name was Alexander. Elizabeth and Pip, Dean Aysgarth’s two offspring by his weird second wife, were still children at the time of Marina’s Starbridge party, and I knew little about them except that Pip was a pupil at the Cathedral Choir School and Elizabeth had been nicknamed Lolita by various ordinands at the Theological College.

‘Your father was the Principal of the Theological College back in the ’forties, wasn’t he?’ said Christian to me when we finally met that night. ‘I can remember him visiting us just before Father left Starbridge to take up the canonry at Westminster.’

‘Ah,’ I said, very young, very gauche.

‘And I remember Sandy telling me about you,’ pursued Christian. ‘“What’s the point of reading Homer,” you said to him, “when you could read Shakespeare instead?” Very shocking that was to Sandy! But I thought: there goes a man after my own xenophobic heart – a rampant chauvinist who goes to bed wrapped in the Union Jack every night!’

Everyone laughed as I tried to assemble a sentence which would prove I was no mental defective, but before I could speak, my friend Venetia exclaimed: ‘Stop teasing him, Christian! You don’t have to be xenophobic to prefer Shakespeare to Homer!’

‘No, but it helps.’ Suddenly he smiled at me and at once became the Oxford don who was well accustomed to socially inept undergraduates. ‘I seem to remember you’re reading divinity at the Other Place,’ he said kindly. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Okay.’

‘I read theology up at Oxford, although my special subject is now medieval philosophy. Going to be ordained?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good for you. You’re a braver man than I ever was.’

‘Darling!’ said his wife reproachfully. ‘You can’t imply you’re lacking in courage just because you weren’t called to be a clergyman!’

‘The Devil only knows what I was called to be,’ said Christian, turning his back on her, and at once I was aware of tension, of darkness, of a tingling on the spine.

Marina surged past me into the middle of the group. ‘Christian, did I ever tell you I met Nicky when I was lying semi-nude in a punt on the Cam?’

‘I should think you met a lot of people, my love, if you lay around semi-nude in a punt on the Cam.’ He raised his voice to address a man who had begun to drift towards us from a group by the window. ‘Perry, come and meet the bravest man in this room – Marina’s soothsayer’s heading for a cassock and dog-collar!’ And to me he added: ‘Nick, this is Peregrine Palmer, a very old friend of mine.’