Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
sure you really want to be a clergyman?” and immediately your psyche soars on to a very odd plane indeed. But why? This is a good question of Christian’s and one which you should, in fact, be periodically asked.’
‘But Father –’
‘Sometimes when a young man chooses to follow in his father’s footsteps, it’s a way of evading the difficult task of deciding what he’s really called to do, and I for one don’t want you falling into that particular trap. We’re not all called to serve God as priests and I fully accept the possibility that He may wish you to serve Him in some other way.’
‘But if I’ve been designed by God to be specially like you –’
‘He may still call you to serve Him in a different field. Of course it’s very gratifying to me that you want to be ordained but you don’t exist to ensure my selfish desire for gratification. You’re here to serve God, not your father.’
Nowadays my father regularly felt compelled to deny his desire for a replica, but since I had long since decided this denial was a mere formula to soothe his conscience, I never took the slightest notice. ‘So what you’re really saying,’ I said after he had finished his new attempt to brainwash himself, ‘is that Christian was sanity personified and I reacted like a lunatic.’
‘Not like a lunatic – that seems a little harsh! – but I see no sign of the demonic in this conversation, and I’m wondering if you projected on to Christian a particularly oppressive anxiety which you normally keep buried deep in your unconscious mind. Maybe you should interpret the scene not as a demonic manifestation – and certainly not as a sign that Christian was being infiltrated by the Devil – but as a hint from God that you should re-examine your call to be a priest.’
‘But that’s all –’ I bit back the word ‘balls’. If there was one certainty in my life, it was my call to the priesthood. I had wanted to be a priest ever since I had learnt in my early childhood about Jesus the healer and the exorcist, the hero who always triumphed over the Dark.
Making a new effort to hold on to my patience I said to my father: ‘Your explanation’s so far from what I actually experienced. I know the Dark was there, billowing around Christian and seeping into him through all the cracks in his personality, so your whole interpretation of the scene falls as flat as a pancake.’
My father then became very angry. ‘You understand nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing. And what’s worse, you don’t want to understand, you refuse to be taught, your pride’s convinced you that you know everything there is to know. But I tell you, Nicholas, that if Father Darcy were present in this room –’
I somehow managed to stifle a groan. It really was awful how old people repeated themselves. Cuthbert Darcy, who had once been the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks, was my father’s hero. In fact I had been brought up on the extraordinary memories Father Darcy had left behind him. My father would reminisce about this peculiar old cove at the drop of a hat. Sometimes I felt I had heard each Darcy story at least twenty times.
‘But Father Darcy isn’t present in this room,’ I said. ‘Father Darcy’s been dead for over twenty years.’
‘More’s the pity – if only he could be here to train you as he trained me! Psychics have to be trained. When I think of the appalling messes I got into before I met him – and I didn’t meet him until I became a monk at the age of forty-three –’
‘I know, Father, I know, you’ve told me a million times –’
‘Then you’ll understand why I pray constantly that you’ll meet your own version of Father Darcy very soon – and sometimes when I pray I feel he’s quite close – or is it that he will be quite close? I’m not sure, but what I know for certain is that Aelred Peters is no longer right for you and you’ve got to have someone much tougher.’
‘But I like Father Peters! We get on.’
‘You mean you’ve reached the age when you can manipulate him. You need someone very strong, Nicholas, strong psychically and strong spiritually. Father Darcy …’
The reminiscences began. I stifled another groan.
‘… and he had the toughest psyche I ever encountered, strong as steel yet so extraordinarily flexible – like a magic rope his psyche was, I can see it quite distinctly in my mind’s eye even now after all these years – forty years it is since I met him, imagine that! What a priest he was, so perfectly trained and disciplined, his psychic powers so striking yet so wholly under control, so entirely devoted to God’s service – oh, I can see that first meeting of ours in 1923 as clearly as if it were yesterday …’
I picked up Whitby who had wandered over as if to sympathise with me. Lucky old cat, unable to understand my father’s monologues.
‘… and there I was, six foot three, and there was he, no more than five foot nine, but within seconds I felt like a dwarf and he seemed seven foot tall. And all he did was look at me. He had very dark eyes, rather sunken, set in shadowed sockets …’
My father droned on but I switched off. The truth was that Cuthbert Darcy had been a monastic thug. Their first meeting had resulted in the thug beating him up. I never pretended to understand any of it. After that they had enjoyed a love-hate, father-son relationship for seventeen years even though they had never lived beneath the same roof. (My father denied any father-son relationship, of course, since this type of attachment was forbidden in the cloister, but it was obvious to me that Darcy had had all the spiritual glamour and psychic understanding which my Grandfather Darrow had lacked.) My father had spent some years at Ruydale, the Fordites’ estate in Yorkshire, before he was appointed Abbot of the Grantchester house near Cambridge, and throughout this time Father Darcy had remained at the Fordite headquarters in London, the tarantula at the centre of the web. In consequence the two men had seldom seen each other. Initially they had met once a year, when the Abbot-General made his annual visitation. Later they had met twice a year, once during the visitation and once six months afterwards when my father was summoned to London for what was described as a ‘spiritual spring-cleaning’. But despite the rarity of the meetings there had been copious correspondence. Apparently the strong psychic affinity between the two men had generated an interest powerful enough to overcome their temperamental incompatibility.
This exceedingly weird relationship should have served as a text-book example of how not to conduct an association arising from spiritual direction, but my father always said that Darcy had been the one spiritual director who had succeeded in keeping him on the rails. Indeed my father in old age was lyrical on the subject, and the saga of how the renegade psychic had been rescued, dusted down, shaken up, taught, trained and saved had now acquired the golden sheen of heroic legend. The darker side of this off-beat monastic pas de deux – all the bouts of unChristian dislike, anger and truly scandalous violence – had long since faded away, obliterated by the rosy glow of my father’s unflagging nostalgia.
‘… so Father Darcy said to Francis …’ My father was still deep in his Fordite reminiscences. ‘… and then Cyril said to Aidan …’
I decided it was time to haul him back to 1963. ‘Can we return to Christian for a moment?’
My father recalled himself with an effort and said politely: ‘Of course.’
‘Are you saying I was completely deluded?’
‘No. I’m not doubting for one moment that you experienced a dark force that frightened you. All I’m saying is that you may not only have misinterpreted this force but mislocated it as well. You’re so young, you see, Nicholas, and you’re not trained. If only we could find you your Father Darcy –’
Off he went again. Hopeless. I gave up, muttered some excuse and slipped away.
VI
I came down from Cambridge in the summer of 1964. I hadn’t seen Christian again. Eventually I came to accept my father’s opinion