The Stranger House - Reginald Hill

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the ear, followed by a recommendation to the family that they seek a good child psychiatrist to nip this childish delusion in the bud.

      So when Mig sought an interview with him, he limited himself to the unadorned statement that he felt he might have a vocation. He was glad of his discretion when Father Adolfo’s reaction was to throw back his head and let out a long booming laugh.

      When the echoes had faded, the priest said, ‘Have you talked to your father about this?’

      ‘No, Father,’ said Mig.

      ‘Then let’s go and see him now. I’m not having a decent generous man like Miguel Madero saying I’ve been sneaking behind his back, subverting his son and heir.’

      Miguel Madero’s reaction had been one of amazement, which he showed, and horror, which, out of deference to the priest, he tried to conceal. But the shock was too great and it was apparent both to Mig and the priest that Madero Senior could hardly have been more distressed if told his son had ambitions to be a fundamentalist suicide-bomber.

      Father Adolfo, though having no desire to appear to encourage what he suspected was an adolescent fancy, was not about to let the dignity of his calling be traduced.

      ‘To be called to the service of God is the greatest honour that can befall a true Catholic,’ he said sternly.

      ‘Yes, of course…I was selfishly thinking of the business…’

      ‘The Church’s business comes first. You have another son to look after yours,’ said the priest shortly. ‘You will want to speak further to Mig. So shall I. Let us both pray to discover the truth of God’s purpose.’

      The next few months saw Mig’s infant sense of vocation tested to the full.

      His father’s motives for opposition were practical and genealogical. Mig had shown a peculiar aptitude for all aspects of the family business, commercial and vinicultural. His flirtation with football apart, he had never seemed likely to divert from his preordained role as head of the firm, the sixteenth Miguel in an unbroken line since the fifteenth century. Sherry is a sensitive creature. It likes calm and continuity. Miguel Senior was so upset that he hardly dared go into the bodega during this period.

      His mother’s objections were English and social. Behind every great man there is a great woman, telling him he’s driving too fast. This was Cristina Madero’s role in the family, and she found it hard to accept that her control of her husband did not extend to her son. She also felt things would have been managed better back home. The rich Catholic families of Hampshire provided the Church with money, congregation, and voluntary workers, but saw no reason to provide priests, not when the poor Catholic families of Ireland needed the work.

      Only Mig’s young brother, Cristo, inspired by a vision of his future which did not involve being perpetually second-in-command, encouraged him.

      Father Adolfo was the one who most vigorously questioned his vocation. ‘It means a calling,’ he mocked. ‘Are you sure it’s not just an echo of your own vanity?’

      Often Mig was tempted to silence him with the revelation of his experience of the stigmata, but a natural reluctance to make such an enormous claim kept him quiet.

      But one day when Father Adolfo sneered that he had so far seen precious little evidence of that special spirituality he looked for in a postulant, Mig could not resist the temptation to put him in his place by revealing his other special gift.

      Far from being impressed, the priest reacted as if he’d confessed a mortal sin.

      ‘You foolish child!’ he cried. ‘Such trafficking with the alleged spirits of the departed is a common trick of the devil to seduce susceptible minds. Remember Faustus. The Helen he saw was no more than a succuba, a demon that comes in the guise of a naked woman and steals men’s seed. Be not deceived, my child. These fancies of yours are the first steps towards the mouth of hell which gapes wide to receive errant souls.’

      Mig was horrified. Adolfo’s words quite literally put the fear of God into him, though he couldn’t repress a small regret that so far the demons hadn’t come after his seed. For he was already wrestling with that more common danger to a young man with a sense of religious vocation, the tendency for images of naked girls to invade his devotions.

      There was no question which was the stronger urge, and after Adolfo’s terrifying admonition, there were times when he allowed the lesser sin to divert him from the greater. Lying in bed, he would sometimes feel one of these perilous ghostly presences forming in the darkness, but all he had to do was conjure up an image of some girl of his acquaintance spreading herself before him lasciviously, and it was goodbye ghost!

      But this was mere equivocation. In his heart he knew he had to learn to deal with all temptation, great and small.

      How he wrestled with his adolescent lust! He mortified the flesh by running till exhausted and he spent so much time under icy showers that he had a permanent cold.

      In the end he found less dramatic strategies to master his own body. At the first hint of arousal, he would turn to certain spiritual exercises which sublimated carnal longings into Marian devotion, and if he felt himself backsliding, he would reinforce the sublimation process by adopting positions of great physical discomfort, such as kneeling across the sharp edge of a doorstep. But gradually the need for this reinforcement diminished. The grace of God and his strong human will was enough. And enough also, so it seemed, to save him from that other tendency which had so disturbed Adolfo.

      Girls and ghosts. By the end of his teens he believed he had them both under control. His sense of vocation felt strong and real. But still, in deference to his parents who urged him to be absolutely certain before taking the final step, he tested it further. He enrolled at Seville University to study history and laid himself open to all the temptations of student life. With these successfully resisted and a degree in his pocket, he demonstrated that his inner strength was not merely self-denial, which can be a self-congratulatory and ultimately sterile form of virtue, by joining one of the Church’s missions to South America as a voluntary helper. Here he spent eighteen months in the rainforest, facing up to the best and the worst in his fellow men, and in himself.

      Finally he was ready. His vocation felt powerful and permanent. Every year in the spring the pain returned as strong as ever, though the stigmata had shrunk now to a few spots of blood. Still he kept silent about the experience. When all else failed, this was God’s private earnest of the rightness of his choice.

      So he entered the seminary in Seville at the age of twenty-three at the same time as nineteen-year-old Sam Flood entered Melbourne University, both convinced they knew exactly who they were and what they were doing and where the paths of their lives were leading them.

      And neither yet understanding that a path is not a prospectus and that it may, in the instant it takes for a word to be spoken or a finger-hold to be lost, slip right off your map and lead you somewhere unimagined in all your certainties.

      In the cases of Sam Flood and Miguel Madero, this place was situated far to the north.

      In a county called Cumbria.

      In a valley called Skaddale.

      In a village called Illthwaite.

       Part Two The Valley of the Shadow

       Lady, it’s madness to venture aloneInto that darkness the dwelling of ghosts.

      ‘The Poem of Heldi Hundingsbani (2)’ Poetic Edda

       1 Hilbert’s hotel

      ‘So why’s it called Illthwaite?’ asked Sam Flood.

      She thought the bar was empty except for herself and Mrs Appledore but the answer

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