Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch

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had been in bad shape.’

      ‘That would explain the existence of some degree of guilt on her part, certainly, but I’d suspect there was more she wasn’t revealing to you – much more. Tell me, was she difficult to hypnotise?’

      ‘No, she –’ I stopped. He’d caught me. Clever, cunning old –

      ‘So you did use hypnosis. I’m outraged, Nicholas, absolutely outraged. I’ve told you time and time again –’

      ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry –’

      ‘And how dare you lie to me about it earlier! Did you seriously think you’d take me in? As Father Darcy used to say –’

      Here we went again. I knew what was coming. Father Darcy had said to anyone who he judged was making an unsatisfactory confession –

      ‘– “You’re saying the words you want me to hear but I hear the words you can’t bring yourself to say,”’ quoted my father, and added: ‘You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully, and when I think that in a few weeks’ time you’ll be ordained I feel quite ill with despair.’

      ‘I’ll drive over to Starwater straight away – see Father Peters – make my confession –’

      ‘Yes, do all those things – and in future stay away from poor Mrs Aysgarth, who quite obviously needs medical help as soon as possible. Which reminds me, how did you deal with her once you’d brought her out of the hypnotic state?’

      ‘Oh, I just talked to her, held her hand for a bit, calmed her down –’ By this time I was on my feet and hurtling from the room.

      ‘If Father Darcy were here,’ said my father, intuitive powers now working full blast, ‘I think he’d demand a somewhat fuller explanation. In fact if Father Darcy were here –’

      But he wasn’t.

      I flung open the door and fled.

      IX

      I staggered across to the chapel, which stood near my father’s cottage on the floor of the dell. A hundred yards away I could see the wall which surrounded the grounds of the Manor, and I could also see the door there which the members of the Community used when they brought provisions to my father. It was easier to park the car beyond the wall and walk the few yards up the track to the cottage than to carry the shopping-bags for ten minutes along the meandering path from the main house, and in those days, before crime became a problem even in rural areas, my father kept the door in the wall unlocked during the daylight hours.

      I was in such a state that I nearly bolted straight down the track to the road and hared to the village pub for another shot of brandy, but the chapel exerted its familiar magnetism and I headed across the floor of the dell instead. The chapel was young, about a hundred and twenty years old, and had been built in the style of Inigo Jones with such panache that it never seemed like a pastiche of his Palladian designs. It was small but perfectly proportioned, austere when viewed from the outside but fussier when viewed from within. This fussiness arose from the fact that my father had been unable to resist decorating the interior with various sumptuous Anglo-Catholic aids to worship. They formed a bizarre contrast with the plain, stark beauty of the altar’s oak cross, made by him before he had left the Order.

      There were candles everywhere – my father was mad on candles – candles on the altar, candles to the side of the altar, prickets for the burning of votive candles at the back behind the pews. There was a holy water stoup by the door. Another candle (no electricity; that would have been cheating) burned before the Blessed Sacrament which was reserved (of course) in a pyx. The whole place reeked of incense but I didn’t mind that; I’d grown up with it, and a strong whiff of the Fordite Special always made me feel relaxed and at home. What I minded were the pictures, florid representations of biblical scenes which in turn represented my father’s uncertain taste in art. This uncertainty found its most embarrassing expression in a sentimental plaster statue of the Virgin and Child, vulgarly coloured and placed to the right of the altar on a fake-jewelled plinth. This had been installed after my mother’s death. My mother, a Protestant who had loved my father not because of his Anglo-Catholicism but in spite of it, would have booted that statue out of her ancestors’ chapel in no time flat.

      It interested me that my father, who was extremely ascetic in so many of his habits, should choose to worship in this particular way. Ritualism does tend to be attractive to mystics because it’s designed to express those mysteries which are beyond the power of words to describe, and indeed I believed my father when he said a rich liturgy infallibly created for him a deep sense of the numinous and a consciousness of the presence of Christ in the mass. Yet now that I was older I thought there was also a psychological reason for his attraction to this lavish, extravagant classical ritualism which had been such a daring liturgical fashion in his youth. He had had a sedate upbringing in a little Victorian villa where money had been far from plentiful, and this had given him not only austere tastes but an inverted snobbery about the luxuries money could buy; he always had to pretend he hated luxury, but I think deep down he found it attractive and the only way he could give vent to this attraction was in his religious life. That somehow sanctified the illicit passion which could never be consciously acknowledged, and becoming an Anglo-Catholic had been his way of escaping from the emotional constipation and straitened circumstances of that Victorian middle-class upbringing.

      But I hadn’t had that kind of upbringing, and now that I was old enough to think for myself, I felt increasingly confused about Anglo-Catholicism. It was well over a century since the Oxford Movement had relaunched the Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the ageing of a once dynamic movement was becoming all too apparent. Undermined by Vatican II which (so the traditionalists said) had Protestantised the Church of Rome, the Anglo-Catholics had been left high and dry with a bunch of rituals which were going out of fashion not only among the Romans but among the Anglicans. The new trend towards a weekly parish Eucharist, that watered-down version of the mass, now made the Anglo-Catholic services look archaic and – that most damning word of the 1960s – irrelevant. And the majority of English churchgoers – the Protestant majority – hated ritualism anyway.

      Yet I had been brought up an Anglo-Catholic. It was my wing of my Church. I belonged there, and as a mystic I too was drawn to the numinous qualities of the services. Yet although I knew I couldn’t abandon Anglo-Catholicism I was deeply dissatisfied with it. I felt strongly that it should be modernised but the traditionalists who ruled the roost were holding fast to the old ways as they developed a siege mentality. No hope of change there, and meanwhile that fatal old-fashioned look was becoming tinged with decadence. Often it seemed to me that the idol of the die-hards was now a god called LITURGY – and there were other even more unsavoury hints of decadence than idolatry, hints that were beginning to surface in the sexual hothouse of the late 1960s. Anglo-Catholicism had always attracted a homosexual element, but in Victorian times the homosexual priests had committed themselves to the celibate ideal and followed the fashion for intense friendships which were never consummated. Now celibacy was on the wane and society worshipped the idol called SEX. No wonder Anglo-Catholicism was in trouble. Sometimes I thought even heterosexual Anglo-Catholics were only interested in providing a camp stage-show of all the fashions imported from pre-Vatican-II Rome.

      I said nothing of my dissatisfaction to my father. A relic of another age, the age when Anglo-Catholicism had been a dynamic movement sweeping all before it, he would have been deeply upset by my critical thoughts. He might even have thought I was a closet Protestant but I wasn’t. I just hated seeing Anglo-Catholicism go down the drain, and during my terms at Theological College I had found it a relief to retreat into the churchmanship of the Middle Way which I found not only in the College chapel but in the Cathedral. There was an Anglo-Catholic church in Starbridge – St Paul’s at Langley Bottom – but I never went near it. The Principal of the College said it had fallen into the hands of cranks. (‘Cranks’ was his shorthand for homosexuals and/or nutcases). Even my father, who thanks to his small circle of distinguished visitors was well primed with diocesan gossip, said once that he did hope I wouldn’t go there, and I was relieved to find I had no difficulty in giving

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