Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch

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      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

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