Susan Howatch - Mystical Paths

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.’

‘Hullo, Nick,’ said Palmer. ‘Nice to meet someone under twenty-five who’s committed to Jesus Christ instead of that crashing bore Elvis Presley.’

‘I’m mad about Elvis!’ cried my friend Venetia hotly.

‘I’m mad about you,’ said Palmer, ‘and how you could enjoy that kind of moronic music is quite beyond my power to imagine …’

An argument followed about whether rock –’n’-roll had replaced religion as the opium of the masses. I wanted to talk to Christian but still I was unable to devise a remark worthy of his attention. Meanwhile Christian himself continued to lounge against the chimney-piece, his glass of champagne in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and his wife continued to gaze at him adoringly. So did Marina. That was when I realised that the secret hero-worship of last summer had blossomed into a passion which I had no doubt was platonic. Katie obviously had no doubt either. She was quite at ease, and when Marina offered her a cigarette she accepted it with a smile. By this time the debate had progressed from a disagreement about Marx’s ‘opium of the masses’ to a slanging match about Sartre’s brand of existentialism, and I couldn’t help admiring Venetia. Refusing to conform to the conventional pattern of feminine behaviour, she spoke up to both men, remained unintimidated when Palmer tried to undermine her argument and finally won the debate by shouting out a quotation in Latin.

‘Phew!’ gasped Palmer pie-eyed.

I couldn’t make up my mind whether he liked Venetia as much as he appeared to like her, or whether the friendly admiration was just an act, part of an adroit social manner which could be switched on and off without effort. There was something unreadable about Palmer. He had brown hair, neatly cut and parted, bland blue eyes and a square, unremarkable face which any poker-player would have envied; he economised constantly in his use of facial muscles. He was shorter than Christian. I remember noticing, as I glanced in the glass above the fireplace, that Christian and I were the same height: six feet exactly.

The party blazed on. Having reviewed my limited knowledge of Christian’s special subject, I finally managed to compose a sentence suitable for opening a conversation with him (‘Could the work of Joachim of Flora be considered a forerunner of the Marxian view of history?’) but unfortunately I never managed to ask this mind-bending question because I was collared by Michael Ashworth. He wasn’t engaged to Marina in those days and was busy being girl-mad, reacting against his father, the strait-laced bishop, and his brother, Charley-the-Prig. I had been watching him as I devised my question about Joachim of Flora. He had been sprawled on the sofa with two girls, his right arm squeezing the waist of the blonde (Emma-Louise) while his left hand squeezed the breast of the brunette. This unknown brunette interested me deeply. She was an ultra-steamy concoction of heaving cleavage, lissom legs and smouldering dark eyes.

‘This is Dinkie,’ said Michael, having nobly abandoned his squeezing in order to look after me. Although nearly three years my senior he always took a benevolent interest in my welfare.

‘Hiya, gorgeous,’ said the steamy brunette in a show-stopping American drawl.

‘Hi.’ Of course I could think of nothing else to say. What hell it is to be young.

‘I just love to make passes,’ said this fabulous creature, ‘at guys who wear glasses.’

This indeed was an education. I had lost my virginity a month after my encounter with Marina the previous summer, but I still knew very little about girls and I still thought my reflection in the mirror fell far short of the masculine ideal which would be demanded by any discerning steamy brunette. I was glad to be tall but I hated being so lanky and angular. I was glad not to be blind but I hated having to wear glasses. I was glad to be white, since life in England was such hell for blacks, but I hated the unusual pallor of my skin. I was glad not to be a hermaphrodite but I hated being so unremarkable below the waist. Since the loss of my virginity I had accepted that average-sized genitals were quite sufficient to see me through life, but nevertheless I remained discontented because I had hoped to be compensated for my plain looks by being supremely well-endowed sexually. (What hell it is to be young.) No wonder I was so tempted to rely for sex-appeal not on my physique but on my psyche. It was all very well for my father to drone on about those ‘glamorous powers’ which could be so easily purloined by the Devil, but at the insecure age of twenty it was hard to resist parading all the glamour at my disposal once a steamy brunette appeared on the horizon.

‘A soothsayer, huh?’ purred Dinkie Kauffman at Marina’s party that night. Tell my fortune, Wonder-Cat, and be sure you make it cool!’

But before I could begin to produce the usual intuitive rubbish, Christian clapped his hands to gain everyone’s attention and I realised that the climax of the party had been reached. The lights were switched off, the curtains pulled back and as the floodlit Cathedral was revealed beyond the window, Christian proposed a toast to Starbridge. I had long since finished my Coke but I thought I might eat, rather than drink, the toast so I sidled to the buffet under cover of darkness and grabbed another of the sausage rolls. As I did so Dinkie suggested that we should all dance on the Cathedral roof and for some reason everyone seemed to think this was a brilliant idea. Funny the whims people get when they’re drunk. But maybe the concept of polluting a numinous place by idiotic behaviour just has no meaning for non-psychics. For me it would have been like throwing paint at the Mona Lisa.

Deciding it was time to leave I stuffed the last two sausage rolls into my pocket to keep me happy on the journey home, but unfortunately the lights were turned on again before I could complete this manoeuvre and my friend Venetia saw the second roll vanish. Immediately I felt embarrassed by my brazen greed, but almost before I had time to register her smile of sympathy my embarrassment was wiped out as the horror began.

The power was switched on in my psyche.