Susan Howatch - Mystical Paths

‘Jealous. Funny, wasn’t it? You’d think I’d have been jealous of the woman and tolerant of the man, but it was quite the other way round.’

‘Was Christian as close to Perry as he was to Marina?’

‘Oh, closer, because of their long shared past. But the relationship was certainly similar. Of course sex never came into it at all.’

‘Ah.’

‘No, Perry’s no more interested in sex than Marina is, and anyway Christian was never drawn sexually to other men. My brother Simon used to say that Christian was very middle-class about sex,’ Katie added, unintentionally revealing her upbringing in an aristocratic world where sexual permutations failed to raise eyebrows, ‘but that was just because Christian found smutty jokes boring and immorality an unintelligent waste of time and energy. Christian was actually a very moral man. It was the clerical background.’

As I knew so well, a clerical background was no guarantee of moral behaviour but I understood what she was trying to say: a clerical upbringing at least makes one acutely aware of morality even if one fails to wind up as a replica of Sir Galahad.

‘What’s Perry’s background?’ I said, more to keep the therapeutic conversation going than to satisfy my curiosity.

‘His father was some military VIP in India. Wealthy family but new money,’ said Katie, again offering a glimpse of a background where respectable fortunes had to be at least three hundred years old. ‘His grandfather manufactured something in Lancashire, a sort of hip-bath it was. Perry has a picture of the original drawing in his lavatory at Albany.’

‘I think I remember it. When exactly did Perry meet Christian?’

‘On their first day at Winchester when they were both thirteen. I didn’t meet Christian till much later, and we didn’t marry till he was nearly thirty. Sometimes I feel I never caught up with Perry … oh, how baffling it all seems in retrospect! The truth is that at the end it was Perry he turned to, but why the marriage was disintegrating I don’t know. I just feel increasingly sure that it was all my fault, and I’ve reached the stage where I don’t know how to bear either my guilt or my ignorance.’

‘I understand,’ I said at once. But did I? One could say that she was being haunted to an abnormal degree by her unhappy memories, but beyond this dramatic symbolic language it seemed to me that a very commonplace situation was being described: a man had fallen out of love with a woman, got bored and hadn’t quite been able to figure out how to extricate himself from the relationship. Love affairs disintegrated in that way every day, and so did marriages – although of course the disintegration of a marriage would usually be a more complex matter. It would be rarer too because in marriage friendship was supposed to take over when the sexual excitement had expired, but supposing one woke up one morning and realised that not only was desire dead but that even the possibility of friendship had fizzled? Inevitably one would toy with the idea of divorce, but divorce might be undesirable for a number of social, professional and financial reasons. In such a jam what could be more natural than to escape from home as often as possible in order to relax with one’s best friend? That all made sense. But it also made sense to note that none of this marital distress was necessarily the wife’s fault. She could have been a model wife and still have induced boredom. The real difficulty almost certainly lay in the fact that the marriage had been based on illusions which time had mercilessly exposed.

I said with care: ‘It certainly seems that Christian had a problem which was putting a strain on the marriage, but that problem needn’t have been connected with you.’

‘If he had a problem,’ she said at once, ‘I should have been told about it. The fact that he couldn’t confide in me just underlines how deeply I failed him.’ And she added in a rush: ‘You do see now, don’t you, why I wanted to contact him at the séance? I wanted to tell him I was sorry for whatever it was I did wrong, and I wanted to hear him say: “I forgive you.”’

The words ‘repentance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘absolution’ and ‘salvation’ flashed across my mind in an automatic clerical reaction to the pastoral challenge which now confronted me. I had been about to draw the conversation around to the subject of seeking help – I had already phrased my opening remark on the prolonged physical stress which could result from the mental torment of guilt – but now I suddenly thought: maybe I can still fix this. And I felt driven to wipe out not just the fiasco of the séance but my guilt that I had only exacerbated her grief.

‘Katie,’ I said, looking straight into her eyes and putting considerable emotion into my voice, ‘you did your best to be a good wife and we can never do more than our best. Set aside these bad feelings about yourself. If you did do something wrong, it’s obvious you repent with all your heart and that means you’re forgiven.’

‘But –’

I piled on the emotional pressure by leaning forward and tightening my grip on her hands. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m not Christian. I can’t be him saying: “I forgive you.” But I can be me saying: “You’re forgivable.” That’s because you loved him and love generates forgiveness, it’s automatic, it’s assured, it’s built into the system.’

‘But I feel my love was such a failure – I feel I’m such a failure –’

‘Absolutely not. You loved him devotedly, with your whole heart – and that makes you a success, a great success, the greatest success you could possibly be.’

‘Oh Nick, you’re being so kind, so –’

‘A beautiful woman capable of a deep, unselfish love – of course Christian would forgive you if he were with us now! Any man would forgive you. I forgive you.’

The next thing I knew I was kissing her and her arms were sliding around my neck. This was hardly what I had intended to happen, but I knew how important it was to restore her self-esteem. Christian had destroyed her sense of her own worth, I could see that now, but if I could give her back her faith in herself and in the power of love … I was dimly aware of my feet leaving the floor as my body arranged itself on the bed beside her.

She said in a low voice: ‘You’re standing in for Christian, aren’t you? Maybe the séance worked after all and he’s speaking to me through you.’

I couldn’t answer. I just thought: a couple more kisses, then I stop, no harm done, total cure.

‘Tell me again you forgive me.’

‘I forgive you, Katie,’ I said, saying Christian’s lines for him. ‘I promise.’

Immediately she clung to me with great passion.

Funny how difficult it was not to be passionate in return. No, it wasn’t funny at all. And it wasn’t just difficult either. It was quite impossible not to return that passion, especially when her fingers encountered the zip of my jeans. Her fingers? My fingers? The terrible part is I don’t remember. No, they were her fingers, must have been. Mine were already unbuttoning her blouse.

Her last words before we copulated were: ‘I feel forgiven now.’

Pathetic.

I can hardly bring myself to admit this, but I still honestly believed I was healing her.

Game, set and match to the Devil.

What a catastrophe.

In my rational moments, as I’ve already noted, I wasn’t attracted to underweight women who looked fragile enough to break during intercourse. But this was not one of my rational moments. The obsession to achieve a healing had unplugged my brain.

She didn’t break during intercourse. It was afterwards that she went to pieces.

As soon as she could speak she said in a shaking voice: ‘You’re not standing in for Christian at all. You couldn’t. You’re quite different.’