by Mike Voyce
Chapter 15 – Sarah
These last two chapters took all our attention, Angharad and I. That she could channel, and the mysteries of the Tower Room! How we speculated; had Edward seen the Holy Grail in Stafford Castle? had he really survived two assassination attempts? Angharad was sure it was so, she was cross that I hesitated, yet I needed so much more proof to believe the extraordinary.
It brought our friendship the closer, yet there was a dark side to our plaything, that reached me when I was left alone. There was no controlling the rolling force of these visions, we tended to forget Edward’s difficulties and the year 1497; then there were my difficulties, first with Frances, and the business, and then with Sarah.
There came an evening when I sat down on my own, left to think of all this.
You know I feared the happiness between Edward and Eadie would somehow never be recovered? Separating Edward from Eadie would be like divorcing the night sky from the stars. It was impossible for me not to identify with Edward. I was living his life; I actually felt his emotions as my own.
And still there's something more.
There’s a resonance between Edward and I. It's as if when things went well for him then so they went for me, but if they were to go badly? Locked in the grip of this senseless fright I would have changed Edward's story. But I saw it as a passenger unfolding in disregard of my wishes
Several things conspired to stretch my philosophy.
First was a great deal of whisky.
It's rare for me to drink; but there was in the flat, left over from Frances' father's stay with us, a bottle of good Islay whisky.
The last time Sarah and I spoke before that day in August, we hadn't exactly argued but there had been a difference between us. We disagreed on priorities, hers of treatment and mine of assessment. I told her frankly, the game is to make a difference to the system.
Had it been foolish to phone her, from my office, now, after Edward and the Tower Room? I'd done it anyway, with that whisky in my hand.
She greeted me warmly, with lightness and unexpected familiarity in her voice.
“I got your messages. I'm sorry I didn't phone, I've had the sweating sickness.”
“Really?”
After all this time of frustration over Sarah, I'd expected her to be difficult.
“So what have you been doing, apart from leaving me messages?”
“Going over a few old things.”
I was falling into her bantering mood. It wasn't what I meant.
“So, do you want to come and see me again?”
“What I need is a methodology. I need ...”
I gave her a list of serious academic points that needed to be made clear. By the end of it the warmth was missing from her reply.
I wanted to explain to Sarah about government, responsibility and scientific method, how E.S.R.C. works. But her coolness grew.
I did my best to put it all simply. Maybe it isn't so simple. Maybe she didn't understand. She turned back again to the argument we had even before the start of this story. She still wouldn’t see; it’s not our job to cure prisoners. I wonder if it would be right to ‘cure’ crime even if we could.
When I put the phone down my mind turned to government; remembering my days in university. The course had been designed for future third world leaders, but it actually attracted English misfits like me, wanting a higher degree outside our mainstream careers. It taught me a great deal, how the English secular civil service, necessitated by Henry VIII’s destruction of the Church, became the World model for government.
That World model wouldn’t have come about but for the English Reformation, and that would not have come about but for the Tudors. The one person, who could have stopped them, even in 1530, if he’d still been alive, was Edward Stafford.
This was the second thought to come out of that bottle. What a jolly whisky it was, but for dark nights only.
You can look at Edward and see what he might have been. What would he have done with power? Do individuals make a difference to the way history unfolds? I have to tell you, I don't think so. Would the World be so different today without, say, Napoleon Bonaparte? The great forces within society roll on, throwing up great leaders to express them, but it's the forces that make the leaders, not the other way round. No doubt there are exceptions, but once they're gone the great forces of historicity take over and lead us back to where we always would have been. Would Edward have been different?
If the universe unfolds according to the model I gave John, that distant afternoon, the growth of Mankind is as governed by universal laws as matter is by entropy. Where then can any of us make a difference? And yet we do.
Accurate prediction of the weather is impossible, yet countless hours and sums of money are spent on it. Nobody finds this unreasonable. Why then, oh why don't we do the same with society?
By this time the bottle was gone and so went I also, away to bed. For all the joy Angharad and I found in the Cup and the Tower Room, Edward's misery still haunted me. It came to focus my own loneliness and frustration, merging with the pain that I hadn't trusted Sarah in that phone call, that I couldn't talk to her as I did to Angharad. That was the last thought as I fell into exhausted sleep.
(Past)
For days I was left in the pit of a depression, making it hard to find Edward. The one vision that did come to me came as a dream. It's one of those images which doesn't fit with the story, if it has a place it's right at the end of the book. It was a burial party, which must have happened sometime after Edward reached manhood. No body was buried, no Christian interment and no priest was present. It was done in secret, in woodland, at dead of night. Edward came with several trusted riders, leading two horses with a heavy box slung between them. Some men held spades and torches while Edward stood a little way off, trying to fix the place in his memory. It was the strangest dream to contrast with normal sleep.
This was all I could make of it. Ever since Duke Henry's rebellion Edward had known position and fortune could evaporate like morning mist. I felt this was his way of putting something away from him, lest it fall into the hands of his enemies. There's a sense of loss and of fear. He was protecting something, protecting it from some grave risk, though what I couldn’t tell.
The burial was hauntingly symbolic. It was as if some force was guiding me; for I found that burial place, in this life, quite by chance. I found it while wide-awake, merely days after seeing it, asleep in my bed.
Imagine my shock, driving down a country road, to be confronted by the scene of my dream. I stopped the car, got out and walked around. No one could describe the sensation; it brought prickles to the hairs on my back and tears welling to my eyes. Five hundred years haven't erased the emotion that still clings to the very earth and hangs in the menace of the trees, trees which surely can't be the ones which stood sentinel five hundred years ago.
My present life was standing poised and I didn't know what to do. Finally I consulted a professional medium, recommended to me by Angharad, truly herself, a far better medium.
What prompted me was the dream of Edward burying that box, that and the vision of the Tower Room. What was I to make of Edward finding the Holy Grail? It was all so fantastical. I needed someone outside all this to guide me; I should simply have relied on Angharad.
I found myself visiting this very nice, practical, down to earth woman called Mary. She lived in a very ordinary modern house in Derby, surrounded by very ordinary and normal things. Everything about her was 'no nonsense' even down to her flat, North Country vowels. She sat me down with a cup of tea and endless, down to earth counselling.
She probably thought I was off my trolley, one grape short of a bunch.
I tried to hide my frustration and keep my courtesy. What I needed was clairvoyance not counselling. In the passage of time I've picked up a fair knowledge of psychology. I could have taught Mary to handle other people as she handled me. Obviously I'd been over the same ground for myself; it wasn't
what I came for.
At one time Sarah worked with Mary; at least that caught my interest, the insight it gave to the attitudes and beliefs they shared. If Sarah saw life as Mary did, it wasn't surprising I was having such difficulty with her.
I was at a crossroads in every way. I remember telling Mary so. I was as honest as I could be with someone who knew Sarah.
No matter how I framed my questions, I got no answer but good counsel. The more I explained the more foolish I sounded, even to myself. It seemed as if the fund of my knowledge was being carefully rationed. It was as if everyone were waiting for me to make up my own mind. At least Mary meant well.
In the project I did what I could. I arranged a meeting between our university, in the person of William Gregson, Sarah and myself. I liked Dr. Gregson, a consummately modest man of immense knowledge and experience. It was becoming urgent for someone, to help Sarah, and I knew of no one better to do it. To be honest, presenting her with such a fait accompli didn't seem a good idea but what could I do?
Sarah arranged to stay overnight with Angharad, killing two birds with one stone, to catch up with the gossip. I didn't see her the night before our meeting but picked her up in the morning, just a little before William's train. There was a frost on the ground that morning and a frost in the air. Expecting Sarah to be difficult had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but even Angharad spoke little.
There were issues to go through and I set about them with Sarah, as I would have done with a class of students. I might as well have been talking to my self; no response, no enthusiasm. I really did wonder if it was all an entire waste of time.
We met William at the station. Our conference was arranged at a hotel, in comfort and away from the distractions of the office. The hospitality was routinely excellent and it was getting on towards four o'clock when we got William back to his train.
No doubt it was all pleasant enough, but this wasn't why we were here. It greatly concerned me Sarah had so little to say on any subject. We chatted of academic psychology in general and of visual aids and teaching techniques. But what Sarah contributed and what she learned from it all was zero.
There had to be some reason. Had Angharad spoken about Edward? After we put William on his train I tried to flush it out.
What a fool I was to fall between two such stools as Edward and my project. How foolish to play Sarah at her own game, yet she was one of the very few people who might be able to unravel the meaning of Edward. The problem was how to present it when it was so enormously difficult just to talk to her.
Sarah's own train wasn't for another two hours. There was a sort of desperation that she simply couldn't be got into the right frame of mind. Somehow I had to shake her.
There was something else. It pressed in on me that people in Edward's life are the same as people alive today. First this made me fear I was fantasising. Common sense said I was inventing Edward and the others, projecting on to them the characters of people I know. It's like writing a novel. Surely this must be reason to think the whole business of Edward a pure nonsense.
I need no psychologist to point out such things. After my failure with Mary I talked to an expert, suggested to me by the Society for Psychical Research. He was a retired cannon of the Church of England and I phoned him one bright October afternoon. I can still picture him, leaving off pottering in his Sussex garden, still in his white cotton jacket and Panama hat, to deal with the most arcane problems of existence. I remember his comfortable warmth and easy authority. Group reincarnation was, he said, his pet interest. He heard me patiently and gave his advice; I must talk to the others. He'd be delighted to see me and as many of 'the others' as I could bring but first I must talk to them. He took everything I told him as a matter of course. I asked if these images really could mean what I've said, here in this book.
“My dear boy, why ever not?”
“I remember reading the Greek classics as a boy, and what Jung said about them. Didn't the Greeks have this gift of projecting their inner minds, onto the outside World? Isn’t that where their stories of heroes and gods came from?”
“Ah, Jung. I wouldn't worry about that.”
You could hear the chuckle in his voice,
“We project what's actually there. It's not that we see things that aren't real; we filter out a good deal which is real. You wouldn't want to see monsters and demons would you? Of course we miss out on seeing angels at the same time.
As to projecting personalities, you don't need to. You're already imprinted with the people around you, it's how group reincarnation works. It's frightfully common, the difficulty is to break away from a group, not to keep reincarnating with one.”
I promised to think about it, and haven't spoken to that reverend gentleman again to this day.
If these images might really be true didn't I have a duty? To Sarah, who at least had the talent to recognise it.
After our meeting with William I needed a change of air, a change of scene. We got into my car and drove. I meant to take her to a restaurant I sometimes used, when tired or bored, on the way back from Peterborough. It was less than ten miles away and we could have swapped one piece of civilisation for another.
We talked about the use of Ericksonian metaphors. This was an area of Sarah's work I boned up for the project and I used it to draw her into talking about assessment. The problem is that these metaphors are very personal. This was, she said, why she couldn't create a simple list of questions for prisoners; it makes her work an art, everything depending on her right use of metaphor.
But according to Jung dreams can eventually be reduced to certain basic patterns, what was to stop Sarah using universal symbols in her metaphors? I'd already been over this with her, now I coupled it with my burial scene.
“What do you make of a dream, horsemen coming in the middle of the night to bury a heavy box in deserted woodland?”
“Tell me more.”
I did.
“Imagine a young man under some sort of pressure, it might be to do with a forbidden love affair, it might be to do with politics or something mystical in the box.”
I knew that should be enough for Sarah, but she wouldn't commit herself.
“Do you think that relates to the dreamer's present problems?”
“Oh yes. But I'd have to know what they are.”
“Do you remember talking about reincarnation and old problems? Could it be something to do with that?”
Sarah didn't answer.
I made as if to change the subject.
“Now, suppose someone comes to you with a series of visions. If they're true at all they have to come from hundreds of years ago. They contain precise detail. Would you think they were metaphors for current problems?”
For once her reaction seemed careful, even measured. She looked around the scene outside the car before answering.
“What you remember from the past certainly does relate to the present. Why else would you remember it? But such visions are rare. You do better thinking of the present.”
“Lots of things have associations, names for example, ordinary names like Thomas, Henry, Eadie or Margaret. Do names like these have significance?”
“Those names don't mean anything to me. I can't help you with it. I'm sorry; it really isn't anything to do with me.”
I painted her a little story, the merest thumbnail sketch, it's part of my job to be a reasonably good advocate. It would be disappointing if I couldn't get even a reluctant audience to hear me. But you always know the difference between a willing audience and one that isn't.
At the end she told me what she thought, who knows, maybe she believed what she said.
“It's probably fantasy. I really can't tell you anything about it. You'll have to deal with it yourself.”
Fantasy! But what about the dreams of her patients and the metaphors she used with them every working day?
There was still time before Sarah's train and she told me about her French trip. Now sh
e started to bubble, she even used an age-old metaphor from Jung's race memory, the god of cornucopia offering the 'Horn of Plenty', to describe the luxury. She talked of the wealthy people she mixed with; what they ate, what they drank, how much they spent. When I was a student I thought seriously of dealing in fine wines and met many such people. I wasn't impressed. I refrained from mentioning the luxury of Lady Margaret's household, still more, the court.
Driving her back to the station, I deliberately took Sarah past the place of that burial. She even described to me what took place there. She did it without intending to, almost absentmindedly, like Angharad when she goes into trance, following my words as we drove, with only half her mind on what I said.
I pointed out a group of trees standing some way from the road. At this point the woodland comes down into the valley and the trees make a natural landmark. I asked her to picture them in her mind, as they'd stood in that place for so many, many years.
“What happened there do you think?”
I watched Sarah from the corner of my eye, slowing the car imperceptibly, so she should have longer to look at the trees.
“Oh, it's just a feeling of sadness; terrible sadness and great pain. There are riders, coming at night. They’re carrying something heavy; one of them’s a tall man, fair-haired, he’s a giant; the others could be soldiers.
The tall one, he’s wearing a very rich cloak, it looks like fur. He’s lost someone very important… more than one person.
There’s a great light, it’s very powerful, it’s coming from the box. I can’t see any more.”
There was a pause; I waited with my fingers crossed.
“It’s very powerful.., but it’s nothing to do with me.”
Sarah came to a stop. While she spoke she’d seemed not quite conscious, almost as if she were distracted, but very clear.
When she came to herself I asked her,
“Well?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe there is something there, but I can’t help.”
Even then she didn't connect it with what I'd told her of the burial or with Edward. I hadn't told her Edward, like so many of the Plantagenets, was a blond giant. I hadn't told her about the Grail Hallows in the Tower Room. I don't even think she was aware of what she'd said.
What a loss there was in that rejection!
***