Chosen

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Bye then,’ Stella said. She put her thumb to her mouth and bit savagely at her cuticle.

  ‘If you ever need any help, or you want me to come and stay or anything . . .’ I said.

  She wound a strand of hair tighter and tighter round one of her fingers until the end bulged dark with blood.

  ‘Sorry, Stell,’ I said in a small voice.

  She shrugged. I got up and stood. I wanted to kiss her or hug her or something but there was a sort of force field around her that I dared not enter.

  ‘Remember what you promised me?’ she said, and darted me a look.

  I nodded and my heart beat thickly with the memory of it. I thought she’d forgotten. ‘But you’ve got a new baby –’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said quietly. ‘Now, just go.’

  I stood looking down at the top of her head. The door opened and Aunt Regina beckoned me out. I looked back at Stella, who hadn’t moved, hoping for a smile, but she was frowning at her knees.

  ‘Bye,’ I said, and followed Aunt Regina out into the hall.

  ‘You can have a look at Seth if you like,’ she said. She was regarding me in a kind but wary way. Seth was in his basket in the dining room, awake, lying on his back. He had a funny round little head and his black hair spiralled upwards like a puff of smoke. His eyes were that indeterminate hazy blue that could turn any shade.

  ‘Do you think she’ll be OK this time?’ I said. ‘I mean, what if she gets ill like with Dodie?’

  ‘We’re here,’ Aunt Regina said. ‘You don’t need to worry. Now you’d better go.’

  ‘Aunt Regina?’ I began.

  ‘We all make choices,’ she said firmly. ‘And you have made yours.’

  ‘Auntie –’ I tried again, but Kathy stepped between us, looking significantly at her watch.

  I felt like a stupid fish, my mouth opening and shutting. I thought of the glossy carp. I couldn’t formulate what I wanted to say and I could feel clouds gathering inside me. ‘I’ll go then,’ was all I said, and I let myself be propelled towards the door. I looked back at Aunt Regina, but she had turned her face away.

  †

  We arrived back at Soul-Life with no child and I was clearly no longer pregnant. Adam had an explanation. We wanted the child brought up in England, in secret safety in case of trouble. Even back then, there were grumbling problems within Soul-Life – families trying to get their children back, internal disagreements about protocol, financial complications – and our prolonged absence had exacerbated these. Soul-Life’s golden age was over, but while Adam remained strong, we kept it under control. His vision kept it under control.

  I went along with the story. I didn’t want despair to bring back Adam’s disease. It’s an interesting word: dis– ease. I wanted him to be easy again in his dreams and visions and beliefs. For that he needed absolute faith in me. I saw that. I knew that. I was his rock. It had never been so clear before.

  The first time we’d met, when I sat on him – though he has it that he saw me walk across the room – I thought I needed someone and I thought that it was him. But every day after we got back from our futile trip, a few more flakes of illusion fell away and left my vision clearer. The strength had been within me all along. If we hadn’t met I would’ve been all right. Maybe even Stella would’ve been all right. How could I allow that thought and not go mad?

  ‘We all make choices,’ Aunt Regina had said. And she was right. And I couldn’t unmake my choice. This was the path I’d chosen, and now Adam needed all my strength. Through a lawyer, Stella negotiated extortionate child support until Seth was sixteen, when Adam could take over his upbringing. Who knew if she’d stick to it when the time came? There was nothing we could do except wait. For once, even Adam had doubts. My role was to reassure him. But the stronger I seemed on the outside, the more I broke apart inside. I had to admit to myself that I didn’t believe in Adam’s visions. I believed he had the visions but I stopped trying to believe they were any more than delusions. But what delusions that could persuade so many!

  I considered leaving. If I could have left in the few months after our return, then maybe I would have done so, though leaving Adam would have torn my heart out. One day, in a fit of despair, I went into the office while Obadiah was out and phoned Aunt Regina.

  ‘I want to come home,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Best stay away, dear,’ she said. (She did say ‘dear’, and I treasured that tiny crumb of comfort.) ‘Stella’s on a reasonably even keel and we don’t want that upset.’ We talked on for a little while. She told me about Kathy’s arthritic knee, a glut of pears, the birth of another kid. I had nothing to contribute. Nothing about Adam or Soul-Life would have interested her.

  ‘Best not ring again,’ Aunt Regina said, when our conversation had run aground. ‘Best let things be.’ Her voice sounded kind, but then it vanished into the click and hum of all the miles between us. I thought of running, then. I thought of returning to India. I could live as I had before, in cheap and grubby anonymity. My mind began to fold and shrink against itself; memories disappearing into creases. Shuttering of light and stuttering of meaning. I think that I was ill, maybe like Stella was ill. It had never happened before but now my mind reached the edge of a slippery slope and I slid into the darkness. I was put into a room alone.

  Every day Adam came and held my hand and talked and talked and pulled me back as surely as a fisherman. He reeled me in again. We prayed and meditated. He thought it was the disappointment of not having the child with me. Perhaps there was some of that. Adam was right that I suffered from the lack or loss of a baby in my arms, but it was more than that. It was a loss of faith, not just in God and Adam and his visions, but in myself and the way I’d chosen to live my life – and that is worse.

  And then Adam’s disease returned. He became so ill we all thought that he would die. From somewhere I found the strength to nurse and meditate and pray with him. Hannah and Obadiah took more responsibility for how things were, how the money was, the bad press Soul-Life had begun to generate. As if there was something dangerous going on within our walls, when all it was was love. Even if it was deluded, it did no harm.

  While Adam suffered his relapse I became the fisherwoman and my hand in his hand the line that reeled him in. You see the human love we gave each other? Beyond all else, despite all else, there was a solid mortal love between us. From that time my soul was split. I lived the life, the soul life, and no one lived it more thoroughly than me, but I lived it with a voice up on my shoulder, a parrot with Stella’s face perching there and making a mockery of everything I said and did. You can’t imagine the pain of that. To live without integrity is the greatest burden a soul can ever bear. But I bore it. What else could I do? Out of love for Adam I bore it for another fifteen years.

  And, to my relief and amazement, Adam recovered once more. This was the power of his belief. There was power in it, you see. Real power can come out of delusion. He never entirely regained his former health – he was weaker and the times he revealed himself to the Brethren became fewer. Where once there’d been a meeting every week now there was scarcely one a month, but it was enough. Perhaps the scarcity increased the intensity of joy among the throng when he did speak, and he did so with a renewed fervour since he’d emerged from the illness to a series of new visions and visitations.

  Crows replaced herons, and our place flocked with the horrid creatures, so he would sit outside and wait and almost always one would come to him. And he dreamed one night of a man without a face. The dream haunted him, it had the atmosphere of something vital, he said, and he prayed and fasted and meditated until it came to him. To be faceless is to symbolize the destructive futility of personality, of individuality, which is the enemy of the very oneness which must be our goal. That is when the idea of the masks occurred to him.

  For a while every recruit wore a mask and relinquished possession of a name – but this proved impractical and there were a few months of chaos until Jesus sp
ake again. The masks were only for those who had proved their worthiness, who had shed their worldly personalities through the clarification process. And then they would only be worn for ceremonial and teaching purposes and to maintain a distance between the truly absorbed Soul-Life members and those still to be tested in their resolve and their belief.

  Once I said to Adam, ‘What is the end of all of this?’ We were sitting in our own white room. It was after celebration and sacrifice. I’d bathed the blood from his hands and washed his feet, as he loved me to do. And I didn’t mind that. I loved him as a mother loves a child by then, that is how I reconciled my lack of belief in what he said, with the storm of tenderness I felt in his proximity. I cut his toenails and rubbed hand cream into the rough skin on his heels. I was used to waiting for him to formulate his reply but he was only looking at me.

  ‘What are you asking?’ he said.

  ‘There are millions, maybe billions, of dollars in the bank accounts. You have hundreds of devotees.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But what . . .’ I paused. I didn’t want to anger him, nor did I want to say anything to rock his own belief, since that was all that held him together – that and my love. ‘What’s the point of it?’ I dared myself to ask.

  ‘That is the question of a child,’ he said coldly, ‘and do not pretend to me, Martha, that you are so naïve.’

  I swallowed. ‘What’s at the heart of it?’ I persisted. ‘For what are the Chosen chosen?’

  ‘Eternal life,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but –’

  He began tiredly to preach at me and it was all words I’d heard before. The parrot was cackling as he spoke and it was saying, ‘Nothing, there’s nothing at the heart of it,’ and that voice was louder to me then than Adam’s voice. And when it shut up I heard silence ringing like a tongueless bell.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, to force words into that silence. ‘Oh yes, you’re right, Adam, of course you are. Forgive me. It must be Satan trying to work into a chink.’

  ‘I’m glad you spoke your doubts,’ he said. ‘Of course Satan will try his luck every now and then even with one so devoted as you, my love. You must be his greatest challenge.’ And he stroked my hair as I lay my head against his knee and my heart wanted to scream out with the tragedy of his belief in me, and how easily he could be deceived.

  †

  Five years after Seth’s birth, Stella wrote to tell me that Aunt Regina had died. She’d had a stroke and had lived for six months with Kathy nursing her and then, just as she’d seemed to be recovering, she’d had another massive stroke. When I heard this news, the weakness came into my mind again, and it was some months before I was better. I prayed for belief as strong as Adam’s to help me deal with Aunt Regina’s death, and to deal with the fact that now we never could be reconciled. There was a chasm in my poor fake soul that could never be mended.

  †

  It was November last year, Seth’s sixteenth year, when I phoned Stella. Adam was there with me. He was very ill. Too ill, I thought, to wait until the following October and Seth’s birthday. The disease had come creeping back. He said nothing of it until I happened to see him undressed one night, saw how thin his limbs had become and how lumpy and distorted his abdomen.

  ‘Please let us see a doctor,’ I said, though I knew this would anger him.

  ‘Why can’t you understand that this is the will of God?’ he said and, before I could reply: ‘Hannah understands.’

  I stiffened. ‘What?’

  ‘I must live till my son is here,’ he said, ‘until my son has received the wisdom, and then I will be pleased to join the Universal Soul.’

  ‘Please don’t talk like that,’ I said.

  He sighed and shook his head, put on his night robe and got stiffly into bed. I lay down with him, feeling his dear body in my arms. His breath was foul, as it had been for a long time, but I didn’t care: it was his breath and it was precious. His heart was still beating strongly. I put my ear against his chest to listen. I couldn’t believe that such a strong heart would ever stop.

  ‘We’ll pray again,’ I said. ‘You have the will to live and we have the will to keep you alive.’

  He was silent for a moment and then he said something he’d never said before, not in all the time I’d known him: ‘I’m tired. I’m tired. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘If you die, I might as well die too,’ I said, though as I spoke the words something pugilistic sprang up inside me, fists clenched. No, I was not ready.

  ‘You must look after Seth. You’ve been my rock,’ he said. ‘It’s not your time and you must carry on.’

  We lay and stroked each other, taking such comfort as we could. His hand stroked my skin from shoulder blade to buttock over and over and I sighed with the pleasure of it.

  ‘Adam,’ I said into the darkness, ‘if I am to carry on, I need guidance. I understand the process of clarification and the holy work and the investing of money, the fishing, all of that, but I don’t feel I have an overview . . . do you see what I mean? I don’t know’ – I hardly dared to say it again – ‘I don’t know what’s at the centre of it all. I don’t know the point, the end point. Without you, it will be a light going out . . .’

  ‘Shhh.’ He put a finger to my lips. ‘My son will show you the way. He is the next step. Have faith, Martha. All will be revealed.’

  Passing the buck, sniped the Stella-parrot.

  We lay quietly then, and I listened until his breath had deepened into sleep and he began to snore gently, the sound of a boy sawing balsa wood, soft and soporific to my ears. I turned away from him and lay huddled round my lonely, secret lack of faith.

  When he went, I would go too: that became clear to me then. I would leave Soul-Life. I took to spending time in the admin block – Obadiah’s territory and where, unfortunately, Hannah took to hanging around too. She didn’t like it when I came in; she made that obvious. But when she wasn’t there, I got Obadiah to teach me about computers, to use a laptop, to understand something of the way the finance worked – though it was too vast and confusing an operation for me to understand more than the tiniest bit.

  Adam and I went together to the admin block when we deemed it time to phone Stella. He sat in a chair, listening, his good hand squeezing and kneading the maimed one as it always did when he was nervous.

  ‘It’s almost time, Stella,’ I said.

  ‘He’s not sixteen.’

  ‘It’s his sixteenth year.’

  She was quiet for a long time. I was almost certain she’d laugh her head off at us for believing she’d stick to her agreement. Or else she’d make us wait until next October, until the actual birthday. I could hear the brittle catch in her breath and even the ticking of the clock over the dining-room fire. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come and fetch him.’

  I was surprised enough to hold the phone away for a moment and stare at the scattered holes of the mouthpiece. ‘Are you sure?’ I said, but she’d put the phone down.

  Adam had never doubted it, he told me, although I’d seen and smelled the anxiety in him these last few weeks.

  ‘What if it’s a trick?’ I said. ‘Like last time? What if she’s taunting us?’

  He shook his head at me, a glaze of sadness in his eyes.

  †

  Adam was hardly well enough to travel. I said he didn’t need to come with me, but he was determined. We bought first-class tickets in order for him to be more comfortable: two outward, three back. Stella had given us the information we needed to organize a visa for Seth. I still could not believe her co-operation.

  This time we said nothing about our mission to the community – except to Obadiah, Hannah and Isaac. We booked into the same hotel as before, but it had changed hands and the swimming-carp room that had once been so cool and gloomy green had been jazzed up with red wallpaper and pictures of hot air balloons. The bath had a Jacuzzi feature, which proved wonderfully soothing for Adam’s aching body.

  Once we were settle
d, I rang Stella again. ‘You can come and get Seth tomorrow,’ she said.

  I still did not trust her. ‘What if he doesn’t want to come?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll come.’ She gave a parched little laugh. ‘He hates school, gets himself bullied. I said, “How’d you like to go and stay with some relatives in America for a bit, and if you like it, you can finish school there?” He jumped at the idea. I phoned his school and said he was transferring.’

  ‘No trouble?’ I said.

  ‘The head tried to interfere of course, but there’s nothing they can do.’

  ‘So you’re happy about this?’ I asked, pulling a disbelieving face at Adam who was lying awkwardly back against a pile of scarlet fun-fur cushions, beside which his skin was ghastly lemon.

  ‘Tomorrow, five o’clock,’ she said.

  ‘What about Seth? You mean he’ll just drop everything and come?’

  ‘“Beam me up, Scotty,” were his exact words.’

  ‘But his friends, school . . .’

  ‘He’s miserable at school and I’m not making it any better.’

  ‘Oh, Stell,’ I said, in a rush of fondness.

  ‘Five o’clock,’ she repeated.

  ‘Is there any chance we could see Dodie?’ I dared to ask.

  She laughed and rang off. I put the receiver down and watched the sweat on it evaporate.

  ‘Surely she won’t let it be this easy?’ I said, but Adam only did his holy smile and closed his eyes.

  On Friday we went to the house. It was a dark afternoon, everything gloomy and dripping. I knocked and we waited, Adam leaning against the wall. Stella came to the door in her old red velvet dress. Her hair was clean and brushed. If it wasn’t for the age in her face she could’ve been a hippy chick again.

  ‘Mel,’ she said. ‘Adam, do come in. What years it’s been!’ I guessed she was projecting her voice for Seth’s benefit.

  I clasped her hand, leaned to kiss her cheek and felt her stiffen as my lips touched her skin. ‘Come on in,’ she said again. She didn’t acknowledge Adam. She led us into the dining room. On the table was a near-completed jigsaw puzzle, a view of Venice.