The Heartbreaker

by Susan Howatch

  “I could do injections,” I say, but I know I can’t. I can’t do any of those things I did in the Life, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t . . .

  I’m panicking. I know there’s more to sex than just getting it up and sticking it in, but I panic anyway. That’s what happens when your brain goes on the breakdown blink. It’s all anxiety, fear and despair.

  “How can you take this so calmly?” I yell at Susanne, but she wipes the panic off the map by shrieking: “Because I know life can be a bloody sight worse!” In a normal voice she adds firmly: “Now think, pinhead, think. We’ve got our own home, all paid for, we’ve got enough to eat and we don’t have to have sex with smelly, revolting people in order to make a living. We’re the luckiest ex-hookers in London! So why don’t you stop whingeing and start being grateful for this fantastic new life we’ve got?”

  I make a mental note to talk to Lewis about this insight. Trust Susanne to cut through all the crap and see the situation as it really is.

  Some time before Carta’s Great Visit, Lewis starts turning up at the house twice a week and staying for fifty minutes. Susanne says this is like a therapist’s appointment where an hour is set aside but five minutes is allocated at each end for arriving and departing. He says straight away at the start of this routine that we don’t have to make conversation. He likes silence, feels at ease with it, and if I can’t talk he won’t mind. So at first we just loaf around listening to music and nothing much gets said. He makes it clear I don’t have to see him, but I always do. He’s my link with the real world which I hope to get back to one day. And soon I find out he knows a lot about music. He brings me little pieces of Bach’s cantatas on tape like a parent-bird producing food for the oversized fledgeling who can’t bring himself to leave the nest.

  After a while I find I’m talking about my nest, the house. I explain that the furniture’s just a load of flatpack specials to tide us over till we can choose something better. I tell him how much I liked fixing up the house before I got ill, and how depressed I feel because I can’t face doing anything now. I even tell him that when I was a kid I used to design houses which I planned to build when I grew up. Of course I wouldn’t want to be an architect now because I’d probably wind up having to design things like offices, but I still like the idea of designing and building a house—or a boat. I loved my father’s boat. I loved the way every inch of precious space was used so creatively. I do mention to Lewis how crazy my father was about his boat, but at this point—and it’s before Carta’s Great Visit—I don’t want to talk about my family so I quickly change the subject back to music.

  It occurs to me early on during my sessions with Lewis that he’s the same age as my father would have been if he’d lived. They were both born in 1921, over seventy years ago. I’m also reminded how like my father Lewis sounds. That old-fashioned public-school accent’s identical and so’s the timbre of his voice.

  Every time Lewis visits me we take great care to avoid all possibility of physical contact. The thought of even an accidental brush with a male body reminds me of the Life and I can’t bear it, I can’t—if I think of what I allowed those blokes to do to me all that time I’ll go mad, I’ll cut myself and cut myself, I’ll slice off my equipment, I’ll—

  Mental. I know I’m being mental, and that means I’m not so bad, doesn’t it? If I was really ill I wouldn’t know how mental I was. So I can tell myself it’s no big deal, it’s just a breakdown and I’ll get better. I haven’t got a mental illness where the prognosis is poor.

  But sometimes it feels as if I have. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get better. Sometimes—

  “You’ll get better,” says Lewis on one of his early visits. When he was young he was a chaplain at a mental hospital so he knows about mental illness. It doesn’t faze him. I don’t faze him, even at our first session when I say straight out: “I don’t want to talk about religion.” I’m afraid he might go all fundamentalist on me and spout stuff about the blood of the Lamb, but as soon as the sentence is out of my mouth I panic. Supposing Lewis decides I’m not worth visiting? Supposing the St. Benet’s team loses interest? Supposing my one link with Carta gets wiped? (Can’t ask her to visit when I’m such a mess.)

  But Lewis puts everything right. He says: “We don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. I haven’t come here to dictate to you. I’m here to serve. That means listening when you want to talk, responding when you require a response and praying with you if you should wish me to do so. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a therapist, I’m a priest.”

  I’m reassured. I don’t want a doctor and I don’t want a therapist. I’m too scared they’ll say I’m mad and need to be locked up so that my head can be rearranged and the real me destroyed. But Lewis is non-threatening. And beyond Lewis, as I gradually realise, is The Bloke, a positive force battling with the negative forces which are keeping me sick.

  “I don’t believe in dogma,” I say to Lewis as I try to explain how negative I feel about religion. “I just believe in The Bloke because he actually lived and made a difference.”

  Lewis says that maybe I’m a mystic. They tend to sit lightly to doctrine, he says, and illustrate that there are all sorts of ways to be religious. A great religion, he says, is never a monolith but a bunch of diverse groups catering for different psychological temperaments. Christianity caters well for mystics, although too often people in the West behave as if mysticism’s only available in Eastern religions. Mysticism, I learn, means a direct knowledge of God—or a direct experience of The Bloke—or it can mean an experience, impossible to describe concisely, of the splendour of the world despite all the suffering, a sense of the overarching unity of all things. Anyone can have a mystical experience, says Lewis, even people who pride themselves on their rational, analytical minds (I think of Carta) but those more inclined to approach religion as mystics are less likely to suppress their mystical experiences and are more drawn to the challenge of exploring them.

  “If mystics can tune in without any help from the Church,” I say, “why bother with the Church at all?”

  “Good question!” says Lewis approvingly as if I’d displayed a dazzling intelligence instead of a basic curiosity. “And the answer is we need the Church as a framework to stop us getting so pleased with ourselves that we go over the top into egomania and start thinking we ourselves are God. That attitude’s characteristic of religious corruption, and the dangers of corrupt religion, as Mr. Asherton showed us, are very great.”

  I shudder at the memory of Asherton, but to my surprise I feel better after this conversation. I feel I’ve got a new interest, particularly when Lewis (who’s obviously a mystic himself ) begins to talk of meditation. In a burst of optimism I even decide I’m well enough not to make Carta recoil in horror, and when I tell Lewis I want to see her he reports back that by coincidence she has a pressing reason for wanting to see me. He discloses no details on the phone, but it turns out she wants to deliver Colin’s letter offering me a job.

  Carta creams in for Her Great Visit, the goddess from another dimension. I’m pleased to see her because I know then she really cares about what’s been happening to me, but at first the scene goes badly wrong because I wind up crying in front of her. Pathetic! But she was sweet and hugged me. I loathe that word “sweet” but that’s what she was—and shit, I never even got an erection! Hugged by a goddess and my equipment stays deader than chopped wood! But here’s the truly amazing part— I mean, more amazing than the hug: despite the water-fairy stuff, she even . . . no, skip that. No wait a minute, I’ll say it. She even—yes, I know this sounds like a fantasy, but I swear it’s true—she even said she loved me. Of course she doesn’t really, how could she, but she cared enough to want me to believe she does, and that’s almost as good. I wanted to shout: “I LOVE YOU TOO!” but of course I couldn’t, it would have turned her off, she’d never have come near me again.

  Anyway, the bottom line was that she was sweet and she cared—and yes
, I know that sounds sick-making but, as I now realise, it’s a miracle. It led directly to the next miracle: I began to talk about my family at last, and this marked the beginning of my big effort to get sorted.

  So Carta’s alongside me again. The journey continues. But surely she herself has “come home” now? If coming home to your true self means being set free to realise your full potential, what can possibly be restricting her freedom now she’s finally come to terms with the past? Can’t imagine, she seems so together—together enough to make her Great Visit, although I don’t want to see her again until I’m sure I won’t cry in her presence.

  Meanwhile Nicholas has been to see me, and I appreciate this as I know how busy he is, but I’m happy so long as I have Lewis. As the result of the Great Visit, Lewis is developing a plan that’ll evict Hugo from that crevice in my mind which he’s occupied for so long. It’s all part of my rehab, part of ensuring that I’m no longer just an unintegrated mess, lying, role-playing and brutalising myself.

  I think about rehab. This, says Lewis, is The Bloke’s primary job— The Bloke’s not only a symbol of integration but he is integration, the force working to make everything whole in a world of broken fragments. God’s fighting away in the chaos to bring his creation under control, says Lewis, and The Bloke is God’s way of manifesting himself to show us he’s not just sitting on his backside drinking Australian lager (as I’ve suggested) while the work-in-progress is such an unfinished junk-heap.

  Eventually everything will be made good, says Lewis, even the dark vile bits, but meanwhile (as I’ve already worked out) it’s important to line yourself up with The Bloke, the integrating force, so that you can give him a helping hand instead of being just a waste of space and/or a dark vile bit. That’s where prayer and meditation come in. You’ve got to be lined up right with the force, you’ve got to journey inwards to find the right position, you’ve got to find the centre of yourself—your real self—because that’s where God exists as a spark, and then once you’re hooked up to that spark within, says Lewis, you can connect with the God without—you can turn outwards to face the world and live dynamically as part of the integrating force: a worker on the rehab job, a soldier on the Operation Redemption front, a contributor to the make-it-all-come-right side of God’s huge creative splurge.

  That’s why it’s so important to be your true self. How can you find the centre of yourself if you’re busy being someone else? And even if you’re trying to be your true self, how can you make progress if your mind’s littered with a series of roadblocks? No, you’ve got to get yourself sorted— I’ve got to get myself sorted—which is why I’ve agreed to tackle Hugo again even though the prospect makes me shit-scared.

  Supposing Hugo gets murderous? Supposing he decides to drive me totally insane? Supposing he makes me top myself?

  I want to bang my head against the wall.

  Lewis calms me down. He says I can forget all the blood and thunder because we’re just not moving into an adversarial situation. We have to put Hugo in the right frame of mind by befriending him. That’s not going to be easy because Hugo’s so angry, but it’s hard to stay angry for ever, particularly if one’s approached with sympathy and respect.

  Lewis says we should start by reviewing the happy memories of the past, so slowly I pluck them out and hold them up to Hugo for inspection. Hugo likes this. He’s surprised, of course, and suspicious too but he soon gets interested. In the end he doesn’t even mind when I recall the childhood memories which aren’t so good, because Lewis helps me set these in a friendly context. So when I recall Hugo clobbering me in the nursery for overworking his fire engine, Hugo refusing to let me ride his new bike, Hugo yelling at me when I forgot to feed his guinea pig, Lewis and I take a moment to reflect that possessiveness about toys is common, little kids shouldn’t mess with bikes that are too big for them, failing to feed guinea pigs is unacceptably absent-minded. Hugo finds these judgements very fair. “In other words,” I say to him, “you could be a bruiser sometimes but it wasn’t often and you were never a bruiser without provocation.” And he finds this a reasonable judgement. As I say to Lewis, Hugo was basically a good bloke and the older he got the nicer he was to me. We usually played together without fighting, although that was probably because I’d discovered that the way to have a quiet life was always to let him take the lead. But then he was older and knew how.

  Every time Lewis and I review memories of Hugo we pray for him. We offer the memories to God, all of them, good and not so good, and we say thanks for Hugo’s life, he counted, he made a difference, the pattern he made on those early years of mine was important. I tell Lewis I’m glad I know what it was like to have a brother, and he says he envies me. He never had one. He tells me he had a weird childhood and after misbehaving on the grand scale he wound up living in a Church of England monastery run by his great-uncle. I get the impression Lewis was a teenage tearaway before the word “teenager” was invented.

  “But Great-Uncle Cuthbert saved me,” says Lewis nostalgically. “Great-Uncle Cuthbert was a monastic masterpiece.”

  I’m interested in this Cuthbert bloke, but right now . . .

  Right now I can only think of Hugo.

  We’re like archaeologists uncovering a valuable artefact. We have to expose it little by little, brushing away the earth so carefully that nothing gets damaged. And Hugo’s now emerging steadily, the Hugo who was the best of brothers, generous-natured, exuberant, fun. I used to patter along in his wake, not so clever, not so sporty, paler, more serious, more introverted. “Why can’t you be more like Hugo?” my mother would exclaim when I didn’t want to go to the neighbourhood kiddie-parties, but my father would say: “Let him be. Not everyone likes to be sociable.” My mother hated any dig he made about being sociable. “Just because you’re so dull, you can’t see why anyone should want to have a good time!” she’d cry, but he’d never argue with her, he’d just go into his study and close the door.

  “It sounds as if your parents weren’t so happy even before Hugo died,” says Lewis one day, but at once I tell him how despite the age difference they were famous for being happily married.

  “He was a lot older,” I add. “He’d been married before but his first wife was an invalid and they had no children. When she died he was chased by hordes of women, Granny said, because he was a doctor and good-looking and as the result of the invalid wife and the busy medical practice he had a sort of harassed, exhausted air which made women long to spoil him rotten. He didn’t mean to break hearts, Granny said, but he couldn’t seem to work out how not to. He was basically just a quiet, shy type.”

  “And how did your mother capture this lethal blushing violet?”

  “She was the bright extrovert who had the chutzpah to go after what she wanted and get it.”

  “Did she enjoy sailing?”

  “No, but Hugo and I loved it.”

  “Who was the better sailor?”

  “I was,” I say without hesitation. “Hugo preferred sports that involved a ball, so I became the sailor and the swimmer. That way there was no competition.”

  “Your talent for sailing must have created a strong bond with your father.”

  “Yes, it did. He and I liked the parts of sailing which Hugo never seemed to notice.”

  This intrigues Lewis. “Such as?”

  “The beauty of the seascapes. The feeling of being at one with nature . . . Dad talked about it once to me when we were sailing without Hugo—we were sailing down the Solent towards the Needles . . . You know the Needles, those spectacular cliffs at one end of the Isle of Wight?”

  “I’ve seen them, yes.”

  “They were looking wonderful that day. The weather was very fine, but there was a stiff breeze so we were sailing in optimum conditions, and everywhere seemed to me so beautiful. I said to Dad: ‘This is paradise—I’m so happy!’ and when he smiled at me and said: ‘So am I!’ everything was perfect, perfect, perfect . . . I remember that day because it was the l
ast happy time I had with any member of my family. Hugo was diagnosed two days later. That was why he hadn’t come sailing with us. He was already ill.”

  Lewis offered no comment, but I could feel the strength of his sympathy.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” I hear myself say, “something extraordinary. The last time I went sailing with Richard Slaney, we sailed along that same stretch of water under identical conditions, and suddenly, just for a second, I looked at Richard and saw my father looking back—and that was so unexpected because usually the person Richard reminded me of was Hugo.”

  “Ah!” says Lewis as if I’ve suddenly pulled a white rabbit out of a hat, and I see I’ve dealt him a big surprise.

  “We all realised Richard was special for you,” explains Lewis, “but we all fell into the trap of thinking you saw him as a father-figure. Can you tell me why he reminded you of Hugo?”

  This was easy. “Richard was clever and fun with lots of style,” I say, “and so was Hugo. They didn’t look alike and Hugo certainly wasn’t gay, but there was still a resemblance in personality.” I pause to remember them both before adding: “I didn’t see the resemblance straight away. At first Richard was just another client. But when we were on his boat together the resemblance to Hugo hit me between the eyes—it was like having the old Hugo back again.”

  “Was that when you started to hanker for the world you’d left behind?”

  “Maybe.” I try to see the truth but I feel as if I’m standing in sunlight while peering back into a fog. “Even before I met Richard,” I say, “I used to drive down to Surrey and coast around the area where I used to live, so I suppose I was like an emigrant who gets homesick, but I never seriously thought of going back. I couldn’t imagine living without Elizabeth.”