Harry nodded, no longer able to speak. Swallowing with difficulty he embarked on a series of rapid blinks.
The bell rang to announce Val’s arrival, and as I opened the front door I heard, far away in the distance, the steady wail of the ambulance as it sped towards us along London Wall.
II
By the time Lewis came home Nicholas and Harry were at the hospital while I was just having a very belated lunch. I had cooked myself a deep-fried banana sandwich and spooned a layer of rum raisin ice cream on top. I had a craving for at least three thousand of the worst kind of calories. I supposed it was all part of the aftermath of the trauma.
“How was Rosalind?” Lewis demanded, moving into the kitchen and heading for the percolator.
“Never mind Rosalind. She’s alive and well and HIV-negative in Surrey. But just wait till I tell you about …” I rattled on at top speed, pausing only to nibble at the fried mess on my plate. The strange thing was that when I tried to eat this hi-cal dream I found it revolting. Perhaps I was even more traumatised than I’d imagined.
Meanwhile Lewis had extracted a spoon from the cutlery drawer and was sitting down with his coffee in front of the ice-cream tub which I had been too distracted to replace in the refrigerator.
Breaking off in the middle of my narrative I said severely: “Don’t keep chiselling away at that ice cream unless you intend to finish the tub! It’s not hygienic to keep having scoops with a spoon that’s been in your mouth.” Lewis was slobbish about that kind of thing, but the fact that I was bothering to waste time being picky about it was yet another indication of my pulped nerves.
“I’m finishing the tub,” he said equably. “Your news is triggering a bout of nervous gluttony. Go on.”
I resumed my narrative. Confiding in him was cathartic. By the time I reached the end I was feeling better but I still couldn’t face the fried banana sandwich. I got up and shoved it in the swing-bin.
“Poor little Alice,” said Lewis. “What a hellish thing to happen to you! I’m very sorry indeed to hear that Nicholas was stupid enough to put you through such an ordeal.”
I was very surprised and more than a little shocked. “But what else could he have done? He had to have a witness, and it was hardly his fault that Francie went ballistic!”
“It was hardly his fault you didn’t both wind up dead! My dear, it’s time for you to hear the unvarnished truth: the whole scene was a disaster from beginning to end.”
III
“I’ve no wish to be too severe in criticising Nicholas,” said Lewis, “because it’s obvious he’s very debilitated at present, but in order to help you come to terms with all this, I feel you should be told where he went wrong.”
I sat down abruptly again at the kitchen table.
“The first mistake he made,” pursued Lewis, “was not to summon help straight away. He should have shown her into his study, made the excuse that he had to go to the lavatory and then called Val from the phone in the bedsit. He should also have sent you down to the hell-hole and told you to lock yourself in.”
“But he needed a witness!”
“He needed you to survive! Francie wasn’t just a sad woman with a crush on Nicholas, Alice. Not by this time.”
“But there was no way of telling straight away that she was dangerous!”
“No way for you, perhaps; you lacked the experience to detect the danger, but Nicholas had already decided she was psychotic and we were both convinced she was suffering from a severe demonic infestation. It was seriously wrong that he allowed you to be present at the meeting.”
“Perhaps he thought he needed my support—as he did at Communion this morning—and with Rosalind later—”
“However he justified himself he was wrong. Now let me tell you what he should have done next. After dispatching you to the hell-hole and calling Val he should have created a further diversion while he waited for help to arrive—he could have said he had to make another phone call, or if he wanted to keep Francie occupied he could even have suggested she made tea for them both. If she was coherent on arrival she might have been keen to perform such a cosy little domestic task which would have implied they were on intimate terms. But the most important thing he had to do was to avoid all serious conversation with her about why she was at the Rectory—he should have pre-empted the entire scene which actually took place.”
“But that would have been so difficult! She was mad as a hatter!”
“All the more reason not to engage with her without the right medical support. However, since he did engage with her, let me tell you this: he should never have let her get to the point where she was advancing on you with a butcher’s knife. He should have intervened long before with the deliverance rite, and if he’d done so he might have managed to bind the demons with the minimum of disruption.”
“But you don’t understand!” I persisted desperately. “Once she started talking about her brilliant scheme we had to know what she’d done to Harry!”
“Of course. The demons were luring you on. But all that could have waited until later. Nicholas should have put the welfare of his patient before his rampant curiosity.”
Much disturbed by the rerun of the trauma from such a dark perspective I finally marched to the dresser and poured myself a slug of brandy. It was quite the wrong time of day for drinking but I no longer cared. I was too rattled. And I’d had enough of sweet tea.
I heard Lewis say: “I apologise for upsetting you,” and making a big effort I managed to reply: “No, it’s better to face the truth.” Then after a swig from my glass I said: “Lewis, what was actually going on with Francie? Nicholas did try to explain but he was very confusing and kept talking about language and symbols and archetypes until finally he admitted he wasn’t sure of anything except that he was shell-shocked.”
“That was his final mistake,” said Lewis tartly. “Priests should save their doubts and their theological hair-splitting for their spiritual directors. Lay people want certainties.”
“Do they?”
“Of course—it’s human nature! When you consult a specialist in any field, you don’t want to hear confused, agonised waffling! You want him to display confidence and lay the facts on the line!”
“But Nicholas seemed to be confident that in this case the facts were full of mystery and ambiguity!”
“The trouble with even the most intelligent liberals,” said Lewis kindly but firmly, “is that they always have difficulty in calling a spade a spade. Now sit down with that brandy, my dear, and I’ll tell you exactly what was wrong with Francie Parker …”
IV
“The one fact beyond dispute,” said Lewis, “is that Francie was ill. Her illness was physical, mental and spiritual. (That’s the dimension doctors tend to overlook.) We know she was physically ill because in the end she had a seizure and had to be hospitalised; her brain, which is part of her physical body, suddenly went hay-wire and various systems shut down. We know she was mentally ill because not only did she drift farther and farther from what is obviously reality but because in the end she succumbed to anti-social, violent behaviour which was deeply uncharacteristic. But we know too that in addition to the sickness which was afflicting her mind and body, she was spiritually ill. Indeed in my opinion the spiritual sickness was the primary illness, the one that generated the others.
“What was this spiritual illness all about? Let me explain. Francie had been successfully facing outwards—by which I mean she had learnt how to serve God by trying to help others in her own special way, the way to which she was uniquely suited, and this service made her feel happy and fulfilled. But gradually this outward-looking, God-centred service broke down and she became inward-looking and self-centred until the concept of ‘service’ was lost and her life at the Healing Centre became merely a way of fuelling the demands of her ego. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this, I may add. We’re all to some extent consumed by self-centredness, obsessed by our own egos. It’s the human condition. In r
eligious language it’s called ‘original sin.’ But unfortunately it doesn’t make us happy and it doesn’t lead to lasting fulfilment.
“If God created us to find happiness in loving and serving others, happiness is not to be found in loving and serving the self to the exclusion of all others. There are two sorts of selves: the selfish self and the unselfish self. Self-centredness means pandering to the selfish self. God-centredness means using the unselfish self, the self that God created, to do what God created us to do—and in losing your selfish self you find your real true self. Got it? Well, never mind if you haven’t. All you need to know is that the more self-centred and alienated from God you are, the more sick you become. We’re all sick to some degree or other because each one of us is to some degree cut off from God. That’s the human condition: no one’s perfect so no one’s a hundred per cent fit. There’s a bit of today’s Francie in all of us.
“Now, here’s another fact for you to digest and one which is very relevant to Francie’s illness. Human beings need some kind of God in order to feel whole, and if they lose touch with THE God, the right God, they can’t rest until they’ve put something else in his place and elevated it into a false god. The spiritual vacuum always has to be filled. It’s the way of the world. It’s another part of the human condition. In religious language it’s called ‘the sin of idolatry.’ In the language of psychology it’s called—no, never mind, let’s keep this simple.
“Well, anything can be a false god—money, power, politics, football, science, painting, fashion, fame, communism, pornography, food, drink, sex, atheism—you name it. The pattern is that the person alienated from God sets the false god up on a pedestal in his mind and worships it with increasing intensity and decreasing fulfilment until contact is quite lost with the real world. One thinks at once, of course, of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, but in fact this spiritual sickness is very common and not usually destructive on the global scale.
“Now, Francie’s false god, specially selected by her for unstinted worship and adoration, was Nicholas. She worshipped and adored him until all she could think of was not serving God and fulfilling her true self but serving her selfish self by gaining, at no matter what cost, the object of her desire. This was unhealthy. This was dis-eased. This was self-destructive, destructive of the true self. But why did all this happen? Francie had earlier got it right—how did things then go so wrong? What was the genesis of this spiritual sickness which finally infected her mind and body and overwhelmed her?
“Well, we know that Francie’s marriage had become increasingly unhappy, even though her husband wasn’t a wife-beater. Harry was often away; he seems to have treated her as some sort of domestic convenience and he showed no interest in or understanding of the rewarding life she’d so enterprisingly carved out for herself at the Centre. If he did genuinely love her, he had a pretty odd way of showing it. (Do we, I wonder, hear echoes of the Darrows’ unhealthy marriage at this point?) In addition Francie was beginning to feel redundant as a mother because her children were not only away for most of the year but also growing up, keen to cut loose from the maternal apron-strings. We suspect she’s close to none of the other members of her family, whoever they are, because apart from her demanding, semi-invalid mother in Kent, she never mentions them. She doesn’t mention her friends outside the Centre either. And why? Because she doesn’t have any—apart from Rosalind, who we now know isn’t her friend at all. Perhaps Francie’s made the mistake of dropping her old friends to focus entirely on the Centre—and at the centre of the Centre (forgive the pun) is Nicholas, who she increasingly came to believe could give her all the love which is so patently lacking elsewhere.
“Francie was starved of love. That was the rock-bottom, unvarnished truth. That was the genesis of this illness. When Christ commanded his disciples to love one another he knew what he was talking about. Without love we get sick and wither; without love we die. Ask the doctors and psychiatrists who have dealt with unloved, abandoned people. Ask the social workers who deal with the underclass, the urban low-life. Ask the chaplains who work in prisons and mental hospitals. If people feel they’re unlovable and isolated they’re prey to all kinds of illness, mental and physical. Each human being is a single entity, you see; the spiritual can’t be divorced from the physical and mental and vice versa. It’s all one … You understand that, don’t you, Alice?”
I said I did.
“Then let’s finally consider today’s most serious stage of Francie’s illness. Until today Francie’s physical health seems to have held up, but as we know, the spiritual sickness has been triggering mental illness for some time. She’d become neurotically fixated on Nicholas, and the more ill she became mentally the more vulnerable she was to a far more serious spiritual illness. In fact the spiritual and mental illnesses seem to have interacted on each other to permit the sickness which today spiralled out of control.
“What happened today is obvious: Francie was being driven by a force which made her both evil and violent. Now, let’s switch languages for a moment and look at things from a medical angle. Most mentally ill people, contrary to misinformed popular belief, are neither evil nor violent, and the small minority who want to go around killing people are usually either suffering from a fairly rare type of schizophrenia or else they’re psychopaths—sociopaths, as they’re called nowadays. Sociopaths have a personality disorder. If the violent behaviour is schizophrenic and triggered by a chemical imbalance in the brain it can be treated by drugs, although drug therapy isn’t always successful and there can be problems with side-effects. If the violence is sociopathic, triggered by a personality disorder, then there’s a problem because sociopaths are notoriously difficult to treat. Sometimes psychotherapy helps. But not always.
“Now, Francie wasn’t in either of those categories. She wasn’t a sociopath, someone who can’t empathise with other people and in consequence has no qualms about hurting them, and in my opinion she wasn’t a schizophrenic either. There’s supposed to be no such thing as a typical schizophrenic, but there are certain symptoms which can encourage a diagnosis of schizophrenia to be made, and before her breakdown today I didn’t see any of them. What I did see was evidence of her neurotic fixation, but this type of disorder wouldn’t normally produce a murderous outburst out of the blue. What should have happened to Francie, if one bears in mind her illness over the last few months, was a nervous breakdown. What did happen was this extremely rabid psychosis—and it’s not without interest, let me add, that the murderous assault was in the end directed not at you, although she’d sensed you were her rival, but at Nicholas, the object of her desire. Obsessed people do occasionally kill the love-object, but in all the cases I’ve read about there was a build-up beforehand of violent threats. It seems to me, from your account of the scene, that when Francie was being Francie it was you she was gunning for, but when she turned on Nicholas at the end something else was standing in her place.
“So what’s the explanation? It seems abundantly clear to me that the Devil and his cohorts used the mental and spiritual illnesses which were present in her to try to destroy Nicholas and his ministry. (You’ll note that I make no namby-pamby, mealy-mouthed, liberal apology for using the robust, old-fashioned religious language to describe this all too commonplace reality: the attempts by the forces of darkness to blot out the powers of light.) But having said all that, I must also state unequivocally that Francie wasn’t possessed by the Devil. If this had been the case there would have been a greater variety of bizarre symptoms, much more distress over a long period of time and an acute awareness by Francie herself that her personality was being eroded. The hallmark of this case was that Francie was convinced throughout that there was nothing wrong—the demons were invisible to her because they were embedded in the mental and spiritual illness.
“So my final diagnosis is that she was not possessed by the Devil but infested by his cohorts, the demons. The diagnosis is confirmed by the fact that when Nicholas at last got his act
together and called them out, they responded—and now they’ve been dispatched. The result is that Francie will still have her obsession with Nicholas but she’ll no longer be crashing around in a psychotic frenzy. She’ll need a lot of therapy for the obsession, and a lot of love—loving care, loving prayer, loving support—to restore her spiritual health, but she’ll recover. Sadly, the prognosis for a paranoid schizophrenic or a sociopath wouldn’t be half so positive.”
By this time I was feeling much more enlightened but the enlightenment was producing new questions.
“Nicholas said something about how exorcists deal directly with the unconscious mind when they name the demons. Would you agree with that, or—”
“Oh yes, yes, yes, I can talk the language of psychology just as well as he can, but the old-fashioned religious language is more graphic, more powerful, more evocative of the life and death struggles of spiritual illness! Of course one can dress up the phenomenon of deliverance in the latest flavour-of-the-month scientific language, but we live in the age of the sound-bite and the most effective sound-bite here is EVIL WAS PRESENT BUT WAS CAST OUT!”
“Okay, but …” Further questions cascaded through my mind as the brandy cranked up my brain. “Could I get infested like that if I developed an obsession?” I demanded. “Is it possible the demons only pretended to go away and are still present in Francie? Or if they’ve gone, could they come back and reinfest her? And what happens if she’s not normal when she comes out of the coma? What happens if the doctors at the hospital think demonic infestation is a fiction and that deliverance is rubbish? And how is poor Harry ever going to understand anything that’s happened?”
“Right,” said Lewis efficiently, not in the least disconcerted and even appearing to relish rolling out the next bunch of certainties, “here come the answers. Number one: you could indeed get infested, if you were caught in a similar spiral of mental and spiritual illness, but rest assured that it’s not likely unless you’ve been mixed up with the occult. If you stick to a healthy spiritual path you’ll be in no danger. (And remember: no demon can withstand the power of Christ.) Francie was unlucky in that she was the ideal tool for the Devil to use in his efforts to liquidate Nicholas—but on the other hand we may yet find she’s been dabbling with an Ouija board; unhappy people yearning for hope of a better future regularly get mixed up with occult practices.
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