The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  DAVID F. FORD

  The Shape of Living

  I

  The trouble was that I could not now think of my marriage without being assaulted by a wave of unbearable emotions which I felt quite unable to handle. Rage that Kim should have been deceiving me on such a huge scale, coupled with horror at his disastrous involvement with Mrs. Mayfield, were followed by grief that my love had apparently been a grand illusion, coupled with a violent, unforgiving self-disgust that I should have made such a devastating mess of my personal life. I began to think I was going through emotions similar to those which a man must experience after castration: an overwhelming shame, an all-consuming humiliation and a marked loss of confidence and self-esteem.

  I was coping with the collapse of my career at Curtis, Towers by telling myself, with justification, that the disaster was survivable. But I had no idea how to cope with the collapse of my marriage. I found such a failure impossible to process mentally; whenever I started to think of Kim, my mind would shut down in less than twenty seconds. The memories of the final scene at my flat were unendurable.

  It was obvious that his final frantic attempt to regain his files meant that I had by no means heard the whole story of his past. It also seemed plain that Mrs. Mayfield’s willingness to help him conceal it must mean that the rock-bottom secret involved her in some way. But beyond that point my powers of reason and logic refused to work. I was still too traumatised by that scene when Mrs. Mayfield had called the shots and Kim had acquiesced in her attempt to brutalise me. How could he have stood by while she reduced me to a speechless, panic-stricken wreck? I accepted that the stabbing of Tucker was an accident; I accepted that the charade with the knife had seemed the best way to get Tucker to disclose where the files were; but I could not accept any behaviour which had permitted Mrs. Mayfield to scare me out of my mind.

  I could only conclude he had never genuinely loved me, and that conclusion, making a mockery of my judgement, my discernment, my perspicacity, my common sense, my good taste—indeed my whole grasp of reality—was devastating to me. I felt he had rewritten the past and trashed the happy memories we had shared.

  Nicholas tried to tell me that Kim had been in the opening stages of mental breakdown and so not responsible for his final actions at the flat, but I refused to listen. I still thought Kim was faking the breakdown to gain time to plan how he could best survive the disasters of Sophie’s death and Tucker’s wounding. Nicholas also said that Kim might well still love me but that Mrs. Mayfield had so subjected him to her will that by the end of the scene at the flat he had had no will of his own. However, I refused to listen to this theory either, since it failed to correspond to my knowledge of Kim as a tough customer, and when Nicholas tried to reason with me I cut him off.

  I could not cope with Nicholas by that stage. I could not now cope with the memory of him as an exorcist, unleashing the power of his personality to grapple with forces which terrified me. Or perhaps the truth was I was recoiling from the sexuality which was keeping Alice in thrall to him and which any woman who valued her sanity would do better to avoid. I distrusted men who had such power over women. I distrusted men who had power. I distrusted men. I was awash with distrust, battered and broken by it. I felt I would never be able to trust any man again.

  “How about me?” said Lewis on the day Tucker’s first postcard arrived from the Algarve. “You can’t possibly feel threatened where I’m concerned! After all, I’m just a dilapidated old tiger-thumper—what could be more reassuring than such a familiar and pitiable stereotype?”

  I laughed but was unconvinced. Lewis had told me that he wanted to visit Kim in hospital.

  II

  Nobody suggested that it was my moral duty to visit my husband. Nobody talked about my moral responsibilities as a wife. But Val kept in touch with the doctors at the hospital, Nicholas kept in touch with the senior chaplain there, and now Lewis was talking of keeping in touch with Kim himself. The more I tried to escape from the reality of my shattered marriage, the more my new companions seemed to be quietly drawing my attention back to the husband I was unable to confront.

  “The chaplain’s told Nicholas that Kim’s well enough now to receive visitors,” Lewis said, “so I thought I might drop in for a word or two. After all, I was the one who established the rapport with him at the Rectory.”

  I said nothing.

  “You remain our primary client,” said Lewis after a moment. “Never doubt that. But the trouble is that Kim is so inextricably bound up with your case that we can’t just ‘split him off,’ as a psychologist would say, and pretend he doesn’t exist. We have to try to integrate him into the healing process.”

  I still said nothing.

  “Kim has no family,” persisted Lewis, “and his friends are now giving him a wide berth because mental illness is the modern equivalent of leprosy, so I could be useful in alleviating his inevitable feelings of isolation. Besides, Mrs. Mayfield’s abandonment of him could create a dangerous vacuum. We don’t want more passing Powers taking up residence in his personality—they could be even worse than the ones introduced by Mrs. Mayfield.”

  But again I was unable to make sense of the foreign language. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to write him off?”

  “Christ never wrote anyone off. And he had a particularly good track record with the mentally ill.”

  “I’m not interested in Christ,” I said. “I don’t believe what you believe. I only believe in what I can perceive with the aid of my five senses.”

  Now it was Lewis’s turn to be silent. I sat there with him in the kitchen. I sat there with this clergyman in the main kitchen of the Rectory. I sat there in a situation which even as recently as a month ago would have seemed inconceivable, and every one of my five senses told me the scene was real, just as every cell of my rational brain told me I was being cared for with infinite patience. I looked over my shoulder; the door of the room was closed but it was as if someone had come in. As I covered my face with my hands I felt someone sit down beside me, but of course that was Lewis, moving around the table to offer me the box of Kleenex. Through my fingers I could see the box, see his square old hand, covered with age spots, but as the tears blurred my vision the hand began to seem younger, smoother, tougher, brimming with energy, vibrating with power, bursting with light.

  I wanted to touch it but I was too frightened of hallucinations and of breaking down beyond repair. I knew then how frightened I was, and what frightened me most of all was the chaos of a world which my five senses could not reduce to order.

  My unseen companion urged: “Start naming the names!” I heard him clearly, inside my head, so I knew he was present; I knew he had come through the closed door of the room; I knew he was separate from Lewis although at the same time mysteriously fused with him. “Start naming the names!” he urged, and I knew that if I could name the names I would reach my destination, whatever that was, just as I had reached St. Eadred’s vicarage after my long journey across the City through the dark.

  “Bevis Marks,” I whispered, “Houndsditch, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Lothbury, Aldermanbury, Cornhill, Threadneedle Street, Poultry, Cheapside, St. Martin’s Le Grand, Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Amen Court . . .”

  Someone said: “You’re going to be all right, Carter. You’re going to be all right,” and of course it was Lewis’s voice which I heard.

  But the person beyond the voice was not a dilapidated old tiger-thumper at all.

  III

  A long while later I said to Lewis: “I can’t stand there being no order. I’m so frightened of the chaos.”

  “It’s like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming-pool, isn’t it?” said Lewis casually. “The rules that apply to life on dry land no longer apply. You’re immersed in water, a substance which has the potential to drown you. If you’re not accustomed to swimming every instinct tells you to yell in terror and grab the rail at the side of the pool, but in fact this isn’t the way to deal with the prob
lem. You have to make the problem no longer a problem by embracing it—you have to let go of the rail and launch yourself out on the water because once you’re swimming, playing by the water-rules instead of the land-rules, you find the water’s stimulating, bracing, even welcoming. So by embracing the chaos instead of shunning it you’ve opened up a whole new dimension of reality.”

  I pushed this picture around in my mind for a moment but could only say: “I feel more like an earthquake victim than a swimmer. I feel I could cope better if only I had a patch of firm ground to stand on.”

  “What would the patch look like?”

  We started to speculate about what would make me feel more secure. Lewis suggested that I might be missing the comforting routine of the office but I said no, it was a relief not to be battered, blitzed and brutalised daily by the demands of a top job. He then suggested that I might be missing the comforting surroundings of my own home, but I just shuddered. Finally he suggested I might be missing the comforting presence of a husband, but at that point I just reached for the Kleenex again.

  However, before I could get as far as shedding a tear I heard myself say: “If only I could understand why I’ve wound up like this, the chaos wouldn’t seem so chaotic. Perhaps my ‘patch of firm ground’ is just a mental state where I can look at the chaos and see a pattern of meaning.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “You asked me questions the other day which I couldn’t answer. Why did I really marry Kim, how have I wound up camping out at a rectory—”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I can think of more questions. Why have I been so in thrall to the dream of becoming a high flyer? Why have I devoted myself to a fanatical lifestyle which is as strict as the fanatical lifestyle required by a fundamentalist religion? I feel as if I’ve been brainwashed about how I should live—about how much sex and money and power I should have in order to achieve salvation. I feel as if I’ve been conned all the way along the line.”

  “No salvation?”

  “Well, I’m hardly living happily ever after, am I, even though I’ve sweated and slaved for years to do everything this fundamentalist religion said I ought to do. So obviously my world-view needs changing, but how do I do it? And how do I recognise a world-view which will be liberating and life-giving instead of oppressive and soul-destroying?”

  “Those are certainly big questions. But you’ve made enormous progress just by asking them.”

  “So what are the answers?”

  “Your next task is undoubtedly to find out.”

  “You mean I have to answer all these questions myself?”

  “Yes, in the sense that it’s your spiritual journey, no one else’s, but no, in the sense that you won’t have to take this journey without guides. I suggest the first question you might try to answer is why you were prepared to make such sacrifices to be a high flyer—and if you’re going to take a look at your unconscious drives you might like to have a word with Robin.”

  Robin was the Healing Centre’s psychologist. I must have looked unenthusiastic for Lewis added quickly: “He’s good at giving people encouragement in this sort of situation, and as counselling’s a short-term process, designed to get people in trouble back on their feet quickly, you needn’t fear you’re heading for years of analysis.”

  I toyed with the idea of Robin. Finally I said: “I’m so desperate I’ll try anything. But will this mean I won’t get to talk to you any more?”

  “Of course it won’t mean that! Robin and I will complement each other. He’ll help you uncover the information you need about your past, and then you and I can discuss what meaning and value can be attached to it so that the present makes more sense.”

  “But if you’re going to cosy up to Kim, won’t there be a conflict of interests?”

  “I’m only going to visit Kim as a sympathetic acquaintance. I’m not going to counsel him.”

  I was unable to stop myself saying: “I wish you’d give up the whole idea.”

  “Don’t you at least want firsthand information about what sort of state he’s in? The Maudsley will report to you, of course, whenever you care to approach them, but you’re not their patient and their views are inevitably going to be coloured by what Kim tells them. So if you bear this in mind, doesn’t it seem a good idea to sanction a scout to make a reconnaissance?”

  With dread I had to concede that it did.

  IV

  Robin, the psychologist and counsellor at the Healing Centre, was a man of about forty-five, very tall and thin with horn-rimmed glasses, a campish air and a florid taste in ties. I was surprised to see he wore a wedding ring. It took me more than one session to realise that Robin himself did not find his marital status surprising at all.

  He was adept at giving the impression that he sympathised with me entirely on every emotional level I had ever imagined and quite a few that I hadn’t. Beneath this faintly nauseous professional caring he was sharp as a needle and nudged me skilfully into some interesting insights. These I appreciated, and gradually I came to respect him, despite his trick of talking in italics as if to stress the sincerity behind his professional manner.

  “Of course I’m not a Freudian,” he said after I had completed the trip through my past. “In my counselling role I’m more interested in the here and now instead of remote history, but sometimes connections pop up, as it were and simply demand to be noticed . . . like this business of your mother telling you not to cry when your father lost the cat. And like—gosh, now I’m really reaching for it!—the fact that your real name’s Catriona, a word beginning C-A-T. Am I being completely fruity-loops, as you would say, or is this rather more than just a curious little coincidence?”

  I heard myself say: “My father calls me Kitty. I was his Little Kitty,” I said, “and he lost me. He let go of my hand and he let my mother take me away and all my mother said afterwards was: ‘Big girls don’t cry.’ ”

  V

  “My mother never cried, never,” I said in a later session, “and after she remarried she used to say angrily to me: ‘You can’t possibly be unhappy, you’ve got so much to be thankful for!’ So I wasn’t allowed to be unhappy, it didn’t happen, and I never cried, never. But not crying didn’t mean I felt happy and after a while I got angry. I thought: I’ll show her! I’m going to escape into a world she only sees on telly and I’m going to drive the kind of car James Bond would drive and I’m going to live in a place like you only see pictures of in magazines and I’ll be so bloody rich I’ll be able to have ANYTHING I WANT, and I’ll show them all—I’ll show not only Mam and Ken and those two stupid girls but him up in Glasgow—I’ll show them all I can live very nicely without family, thanks very much, and then I’ll be really happy because I’ll never again have to pretend to be happy when I’m not.

  “And in the end, I said to myself, in the end I’m going to marry the exact opposite of him up in Glasgow, I’m going to marry a man who’s hugely rich because I know it’s only money that counts, and if him in Glasgow had had money he wouldn’t have spent his life in the betting-shop trying to win a fortune and he wouldn’t have let go of my hand and we’d all be together still and I’d be happy.

  “So it all seemed so clear, you see, it seemed so obvious that you had to be very successful in order to make lots of money, and having lots of money was the only way to control what happened to you, it was the only way to survive all the bloody mess everywhere, the mess generated by all the people who couldn’t make money. God, I can’t tell you what a mess it was when I was little, living from hand to mouth, never knowing when the bailiffs were coming—yes, it was chaos, chaos, and the chaos was vile, it was terrifying, it was absolute bloody hell.

  “But I found my way out of all that, didn’t I? I was saved by my brains—and by my determination never to wind up like my mother. Never, never, never, I said to myself was I going to marry a man like my father who would destroy my trust and rob me blind and lie to me over and over again! No way was I eve
r going to wind up trashed like that, I told myself, because once I had money I’d be safe, I’d be secure, I’d have everything under control, I’D BE HAPPY.

  “I had this life-plan. I loved my life-plan, loved it, and I followed it to the letter. I got the education, I got the professional qualification, I got the jobs, I got the red Porsche, I got the dream-home in the sky, I got— oh, so much money, I can’t tell you!—I got power, I got control, I got ORDER. No more chaos. And at the end of all that I even got the man of my dreams, so everything was perfect, perfect, perfect . . . although, of course, life was quite a strain, I was always working so hard, never having time for . . . well, for just living a normal life, just simply being. I mean, there was really no time for anything except achieving my goals on schedule and working my life into a statement which said to my parents: ‘Fuck you for not loving me properly, fuck you for all the mess which made me miserable . . .’ It was almost like an act of revenge. Well, I suppose it was an act of revenge . . . But of course it was also the road to happiness, and I wanted happiness, lots of it, it was owing to me.

  “Sometimes I did wonder if I was happy. Sometimes when the City bastards were bloody to me, sometimes when all the hard work seemed too much to bear. But I couldn’t be unhappy, could I? My life-plan was guaranteed to bring me happiness. The guarantee was cast-iron, blue-chip, fail-safe. I was so rich and so successful—how could I be other than happy? As my mother would have said, I had so much to be thankful for, and big girls don’t cry.

  “But sometimes I think I wanted to cry. Sometimes when it all seemed more of a strain than I could bear . . . But I never did cry, except when my last lover left me. That was so painful that I couldn’t help crying, but I only cried for less than a minute and after that I filed the memory away, I wiped it, it was as if it had never happened. I soon put my life in order again, believe me. I always had everything so absolutely under control, and that’s how I succeeded in winding up with the perfect job, the perfect home and the perfect husband.”