The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “I can imagine her turning to someone else if the marriage became unendurable, but I believe if this had happened the marriage would have ended. Sophie was high-principled; she wouldn’t have wanted to live a double life. I know I can’t be sure I’m right about this, but all I can say is that when I heard the story about the love-letters my reaction was: no, I don’t believe that.

  “But if there were no secret love-letters, what was in that mysterious brown envelope? The divorce file isn’t really important, is it, because Sophie’s lawyers have copies of the letters there and Kim only took the file because he couldn’t bear to miss the opportunity to find out what she’d said, but that brown envelope . . . well, I suppose we’ll never know what was in it, not now, because even if he tells you, how do you know whether to believe him? I think your situation’s a nightmare, Carter, and if I were in your shoes I couldn’t handle it, couldn’t cope with a serial liar—I’d go mad with never knowing where I stood and the marriage would be absolutely unworkable.

  “But having said all that . . . Well, I can’t help believing Kim really does love you. I remember how he looked at you on the night of the dinner-party—and incidentally, he was very sweet to me then, you know. He needn’t have been but he was. And maybe he is some sort of victim— maybe his parents really were ghastly and he was justified in hating them. I hated my mother for years before I visited her last summer and discovered she wasn’t an ogress after all but just a middle-aged housewife who hit the sherry too hard when faced with the child she’d abandoned all those years ago . . . I was just so lucky to have that great-aunt who brought me up, just as Kim was so lucky in the end to get that British stepfather who helped him do well. I turned out pretty weird after that upbringing but even so I think I’m finally getting my act together. So maybe Kim too turned out weird in lots of ways—and maybe you were the person enabling him to get his act together, just as Nicholas was the one who enabled me to change my life.

  “It’s awful not knowing where the truth lies, isn’t it? It seems to me that even if the marriage can’t be saved you’ve still got to find out the truth—not just to stop yourself going mad but to be fair to Kim. How strange—I started out by seeing him as a villain, and yet now I seem to have ended up on his side. I hope Mrs. Mayfield’s not brainwashing me long-distance! Of course I feel angry with him for putting you through such hell, but at the same time . . . well, I did like him when I met him. In fact to be absolutely honest, I thought he was rather super . . .”

  XI

  I went downstairs to see if Nicholas had retired to the Rector’s flat, but he was still in his study on the ground floor. He was writing a letter by hand. It seemed odd to see the pen between his fingers when the computer lurked behind him, but Alice had told me he often replied by hand to correspondents who sought spiritual advice.

  “I’m still being a workaholic, aren’t I?” he said guiltily when I appeared in the doorway, and immediately capped the pen.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” I hovered uncertainly on the threshold. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I froze you out earlier. I’m truly grateful for all your help.”

  He seemed relieved by these statements. After inviting me to sit down he said: “I know I haven’t been much use lately.”

  “Well, you could certainly be of use now.” I posed to him the questions I had asked Alice. “I’ve got to know what you think,” I said, “or if you can’t tell me what you think, I need some hints and suggestions about how I can get my head together. I can’t just go on guessing in the dark when my marital future’s on the line.”

  He seemed to find this opinion reasonable. “If you’re ready to listen,” he replied willingly enough, “I’m ready to talk. The only problem is that you may not be able to hear what I have to say—in which case we’ll fail to connect and I’ll still be no use to you.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” I said, and privately vowed to suppress my current annoyance with him in order to benefit from his professional experience.

  XII

  “You ask if the marriage is still viable,” said Nicholas, “and I think it could be—provided, of course, that Kim levels with you about the past and disassociates himself from Mrs. Mayfield.

  “But let me just make my position clear about divorce. As a priest I certainly believe that life-long marriage is the ideal to aim for, but I believe too that we’re imperfect people living in an imperfect world and our inevitable failures should be recognised instead of denied. If a marriage is dead, I think it’s better to face that fact and seek a divorce. There are Christians who would disagree with me about this, but I would point out to them that Jesus’ teaching on divorce isn’t so clear-cut as is often supposed. What’s far clearer is that he thought there were times when applying the law strictly could result in injustice, while a more compassionate approach could revitalise blighted lives—and I’m inclined to apply that attitude to the problem of broken marriages. But as Lewis is always telling me, I’m just a wishy-washy Church of England liberal, and there are priests older and wiser than I am who are made of sterner stuff.

  “What I’m trying to say, Carter, is this: if I suggest your marriage could be viable, I won’t be making the suggestion because I’m ideologically opposed to divorce. But how likely is it that the marriage is viable? One can’t deny it’s taken some terrible knocks, but marriages do recover from even the most catastrophic blows, and this one may recover too.

  “I think it’s important to remember that you’ve only been married for a few months. That’s not long. Maybe the marriage just needs more time to assimilate all the traumatic baggage which is being brought into it from the past. And there’s one big psychological advantage in giving Kim a second chance: if the marriage still fails, at least you’ll be able to tell yourself you did all you could to resurrect it—whereas if you end the marriage now you’ll never be entirely sure whether it might have been saved, and this ambiguity could lead to guilt and depression.

  “But everything I’ve just said about trying again depends on Kim’s desire to turn his life around and make a fresh start. Assuming the desire’s there, your response becomes crucial, so obviously the next question is: can you forgive him for what he’s done?

  “As a priest I’ve come to believe forgiveness is one of the most difficult and complex of the spiritual issues which people have to wrestle with. Let me say straight away that no one should try to forgive Kim on your behalf. You’re the one he wronged and you own the suffering resulting from that wrong. If Kim made a confession to me and expressed a genuine desire to repent, I could offer him forgiveness for the wrong he’s done to God by behaving as he has, but he’d still have to remake the relationship with you. If he were a believer and could feel he ‘stood right with God’ as the result of his confession, he’d be well-placed psychologically to translate his repentance into effective action, but even if you eventually said: ‘I forgive you,’ those words would mean little unless they reflected your actual feelings. Forgiveness can’t be turned on like a tap, that’s the truth of it. It’s not a matter of will-power. Forgiveness is ultimately a gift from God, but as you prefer not to think in theological language I’ll just say: to forgive and be forgiven is a form of healing, but the healing dynamic can’t always be accessed by the powers of reason and logic. We certainly need to forgive in order to stay healthy, but it can be the hardest of goals to attain.

  “Is Kim a villain or a victim, you ask. But really all that matters is that if he genuinely repents he’s eligible for forgiveness and a fresh start. So the biggest question right now has to be: does he genuinely repent? And that’s a question we’re not yet in a position to answer . . .”

  XIII

  “So if Kim regrets what he did,” I said flatly, “I’m to forgive him, and— bingo!—the marriage becomes viable. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “By condensing my words into that bald statement you’ve lost all the nuances. But yes, if we’re talking in shorthand, resurrecti
on and renewal can follow on from repentance and forgiveness.”

  “So a man’s allowed to crash around doing what he likes and the woman’s supposed to be a saint and put up with all manner of crap for ever provided that he says sorry every now and then?”

  “I think if you take a moment to go back over what I’ve said, you’ll find—”

  “What bloody male-orientated rubbish!”

  “—you’ll find that repentance involves far more than glibly saying one’s sorry. Repentance means—”

  “Okay, so Kim’s got to promise to do better! But how the hell can I ever trust him to keep his promise?”

  “Maybe if you saw he was genuinely repentant—trying hard to turn his life around—the idea of trusting him might not seem so inconceivable.”

  “But I don’t want to see him!”

  “Surely at some stage you’ll want to give him the chance to level with you? Surely it’s vital that you should find out the whole truth? If you were to visit him at the Maudsley—”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said, and walked out.

  XIV

  “Nicholas drove me up the wall again,” I said to Alice. I was in such a state that I could hardly speak, and when I did manage to spew out some more words I was unable to censor myself. “He delivers all this stuff about me forgiving Kim and making the relationship viable, but he seems to have no idea how bloody offensive this is to me after watching what he gets up to in his private life! Damn it, there he is, giving you a hard time and apparently repenting of nothing, while you keep forgiving him when you should be kicking his teeth in!”

  “But Carter—”

  “And how does he have the nerve to tell me my marriage is viable when he’s busy telling you—on his good days—that his own marriage is over? Why can’t my marriage be over too? Why can’t I go off and find happiness with someone else, just as he has?”

  “Carter dear, you must see Lewis—you’re so upset that you’re getting everything mixed up—”

  “If I see another clergyman tonight I’ll go berserk!” I shouted, but Alice, with admirable determination, was already buzzing Lewis on the intercom.

  XV

  “I can’t help thinking these persistent failures with you must be very good for Nicholas,” mused Lewis. “The ego of a successful healer does need to be deflated on a regular basis, but since he’s supposed to be good for you and not vice versa, that comment is hardly relevant.”

  We were in the main kitchen on the ground floor and I was sitting slumped at the table while Lewis was padding around making tea. Reflecting the lateness of the hour he was wearing an ancient claret-coloured dressing-gown over faded green pyjamas. I had apologised for disturbing him, but when he had taken the interruption in his stride I had remembered Tucker’s remark that some people found chaos stimulating.

  “If I continue to think of Nicholas I’ll burst a blood vessel,” I said. “So why don’t you yourself tell me what you think of those questions I posed him?”

  “You want the unvarnished truth?”

  “What else?”

  “Very well, let me see if I can avoid inciting you to new heights of wrath. At least I have the advantage that my wife’s now dead and I’m not contemplating a trip to the altar.”

  “I know I should blot Nicholas’s private life out of my mind when I’m talking to him, but—”

  “My dear,” said Lewis, “why on earth should you? If a priest’s private life is in disarray, it’s going to affect his work and muddy the pastoral waters. How can it be other than an upsetting distraction for those who require help with their own private lives? Now, sit down, take some deep breaths and relax with your tea . . . can I give you some whisky on the side?”

  “You can do anything you like, Lewis, so long as you stop calling me ‘my dear.’ ”

  He sighed and trundled off to retrieve the whisky bottle.

  XVI

  “First of all,” said Lewis briskly, “let me tell you that you’re asking the wrong questions, and if Nicholas wasn’t in a sub-standard state as the result of trying to cope with his complicated private life, this fact would be as clear to him as it is to me. At present we have no way of knowing whether the marriage is viable because we have insufficient information—so forget the marriage for the moment, put it on ice. The real question you should be asking is whether any relationship between you and Kim is remotely possible. Could you, for example, meet him and utter the words: ‘How are you?’ I think it would be very difficult for you even to get this far, but I think too that I can come up with a motive which would encourage you to try. However, I’ll get to that in a minute. Let me just explain why your second question’s also a non-starter.

  “ ‘Is Kim a victim or a villain?’ you ask, with a touching faith that a clear-cut answer is available, but it’s perfectly possible for him to be both. He could well be a victim of that Nazi past and those unpleasant parents, but he could also have chosen later of his own free will to do evil things. I must tell you straight away that I don’t go along with this pathetic modern habit of blaming all one’s wrong-doings on a difficult past and refusing to accept responsibility for one’s actions. In my opinion such a fudging of the truth does the soul no good at all.

  “The real question here, you mark my words, is not whether Kim’s a victim or a villain. It’s whether or not he’s a psychopath. The doctors at the hospital have concluded that he’s not, and as I said to you in one of our earlier conversations, that’s good news—if it’s true. Personally I prefer to keep an open mind in this sort of case; I think it’s safer, particularly when severe spiritual illness is present. And let me just say, in case you’ve been too influenced by those Hitchcock films you like so much, that the typical psychopath isn’t an axe-swinging murderer! The truth is you’ve probably met dozens of psychopaths in the course of your work because they often do wonderfully well in big business; they flourish in an amoral environment. They need never get into trouble with the law, particularly if they’re clever, and they can be very attractive to the opposite sex—although no relationship lasts long. And now I see you’re about to remind me that Kim was married to Sophie for over twenty years! But how long was that marriage a going concern? How soon after the wedding did he start to be unfaithful to her?

  “Now, we’re talking here of a serious personality disorder which is notoriously difficult to treat. If Kim’s not a psychopath—if he knows the difference between right and wrong and can empathise with other people sufficiently to be able to form genuine relationships—then it would certainly be possible for him to reject Mrs. Mayfield, embark on a new life and work with you to save the marriage. But if he is a psychopath, we’re looking at a much bleaker prognosis, and I doubt if the marriage could survive no matter how strenuously you made a habit of forgiving him— as Sophie did for so many years. Of course with the grace of God anything’s possible, and I don’t want to say that psychopaths can never receive any degree of healing, but the main problem, from your point of view, would be that Kim wouldn’t be the man you thought you’d married. In fact Roman Catholics might well say you were entitled to a nullity in such circumstances . . . But let’s put the marriage firmly back on ice, where it belongs at present, and refocus on the question of whether any relationship with Kim is now possible.

  “I said a moment ago that you’d need a strong motive even to say: ‘How are you?’ but the motive does exist and it’s this: you’ve got to find out, once and for all, what kind of a man he is and what he did in the past because if you don’t find out you’ll be so haunted by an obsessive desire to speculate that you could wind up with serious problems. I also think that only when we know the full story will we really be in a position to judge whether or not he’s a psychopath.

  “Let me add that you don’t have to see him at the Maudsley. (Nicholas was wrong to suggest this.) Kim does want to see you, but not, I think, when he’s in circumstances which suggest he’s weak and powerless. If I’m reading between the lin
es correctly, he’s relieved that you don’t want to visit him at present. So it seems to me that the best solution is for you both to meet at the Healing Centre after he’s been discharged from hospital, and then you can talk to him in the presence of others who’ll help you discern where the truth lies.”

  He stopped speaking and for a moment we were silent as I digested his advice, but finally I asked: “You’ve been seeing him regularly. I respect the fact that you’re keeping an open mind, but how has he actually seemed to you?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask that,” said Lewis.

  XVII

  He poured us some more tea and added another tot of whisky to my glass. “The problem is I have to be careful to respect the confidentiality rules here,” he said. “I did start my visits to Kim as a mere sympathetic acquaintance, but we struck up more of a rapport than I anticipated and the fact that I’m a priest now definitely features in the relationship. (I’m afraid the chaplaincy team were right to suspect me of trespassing on their territory.)

  “However, although I can’t say much about my conversations with Kim, I’d like to underline my original opinion that he’s spiritually sick. As I see it, his personality’s become so warped by his commitment to Mrs. Mayfield’s world that he’s become morally desensitised—he’s reached the point where wrong-doing fails to arouse normal, healthy feelings of guilt. I say this not as the result of my recent conversations with him but as the result of his past behaviour to you and Sophie, and this personality damage explains why it’s difficult to judge whether or not he’s a psychopath; in my view he’s capable of behaving like one even if, technically, he doesn’t meet the medical definition of the condition.

  “I have to say he’s always charming now whenever I visit the hospital, and I often think—hope—certainly pray—that I’m getting somewhere with him, but at the same time I have to be very careful not to be tempted to make assumptions that simply aren’t true. The seamy explanation for all the charm is that he’s trying to manipulate me in the hope that I’ll further his cause with you. I do want to think well of him, but I’m still gauging the extent of the damage to his personality, and I need time for the survey to be completed.