The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “He was a freak, like Stalin and that Chinese man who was always taking great leaps forward. But you can’t explain freaks any more than you can explain evil. They just happen, like elephants.”

  “But why does God let them happen?”

  “Oh, we can’t possibly know the mind of God! Our brains are too small.”

  “Then why didn’t he make them bigger? Surely God wouldn’t be so inefficient as to give no comprehensible explanation?”

  “What’s efficiency got to do with it? God’s ways aren’t our ways— but look how spectacular his ways are! Look at the skies and the stars and the mountains and the seas and the animals and the fish—”

  I thought of my dolphin. Then I drained my glass and said: “I don’t care about all that. I just want an explanation, and if God can’t come up with one he can get lost.”

  “It’s people who get lost, Carter.”

  “Then why the bloody hell can’t God send someone to find them?”

  “I sort of think he already did.”

  “But Kim stayed lost,” I said, and went away to shut myself in my bedroom.

  XII

  When Alice eventually came to check that I was resisting the urge to bang my head against the wall, I said: “If I’d loved him as he wanted to be loved I might have saved him.” I was sobbing so hard I could barely speak.

  “Oh Carter, no—you mustn’t blame yourself—”

  “But I’m responsible, aren’t I? It wasn’t Mrs. Mayfield who killed him after all. I killed him by rejecting him and giving him nothing left to live for.”

  “Carter, you didn’t kill him. He killed himself. And he did that because he was sick and Mrs. Mayfield had driven him mad.”

  “But if I’d loved him as he wanted to be loved—”

  “Carter, this man was a murderer! He did terrible things for years and years and years—”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t his true self! If the evil other self could have been amputated—evicted—whatever—then I might have saved his true self by loving him. If I’d agreed to a reconciliation—”

  “How could you possibly have done such a thing? Kim had crushed your love to death with all his cheating and his lies! How could you ever, ever have trusted him again?”

  “But if I’d somehow managed to forgive him—”

  “Forgiving him is one thing. Forgiving him and going on with the marriage by living a lie, pretending the love still existed even though it was dead, is something else.”

  “But I did love his true self! If that was still there, buried under all the evil, then perhaps if only the evil could have been shovelled off—”

  “Yes, I understand what you’re getting at, but bearing in mind what happened at Oakshott, how can you blame yourself for recoiling from a reconciliation either then or now? And if you can’t blame yourself for that, how can you blame yourself for the suicide?”

  I had no answer but felt no better. “I can’t bear to think of those scenes at Oakshott!” I burst out, starting to cry again. “If I go on remembering how much I hated and feared him then, I’ll go mad too, I swear it, I’ll never get over it, never—which is why I’ve got to focus on the real Kim, the man I once loved—and yet if I do that I’ll go mad too because then I’ll have to blame myself for not loving him enough, not agreeing to a reconciliation, not being strong enough to save him—”

  “Carter dear—”

  “Oh God, I’m so messed up, I can’t believe how messed up I am, but if only I could get some kind of a rational, logical handle on what really happened I feel there’s a chance I might stay sane—”

  The doorbell rang as Val arrived to pay a lunch-time house call.

  XIII

  “I’ve got to understand what happened,” I said to Val after Alice had left us alone together. I had mopped up my tears, consigned the sodden tissues to the wastepaper basket and mixed myself a second vodka martini. Val had declined my offer of a drink but showed no sign that she disapproved of my self-prescribed tranquilliser. “In law,” I said, “a case may look a mess, but once you interpret it from a legal point of view and apply the correct legal principles the problems become comprehensible and the mess can be overcome. So please—give me the medical, scientific explanation of what was wrong with Kim! Then I’m sure I’ll be able to sort out the mess and get on with my life.”

  “That sounds like a positive attitude,” said Val, trying to be encouraging but only succeeding in sounding wary. “However, medicine can’t always provide clear-cut answers, and scientific theories are often far more speculative than the non-scientific members of the public are willing to believe.”

  “But what’s the final medical verdict on Kim? There must be a final verdict!”

  “As I understand it, the hospital’s in-depth inquiry into why Kim killed himself shed no additional light on the evidence given by the doctors at the inquest. The psychiatrist in charge of the case remains convinced that Kim’s release from hospital wasn’t premature.”

  “But it must have been!”

  “The psychiatrist defends himself by saying this second breakdown was entirely due to the extreme stress involved in the confession, and he blames Lewis for encouraging Kim to go down this route when he was in no fit state to do so. Lewis, on the other hand—”

  “—says the men in the white coats are round the twist.”

  Val sighed. “Everyone gets upset when a case ends tragically,” she said, “but the hard fact is that not all tragedies are avoidable. Personally I wouldn’t want to condemn dear old Lewis here because I believe he did valuable work in befriending Kim, but I do see the psychiatrist’s point of view. He’d been led to think you were just going to drive Kim to Oakshott, have a sandwich or two and enjoy a friendly conversation which would bode well for the marital future. That was a very different script from the high-stress confrontation which actually took place.”

  “So the doctors never secretly revised their diagnosis that both the suicide and the initial breakdown were due to stress? They still honestly believe there was no pathological illness and no serious personality disorder present?”

  “I know why you’re asking those questions,” said Val. “It’s because the man you described in those final scenes appeared to be behaving like a sociopath. But when a personality fragments under extreme pressure, all kinds of subpersonalities, normally suppressed by the ego, can erupt out of the unconscious and grab control of the mind. Of course anyone who commits murder without remorse has a serious problem, but personally I still don’t feel I can label him a sociopath, someone disconnected from normal emotions. We know he felt guilt about Sophie; we know he cared deeply for you.”

  “But surely he must have been in some sense mad?”

  “He was certainly disturbed but he remained lucid, he wasn’t suffering from hallucinations and he wasn’t suicidal when he was in hospital. I don’t actually think he was mad at all until right at the end when his personality shattered to pieces on that balcony.”

  “So what the hell was going on?”

  “Well, if I were to say he was bad but not mad I’d be making a judgement which a doctor isn’t qualified to make. I can’t say: ‘He was a corrupted man who couldn’t bear the burden of his sins.’ That’s not a medical diagnosis. One could treat the medical problems caused by this spiritual malaise, but as for the malaise itself . . . No. The scientific, medical language stops here. All I can say is that this case was definitely one for the priests . . .”

  XIV

  We were silent for a moment. Outside it had begun to rain, and I watched the drops spatter across the windowpane as a gust of wind swept up Egg Street from the south. I was aware of Val’s stillness, the concentrated quality of her attention, and I wondered if, in the uncharted borderland which lay between sickness and health, I was traversing an abyss which I was too terrified to allow my eyes to see.

  “Then was I to blame,” I heard myself say numbly, “for forcing Kim into this high-stress confrontation?” />
  “But you didn’t force him, did you?” Val said at once. “He was burning to tell you everything in the belief that this would save the marriage. If the blame belongs to anyone it belongs to Lewis, but on the other hand I’m sure Lewis was right to believe Kim had to level with you—by that stage you couldn’t have gone on with the relationship without learning the whole truth. No, the real problem was that it was the wrong time and the wrong place for the confessional.”

  “But that really was my fault! I didn’t intend to wind up at Oakshott, but I certainly insisted that I meet him on his own as soon as he left hospital!”

  “But we all knew of this plan of yours, didn’t we? So the fault was ours for not talking you out of it! Carter, the truth is we’ve all made mistakes in this case, so don’t crucify yourself by taking on all the guilt. That would certainly be the road to neurosis—which reminds me: Robin said I was to tell you he had a cancellation at four-thirty this afternoon, and if you wanted to drop in for a word he’d be very happy to see you.”

  I thanked her and agreed with relief to be there.

  XV

  “I can certainly offer you an opinion resembling a diagnosis if you feel this would be helpful,” said Robin when I saw him later in his consulting-room at the Healing Centre. “Now that the marriage is unquestionably over I can be more frank, but I must warn you that my opinion may not be as satisfactory as you think.”

  “Why not?”

  “Reality isn’t always something which can be committed to paper, analysed, tied up in pink ribbon and filed away neatly in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.”

  “All I’m looking for is a professional opinion which is reasonable and logical—”

  “Reason and logic are useful tools, but human beings are so mysterious, so very much more, it always seems to me, than the reasonable, logical sum of their mental and physical parts . . . And don’t forget that as I never met Kim what I say will inevitably be speculative. Scientific accuracy? No, I’m afraid that won’t be possible. But would you be prepared to look at an impressionistic sketch?”

  “Anything’s better than nothing!”

  “Then let me start with those questions I raised for you to consider earlier. Some of them turned out to be more important than others, didn’t they? I was interested to hear that Kim showed signs of being more benign towards his father, more forgiving. It sounds as if his psychiatrist did some effective work on that front even if he never got to grips with some of the other problems . . . But we have to remember that Kim was only at the beginning of being treated. Several months of out-patient therapy might have made a big difference to him.

  “I was certainly right to call attention to the enigma of his sexuality. His most obvious problem, it seems, was that he reached adult life with a poorly integrated sexuality, and the part he couldn’t adjust to was split off and repressed. Am I saying he was a closet homosexual? Not necessarily. Without interviewing Kim in depth it really is impossible for me to reach any kind of firm conclusion, but if you pushed me hard enough I’d say he sounds more like a maladjusted heterosexual than a homosexual. Wasn’t he bisexual, you ask? Not in my opinion. The evidence suggests that he was strongly attracted only to women and that the motivation behind the homosexual episodes was more akin to the motivation underlying rape—which is primarily about violence, not about sex. Cases like this illustrate that sexuality is a far more complicated subject than a lot of people think, and that all the conventional sexual categories are really only broad generalisations which can be seriously misleading . . .

  “But for clarity’s sake, let me add this: let me theorise that Kim hated and feared the unintegrated part of his sexuality, and this hatred and fear was projected onto homosexuals whom he then abused; it would have been a way of ridding himself not only of self-loathing but of great psychological discomfort. He talked of easing a dislocation, didn’t he? Yes, I see him as someone who never came to terms with his feminine side and so despised any man who didn’t fit his definition of the macho male. Why was he like this? We don’t know. Possibly his father always insisted on him being very tough—while at the same time his mother made certain aspects of the feminine repulsive to him.

  “The dislocation would have set up a fault-line in his personality and under stress this fault-line would rupture, propelling him into the incidents which formed his ‘hobby.’ No, I don’t see his personality as fragile but I do see it as fractured; that’s not quite the same thing. He was certainly tough enough to paper over the fracture most of the time, but the trouble is that the more we repress unwelcome feelings and the deeper we bury them in our unconscious minds, the more likely those feelings are to erupt eventually in very disagreeable forms.

  “Kim’s remark to you that his ‘hobby’ seemed to have more to do with rage than with sex supports my theory that the homosexual episodes had nothing to do with his basic sexual orientation. I see him as an angry man, angry with his parents for not fulfilling his emotional needs, angry with Sophie for making him feel guilty, angry even with the professional success which gave him so much yet couldn’t give him the satisfaction he was still seeking when he got involved with Mrs. Mayfield’s occult society—and in the end perhaps he was angry that he ever got involved with Mrs. Mayfield in the first place. If his feelings for you were genuine he would have been angered by the trouble he was having disassociating himself from both her and her world.”

  Robin paused. I supposed he felt it was time to check that his “impressionistic portrait” was not affecting me too adversely, but I was already feeling better. It helped to have the baffling pieces in the jigsaw of Kim’s personality slotted into a pattern which made sense. I felt I was beginning to have a firmer grasp of Lewis’s idea that the personality of the real Kim had been invaded and poisoned by a malign subpersonality, and by spelling out the psychological distortions which had grown upon Kim’s true self, Robin was helping me to visualise a metaphorical cancer of the mind, a spiritual cancer, which had in the end proved terminal.

  “Go on,” I said. “Do you, in fact, think his feelings for me were genuine?”

  “It certainly sounds as if they were—although, as you came to realise, he was projecting onto you an image which didn’t match your reality. But as I explained to you before, this is not uncommon behaviour when people are in love, and as it turned out, you were projecting an image onto him too . . . Can you see now what was going on?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, and although I tried to keep my voice light and ironical I was unable to stop the bitterness creeping in. “I was projecting onto Kim the image of an idealised father, the father whom my real father had failed to become, the father I always felt was owing to me— although that projection was too painful ever to admit.”

  Robin nodded, refraining from comment, allowing me my moment of grief. Finally I was able to say: “But if Kim and I were projecting false images onto each other, surely the relationship was a grand illusion?”

  “Not at all. The images weren’t entirely false, were they? You did have this masculine persona and Kim was indeed a version of the man your father had the intelligence to be. Of course Kim misread your persona— and as you chose not to see his resemblance to your father you couldn’t judge how accurate the resemblance was—but these projections were mere distortions of reality, not total inventions. I suggest that the fact that you were projecting these images onto each other just means you were romantically in love, but romantic love can often precede a successful, reality-based relationship.”

  “But if Kim was attracted to me because of my masculine persona, surely this means—” I broke off, too confused to put my doubts into words.

  “It seems clear that Kim was primarily attracted to you for all the obvious reasons connected with your femininity,” said Robin without hesitation. “I doubt if he’d have been interested in a woman who didn’t appeal first and foremost to his heterosexual taste. But the big bonus to him—the bonus which made you unique—was that this
masculine persona of yours had the power to call forth the feminine side of his personality which he had repressed. Now, this masculine persona’s like a radio which you operate instinctively, adjusting the volume for each situation; the volume can be turned right up, but most of the time when you’re not at the office it’s just a background hum. Kim detected the persona straight away, he said, when you picked him up at the airport, and my guess is it fulfilled such a need in him that he could always hear it, even when you had the volume turned down low.”

  “And when I turned it up high—”

  “He would have been bowled over. But even when he wasn’t bowled over I believe the background hum would have had an important effect on him; I believe that whenever he was able to discard the role of shark and play the dolphin with you, he was indulging the feminine side of his personality, and this unprecedented freedom to be more fully himself would have made him feel more integrated; he would have experienced this as some kind of healing.”

  “So that was why he felt the time was right to give up Mrs. Mayfield and her various ‘cures’!”

  “Exactly. But I’m sorry to say,” said Robin with a sigh, “that there were two big flaws in this potential happy ending—and this is where we face your dread that if only you’d agreed to a reconciliation you and Kim might have lived happily ever after (assuming, of course, that he escaped a murder conviction). The first big flaw—”

  “This must be where we also face the fact that the masculine persona isn’t the real me.”

  “I’d prefer to say this is where we face the fact that the romantic love you both shared was unlikely to develop into a long-term reality-based relationship. Your masculine persona doesn’t accurately mirror the masculine side of your personality—it’s a hyped-up distortion aimed at helping you survive in a man’s world. Could Kim ever have adjusted to this reality once it impinged, as it inevitably would have done, on his romantic illusions? Your experience when you told him you wanted children leads me to say: probably not. His attraction to you was too bound up with this mask of yours, but if your journey was leading you out of a masculine world into a feminine one the mask would have become redundant and a key feature of the relationship would have been displaced. My guess is that when that happened Kim would soon have started searching elsewhere for another woman who could keep him stitched together, and something tells me you wouldn’t have been as willing as Sophie to put up with an unfaithful husband.”