I shuddered but merely said: “And the second flaw in the potential happy ending?”
“This is even more of a marital chiller. In the end, contrary to what Kim appears to have thought, I believe he would have felt compelled to return to his ‘hobby.’ Carter, it’s a safe bet to say that even if you’d been the woman he thought you were, you alone could never have provided Kim with a long-term answer to this problem—the healing you provided wouldn’t in the end have been enough because the roots of the compulsive behaviour hadn’t been treated. Kim would have needed a great deal of therapy to bring the behaviour under control—indeed in my view he would also have needed to turn himself over to what the members of Alcoholics Anonymous call a ‘Higher Power.’ How interesting that he could identify with the part Jack Lemmon played in Days of Wine and Roses! He was not without self-knowledge, it seems, and certainly not without intelligence, but he needed professional help on a massive scale. Mrs. Mayfield, I need hardly add, would have been no use to him at all, quite the contrary; she would have made him worse by encouraging him to replace the ‘hobby’ with other deviations, all of which would have failed to solve the problem.”
“Could Kim ever have been cured?”
“In these cases ‘cure’ isn’t the favoured word to use, but he might have achieved a remission which would turn out to be permanent. The danger of relapse would always be there but with the right support he’d be all right.”
“Like a recovering alcoholic in AA?”
“That’s it. And as I said, the right support would be crucial. Ideally a priest would be working alongside the doctors, and there’d need to be a caring community, praying regularly—”
“But why?”
“Well, medicine doesn’t have the complete answer to this type of problem. Doctors—even a psychologist like me—can offer a great deal of help, but in the end when we start to use phrases such as ‘turning oneself over to a Higher Power’ or ‘accepting Jesus Christ as Lord’ we’re really venturing beyond the boundaries of our disciplines. We can justify these phrases by saying that they’re both referring to an integrating principle and that integration equals salvation, but nevertheless . . . no, I think it’s healthy to admit we don’t have all the answers, healthy to admit that in this kind of case the priests should always be working alongside us to reach the parts the medical textbooks fail to touch . . .”
XVI
“How guilty should I feel about all this?” I said after a prolonged pause spent surveying this portrait of Kim. I was unsure how far Robin would respond to this direct question, since he preferred to help me uncover the answers to my questions myself, but he answered willingly enough: “It’s normal to feel some degree of guilt when one’s marriage fails, and that’s not unhealthy. It’s the obsessive, morbid forms of guilt which cause trouble.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the failed marriage. I can see now it would never have worked out.” I hesitated before confessing in a rush: “I’m still feeling so guilty because my confrontation with him triggered the suicide.”
Again Robin seemed to realise he could help me best by offering a frank reply. “It’s also normal for those closest to someone who commits suicide to experience guilt,” he said at once, “but don’t forget that a suicide can have multiple causes, and in this case I think it would be more in keeping with reality if you allowed Kim some responsibility for his actions. Remember that he was seriously disturbed as the result of a way of life he had embraced long before he met you, and you were neither responsible for that chosen way of life nor for the damage he suffered in the remote past. You were also not responsible if, thanks to Mrs. Mayfield, he became neurotically drawn to see the balcony as an invitation to self-destruct.”
“That’s true.” I began to be conscious of relief.
“Don’t forget either that suicide can be an act of aggression,” added Robin, startling me. “It’s an act which lashes out not only against the world but against the nearest and dearest. If Kim had punched you in the face, would you have been tempted to assume that your broken nose was your fault?”
“Certainly not . . . But isn’t one supposed to turn the other cheek when one’s on the receiving end of aggression?”
“The subject of forgiveness does of course come up,” said Robin, becoming cagey again as he reverted to a more oblique approach, “but you need time, Carter. Profound emotional responses to a crisis or tragedy can’t be worked out swiftly by means of reason and logic. Other areas of the brain have to come into play, and they may not be immediately accessible.”
“But I want to sort everything out now so that I can get on with my life! Can’t you tell me how to press the right psychological button which will allow me to forgive Kim for wrecking me and forgive myself for allowing the wrecking to happen?”
“Definitely questions for the priests.”
“Robin—”
“I’m sure that with the help of Nick or Lewis or both of them, you and I can uncover the right way forward.”
“That’s not good enough!” I said exasperated. “If I can’t work out my response quickly by means of reason and logic, then you must give me the appropriate psychological principle to apply!”
“That would be no use. This is a response you have to feel, Carter, not intellectually grasp. Reason and logic are fine but you need another tool here to open up the area of the mind which deals not in words but in symbols and images. After all, forgiveness is rather more than just a three-syllable word, isn’t it? It’s a concept, a vision, an experience.”
“So what’s the tool?”
“Well, have you ever thought of going to our regular Friday healing service? Sometimes the laying-on of hands unlocks the psyche and allows the mind to make powerful connections which—”
“I’m an atheist,” I said, finally losing patience with him, and terminated the session.
XVII
In the reception area outside Robin’s consulting-room I found Alice talking to Nicholas, who was extracting a Coke from the vending machine. The hands of the clock on the wall above the receptionist’s desk pointed to five-thirty, and a fresh detachment of Befrienders was arriving to cater for the stressed-out City workers who were leaving their offices and feeling in need of sympathetic listeners. On Thursdays the Centre was open until eight.
“Carter!” Alice hurried towards me. “Nicholas wondered if you wanted to have a word—I was telling him about the questions you wanted answered, particularly the one about evil.”
I felt extremely annoyed. I was already ruffled by Robin’s refusal to carry our conversation into the areas I wanted to discuss and by his banal suggestion that I could be helped by a religious rite which meant nothing to me. The last thing I wanted at that moment was to be incarcerated with Nicholas, who always managed to set my teeth on edge. I also felt Alice had breached my confidence by reporting my distracted outpourings to him.
“I’m sure Nicholas is much too busy to talk to me now,” I said flatly. “Some other time, perhaps.” I turned away but immediately saw Tucker on the other side of the glass doors which stood at the Centre’s main entrance. I had forgotten he worked on the Thursday evening shift. “I’m sorry,” I said, swinging back to face Nicholas. “How rude that sounded! Yes, could we have a word, please?” And with my back turned to the main entrance I moved quickly past him into his consulting-room.
I had never been in this room before. Robin was the person I talked to at the Healing Centre, and my conversations with Lewis and Nicholas had taken place more informally at the Rectory. As soon as I walked in I saw to my horror a large painting of a snooty blonde with a glassy stare and a steel-trap mouth. I could hardly believe my eyes. My jaw sagged. Automatically angling the chair so that I would not have to look at this chilling mess of oils, I sat down facing an ancient but smartly dressed teddy-bear who was sitting incongruously on top of the long, waist-high bookcase beyond the desk.
“God, you’re an odd man, Nicholas!” I said before I could sto
p myself.
“I know I should take down that portrait,” he said rapidly, and it was the first time I had ever seen him embarrassed. “Of course I’ll take it down when the divorce is finalised, but Rosalind’s not just my wife—she’s my oldest friend. We met before we even got to kindergarten.”
“How sweet.”
“Well, I can see you disapprove, but—”
“Nicholas, it’s not the slightest concern of mine how you choose to adorn a wall of your office—or the top of your bookcase. Is that the bear you both played with in the nursery?”
“Oh, he’s on his way out,” said Nicholas more rapidly than ever. “I want to give him away to the right person but the right person never seems to turn up.”
“I wouldn’t mind a bear,” I said moodily. “The bailiffs took my toys away when I was six—but I didn’t come here to whinge about my childhood. Can we get down to business?”
“Of course,” said Nicholas, almost gasping with relief. “Alice mentioned—”
“Yes, can you make it clear to Alice, please, that when I have a private conversation with her I don’t expect it to be repeated?”
“I’m sure Alice didn’t mean to upset you, but—”
“Forget it, what’s one small indiscretion when I’m floundering around in shit creek and trying to understand not only how I got here but how the hell I’m going to get out? Now listen to me—put some steel into that clerical collar of yours and give me some straight answers to the following questions: how do you explain someone like Mrs. Mayfield? Was Kim a hundred per cent evil at the end or wasn’t he? If he was evil, was he beyond redemption? Is forgiveness of evil actually possible? And what do you have to say about evil anyway?”
To give credit where credit is due I have to record that Nicholas never batted an eyelid as he faced this stream of verbal gunfire. But to my acute irritation he only answered with a sigh: “I’m afraid these aren’t such easy questions to answer as you might think . . .”
XVIII
“Evil is a very emotive word,” said Nicholas. “Of course it refers to something which is all too real when we encounter it, but it’s very easy, by using emotive language, to make evil seem slightly unreal, something ‘other,’ something which exists ‘out there’ and can be kept at arm’s length while we all get on with our ordinary lives. There’s a strong urge in us to disarm it in this way because the reality is so difficult and so frightening that our natural inclination is to run away rather than confront it. It’s only when our lives are invaded by evil that we realise it’s not at all like the lurid fantasies in stylised Hollywood horror movies. Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the Eichmann trial, coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil,’ and that seems nearer the mark to me than all the lurid fantasies in the media.
“The trouble is, you see, that evil isn’t just ‘out there,’ along with the witches in funny clothes and the Dracula look-alikes. It’s among us all the time. A little lie here, a little cheating there, a little self-centredness somewhere else—and then suddenly all those little moments latch onto each other to present a cluster of evil and we come face to face with a monster. But the monster’s not sporting fangs and wearing a black cape. It’s wearing a cardigan and calling itself Mrs. Mayfield.
“But the terrible truth is that our everyday ‘shadow’ sides—our wrong actions and unchecked weaknesses—produce people like Mrs. Mayfield. She couldn’t operate in a vacuum. She feeds on our flaws, and our flaws in turn are fed by her needs.
“So where does Kim fit into all this? He did evil things, there’s no doubt of that. But he himself was bruised and twisted by other people’s evil—by the evil of the Nazi culture—and that’s where we get into an area which the media, in their fascination with demonic stereotypes, are all too ready to overlook. Evil isn’t just a matter affecting private individuals. It affects entire cultures. It’s global. And being civilised is no defence because evil isn’t confined to people who know no better. The Germans were highly cultured and civilised yet they produced Auschwitz. And let’s not forget that concentration camps were invented by the British at the height of their imperial splendour.
“The sheer pervasiveness of evil means we’re all bruised and twisted by it in some way or other, so who are we to reject a fellow victim just because he happens to be rather more damaged than we are? How tempting it is to label Kim EVIL and cast him out, ejecting the evil by saying it takes place within someone ‘out there’ beyond the pale—how comforting that would be! But Kim was one of us. He was ‘in here’ and not ‘out there,’ and that’s why we have to try to avoid using him as a scapegoat and projecting onto him all our own hidden flaws, psychic damage and secret fears.
“But how do we deal with him as ‘one of us’ and not as a monster beyond redemption? I think we have to try to see him as a real person, the man who expressed to Lewis his longing for forgiveness and the chance to turn his life around. To see him in this way is not to excuse the wrong he did. It’s to make him more accessible, easier to understand and, ultimately, easier to forgive and let go.
“Robin outlined to me earlier his psychological portrait of Kim, but although I would go along with what he said there’s always the danger, with such portraits, that the weird is emphasised at the expense of the normal. I’d like to provide a counterpoint by stressing Kim’s normality. He had a job he enjoyed, he led a typically busy urban life, he wanted a wife he could love, he felt guilty about the wife he had treated badly, he liked a nice home, expensive cars, good food and wine, dinner-parties, travel, swimming . . . How normal it all sounds, doesn’t it? Of course he had his hang-ups about the past (don’t we all!) and he had a serious problem with promiscuous sexual behaviour, but one can understand why the doctors decided this man was not pathologically ill but just in need of rest to heal the stress and therapy to iron out the hang-ups.
“And I’m quite sure both the rest and the therapy were helping him. But the real problem was that Kim’s way of life, with a little lie here and a little infidelity there, had led him to Mrs. Mayfield who had converted his moral weaknesses into a moral decay which rotted his personality. This sounds as if I’m putting all the blame on Mrs. Mayfield, but we mustn’t forget it was Kim who chose to associate with her; he deliberately chose to embrace a milieu which was actively opposed to truth, decency, unselfishness, compassion, trust, hope and love.
“Now, human beings must have access to these things or they become deformed. Lies, degradation, selfishness, callousness, deceit, cynicism and exploitation may seem very exciting when they arrive coated in various forms of self-indulgence, but they have nothing to do with lasting happiness or integration or fulfilling one’s potential as a human being.
“In other words, when a person chooses evil like that he or she has to unchoose it in order to set out on the road to healing. Otherwise the spiritual sickness will only continue, and the psychiatrists might heal the symptoms only to discover that far worse symptoms had broken out to take their place.
“Ideally a psychiatrist and a priest would have worked together on Kim’s case, each complementing the other. The primary illness was spiritual, but his long-standing psychological problems fed and nurtured it. And he was acutely aware, wasn’t he, of his need for healing? It was his search for healing which drew him deeper and deeper into the world of Mrs. Mayfield; it was his hunger for integration which drove him to join that occult society which only succeeded in keeping him dislocated and divided. He was a spiritually sick man who made wrong choices—yet even so he was still one of us, still human enough to recognise in the end that he’d taken a wrong turn, still human enough to long to begin again and find redemption through love.
“His true self wasn’t evil, you see. He was deeply alienated from his true self, he was trapped in an inauthentic existence, but . . . Carter, you’re looking very dissatisfied! What have I done wrong this time?”
“Do you realise,” I said, feeling almost demented with irritation, “that you—a clergyman—hav
e spent several minutes talking about evil, sin and morality, and yet you’ve never once mentioned God? Damn it, even Robin mentioned Jesus Christ and Robin’s not a clergyman at all!”
“I thought that perhaps as you were an atheist—”
“Of course I’m an atheist, but you might at least mention God! What the hell do you get paid for? And why didn’t you mention Jesus Christ either?”
“Well, sometimes when an atheist has no personal experience of Christ, it’s wiser to—”
“Who says I’ve had no personal experience of Christ? If your Christ is all he’s cracked up to be, do you really think he’s incapable of making himself known to an atheist like me?”
“On the contrary, I know it happens all the time, but—”
“Well, then! What’s your problem?” I was on my feet and awash with the urge to smash something—preferably the portrait of Ms. Snooty-kins. I wondered if Alice knew it was still there but suspected that she would have no reason to go into Nicholas’s consulting-room and that the staff at the Healing Centre all liked her too much to inform her of the interior decoration.
Curbing my urge to commit an act of vandalism I grabbed the teddy-bear from the bookcase and said to him strongly: “It’s time you turned your life around, Mr. Bear, and started out with a clean slate in the company of someone who knows better than to keep you hanging around gathering dust on top of a bookcase.” I patted his little pair of jeans and his T-shirt embroidered with the words “ST BENET’S.” Then I dumped him on the desk. “This animal’s too good for you,” I said to Nicholas. “Unless you pay him a great deal more attention very soon he’s going to get up and walk.” And having eased my irritation by delivering this barbed prophecy on Alice’s behalf, I swept out of the consulting-room.
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