‘Here and now, if that’s all right. No, don’t leave the tomatoes. Can’t I help you with them? I know how to do it.’
He made no demur, knowing, I suppose, how much easier it is to talk when one’s hands are occupied. He started work again, and I moved to the other side of the row from him, and followed suit. Above us the robin, who was always on the watch for whoever was gardening, flew in through a broken pane, saw there was nothing doing, scolded for a moment, then flew away. Silence, except for the rustling of tomato leaves, the snip of scissors cutting twine and the drip of a tap into the tank.
‘Mr Bryanston, do you believe in telepathy?’
“Believe in”? I don’t query its existence; I don’t think one reasonably can. There have been too many instances of it, thoroughly documented; and now I think it is being seriously researched. Can you be more specific? I take it you mean thought-transference, but this takes a variety of forms.’
‘I think I mean it in its most straightforward sense, communication between mind and mind, straight across without even any bodily presence.’
‘Yes, I see. Well, my answer stands. One can’t query the existence of such a phenomenon. I think I may say that I am bound by the history of my own Church to accept that such things have happened. Elisha, for instance, was telepathic – or else an uncommonly good guesser.’
‘Perhaps he was just a pretty good judge of human nature?’ I suggested. ‘Gehazi had cheated him before, hadn’t he? I suppose you are talking about the time Gehazi took pay from Naaman, then hid the cash and told Elisha he’d never been near him?’
The Vicar’s eyes twinkled. ‘That was a very good education you had in Sunday School, my dear.’
‘Yes, wasn’t it? Was that what you were thinking about? Elisha knew all about it all the time, didn’t he?’
‘He did. “Went not mine heart with thee, when the man turned again from his chariot to meet thee?” A bad moment for the liar Gehazi. Perhaps, as you say, Elisha just knew his man; but the text does not preclude knowledge of what had happened at a distance, and out of sight.’
We worked for a few moments in silence. Then I said:
‘When I said, “believe in”, I think I meant, have you had any experience of it?’
‘Experience at first hand, no. At second hand, I am told so. Like everyone else, I had an aunt who had premonitions, at least thirty per cent of which were correct. And we have all met people who claim to have foreseen things, some of them probably truthfully. No, I’m not joking; I can see that this matters to you. In any event, such cases as I have come across myself have mainly concerned the kind of instinctive prevision which used to be called divination, and was legislated against as far back as, dear me, Deuteronomy. Along with witches and familiar spirits it was an abomination unto the Lord.’ The fine eyes were gently merry behind the distorting lenses. ‘And that, I am certain, you are not, my dear child, and could never be. Am I to take it that you yourself have had first-hand experience of this “communication between mind and mind”?’
‘Yes, I have. Not just premonitions, either. Messages, conversations even, coming clearly from another mind straight into mine. What I would call telepathy.’
‘Well,’ said the Vicar, ‘you are an Ashley, are you not?’
My hands checked, the fingertips tightening on a shoot so that it broke. ‘Sorry,’ I said mechanically, then looked up at him. ‘You knew?’
‘I know the history of your house. And I have read all the family papers that were kept in the library, including some of the otherwise lamentable stuff in the locked shelves. There are records of the kind of thing you talk about, and some of them have an authentic ring. And I know that in your family there’s a history – a record, I should say, since some of it is undoubtedly spurious – of unusual mental powers which appear from time to time in members of the family. Elizabeth Ashley, the “witch”, seems to have done little to deserve that title except to be heard talking to someone who couldn’t be seen, and on two occasions conveying information which she claimed had come from her “secret friend”, and which knowledge could not otherwise be accounted for. If she had escaped burning, her husband would almost certainly have repudiated her. Apart from the fear of witchcraft, he suspected her of taking lovers. But you know all this.’
‘Yes.’
The kind eyes regarded me for a moment, before returning to the work in hand. ‘It’s never easy to be different. But I gather you know that, only too well? You too have a secret friend?’
‘Yes.’
He was silent, not looking at me this time. I said, and heard pleading in my voice: ‘Vicar, please believe me.’
‘My dear, I do believe you. I am afraid for you.’
‘My mind is not abnormal, not in any other way, that is. But as far back as I can remember, I’ve been able to talk to this – this person.’
‘Only one person?’
‘Yes.’
‘A real person?’
His voice was mild and inquiring, but the question shocked me. I straightened, staring. This had never occurred to me. ‘Well, of course. It – it never entered my head . . . Do you mean it might be someone . . . Oh, no, Vicar, he is real. It’s one of my cousins.’
‘I see.’ His look of trouble deepened. ‘Yes, I see.’
‘But what are you suggesting?’ I demanded. ‘That it could be some fantasy thing I made up as a child, and now can’t get rid of? I mean, I know that children do invent imaginary friends, but for heaven’s sake, they grow out of that, and it isn’t that, or anything like it! It’s a real relationship, Vicar, I promise you!’
‘I have conceded that already.’ His voice was sharp, for him. ‘My dear, what have I said to put you in such a state? If this is true at all, and I have said that I believe you, then I prefer to believe that you are in touch with another real and living mind. I gather that you don’t know yet just who it is?’
‘No, not yet. But it must be another Ashley, and he’s here somewhere, and we can talk – communicate – about what’s going on. We can stay in touch at quite a distance, too. When I was in Madeira he told me about Daddy’s accident.’
And I thought I knew, now, how he had known. James had been in Bavaria. The message, made faint and difficult by sheer distance, must have come straight to me from the scene of the accident.
Something the Vicar was saying got through to me. ‘You’re sure the news didn’t come to you from your father himself?’
‘It couldn’t have. We didn’t have that sort of communication, just a – well, a feeling for trouble. I knew he was ill, or hurt, but he himself could hardly have—’ I stopped, swallowed, stared. ‘You mean you knew about this? You knew all along? And that my father had it, too?’
‘To some extent.’
I was silent, thinking again about the message that Herr Gothard had written down for me: ‘My little Bryony be careful, danger. This thing I can feel . . .’
‘Did he know about my “secret friend”?’ I was grateful that the Vicar had given me this name for my lover. ‘Lover’ was not a title I was prepared yet to use aloud.
‘He never mentioned it, nor, indeed, did he give any hint that he knew you possessed this gift. His own was, I gathered, much slighter; he occasionally had moments of premonition, or perhaps extra clear-sightedness. They were all, as far as I know, connected with you. He seemed to be sure, rather beyond guesswork, when you were in trouble, or needing help.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I knew that.’
The Vicar carefully snipped off several lengths of twine, threaded them through a buttonhole, then shifted his kneeling pad, and addressed himself to the next row of plants. ‘You said your friend was an Ashley. That must surely narrow the field considerably?’
‘Yes.’ Even to myself the syllable sounded both harassed and dejected, hardly the tone used by a friend or a lover. Another of the shoots bent in my hands, almost breaking. I apologised, and, abandoning the tomatoes, went to perch on a rickety stool beside the
water tank. The Vicar never paused in his work, but moved on steadily down the row, half turned from me. I leaned back against the warm wall. The robin flew in again, scolding, and I saw that he had a nest high in the roof, in the tangle of passionflower which flourished in a corner. He swayed on a bending stem, cocked his head to regard us with bright eyes, stopped scolding abruptly, and vanished into the leaves. The peace, the sunlight, the warmth, the steady rhythm of the work with the plants, slid down like calm over troubled waters. Without any conscious decision I found myself telling the Vicar all about my lover. Not about James; nothing about last evening; only the long communication between mind and mind until last night’s slamming of the doors.
When I had finished there was another of those pauses. Then he said, with his gentle, unsurprised calm: ‘Well, thank you for telling me. You make it very clear. Now, I take it, something has happened which has worried you and driven you away from him, to me?’
‘Yes. I came because I think I know who he is, and I think he’s done something very wrong indeed, and I want to know what to do. Normally speaking, I think I’d be able to tell right from wrong myself, but this is different. It’s knowing him the way I do – being sure, after all these years, that we are more to one another even than normal lovers, that we are part of one another whether we like it or not . . . Do you see? Betraying him, even if he’s very wrong, would be like betraying myself, or even something worse.’
He straightened up from his task, but did not look at me. He knelt there for so long, looking down at the tomato plants, that I thought he had forgotten my presence and my question. Finally he sighed. ‘My dear, I’m no help to you. Perhaps if I took time to think . . . Yes, I must do that. And pray, too . . . This is quite outside my experience, and outside my book of rules. There was a time when I would have said that right was right and wrong was wrong however one found out about it, but time changes one’s mind about that. In a way one might say that an intimacy of the kind you’ve described is like the intimacy of husband and wife; and the law recognises that; it would be intolerable if the one were allowed to betray the other. I think – yes, I think that if you do indeed hold the key to someone’s inner thoughts, you must not betray them.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. At least, I didn’t think, I felt it. Thank you.’
‘If he has done something so very wrong, then it will surely come to light without you. But I think that if you see him about to hurt others, or to do more harm, then you must use this unique relationship that you have, to dissuade him. In fact, if this bond between you does make you two sides of the same medal, then the decision for right in you could counteract his drive towards wrongdoing. Yes, perhaps that is the answer. Since you have this, er, privileged communication, you must pay for it in this way. In other words,’ said the Vicar, kneeling there in his old patched jacket, with the scissors in his hand, and looking like the law and the prophets rolled into one, ‘in other words it is your duty to act as the voice of his conscience, if he has not a sufficiently powerful one of his own.’
‘“Stern. Daughter of the Voice of God”,’ I said, a little dismally.
‘Exactly. Not an attractive lady, Duty. One of Wordsworth’s more inspired descriptions, I feel. Does this sound so very daunting, child?’
‘A bit. But just at the moment it does seem to be about the only thing I can do – if I dared communicate with him at all. I can’t betray him out loud. Not to anyone else, I mean.’
He had finished the row of plants while he was speaking, and now, getting stiffly to his feet, he crossed to a potting-bench for a new ball of twine. Looking away from me, he spoke again. ‘Bryony.’
‘Yes?’
‘This is not a safe road that you are treading.’
‘I’ve realised that. That’s one of the reasons why I had to talk to you. Up till now, you see, it’s been marvellous, and so familiar . . . I’ve known it so long . . . being able to talk to him about everything, exchange everything, just as if he was part of me and I of him. There was nothing but happiness, I was never alone, always someone I could turn to . . . And it seemed to me that there was nothing but joy in the future, that when we actually, physically, found one another, it would just be a continuing of what’s been going on all our lives. It was so serene.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘After Daddy died I thought all I had to do was to come home to Ashley, and I would be able to find him, my “secret friend”. But he said no, it wasn’t time yet, we must wait. And now I think this was because he didn’t dare let me near him, knowing what he had done. I felt so much alone . . . Then, just as I thought I’d found him, I discovered that he’d done something terrible, really terrible, so bad that all this time he’s managed to keep it secret, even from me. I only found out by accident. That’s why I came to you, to ask what to do.’
‘You found out “by accident”? You mean that you read a thought he didn’t want you to read?’
‘No. You can’t do that. I told you, you can close your mind. For instance, he can’t know what I’m telling you now. No, this was a – a daylight thing. I saw something he didn’t realise would give him away.’
‘Then you are not betraying your secret life if you do something about that. There’s part of your answer, I believe.’ He looked at me, then gave a nod. ‘But that’s not the whole answer, is it? You cannot think of betraying him, whatever he does, yet you cannot live with what he is doing?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.’
‘Then, my dear,’ he said gravely: ‘You must live without it.’
It was the answer I had come to myself, but still it came like a knell. Like a full stop. Like the gate slamming.
‘Without him?’ I said.
‘Yes. Without this private life that you have come to depend on. You cannot keep as part of you something which is alien to what you believe, something you know to be wrong. The ancients used to call it “possession”. It was a good word, for ownership by something alien; the turning aside of oneself from one’s own straight track.’
‘I know. I know. I’ve already cut him off. I knew I had to, and not only because I was afraid of his finding out what I knew about him. This is what made me wonder if them whole thing, this “gift”, as I used to think of it, is evil? I can’t believe it is. I’ve lived with it all my life, since I was tiny. It was comfortable and happy and good, and later, when it became more serious, it still seemed to be good. Believe me, Vicar, I know it was. I know he was, too.’ My hands had gripped together in my lap. ‘And the awful thing is that I can’t bear to be without him. I feel worse than being alone, I feel mutilated, like losing half oneself, or not being able to breathe properly, or something like that. If it was so wrong, why is it worse without him?’
‘That I can’t tell you. I can only say that it is a grave mistake to commit oneself to anyone or anything that may get beyond one’s control. I don’t for a moment suggest that this gift of yours is fantasy, but it might be said, perhaps, to share the same qualities and defects. There’s the same danger that, as reality approaches, there will be a falling off.’
I had thought about this, too. ‘You mean like those people who spend all their time reading stories about ideal lovers and ideal relationships, so that a real ordinary man or woman never can measure up?’
‘Something like that. Any imaginary world has its dangers. The edges between light and half-light are indistinct, and tend to blur more and more the longer one looks at them. You know, Bryony, you’ve given me almost too much to think about. Will you give me a little more time, and come and talk to me again? I’d like to clear my mind. I’m sorry I haven’t been more help.’
‘Oh, you have, you have. You believed me, and that’s almost enough in itself. Thank you for that.’
‘My dear child,’ he said. Then, smiling: ‘You’ve relieved my mind, too. I said you were treading a dangerous road; I doubt if I need have worried about you. You have a clear head, for so young a woman, and you are not afraid to th
ink things through. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and not common at all. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? I see Rob Granger on the other side of the garden, and he seems to be coming this way.’
I turned to look out through the glass. Rob was standing between the rows of vegetables, pointing something out to the boy Jim Makepeace who helped him sometimes. Jim nodded and picked up his spade, and Rob headed towards the greenhouse. I turned back to the Vicar, and asked quickly: ‘Did you ever find out what the prowler was doing in the vestry?’
‘Yes, indeed. What a very strange thing that was! I am glad to say that I was right in thinking that no one from these parishes would have attempted to open the safe. It had not been touched.’
‘No? Do you mean that nothing was missing after all?’
‘Nothing of value – that is, none of the “valuables”, but something worth much more in its own way, and quite irreplaceable. One of the registers.’
‘One of the registers? A parish register?’ The ones at Ashley, I knew, went back without a break to the sixteenth century. It was a serious loss, but for the moment I could not get far beyond a sort of blank amazement and reassessment of what I knew. What in the world could James have wanted with one of the parish registers? Anything less like a ‘disposable asset’ I couldn’t imagine. ‘But I thought you said no one had opened the safe?’
‘Oh, not one of the Ashley registers. One of those which were on the vestry table, from One Ash. Unhappily, it is one of the earlier ones which is missing, the second volume, 1780 to 1837 . . . The latter, as no doubt you know, was the date on which the full procedure of registration was instituted as we know it today. Before that it was a question of signatures, or indeed marks, from the parties concerned. In the registers before 1754, when the Hardwick Act was passed, there is merely an entry of the fact of marriage; nothing else was required . . .’