I had tried, I told myself, as I turned over and faced the whitewashed brick wall of my cheerful college room. I had not been the best nun in the world, but I had honestly done my best, and my superiors had all tried to help me. But it was just no good. If God did exist, he clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and, right now, I couldn’t blame him. There was something in me that was proof against religion, closed to the divine. Let it go, I told myself sleepily. Don’t beat yourself up any longer. Just live simply as a secular, and give up these inappropriate spiritual ambitions. You’re in the world now. Make friends with it. One day at a time.
But soon even that would become impossible.
2 THE DEVIL OF THE STAIRS (#ulink_d2ae36ce-2927-5a58-8607-7067956435f9)
It began with the smell. It was a sweet but sulphury aroma, reminiscent of bad eggs and giving off an aura of imminent menace. Like any odour, it was also intensely evocative. I recognized it immediately. This was how it always started. In the convent, I had several times been assailed by this strange smell, had looked around for a cause and found the world splintering around me. The sunlight, the flickering candles of the altar and the electric light seemed to oscillate crazily; there would be a moment of pure nausea, and then nothing: a long, long fall into emptiness.
These fainting attacks had occurred four or five times, to the intense irritation of my superiors. Once it had happened on the day before Easter, and although afterwards I felt reasonably well, Mother Frances had sent me to bed in disgrace and I was forbidden to attend the midnight Vigil. The next day I had to go to mass at Our Lady of Victories in Kensington High Street, escorted as if under penal guard, and was subjected to a merciless scolding on my return. ‘Emotional indulgence. Exhibitionism … weakness of will’ – I knew the list almost by heart. Nuns were not supposed to faint like wilting Victorian ladies; we were meant to be strong women, in control of our lives, exercising an iron constraint over our emotions and bodily functions. Ignatius had wanted his Jesuits to be soldiers of Christ, and we were to cultivate the same virile spirit. Whoever heard of a soldier fainting on the parade ground, crumpling helplessly into a heap as he stood to attention before his commanding officer? And so these blackouts of mine had been greeted with cold disapproval. ‘You must pull yourself together, Sister,’ Mother Frances had concluded, tight-lipped.
But how was I supposed to do this? Whatever my superiors thought, I did not plan these bouts of unconsciousness. They terrified me. When I felt one coming on, I fought it to the last. And there seemed to be no reason for them. My superiors assumed that they were caused by my unruly emotions, but they rarely happened when I was upset. On that Holy Saturday night, for example, I had been feeling positively light-hearted. We were coming to the end of the penitential season of Lent and were all looking forward to the magical liturgy that evening: the lighting of the new fire, the strange unearthly chant of the Exsultet (the great theological hymn of the Easter mystery), the blessing of the baptismal waters, and the triumphant mass at midnight. The ritual re-enacted the passage from darkness to light, from death to life. There were also the simple earthly joys of Easter Sunday to look forward to: we had boiled eggs for breakfast, could talk all day long, and read our Easter mail. When the attack happened, I was feeling nothing but pleasurable anticipation. Where had it all come from: the smell, the fractured light, the sickness and the slide into unconsciousness?
Nobody ever thought that I should see a doctor. Fainting meant only one thing: hysteria. It had been the same at my school. When girls had fainted, they were subjected to a hostile inquisition and told in no uncertain terms to stop showing off. I had once watched my headmistress, Mother Katherine, grab a girl who had fainted during a seemingly interminable church service, seize her under the armpits, haul the inert body down the polished aisle, and dump it outside the chapel door, returning immediately, stony-faced. Over the years, I had imbibed this ethos, and though I could not account for these attacks, I assumed that even though I might not be feeling especially upset, I was displaying some subconscious need for notice, love or intimacy. The blackouts, I concluded, must be a bid for attention. And yet, I reflected wryly, my unconscious mind must be very slow on the uptake. You would think that by now it would have learned that, far from eliciting the tender concern I craved, the fainting simply inspired anger and disdain.
So my fainting, we all agreed, was emotional self-indulgence. And in my last year in the order, my body did indeed seem to be staging a rebellion all of its own. I wept uncontrollably, convulsed more by anger than grief; I found it impossible to keep my food down; suffered such severe nose bleeds that I had to have a vein cauterized, and … I fainted. It was as though my whole physical self had risen in protest and demanded that I take notice, telling me that, however much I might want to stay in the convent, something was badly wrong. Finally in the refectory of our convent in Harrogate, where I had been sent for the Long Vacation, I had given up the battle and succumbed to a breakdown. It was only logical to assume that there had been unconscious tension all along, which had finally and irrevocably surfaced and taken me out of the religious life. And now I was out in the world. I was no longer struggling to conform to a way of life to which I was not suited. I was free, fortunate, privileged to be attending one of the finest universities in the world, and even though I was having some trouble adjusting, I was now on the mend. Wasn’t I?
So why were the symptoms recurring, as though my body had not been informed that the battle was over? Why was it behaving in the same old way? I was not kneeling in a convent chapel this time, but sitting in a pleasant library in Merton College. The room was full but not unduly crowded; it was not stuffy, even on this warm summer day. The tall leaded windows were open and a light, fragrant breeze wafted into the room, gently lifting the threadbare curtains. I was listening to John Jones’s lectures on nineteenth-century England, enjoying the slightly eccentric cast of his mind and his delightful command of the language, when the familiar stench choked me, the voice of the lecturer became a confused babble of meaningless sound, the light in the room looked suddenly uncanny, there was a moment of pure terror, and then I felt myself falling down that familiar narrow shaft.
When I opened my eyes, I was conscious of a hard band of pain across my forehead. The brown blur in front of me composed itself into the grain of a polished wood floor, and I groaned and rolled over on to my stomach to try to blot out the world for a few more minutes.
‘I think she’s coming round now.’ The voice was male and familiar. Slowly, as from a deep well, the memories came back to me. The lecture … John Jones … ‘Keep back and let her get some air.’ To my right I could see a large scuffed brogue and an expanse of worn corduroy trouser. I knew that in a few moments I would feel embarrassed, but right now the world had shattered into separate, meaningless shapes, none of which seemed related to anything else.
‘Look, I think we’d better call it a day,’ Mr Jones was saying. I tried to raise my head, but it was pushed firmly down again. ‘I don’t think any of us feels like carrying on with the lecture. Does anybody know who this poor lady is?’
‘Yes, I do – she’s at my college. I can take her home. Karen, it’s Jane.’ I peered up at her and tried to smile. She looked strange from this unfamiliar angle and I realized that she was alarmed. Gradually I began to be aware of the disruption I had caused.
‘I am … so sorry,’ I muttered, as I always did after one of these attacks. ‘So sorry.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Mr Jones sounded genuinely astonished, and when I looked round at him, his large kind face was creased with concern. ‘You didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just sad for you.’ That was a bit of a change. I blinked uncertainly. ‘You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?’ That last, clearly, was addressed to Jane.
‘Definitely.’ Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. ‘Do you think we could phone for a taxi?’ I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis – I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired.
As we drove up the Banbury Road towards St Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner.
‘I always longed to faint at school,’ she said cheerfully, as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. ‘I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened. Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.’
I smiled as Jane glared at herself in the mirror and threw back her long blonde hair. It was indeed difficult to imagine her wilting feebly; she was built on too large a scale, was too confident for that. ‘Have you ever fainted before?’ she asked, suddenly serious.
I nodded. ‘It used to happen quite a lot in the convent. It’s all emotional – all in the mind. At least, that’s what the nuns said.’
‘Don’t tell me! I was at a convent school, remember? And I suppose you have been under a strain, giving up that lovely peaceful life.’ I grimaced slightly, amazed as I always was that even people who knew nuns at first hand had such an unrealistically idyllic image of convent life. ‘Tell me,’ Jane said abruptly, ‘do you feel guilty?’
I thought hard for a moment. People often asked me this, because they seemed to associate Catholicism with guilt. ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t feel at all guilty. Guilt is not the word.’ One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. ‘I feel sad,’ I went on, ‘a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.’
‘God, you are lucky!’ Jane flung herself down in my armchair. ‘I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to mass, communion or confession, because I don’t have a “firm purpose of amendment”, as they say. I’m not going to stop doing it, so I haven’t truly repented. So now I’m that dreadful thing called a lapsed Catholic.’
‘Do you miss it?’ I asked, and then surprised myself by adding, ‘Do you care?’ I noticed how far I had moved in the last few months. This time last year, I could not have imagined living outside the Catholic Church, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did God really care so much about Jane’s sexual life? Was sleeping with her fiancé as bad as telling lies or being unkind, sins which didn’t debar anybody from the sacraments?
Jane sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged. ‘In some ways, no – of course, I don’t care. I can’t believe that God – if there is a God, I must say I do wonder sometimes – is really a narrow-minded prude. And I know that lots of people right here in college just carry on going to communion, no matter what they do. But I can’t manage that. It seems dishonest …’ she tailed off.
‘But do you miss it?’ I probed. Jane seemed so much at ease with the world and so bracingly positive, that it was hard to imagine her style cramped by a disapproving Church.
‘Oh, heavens, yes!’ she breathed. ‘I used to love the liturgy at school. Last Christmas, Mark and I were in Paris and went to Midnight Mass in Notre Dame. You can imagine … Mark couldn’t believe that I had been able to give all that up. “You’re a heroine,” he said. Though I can’t say I believe in much of it any more, frankly.’
I wondered how much of a Catholic I really was. No one would ever have admitted to doubts in the convent, and it was somehow liberating to have Jane do it for me. ‘But that’s enough about me!’ Jane got up and reached for her books. ‘I’m going to get the college nurse to have a look at you … I know, I know, she really is perfectly awful, but I promised Mr Jones. And it is sensible, you must admit, even if it is all due to stress. Mr Jones was right. That really was a very long faint.’
Before she left, Jane looked around the room. A typically modern box: shiny cork flooring, matching orange curtains and bedspread, desk and dressing-table combined. ‘You ought to try to put your own stamp on this,’ she said appraisingly. ‘It looks anonymous. Have some of your own things around. Whoops!’ she laughed. ‘You probably haven’t got any things. Well, you’d better acquire some. You’re not a nun now. No more holy poverty for you. What about a record player? You like music and you won the Violet Vaughan Morgan last year. You must have some of that prize money stashed away in the bank. Go on, treat yourself.’
‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps I will.’
The college nurse was brisk and matter-of-fact. Yes, the fainting was almost certainly due to stress. I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but, after all, it was not a competition. ‘Do make an appointment with your GP, however,’ the nurse concluded. ‘Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.’
I promised that I would. It did seem a sensible precaution, and I was grateful for the concern that was so different from the icy response of my superiors. News of the faint travelled fast. People I scarcely knew stopped me in the corridor and asked how I was feeling. Pat and Fiona gave me a bunch of flowers and Rosemary had thoughtfully provided a little vase, realizing that I probably didn’t have one. Charlotte asked me quite a lot about the incident and we again silently sized each other up as fellow-neurotics.
Charlotte and I were no longer tutorial partners. Dr Brentwood Smyth had got rid of me fairly rapidly and passed me on to one of his graduate students. The college had responded indignantly. I was being groomed for a first-class degree and should not have been relegated to what they regarded as the scrap heap in this way. Now I was back with Mrs Bednarowska, who was quite happy with my intricate gothic essays and everybody seemed pleased with me. But I had not forgotten the emptiness I had encountered when I had had to rely on my own thoughts, and felt that Dr Brentwood Smyth had seen through my polished intellectual exterior to the vacuum at the core, as had Charlotte, though she knew too much about the numbing effects of shock to dismiss me as contemptuously as our tutor.
So some good had come out of that faint. I had become closer to Jane, let down my guard a little and allowed people to see that all was not well. And I decided to take Jane’s advice and buy myself a record player. As the new spirit of Vatican II slowly percolated through the convent, we had been encouraged to listen to music. A record player had appeared in the community room of the Scholasticate, and we were allowed to use it during the afternoon recreation hour. I discovered a new world. I remember walking into the room one day after doing the washing-up and being almost shocked by the beauty of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Now thanks to my simple little player, for which I paid the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, I could have this sublime treat any time I wanted. Jane introduced me to the late quartets of Beethoven and I would play these almost nightly. This, I was aware, was probably the kind of experience I had sought in religion. While I listened, I felt my spirit knitting together. Things began to make sense.
But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly ‘essay crisis’, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time. Since leaving the convent, I had fallen into this weekly ritual and in a perverse way quite enjoyed it. There was something rather magical about sitting alone in the lamplight, surrounded by darkness and absolute stillness. Occasionally there would be a gentle scratching on the door, and Rosemary or Charlotte, whose essay night coincided with my own, would peer cautiously round the door and we would have a midnight coffee-break before returning to our books. The next day I felt hollow and depleted, but triumphant, and I used to revel in the post-tutorial euphoria: essay done, duly praised, and a lovely fresh assignment beckoning me invitingly into the next week.
But on this particular occasion, my eyes prickled with fatigue. Suddenly I found myself invaded by the familiar stench, but this time it was different. My brain felt as though a cosmic potato masher was pounding it, reducing it to long worms of sensation like spaghetti, but spaghetti that was alive. I could hear a bell ringing mournfully in the distance and I was convinced that somebody was standing beside me. I could almost glimpse his face out of the corner of my eye. An aged, senile mask, with empty eyes. Some part of me knew that there was nobody there, and that if I reached out to touch him my hand would encounter empty air. And yet I could not connect this knowledge with the spectre because it had its own reality, its own absolutely commanding presence. I had no leisure to think about this, because I was gripped suddenly by a quite overwhelming fear. When I looked around me, the room was wholly unfamiliar, as though I had never seen any of these objects before. The world had become uncanny and horrifying. I did not know who, what or where I was, but was aware only of my extreme terror, a cold sickening dread that made everything around me seem brown, rotten and repulsive, because it had no meaning.
And yet, of course, it wasn’t like that at all. I am trying to describe an experience that has nothing whatever to do with words or ideas and is not amenable to the logic of grammar and neat sentences that put things into an order that makes sense. Maybe I could explain it better if I were a poet. But I am sure that this is the kind of horror that Hieronymus Bosch tried to convey in his paintings. It is as though a comforting veil of illusion has been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful and ugly to the core. T. S. Eliot describes something similar in the third poem of Ash-Wednesday. He is climbing a spiral staircase, a mythical image of the ‘ascent’ of the mind and heart to spiritual enlightenment. But ‘At the first turning of the second stair’ he sees a shape twisted into the banister, surrounded by vaporous, foetid air, and he is forced to struggle with ‘the devil of the stairs’. He leaves these convoluted forms behind, and at the next turning finds only darkness: ‘Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair, Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark’, the underbelly of consciousness that lurks in the basement of all our minds.
When the horror recedes, and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is ‘really’ there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again. The revelation remains embedded in your soul and affects everything you feel and everything you see. But when you try to express this vision in words, you inevitably distort it, and find yourself writing purple, melodramatic prose. Better to be as simple as Coleridge, when he describes the recurrent terror of the ancient mariner after his ordeal, which makes him feel:
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend,
Doth close behind him tread.
The words are flat, and the image of the ‘frightful fiend’ deliberately banal, but the simple description of a fear that is constantly beside you but just out of reach captures the sensation exactly.
This was not an isolated experience. Some weeks later, while I was shopping in Cornmarket, the world seemed to have lost all connection with the fundamental laws that give it meaning and coherence. It took on the grotesque aspect of a cartoon. The women ahead of me in the queue at Marks and Spencer looked as though they belonged in a primitive painting by Beryl Cook; their features became coarse and alien. Again there was that paralysing fear. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. When I reached the till, the woman sitting behind it seemed to be shouting at me, pointing to my purse. I stared back at her blankly, unable to understand what she was saying or what she wanted me to do. Somebody took my purse from me, and opened it, but I could make nothing of the round metal discs inside. Dazed, I put down my wire basket and wandered out into the street. I don’t know how long it was before I found myself sitting outside Brasenose College in Radcliffe Square, contemplating the perfect dome of the Camera, an image of wholeness and harmony. It was one of my favourite haunts, a place where I loved to come and study. It had been raining. I was wet and chilled, but back in my skin on a planet that had returned to normal.
I never imagined for one moment that these were supernatural visitations. I knew at once that I must be ill and assumed that, like my fainting attacks, these ‘visions’ were symptoms of strain. This seemed oddly appropriate. The world that I had rejected had turned on me and exacted a revenge, in which my surroundings periodically took on a nightmarish unfamiliarity. But as these strange interludes became more frequent, I became frightened, and took myself off to the doctor. How was I going to live with a horror that descended upon me without warning and made it impossible for me to function? It seemed as though the world and I had become chronically incompatible; that I would never be able to live in it. And what if one day I remained trapped on the other side of the looking glass?
The doctor dismissed these worries as excessive but agreed that I was not very well. He talked sagely about ‘anxiety attacks’, told me that these things happened, were fairly common and could easily be dealt with. After all, I had been under a strain; I was probably working too hard. In my final year now, was I? Exams next summer? Yes, people often got het up about these things. But in view of my … er … history, it might be a good idea to go and see a specialist. He knew a very good chap at the Littlemore Hospital. Somebody would write to me in due course to set up an appointment. Good idea to talk things over, perhaps take some medication – only temporarily, of course – to get rid of these bouts of panic, and then I’d soon be on my feet.
The Littlemore. One of Oxford’s two psychiatric hospitals. My heart sank. I had seen it coming, but now that the process had been set in motion, it felt like a real defeat. Psychiatry had certainly not been part of the convent ethos. The very idea of ‘talking things over’ with anyone was anathema. But I could see no alternative. The way both the doctor and the college nurse had taken refuge immediately in cliché when confronted with my predicament indicated that they felt out of their depth. I needed expert help, but I still shrank from exposing the mess of my life to a stranger, who would examine it clinically and make his own appraisal, and I hated the prospect of being known to be mentally ill.
It was partly to prevent this, I suppose, that I started to become more reclusive and reserved. I was afraid of experiencing one of these uncanny episodes when I was with other people. I had lost confidence. Where previously I had felt only shy and socially inhibited, I could now place no trust in either my body or my mind. I no longer took it for granted that I could get through a party or a quiet evening with friends without succumbing to this malady, and, indeed, I had noticed that the flickering lighting to which people seemed so strangely addicted these days made me feel very odd indeed. And so, just as I had started to put out feelers to the world, I began to withdraw again.
