The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 2. ESTHER

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Long before the train reached Paris in the early light of the following morning Esther had managed to secure for the two of them, a reasonably empty compartment where they had both achieved a few hours of fitful sleep. It was not until she was thoroughly awake, and had twice unsuccessfully attempted to rouse Raymond into a similar condition, that she began to realise that her troubles were now only beginning. With a sickening feeling she realised that her startling ‘rebirth’, as she now began to feel it to have been, the previous evening, had happened only just in time.

She became aware that she had on her hands someone not far removed from helpless infancy. He lay in the corner of the compartment with his eyes wide open and clear, and said nothing. The only time his eyes moved was when she moved. When, as sometimes happened, she moved out of his field of vision, to go into the corridor to intercept the coffee attendant or go to the toilet, his chin fell on his chest and he relapsed into a sort of stupor. As soon as she returned his eyes were on her again, and there they stayed. Once or twice during the holiday she had the feeling that he was not seeing her as a 20th century girl at all, but a something much more formidable, which he appeared to associate with the Cathar obsessions he shared with Helène. It was this more formidable self she felt he was looking at now as he stared at her, and upon which she realised he had made himself totally dependent. Although it made her distinctly uncomfortable, and to some extent brought back the feelings of inadequacy and avoidance more characteristic of what she now thought of as her ‘previous’ self. She couldn’t help speculating whether it might not have played some part in the very arousing of these new feelings of freedom and independence.

The immediate problem was whether she was going to be able to get him across Paris to the Gare St Lazare and the Dover train without summoning help. She began to experiment, first of all by giving up all efforts to get him to behave as an adult. Fortunately, the two other people in the compartment had showed no interest in their affairs. By consciously controlling her anxiety in case they noticed anything unusual she managed to start talking to him quietly and confidently as nurse to patient or child. When the coffee came she handed him his cup.

"Here’s your coffee, look."

No response. Just the patient dependent look into her eyes.

"Drink it up."

She realised she was going to have to feed him. She managed to get herself between him and the elderly French woman in the opposite corner and fed him the coffee, sip by sip. He drank it all without difficulty. She didn’t know much about amnesia, but she began to suppose that this was what she was dealing with. Later she got him out along the corridor and into the toilet, where all seemed to be well. At least he wasn’t wet.

When they got to Paris she miraculously found a porter, and by using the words "mon frère" and "un peu simple" she managed with his help to get Raymond’s rucksack onto his back. Leading him by the hand she found a taxi and got him into it. At the Gare St Lazare there was half an hour to wait for the train. Her main fear while she collected food at the Café-bar was that he would wander off while she wasn’t looking. But it was all right. By talking to him as one would to a child she got him to sit docilely by the rucksacks. As in the train, as soon as she was out of his field of vision his chin dropped onto his chest and he appeared to lose contact with the world altogether. She bit her fingernails in the café queue, but he was quite all right when she got back.

For some miles before Calais she had nightmares about getting through the customs. She needn’t have worried. She put on a sort of bossy elder sister act and simply raising her eyebrows and making movements with her head was quite enough to indicate the ‘un peu simple’ bit. She opened his rucksack along with hers when requested. Rien à déclarer. Child’s play.

Then Dover. She had to make up her mind what to do. Now the professionals would really have to take over. As soon as they were past the customs, she found a policeman and asked if there was any sort of medical officer on duty. When the doctor came, it was a woman.

"It’s my travelling companion. We were part of a group in the south of France. He wasn’t very well when we were down there, and I felt I ought to help him to get back. I think it must be amnesia."

She said as little as possible about the hallucinations, and nothing at all about her own involvement or Helène’s, which at this stage she was doing her best to put out of her mind altogether. Later when she had had time to think it might be different. She waited till the ambulance came. As he submissively climbed into it he didn’t even look round.

She managed somehow to get herself to London and back to her lodgings. She collapsed onto her bed and cried herself to sleep. Late in the afternoon she woke and began to prepare herself a meal out of tins.

It was more than an hour later that she suddenly realised with absolute horror that she hadn’t even asked what hospital they were taking him to. It was weeks before the reaction reversed itself and she started to take up her old contacts and to make serious efforts to make sense of what had happened. She had aroused more fundamental responses in the laws of human destiny than she had any idea of.

***

Raymond came to himself the following morning and emerged into a state of considerable clarity. He remembered the journey as a kind of peaceful dream overshadowed by the watchful kindly presence of a middle aged man who kept murmuring in his ear that he mustn’t worry any more about someone whose name he couldn’t now remember, and whose pain seemed to be inside him. Linked somehow to his belly, which ached and burned unaccountably. He clasped his hands across it and tried to steady the ache by breathing more deeply. When he did that the memory of the kindly man faded and was replaced by someone quite different, but as if born out of the fading memory a girl of about twenty-two or three, striking without being particularly pretty, with long straight red hair and a firm chin. Her greenish-brown clear eyes seemed to have been looking into his for a very long time. A wave of self-pity overcame him and he began to sob. He needed her. He must find her.

He looked round the room where he was lying, which made no sense to him whatever. It looked like a hospital room. There was a vase of flowers on the windowsill. And those were his things. There was his rucksack by the door. Suddenly, he remembered a long journey by ambulance, and arriving at a hospital. He had to get out and try to remember what he was supposed to be doing. An appalling fear started to rise from somewhere deep in his body. He began to shake, and it was all he could do to stop himself from crying out. This must be a mental hospital. His old fear of madness was getting a grip on him. He all but panicked. At all costs they mustn’t get hold of him again. Last time it nearly came to ECT and heavy drug treatment. Then he wouldn’t be able to…

Slowly the other memories emerged from some depth or other linked with last night’s dreams. What was the place he had to get to? Ashridge, that was it. Somewhere northwest of London, they said. Who was it said that? But this he couldn’t remember. It would come back to him later. The important thing now was to keep calm and hang on to Ashridge. He got out of bed and crept to the door. He could hear nothing. He tried the door. Unlocked. He peered out. A long empty corridor with doors on both sides.

Rapidly he got dressed. Everything seemed to be in his pockets, including wallet; even his passport. They hadn’t started to check on him yet then. He must get away before a doctor or nurse came. Time? 5.30 am. He was about to lift the rucksack onto his back when he heard footsteps approaching. He quickly put it back by the door. He leapt into bed and pulled the things over him. The footsteps stopped outside his door and paused. Quietly the door opened. He breathed deeply. Then the door softly closed again and the footsteps retreated. With beating heart he got out of bed, heaved the rucksack onto his back, gently opened the door, and after a quick glance both ways, made off in the opposite direction to the retreating footsteps. He reached a right-angled bend without mishap. A bewildering array of directional signs faced him on the wall. One said ‘Exit to Front Lodge’. He passed a window. Thank heavens he was on the ground floor. He could not afford to meet anyone. It was far too early for a fully-dressed stranger to escape comment. He made himself walk slowly and quietly. The corridor seemed endless. He could see an open space a long way ahead. He jerked to a halt as someone who looked like a porter crossed the space and disappeared. He began to hurry in case the man came straight back. As he approached the hallway he tiptoed to where he could get a view into the glass-partitioned office. All was silent and the office was empty. There was a ‘gents’ on his left. That’s where the porter was! He made a bolt for the open front door and through it, turning at once behind the doorjamb out of view of the hallway.

It was a fine sunny morning and the sun was already hot. He began to feel safe. The drive was curved and sloping and went through a shrubbery. Suddenly he heard a vehicle change gear and approach rapidly. He darted into the bushes. An ambulance passed within inches of him. Then he was away and out into the road.

The shock of realising he was actually free again shot him straight back into his alternative memory stream. He leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He must somehow get hold of a horse and encircle London. It would be fatal to declare his mission until he got within a few miles of Ashridge itself. Some peasants there would certainly know of the Cathar foundation. He would have to watch in the markets for the ciphered greeting signs. But when he got there, how would he recognise the Templar master? He would have to be accepted into the brotherhood first and give them the opportunity to recognise him. Blurting out his anxieties straight away would only rouse suspicion. If it weren’t all so desperately urgent! He opened his eyes and looked down. The short trousers and hiking-boots gave him a shock of total meaninglessness which cut off his memories, as when one is wakened suddenly out of a dream. He began to walk rather aimlessly along the main road. There was plenty of traffic. He saw a bus stop and walked up to it, trying to make sense of the route numbers. He must be somewhere in southeast London. He remembered that there were four or five pound notes in his wallet, but the rest of the currency was French. He would have to find a Bureau de Change, perhaps at one of the railway termini. The buses might not start this early. He had no idea which direction was towards London. A man was coming towards him along the pavement. Raymond asked him about buses.

"You’re on the wrong side of the road."

"Do the buses start as early as this?"

"Should be one along soon."

He crossed over. The stop was a few yards back. He began to be anxious that a search for him would be starting. He considered hitchhiking. Then he realised he was in no condition to give an account of himself to anyone who got curious. It seemed an age before a bus came. At last he saw the familiar red monster trundling towards him, but it was only a local one. He was about to turn away when he saw a Green Line coach rushing up behind the bus. He panicked. No Green Line stop. There it was twenty yards up the road. He rushed back and just managed to signal it to a halt.

Five minutes later he had recovered his breath and was considering his luck. If the nurse had not decided to let him sleep… If the porter had not chosen that moment to go to the loo… However, here he was. The abyss in his solar plexus started to open up, but he firmly controlled it. Time enough for all that when he got to London. The coach would arrive at Victoria. The one word that he had in his mind was Ashridge. How to find out where that was? He asked the conductor.

"Ashridge? There’s an Ashridge Park near Berkhamsted."

"Is that north-west of London?"

"That’s right. In Hertfordshire."

"How do I get there?"

"Well, there’s another Green Line goes to Aylesbury which takes you not too far away. If I were you I’d get off at Two Waters and get a bus into Hemel."

"Hemel?"

"Yeah. Hemel Hempstead. There’s bound to be a local bus from there."

"Thanks, you’ve been very helpful."

"Pleasure."

He dozed off for a bit. He awoke shouting, out of a tremendous dream in which the whole Cathar brotherhood was crossing a giant bridge, which spanned the heavens. Behind them the smoking ruins of countless stakes and gibbets flamed and reeked, the fading cries of the tortured martyrs rang in his ears, the dying prayers of his beloved companions in the black recesses of the caves rose within him into the golden radiance above. But it was what lay ahead that called up the joyous shout in his soul. The waiting concourse of future souls longing for the message of hope brought to them by the marching thousands from the past.

"We are you! We are one another! The earth is renewed for us again and again from one life to the next. The horror and the loss are all transmuted and raised as seeds for a new hope. Change! Change! Transmute lead into Gold!"

As Raymond woke he thought he was shouting aloud, but only a mutter escaped his lips as the bus came to a halt behind a row of others on the long bridge over the railway lines. He tried to gather himself together, but found he could remember nothing. Then the conductor shook him.

"There’s your coach, look. 318 to Aylesbury."

He got his rucksack down and stumbled to the door.

"Get off at Two Waters."

Somehow he got himself into the other bus. He hoped he still had enough money. He found that the fare still left him with a pound and odd pence to spare. As he settled into the rhythm of the new vehicle he tried to doze off again. There had been something of tremendous importance, which made sense of his whole experience if only he could get back to it. All the way to his destination he was struggling to force his tired and overstrained mind into a straitjacket which was still too small to hold it. As before there came a point when the division passed some threshold of coherence and fell into its component parts. By the time the conductor shook him awake at Two Waters he was past being able to bring himself into any sort of purposeful behaviour. He was still standing at the roadside two hours later with his rucksack beside him.

Fortunately, a police-car had spotted him on two previous trips, and the sergeant began to wonder why he didn’t appear to be attempting to signal cars. On the third occasion he stopped and got out. When he was met by the patient trusting look Esther had become accustomed to on the French train he decided to take the distraught young man up to out-patients at the West Herts Hospital.

He would have been considerably surprised had he known that it was Ramón who gazed back at him, and that the latter had seen the unmistakable signs in his greeting of a knowledge of Cathar lay-brotherhood. All the unknowing sergeant had done was to make a sketchy salute to his cap, but it was enough to bridge the gap of centuries. Ramón knew his Templar master couldn’t be far away. He put himself gratefully into the copper’s hands and was soon once more in hospital. The clinic in the Kent suburbs, which was the only one in the county which happened to have an empty psychiatric bed, never did find out what happened to him.

-- oOo ---

Take Initiation
Enough to realise in solemnity
That the slow trundling move across the first frontier
Came and is past.
That the peaks on the mountain pass look the same
And are subtly different.
Not so much that you forget you chose to come to earth
And those you loved for whom you made the choice.
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’

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