'You said nothing of this before. All was hopeless.'
'That was before.'
'And now you see things differently.'
'Yes.'
This was broadly true. What he did not see differently was Hubert's interests: fame, money, position, divine favour and—hardly less important-ecclesiastical favour were surely a rather better than fair exchange for the sexual and parental functions: the one would in this case never be missed, and the other, to judge by the families one came across, brought no great joy to anybody. It was now clear, however, that the feelings of the boy's mother, reasonable or not, extravagantly expressed or not, were as near genuine as most feelings were. This and the fact that he was in bed with her had done something to Father Lyall's hitherto lukewarm, half-whimsical desire to flout the Abbot and what stood behind the Abbot.
'When I...' Margaret stopped and tried again. 'You said it was love then. You remember.'
'Yes, of course.'
'I don't understand, Father.'
He waited for her to correct the appellation, but she did not. When he put his arm round her shoulders, she looked nervously into his eyes and away again at once, but turned towards him.
'You must be patient, my child,' he said.
Chapter Three
'Will it hurt?' asked Hubert.
Tobias Anvil shook his head emphatically. 'You will feel nothing. You'll be deeply asleep when it takes place, and afterwards—soft bandages, soothing ointments... For just a few days. Then you may leave your bed and never think of it again. The surgeons will be the most skilful in the land. I talked to one yesterday: an old friend of mine. In these times it's not regarded as a serious action: they have so much experience. There's no risk, even of pain.'
'Where does their experience come from, papa? You told me this was rarely done.'
'With children it is. It's sometimes necessary with... others, for their own good.'
'Their own good?'
'And that of the State. You needn't concern yourself with them. Have you any more questions, my boy?'
'When will it happen?'
'Within a fortnight or so. By then you'll be quite used to the idea.'
'Yes, papa, I expect I shall.'
'Good... Well, Hubert, you may leave me now, and consider what I've said to you. When you've done so, you may find there are other things you want to ask. Come to me and I'll answer them.'
Tobias patted his son's head affectionately and saw him to the library door. Outside, Hubert was at once approached by a servant, no doubt set there for the purpose, and asked to attend his mother in the bower at the end of the garden. He thanked the man and, with lowered head, went slowly down the curving staircase, across the hall, through the parlour and into the open. He was trying to think, and finding it hard. His father had been at great pains to make himself understood; Hubert believed everything he had been told, but he had not been told anything about the most important part of what was to happen, about how the world would seem to him when he was a man in years. There seemed to be no words for that part, only for what it was like: to be living in a country of which nothing was known except its position.
Hubert passed the orangery and the aviary, went down the walk between the lily-ponds and reached the bower, a recess in a grassy bank under a hooped wrought-iron framework entwined with climbing plants. Here his mother sat in a canvas chair with Father Lyall standing beside her. Not for the first time since arriving home that morning, Hubert was struck by how pretty she looked, how much like his earliest memories of her. Although he had left her barely half an hour before, he put his arms round her neck and kissed her.
'Your father told you everything, dearest?'
'Yes, mama: everything he could. I followed it.'
'What did he say?'
He sat down at her feet on a three-legged wooden stool. 'That I had been chosen by God and it was a most notable honour and I must be grateful and it was for the glory of God and of His Holy Church. And I should be admired and respected all over the world. But I couldn't have a wife or children. But it wouldn't hurt, being altered. But I...'
There were no words again. His mother drew in her breath sharply, as if startled. Father Lyall said in a grating voice, 'I'll leave you together.'
'No, Father, please stay, I beg you.'
Hubert was glad that the priest, whom he thought amusing and intelligent, had not left: at the moment, he would have welcomed the company of almost anyone he knew. But he wondered why the two had arranged beforehand their piece of talk about leaving and staying.
'Papa said'—he found he could go on now—'that it was a pity I couldn't have a wife, but that there were very many men without a wife, like priests and monks and friars, and I should be better off than they, because I should never want a wife and they often do, papa said. Do you ever want a wife, Father?'
'Yes, Hubert, sometimes.'
'Does it make you unhappy, that you mustn't have one?'
'Again sometimes, but then I remember my promises to God, and I pray to Him to comfort me, and then I... But there are priests and others who are often unhappy, I believe.'
'I knew papa was right. Another thing he said was that he was very happy with you, mama, but that he knew men who were very unhappy with their wives, and they must simply go on being unhappy unless they could have an annulment, and that's only possible for very pious servants of the Church. I expect I knew something like that, but I never thought of it before. Oh, and he spoke of the sins of...'
'Go on, Hubert,' said Father Lyall gravely. 'You may say whatever you please to your mother and to me. God won't be angry with you.'
'Fornication and adultery. I shall never commit those, and I shall never want to, and wanting to is another sin, isn't it, Father?'
'Yes, my child.'
'What else had papa to say, dearest?'
'He talked of love, mama. He said there were many kinds of love: love of friends, love of brothers and sisters, love of parents, love of children-I shall be able to love children, the children of others. And there's the love of virtue and the love of God, the highest kind. And of course the love of men and women, which is not the highest kind, papa said. He was right, wasn't he?'
'He was quite right, Hubert.'
'Forgive me, Father, but I must know what mama thinks.'
'Papa was right,' said Margaret, and looked down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap.
Hubert gazed at her. 'Tell me the truth, mama.'
'It is the truth.'
'In the name of God, mama.'
'In the name of God and of the Blessed Virgin and of all the saints, it is the truth. The love of men and women is not the highest kind of love and that's the truth.'
'Then why do you say it as if it's a lie?'
'Your mother means that there are—'
'My mother will tell me what my mother means.'
'Hubert, dearest, I can't tell you anything more.'
'But there is more to tell, isn't there? I must know what it is.'
'You could not understand it.'
'Tell me and I'll see whether I do.'
'Very well. The love we speak of is not the highest but it is the strongest and the most wonderful, and it transforms the soul, and nothing else is like it.'
'You talk to the wrong tune again, mama. This time you try to make something very interesting sound silly and heavi-some. But I understand just the same: that's easy enough. You mean that what I shall miss by being altered is so important that it would be quite wrong to alter me.'
Hubert's mother burst into tears faster than he would have believed possible. He was not too agitated at this to notice Father Lyall laying his hand gently on her shoulder, nor to find something in the way she responded that, just for the moment, made him think she was used to being touched in that sort of way. But this was soon driven from his head by puzzlement and concern.
'Why do you cry, mama? Please stop.'
'I tried so hard not to tell you, but I
couldn't help it. I wanted you to believe it was right that you should be altered, but then you asked me for the truth and I told it you, God forgive me. I tried to hide it...'
'Why must God forgive you for telling the truth?'
'There are some truths it can be better not to know. You would have been happier if I hadn't spoken.'
'I think not.' Hubert held out his hand and his mother grasped it. 'You mean I might never have known what I shall miss by being altered. But there would be so many other ways for me to hear of it, and other folk to tell me. And after all, mama, I shall never know, shall I?' Getting no answer, he went on, 'It is decided, is it? I must be altered?'
'Yes, Hubert,' said the priest at once. 'Your mother is against it, as you hear, but nothing can—'
'Are you against it, Father?'
'It's better that I don't answer that. But if I were against it ten times over, it would make no difference. Neither of us, nobody at all, has any power to resist what has been decided.'
'I understand.'
'Say nothing of this to your father.'
'I understand that too,' said Hubert, and went on directly, 'I think I should like to be alone now.'
'Pray to God, dearest, and to your saint.'
'Yes, mama, I want to, but I don't know what to pray for.'
'For God's favour.'
'I already have that, as papa said. It might be better to pray for His protection.'
Hubert turned and walked slowly back the way he had come. As soon as he was out of hearing, Lyall said, 'Don't blame yourself, Margaret. You could have done nothing else.'
'If only Tobias hadn't talked of love to the boy. Why did he? There was no need.'
'Your husband is a very fair-minded man in his way.'
'Yes, he is. You did better than I, my love, not to raise Hubert's hopes that we might still prevent this from happening.'
'His hopes? I wonder what they are.'
Margaret waited until Hubert had disappeared into the parlour; then, reaching furtively behind her, she took Lyall's hand. 'It was strange, his saying that he already had God's favour. Was that irony, do you think?'
'No. Only a man could be ironical in such a case, and Hubert is wise enough for his years, but he isn't a man yet. Now I must go and pray too.'
'For Hubert.'
'For Hubert first.'
Hubert's prayers were fairly brief, though they took him a little while to deliver. Even at the best of times, with his mind set on some simple objective like begging pardon for having blasphemed or petitioning to be made to grow tall, the words would slip away from him and become sounds, displaced most often by sounds of a different order, his own music or another's. There was no music in his head this afternoon, and as he felt at the moment there might never be again, but he could still offer real prayer only piece by piece. He asked God's guardianship against harm, then found himself deprecating the artifices of the Devil, who surely had no discoverable part in the matter in hand; he had no sooner pleaded for a stout heart than he began to solicit a serene conscience, not his most pressing requirement. He did rather better with St Hubert, who had been chosen for him out of a so far vain paternal hope that he would interest himself in hunting, but whom he had come to see quite clearly as a grey-bearded, good-hearted old man leading a horse with gentle eyes and a curly tail.
What did God's protection mean? It was not to be regarded (he had been taught) as any assurance against physical harm, though not to invoke it on the battlefield or in a region struck by plague would be the direst folly. The more important meaning, as always, had to do with the fortunes of the soul. God answered prayers of this sort in the same way as He rewarded pious meditations and virtuous deeds: by elevating the status of the soul concerned and preparing a place for it among the ranks of the blessed. Neglect of prayers, sinful thought or action, worked to the soul's eventual disadvantage. But, in the meantime, while it was on the way to its destination, its owner had no idea of what would happen to it, whether it was secure or in danger, what direction the various agencies bearing upon it had caused it to take. Anyone who knew where his soul was going must be a sort of god himself.
Hubert got up from his knees and wandered idly round the small room, gazing at and handling objects of past or present interest: his once-beloved dandle-monkey in real skin, a totum of carved bone that had belonged to his grandmother as a little girl in India, a pair of child's foils and masks, a tennis-racket, a model railtrack-tug and four cargo vans hand-painted in the black and crimson of the Coverley and North-England Line, a set of Turks and Christians in ebony and ivory (the gift of his rich second cousin, now Bailiff of Estates to the Bishop of Liverpool), an old-fashioned book-cupboard with sliding shelves. His eye passed over St Lemuel's Travels and The Wind in the Cloisters, slowed down at a collection of Father Bond stories, and rested finally on Lord of the Chalices. But instead of reaching for the volume he moved to the corner window, which looked out to the south and west and gave a view of the side entrance to the house.
From here, too, he could see the tops of the inn, the Cistercian hospice and the other buildings on the west side of Edgware Road. The road had been there many times as long as the buildings, since the days when the Romans had linked Dover with St Albans and Chester. This part of it ran along the firm ground between the valleys of the Tyburn—finally covered over from the Thames up to St Mary Bourne Parish in 1925—and the Westburn. Once, it had skirted the great Middlesex forest, of which little now remained except the hundred square miles or so between Harrow and the outskirts of Staines. There the wild boar was— at some trouble— preserved for the King to hunt.
What Hubert had been waiting for happened: the foreshortened figure of his brother Anthony came in at the side gate and passed out of view below. Hubert waited a little longer, until he heard a neighbouring door shut, then moved towards the sound.
The walls of Anthony's room were covered with pictures, mostly expensive facsimiles of works of the modern graphic school. Their subjects, or professed subjects, were orthodox in the extreme: scenes from Holy Writ or the lives of the saints, with here and there one of the more familiar mythological incidents. The treatment of these matters, on the other hand, often seemed inappropriate, even perverse, showing Salome in the back seat of an express-omnibus with the head of John the Baptist on her lap in a market-bag, filling two-thirds of the space with a caterpillar on one of the roses in St Elizabeth's apron. The case was different with the large, colourful and popular Adam and Eve by the illustrious Netherlander, de Kooning. Here the artist had plainly not tried to furnish anything that might be called a portrayal of our First Parents; what he had tried to do, with great success, could be seen in the relegation of Adam to a dim shape half-obscured by grasses and, more positively, in the treatment of Eve's flesh at the bosom and other parts. The band of hair above her crotch, or rather above the serviceable poppy that just hid her crotch, was said to have been decisive in inducing the Archbishop of Amsterdam to attach the original under a writ of non permit-timus. It was of course not known exactly why or how the writ had fallen, but the fact of that fall was enough to cause Master Tobias Anvil to content himself with glowering at the facsimile whenever he saw it instead of ordering its immediate destruction. Now, as always, Hubert looked at Eve with sly enjoyment and wonder, but that afternoon he quickly looked away again.
Anthony had taken off his jacket and bands and was washing at the china basin. He gave an unsmiling glance that was not at all unwelcoming. Without knowing him very well, Hubert like and trusted his brother enough to feel as little constraint as possible at what was in prospect; he hoped only that Anthony would not do as he sometimes did and say things he had just thought of and did not mean.
'May I talk to you a little?'
'You may continue to. About your alteration, yes?'
Hubert was surprised. 'Papa told you?'
First glancing at his brother and away again, Anthony said, 'I think he wanted reassurance that the action is as sa
fe and as painless as he'd been led to believe. He must regard my learning more highly than would seem. Well, I could tell him in conscience what he wanted to hear. As I can you. You'll feel nothing and be in no danger.'
'But what happens? Oh, I know what the action consists of, and how my voice won't change, and I shan't be able to have children, or do what's done to make children...'
'Did papa describe to you in full what's done?'
'No, but he went on until he could be sure from what I said that I knew enough. Not everything, but enough.'
Now buttoning a silk shirt, Anthony nodded slowly. 'That's his way. You ask what happens. You mean inside your body?'
'Yes, I think so.'
'It may be easier to describe what, because of your alteration, will not happen. Elements in your blood we call conductors would in time cause your voice to become deeper, hair to grow on your face and body, and your private parts to render you capable of mating. These elements come from what will be removed from you.'
'And the same elements would keep me thin and healthy unless I ate too much.'
'Why do you say that?'
'The other day at the Chapel I saw two men who'd been altered. They were fat and they didn't seem well. They...'
'Yes?'
Hubert had remembered how the two had looked at him, and understood now that they had been considering him as someone intended to share their condition, understood, too what the Abbot must have wanted from them that evening. But there was no reason to explain this to Anthony. 'Just that they seemed sickly. Unsound, not...'
'That's no consequence of their alteration. Their fatness may have indeed come from overeating. It must be a temptation to them.'
'Why?'
'My dear Hubert, do please forgive me and sit down. Now, may I tell you anything more?'
'Yes, Anthony, if you will. I want to know about mating.'
'You said you knew enough.'
'Enough for papa, not for me.'
'Very well. Say how I can—'
'What happens? I said that about the alteration, didn't I? This is not so different. I've been told what goes where, and that something comes, and that the something will make a baby. But what I don't understand is why-I mean, why folk do it, why they want to do it. I see that they must if the human race shall continue, which is God's will. But then, as every-body knows, they'll mate even when they must wish as hard as they can that there'll be no baby.'
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