Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  ‘Canon Fogarty …’

  ‘Yes, the Canon told me that you needed help.’

  ‘Canon Fogarty has done some bad things’ – I halt for a second – ‘done some bad things to me.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Private things … sexual things.’

  ‘It’s not going to be helpful if you do not tell the truth. Surely the Canon has told you to tell me the truth?’

  I am aghast at the situation. The Canon has not told me to tell the truth, he has instead told this man that I will tell the truth, which is something quite different. These, however, are the tools I have at my disposal at the moment. This man, while my father sits outside, nervous at being in the world of professionals, wants to know the truth, but the truth is not what he wants to know. The truth is something else, something I must bring to the table myself. It sits on the table between us, unwelcome and offensive, toxic. It is a lie. This doctor does not believe it, he does not believe me. We are going to have to build a lie that explains things, that we can all live with, we are going to have to construct my illness, and that started in the surgery of a psychologist in Sussex.

  Years later, I learnt about Chance, how he silenced the young men the Church brought to him. How he denied the truth of their allegations and made them ill, literally constructed their illnesses for them, so that they might live with the truth. This was the beginning of my illness, a truth built on a foundation of lies. Another self, found in another confessional, but answering to the blazing questioning of the medical profession.

  *

  Let me give an example of what happened. It’s a straightforward enough story to narrate, although I am both the participant and the narrator, which complicates things. Man likes boy, man destroys boy. He didn’t mean to do that, but it happens anyway. Society picks up the pieces. Perhaps the man pays for his actions, perhaps not.

  We got good at it. We got really good at it. At the lies and the action itself. At first it was awkward, a first date with violation at the heart of it, but soon the participants learnt their roles, what they had to do to get it off the ground. There was a kind of beauty to the thing. First, the back and forth of getting into the bedroom – that was an art in itself. It seemed always that Fogarty was speaking lines he had learnt before. He had certainly prepared for it. What he had not prepared for was a refusal, but for some reason that he never got.

  Then, there was the muttering awkwardness of the stairs. Getting from the classroom to the bedroom seemed a long way. A difficult thing to pull off. The physical obstacle of the stairs was always hard to navigate. One person eager to climb them, the other not, and not willing to enter into the spirit of the thing. This was an adventure!

  The dread of the darkness of the bedroom. The whole action of this scene takes place in near darkness, with mirrors distorting the light. The walls a pale beige add to the mundanity of the setting. There is a dark pall cast over everything that takes place in this room that the faint lightness of the beige collaborates in, unwilling it seems, like the mirrors, to illuminate events.

  The bed. Solid and central to the action. But this is not a bed of lovers; there is no nightingale singing outside, only the lark. Something hurried, and painful, and awkward and full of meaning happens. Suddenly, in a rush of movement, and force, and regret – perhaps – another lie that cannot be said. This will be the cornerstone of many lies. Soft rubber soles murmuring on a carpet scratch their noise into my memory like ice plates cracking as the earth’s poles reverse. At my back I always hear … a fumbling, and a mumbled oath. I do not like oaths, I do not like the word ‘fuck’. I do not like what it means to me. I like ‘God damn’ though. God damn you to hell.

  A spot of blood on the sheets. How will that be explained to Mrs Findlay, the housekeeper, both of us wonder, nervous at the thought of her Irish eyes trying to piece together this action in the darkness. The curtains hang heavily at the side of the bed, blocking the light from this – wait! No. Go and clean yourself in the bathroom and wait for me downstairs.

  Downstairs. I am seated on the uncomfortable embroidered sofa with its hard back, the relic of an age of polite conversation and a wealth that Fogarty’s family has long lost. He reads the Daily Telegraph on it and completes the crossword in the morning, checking the price of his stocks and shares. Perhaps a cup of tea on the side table, while the oil painting of St Peter’s Basilica watches over him, a memory of another time, of the English College in Rome.

  He is a man of the cloth and in this room dedicates his life to the improbable rectitude of the canon law. He is a lawyer, with a lawyer’s mind. After the sin must come the confession. I sit waiting for the judgement of Christ the Redeemer in the room, impatient to be off, to be away from this, with absolution.

  The Canon comes down, adjusting his dog collar. He is the Canon again, in his dull black clothes. He sits down next to me and intones the words which will lead to the act of contrition, an act of attrition in the battle to silence the blank, uncomprehending, yet accusatory words of a child.

  Better than the silence is the confession. The expression of wronged innocence, contorted into the matrix of the ignorant Church. This is not a true confession, it is not made with an honest heart, welcoming the love and forgiveness of the true God. It is something that must be said, again and again, as the acts it confesses take place again and again, over many years, a whole pubescent generation. This now is my reckoning.

  *

  O. O. mag. num. myst. er. ium. That thought again, that thought of my destruction, being plotted in a room somewhere, by someone unalone, in concert, with malevolent intent and urgency.

  The paranoid thought. Think it away, gone. Concentrate on something. The drapery on Roubiliac’s bust of Alexander Pope. As good a thing as any.

  Think of the folds, the texture. Concentrate on it. Luxuriate in it. Think of the silk, the weft of it. Where is the paranoid thought now? I struggle with it, thinking of the drapery. It is insistent, but more indistinct now. And now, thinking of the beauty of the material, the artistry: gone. But the memory of it remains, like the bust of Pope, a monument to posterity of the complication, the complicatedness of the past.

  *

  I’m in the Languedoc with a friend. It is summer. We decide to take the little yellow train up into the mountains. On the peaks there is snow. Outside the white-green florid meadows chant their hymn to creation. A slow movement, carefully finding its way from Villefranche-de-Conflent to Font-Romeu-Odeillo.

  On the train, in the carriage is a mother with her young son. I can speak the language of childhood, even internationally.

  ‘Je suis né sur une petite orange bleue, sous les étoiles immense, aussi silencieux.’

  I am not very good at this. The child looks puzzled and the mother pulls him close to her. The carriage, with its open windows and yellow doors suddenly seems small for three people and a child. Something of my own childhood speaks to me, speaks through me perhaps to these – these foreign people. I think I see through foreigners so, but at this moment it seems to me that they see through me, from the mountains of Languedoc to the heart of the Downs of Sussex.

  My friend looks out across the meadow, ignorant of what I am thinking, of what I know happened to me, happens, is happening.

  *

  There is an exhibition in Blackwell Hall of John Selden’s great map of China. It is a masterpiece. A wonderful creation, speaking of the limits of the world and days of exploration. At the edge of the known world there is a lack of conviction, a wonder at the unknown. Its colours are faded – how glorious they would have been! – telling the mysteries of the East and of a country not yet a country, pieced together from the fragments and memories of the Jesuits and the first visitors to that place beyond. I take a moment to look, carefully. If only I had the time, I would learn the names of these places, learn what happened there and when and why. But the day is impatient for me and in Duke Humfrey’s Library my work awaits.

  *


  When I construct an index, when I construct an index to my life, what will be the main entries?

  Bernard, Gerard,

  Bernard, Helen,

  Bernard, Margaret,

  East, Henry,

  Eisner, Didi,

  Essen, Odette van,

  Fogarty, Canon Dermod,

  Johnson, James,

  Lintot, Bernard,

  and the English literary canon,

  McFergus, Fergus,

  Mulgrave, Sunny,

  Normanby, Hattie,

  Normanby, Richard,

  Pemberton, R.A.,

  Repton, Anne,

  Tagus, Frederick Sanford, marquess of,

  Last will be ‘Bernard, Stephen’. I am not the most important person in my own life.

  *

  I am an ill man. It started when I was a teenager. It first manifested itself after my first suicide attempt. It was brought into this world in a surgery in Sussex. The existence of my illness was invented by a wicked man, a believing unbelieving man in the psychologist’s chair. I would live with the reinforced truth of this condition for the best part of a quarter of a century, until I learnt to challenge my whole superstructure of existence. It had to start somewhere, however, and it started in the mind of a man of religion, with the tools of the psychologist, and a pathological need not to hear the truth.

  By the time I arrive in Oxford, my illness has been made manifest, has manifested itself in a fact. I live for my illness and by my illness. I am disabled by my condition, I am a sick man.

  Before Dr Richard Gipps, there was Charles Timmins, a man who struggled to harness an illness for all ages with the tools of the twentieth century. A good man, mature, humane and caring, he did not realize that psychology, a branch of the medical profession, had made me the person I had become. He listened, intently, but saw the illness as something to be treated, not cured. He did not know that what he heard, my statements about Fogarty, were the real illness, that the cause of all that had happened to me had been the creation of the illness. He did not understand that to hear me speak the truth – finally, as I had, incidentally to him – was the path to recovery, to a world beyond my condition. He asked the question of my condition, how could it be treated, not why was it there. That was the question that he should have asked, hearing as he did, in passing, the murmur, the whisper of the truth. Charles Timmins was not at fault in this. He had to hand the power of an almost redundant psychiatry, unable to challenge the truth of an all-encompassing, vital lie. In this insistent, but limited, dualistic, or confused and postmodern world, this good man perhaps could not see the limitations of his profession.

  *

  My late teens were spent in pubs and punts in Oxford. There was something about the self-assured elegance of Bill Godchester with a pole at the ‘Cambridge’ end of a punt which I could never cease to admire. He was the son of a Cambridge cleric, a friend of Henry East’s from the Queen’s College; a beautiful man with many reasons to feel comfortable in his own beautiful skin. They made an odd couple.

  Henry East wore his radical conservatism with an ironic lack of irony. He was not the most important man in my life, but he is the most important man in my life. Henry has just always been there, not always there for me, but a constant presence, with his unconventional wisdom and slanty way of looking at the world, as though the world could be made straight, if all things were just put right – which is possible, right? The art of making the possible possible is at the centre of Henry’s existence. I have never known a man with such an enthusiasm for the new. Living in central London, an officer of the Blues and Royals, with a ceremonial sword for state occasions, he takes the ridiculous and makes it mundane. It shows his splendid isolation from the present in which he would like, somehow, to live, if there is a place for him. Is there? I don’t know. He seems to find a place. He is comfortable in his own skin, which from schooldays is all he ever wanted.

  Darius Rex was my pastoral master at public school and had been an enormous influence on me there. I thought there was something exotic about him, not because of his Persian looks, but because he had studied at Edinburgh; no one else in Sherborne had, all having gone to Oxbridge, except the sports master, who had gone to Loughborough. If only life were that simple, and that complicated.

  That was the world in which I first met Henry, a fellow chorister. His rebellion consisted in brewing Turkish coffee over a stove in his study. He would huddle over it in his poncho with his fellow rebels, waiting for the doom of the housemaster to fall upon them. A cup of coffee was his answer to the world in which we lived. It was not all about the coffee I realized even then, but still! A cup of Turkish coffee.

  *

  I only ever once tried to kiss someone: R.A. Pemberton. He was the real thing. In his company I could feel no wrong. Sadly for me I could do no wrong either, although it would not have seemed to me wrong, not once, not that once. He was the ultimate public schoolboy, with a shock of dark hair nearly falling over his stiff collar, which sat above the body of an athlete. I did not then know, as it was not written, Stoppard’s masterpiece The Invention of Love, but I could have told A.E. Housman a thing or two about unrequited passion.

  R.A. Pemberton wanted to join the army above all things, which he did, to my shame. I helped him to do it. Not conventionally bright, he needed help to understand the world at large. In the school House he was master of all he surveyed, but the world beyond, Westminster and the United Nations, was a closed book to him. In those days in order to get into Sandhurst one had to know a little at least of the world one wanted to command. It was an admirable sentiment. I took this schoolboy out of the barge yard and away from his passion, football, and showed him the truth of the larger world, at least the truth as The Times would have it. Day after day I schooled him in the intricacies of the political universe, which seemed unreal to us down in Dorset, in a town that closed on Sundays, and where the latest results on the back pages were all of the world that concerned us. Slowly but surely R.A. Pemberton learnt the ways of men. He got into Sandhurst, but I never kissed him. That would have been to introduce him to an alien world without the compulsion to command, where boys could do no wrong, which was not right.

  *

  Bill and Henry were trenchermen at Oxford, living to the full what they lacked in academic brilliance, the wake of another age. It did not seem strange to me that they would wear finely made suits from Ede & Ravenscroft, the tailors to the Queen, founded in 1688 at the ‘Glorious Revolution’ to dress the movers and shakers under the Williamite dispensation.

  Ede & Ravenscroft made the gowns for the University, those markers of distinction. It was a proud moment to be kitted out in their scholar’s gown, to show to the world – at least a world that was unimpressed with less – that one had arrived at some mark of success. Always in that shop when I went to purchase carefully tailored jackets on my father’s account, they would address me as ‘Sir’ and welcome me as ‘Mr Bernard’. It was only yards from one of the busiest high streets in the country, but it was a world away from it, and from a different time. The unobtrusive till would not ring until after one had left, without signing for anything, something vulgar which only they had to deal with. It was a sad day for me when ‘Mr Bernard’ gave way to ‘Dr Bernard’ in their mouths. It was the coming of age of a generation.

  *

  How did I find out that Oxford was even more rarified than my dreams of it? The first October morning I awoke in my set in Peckwater Quad, I opened the tall, richly brocaded curtains to see, at 6 a.m., a solitary figure collecting the empty champagne bottles left on the lawns from the night before. So much champagne! It would start at four in the afternoon, after a light lunch, heavy on the beer, and carry on well into the early hours, long after Tom Tower had called in the students of the House with its one hundred and one knells at nine o’clock.

  The first year I was in Oxford, I tried to commit suicide. I returned the next year, the same man, with the same problems and in
tentions. This time round, I shared my life with Freddy Wyndham, earl of Sanford, an old Etonian with a finely structured face, open to any new experience, and with an urban style borrowed from the precincts of New York. With Freddy I learned about the aristocracy and its unusual ways: estate-bottled mineral water for brushing one’s teeth in – teeth that always looked perfection – bred of good pan-European stock. His great-great grandmother was Victoria, Empress of India, and his mother a lady-in-waiting. His house was on Hyde Park Corner, sharing a fox with the Queen at Buckingham House over the junction. High walls separated the gardens, but they had an ease of access to monarchy, present at the State Opening of Parliament, when Freddy, as a boy, neat in his red and gold jacket and breeches, would carry the Queen’s train along the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, the seat of his fathers.

  At Sanford House, as Freddy’s home was called, there are Van Dycks in the dining room, and over the mantelpiece in the smoking room a solitary, weary Madonna by Michelangelo. There is an opulence and an extravagance in wasting the best of their possessions on those who are determined not to quit and to enjoy resolutely that simple, exquisite pleasure.

  Freddy arrived on the second day of Michaelmas Term the following year. On the first day we less grand inhabitants of the college were treated to the sight of a maid in a maid’s uniform and a capped chauffeur delivering the earl’s essential possessions to his room. They did not look out of place in the college, however. Christ Church has produced thirteen British prime ministers and is accustomed to the aristocracy. That it straddles the worlds of the great and the good and the great unwashed is the result of its fetishization of merit, almost to a fault.

  I have been kissed only once in my life, something I will never forget. The beauty of the University was Alice Heyshot, whom I idolized. We would sleep together, chastely, while outside men who thought her Zuleika Dobson would pant after her company. It was only natural that my place was taken by Freddy Sanford. Within a week of arriving he was her constant companion. I do not know what happened between them, but Alice Heyshot would play intellectual games with him, discussing Bacon, Berkeley and Hume, as was the wont of those unaffected by the weight of what they spoke about.