Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  Prince sat in a semicircle of his elect; one brother and two sisters on either side, the Rev. Samuel Starky on the far left, the Rev. George R. Thomas on the far right. Starky, eldest and whitest of my seven hosts was a tall, stout man of sixty-one years, with mild blue eyes, a little weak and wandering in expression. His name was well known in these Somerset dales and woods, among the gentry of which the Starkys had always held their heads very high. Next to Starky were Sister Ellen and Sister Zoe; next to Thomas were Sister Annie and Sister Sarah. Two of the four ladies would have been thought comely in any place and one was very lovely. Sister Annie was a fine model of female beauty in middle life; plump, rosy, ripe; with a pair of laughing eyes, a full red cheek, and ripples of curling dark brown hair. Some softness of the place lay on her as on all the rest; hush in her movement, waiting in her eyes, silence on her lips. She was the only woman I saw at Spaxton who seemed in perfect health.

  The second lady, Sister Zoe, was one of those rare feminine creatures who lash poets into song, who drive artists to despair, and cause common mortals to risk their souls for love. You saw, in time, that the woman was young, and lithe, and dressed in the purest taste; but you could not see all this at once; for when you came into her presence you saw nothing save the whiteness of her brow, the marble-like composure of her face, the wondrous light of her big blue eyes. She sat there, nestling by the side of Prince; in a robe of white stuff, with violet tags and drops, the tiny streaks of colour throwing out into relief the creamy paleness of her cheek. But for the gleaming light in her eye, Guercino might have painted her as one of his rapt and mourning angels. I do not know that I have ever seen a face more full of high, serene, and happy thoughts; yet gazing on her folded hands and saintly brows, an instinct in my blood compelled me, much against my will, to think of her in connection with that scene which had taken place in the adjoining church; the strangest mystery, perhaps the darkest iniquity of these days; through which Prince asserts, and Thomas testifies, that God has reconciled living flesh unto Himself. Of the other two ladies I shall only say that Sister Sarah is young and tall, and Sister Ellen about fifty-five years old. I was not told what names these ladies had been called in the world outside.

  Wishing to learn if Sister Zoe and “Madonna” Paterson were one, I asked by what name I should speak to her.

  “Zoe,” she replied.

  “But think,” I urged; “I am a stranger; how can I use that sweet, familiar name?”

  “Pray do so,” answered Zoe; “it is very nice.”

  “No doubt; if I were here a month; meantime it would be easier for me to call you Miss – ”

  “Call me Zoe,” she answered with a patient smile, “Zoe; nothing but Zoe.”

  Looking toward Prince I said, “Do your people take new names on coming into residence, like the monks and nuns of an Italian convent?”

  “Not like monks and nuns,” said Prince; “we do not put ourselves under the protection of our saints. We have no saints. We simply give ourselves to God, of whom this mansion is the seat. At yonder gates we leave the world behind; its words, its laws, its passions; all of which are things of the Devil’s kingdom. Living in the Lord, we follow His leading light, even in the simple matter of our names. They call me Belovéd. I call this lady Zoe, because the sound pleases me. I call Thomas there Mossoo, because he speaks French so well.”

  I never got beyond this point with the Saints. When bidding them goodbye I said to Zoe, holding her hand in mine, “May I not hear some word to know you by when I am far away?”

  “Yes; Zoe,” she said, and smiled.

  “Zoe . . . what else?”

  Her thin lips parted as if to speak. Was the name that rose to her lips . . . Paterson? Who knows? With her fingers linked in mine she turned to Prince, and whispered in melting tones, “Belovéd!” Prince told me in a voice of playful softness; “She is Zoe; you must think of her as Zoe; nothing else.”

  The gentleman called Belovéd by his followers is fifty-six years old, spare in person with the traces of much pain and weariness on his pale cheek. His face is very sweet, his manner very smooth, his smile very soft and the key of his voice is low. He has about him something of a woman’s grace and charm, and in his eyes which were apt to close, you seemed to see a light from some other sphere. As we sat before his warm and cheery fire he seemed at once rapt into his own dreams. When the sound of voices roused him he crossed his hands upon his black frock,50 put his shiny shoes on the rug and bore a luxurious part in a long, singular conversation.

  “You hold,” I asked him, “ that the day of grace is past?”

  “We know it is; the day of judgement is at hand.”

  “You expect the world to pass away?”

  “The old world is no more. God has withdrawn us from it.”

  “How many are you in the Abode?”, I asked.

  “About sixty souls in all.”

  At this moment a manservant, dressed in sober black came into the room. I said, “You count the domestics in that number?”

  “Yes. They are all members of our family and share its blessings.”

  “Do you take the service needed in the house, each in turn, like the Brethren and Sisters of Mount Lebanon?” (I saw a faint smile ripple on the servant’s face.)

  “Oh no,” broke in upon us Sister Ellen; “we do nothing of that kind; our people serve us; but they do it for love.”

  “Do you mean that they serve you without being paid?”

  The only reply to my question was a laugh from the lady and a grin from the domestic.

  “Among these sixty inmates, how many are male and female? How many are young, how many grown up?”

  “The sexes are nearly equal,” answered Thomas, “there are no children.”

  “None at all?” I asked, thinking of the Great Manifestation, and what was said to have come of it.

  “You do not understand the life we live here in the Lord. Those who married in the world aforetime now live as though they had not. We are as the angels in Heaven and have no craving after devil’s love.”

  “What do you wish me to understand as devil’s love?”

  “Love that is of the flesh – all love not holy, spiritual, and of God.”

  “Have I not just seen a child through the church window? A little girl playing on the lawn?”

  Prince seemed to be dreaming again. Thomas said with deep emotion, “She is a child of shame – a broken link in our line of life – Satan’s offspring in the flesh.”

  A look of anguish clouded all their faces except Sister Zoe’s, whose sweetly serene countenance was quite unmoved.

  “The work of that time,” put in Sister Ellen with a sigh, “was the saddest thing I have ever known. For a whole year we lay in the shadow of death, and near to hell; but God wrought out His purpose in us. It was a bitter time for all but most for our Belovéd.”

  Poor little girl!

  “Your rule of life is now – a rule of abstinence?”

  “It is the rule of angels,” answered Prince. “we live in love, but not in sin; for sin is death and our life in the Lord is eternal.”

  “Yet surely all men die?”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, “they have mostly done so; but death is subject to the Lord in whom we live. We shall not die. We have no such thought.”

  “But some among you have passed away; Louisa Nottidge, for example?”

  “Yes, some erred and the Lord took them; but many examples do not make a necessary rule. If I saw the valley outside our Abode choking with ten thousand corpses, the sight would not convince me that I too would one day die.”

  “Where do you put the departed ones?”

  “Some are buried at the farm, some rest under the green lawn. We think that all bodies not saved eternally by Christ go back into the earth from which they sprang.”

  “But you are all growing older! As more of you drop away you will be forced to see that death will come.”

  “Not so,” said Belovéd, “we wil
l never expect death. Death is a word that belongs to time.”

  “But everyone lives in time.” “You live in time. We do not.”

  “You see the sun rise and set,” I urged, “you know that yesterday was Friday, that tomorrow will be Sunday; that springtime passes and the harvest comes about.”

  “Well, yes,” said Belovéd in a pitying tone, “we feel the flow you must take as your measure of time. It is no sign of change to us, who dwell for ever in the living God.”

  Such is the Abode of Love. A dozen ardent clergymen, smitten with a passion to save souls, possessing power to warn and softness to persuade, after various grapplings with the world have left their posts and shut themselves up in a garden where they muse and dream, surrounding themselves with lovely women, eating from rich tables, pretending that their passions are dead, and waiting, in the midst of luxury and idleness, for the whole world to be damned!

  Is this all? No; not quite all: in the meantime the reverend gentlemen play a game of billiards in what was once their church.

  28: TAILPIECE

  To the end of his life the Reverend Henry James Prince kept a strangely ageless look that attracted new followers as the original ones died. In 1892 he converted to his faith another equally charismatic Anglican priest, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, then aged thirty. In London Smyth-Pigott repeated the Prince story of fifty years earlier by gaining a large congregation with a core of professional men (stockbroker, chartered accountant, tax collector, civil engineer, architect, master baker) and several hundred ardent female admirers. Like Prince’s early followers these combined to build for Smyth-Pigott and Prince a unique church, but much larger and more splendidly ornate, in what was then known as the “muscular Gothic” style. It was called The Ark of the Covenant, on Rookwood Road, Hackney. The cathedral-like spire is visible for miles around, and the beautiful stained-glass windows are designed by Walter Crane. This church opened with a service of dedication attended by Brother Prince in 1896. Every seat was crammed with eager followers, apart from some allocated to the press and public. After the dedication Prince finally retired for the last time to his Agapemone at Spaxton, Somerset.

  In the last year of the 19th century the chief Agapemone housekeeper sent word that the impossible seemed to be happening: Brother Prince was dying. Smyth-Pigott hurried to the bedside and found Henry almost unable to speak, but according to the few people present his last word was spoken to this, the most powerful of all his disciples. The word was “Belovéd!”

  What follows is described by Kate Barlow, Smyth-Pigott’s granddaughter, in her book about him and how he prolonged the Agapemone into the 20th century –

  “Prince’s followers were confused, appalled and frightened by his death. When others had died it had been easy to dismiss their parting as a failure on their part, but Brother Prince? Surely not. It took all my grandfather’s considerable skill to soothe the confused faithful and at the same time get the old man laid to rest in the garden of the Somerset Abode of Love in what I was to know as Katie’s corner.”51

  I never listened consciously to popular songs but as a student heard them on juke boxes when every café and pub had them instead of television sets. Nowadays phrases from them come to mind for no apparent reason. I awoke this morning with the tune of these words in my head: Hey mister tambourine man sing a song for me, I’m lonely as can be, I’m lonely and I don’t know where I’m goin’.52 I was not lonely. I was cuddling Zoe which always makes me feel thoroughly happy and good. I had made my arms and body like a basket holding her, keeping her warm and safe and both of us at peace. Yes indeed.

  Having completed Victorian English tale will I resume Classical Greek? Or Renaissance Italian? Or Scottish history from big bang till now? Where will I get the knowledge, strength, enthusiasmos53 to continue one of these? As the second policeman says, this is a compound crux, an almost insoluble pancake.54 Until a solution is found this diary must contain my furor scribendi.55

  But how can I stop her bringing terrible people to the house? Last night one of them, a big lad with a bright blue saltire tattooed on his ugly mug, brandished a switch blade when I told him “fucking” was not an adjective appropriate to every noun. I was terrified, may have gone pale but stared frigidly back. Zoe lost her temper and made him apologize. Why did he fear her more than he hated me? Why does she invite him here? That’s the third time. I can’t believe they are lovers. Should I ask her to come drinking with me? She would meet nobody like that in Tennants, but going public with her would be a step toward proposing marriage. Query: is that what she wants? O my God, of course that’s what she wants. Well she won’t get it. Should I accompany her to the Dumbarton Road pubs where she drinks? But that might not stop her inviting ruffians back with us on leaving. Another insoluble pancake.

  This has been an odd year that began with winter prolonged through an extra month, not by frost and snow – for decades snow starts to thaw as soon as it falls in Glasgow – but by occasional sunlit days, each followed by two or three rainy ones. In Hillhead gardens and parks the trees were bare branched far into May, then suddenly in less than a week it seemed that buds unfurled, exploded into dense varieties of lovely green, followed by a warm bright season refreshed by a few cool moist days, a season that has not stopped. Toward the 20th century’s end I noticed a few chairs and tables appearing on the pavement before some Byres Road snack bars. I did not notice the increase of this practice (due to global warming?) until recently, but Hillhead on fine evenings and weekends has an astonishingly Parisian look. I believe a social history of Glasgow – of Britain! – could appear in a short description of how Hillhead shops have changed in the last sixty years, if we count Byres Road and the adjacent part of Great Western Road. Here goes!

  In my childhood and student days the main Hillhead streets had all the small useful provision shops found in any British country town or large village. They included a Woolworths, two Post Offices (the biggest with a sorting and telegram office), two bookshops (one of them second-hand), a cobbler or shoe repair shop, and a clock mender. I do not remember who mended defective radios, gramophones (as record players were called), hoovers and other household appliances, but think it was done by taking them to shops where we had bought them. Hillhead had at least three restaurants of a sort called tea-rooms, where genteel women like my aunts took afternoon tea or sometimes a lunch they regarded as dinner. The many university students lodging here ensured customers for many pubs, cafés, fish-and-chip shops. There must have been an estate agent’s office somewhere but I cannot remember it.

  A change began in the 1970s when two big, useful, well supplied hardware shops closed, the owner of one telling me he could no longer afford to pay the increased rates. It may not be a coincidence that a mile away in Anniesland a huge B&Q arrived selling every sort of household tool and appliance but mending none. There is still a shop selling clocks and jewellery, and twenty years ago I took in a very pretty little clock presented to me by my staff when I left Molendinar Primary. They had several of the same kind for sale, but explained that mending it would cost me £7.50 but I could buy a new one for £5.50. Then a big supermarket opened at the top of Byres Road and soon the butchers and most small provision shops vanished leaving only one shop I remember from childhood, selling fish and game. The others have been taken by several glossy estate agents’ offices that can easily pay the district councils high rates, and many second-hand or foreign craft shops largely exempt from rates by being registered charities, and which are mostly staffed by voluntary workers. Other shops are chiefly staffed by young folk who know nothing about the manufacture and quality of what they sell, do not even need to know arithmetic because cash machines do their addition, multiplication and subtraction. Universal state education was made the law in 1870 Britain because (as Napoleon said) Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, highly productive ones, who could not have lasted as long as they did without a big workforce able to read, write and count. A Victorian statesman56 who had hith
erto opposed state education because it might lead to social revolution of the French sort, now publically announced, “We must now educate our new masters!” and became foremost in committees that ensured state schools taught children:

  1) to sit still in rows,

  2) to never question a teacher,

  3) to only talk when asked by a teacher,

  4) to learn, not think.

  This system was imperfect because it enlarged the middle class with more teachers than could be drawn from its upper ranks. Many of these liked thinking and encouraged it in some of the state-funded schools, generally called Board Schools because Britain is a Kingdom whose governments don’t want to rule a state. But the increase of literate thinking people in Britain led to the founding of the old Labour Party, though the people who governed Britain still graduated from those ancient privatized English schools misleadingly called Public. These no longer care if or what the state schools now teach, since productive British industries are now reduced to banking and weapons manufacture. The owners of British shops and stores fill them with goods packaged in outsourced factories.57

  The genteel Byres Road tea-rooms are long gone, but many more restaurants, cafes and pubs have opened there or in back lanes. The customers are partly the local middle class enriched by the privatisation of public wealth begun in Thatcher’s reign, and partly Glasgow University students who have been more than doubled by a huge intake of students from abroad. They are taken because their fees make up for the lost student grants once paid by the government, so the entrance qualifications have been lowered and in some courses the standard of teaching. Students from poorer families support themselves with bank loans or by working locally as waiters and bar tenders or some other counter job. Their wages are often less than the minimum that European regulations are meant to impose. The two Post Offices are closed but packages can be posted from the back of a Pakistani general dealer.