by A. N. Wilson
It was her belief that men didn’t talk in the way women talked. She did not think that old Stan, or Wilf, or the boy on Sports whose name she could not sixteen years later remember, had passed round the word. Rather, an atmosphere was given off. When L. P. Watson – a bit of a by-word among the secretaries, though chiefly for lewd talk and wandering hands – invited her out for evening drinks at the American Bar at the Savoy, she was not surprised, even though, when she was still a temp at the agency, if you’d told her she’d be swanning off to the best hotels with journalists who, if not household names, were known by their followers, she’d not have believed it. What had changed was not her status – she felt no snobby excitement (or not much) about the fact that her lovers, or potential lovers, were now richer, older, even in some cases more famous than before. What had changed was her attitude to life. For these months she lived in an erotic cloud, passing from orgasm to orgasm with impatience, and now seeing any man who smiled at her or flirted with her in much more specifically erotic terms than she had ever imagined possible. Previously her imagination had followed her giggly conversations with other women. She’d talked about fancying men. With spluttered mirth she had occasionally itemized this or that skill as a lover, this or that physical characteristic in a bloke which had caught that fancy. Now she had thoughts about the men she met which could only be spoken softly, in their ears, in bed.
It was while she was in this phase of highly charged sexuality that Mercy was asked to do a week’s stint working in the Chairman’s office – the old boardrooms at the top of the Legion building. It was a period of great change in the industry, and the Legion knew greater changes than most. The Dutton family, who had founded the paper (it had begun as a local paper in Leicester and moved to London during the crisis over the Corn Laws in the 1840s), had lost grip and no longer had the money or the vision to run it competitively. The last of the Duttons, Lord Charnwood, had been unable to resist a takeover, and the new proprietor, a rising tycoon from West Africa called Lennox Mark, was clearly not going to leave the paper as it was. Rumours abounded – that Lennox was going to move the paper to a tower block in Bermondsey. That the editor was to be sacked. That a new paper, The Sunday Legion, was to be inaugurated. (Most of these rumours were true. The only ones which were untrue were that Lennox Mark would turn around the financial situation of the newspaper or introduce a lot of new journalistic talent. He tended to use the same old team of journalists, and the circulation had been in fairly steady decline since poor old Lord Charnwood, a broken man, retired to a house in the country.)
At twenty-one, Mercy d’Abo had not been much concerned with the minutiae of these developments, though as a member of staff in a small and highly distinctive organization she could not avoid being affected by them. Everyone expected her, after a week in the Chairman’s office, to return if not with pieces of industrial espionage, photocopies of letters or contracts, then with the ‘low-down’. Very few members of staff had actually met Lennox Mark at this stage and Mercy was a proficient, indeed an incurable, chatterbox.
It was obvious to her from her first glance of him – his sleeked-back hair, blond then, not grey; his complexion the same even tan; the pale grey double-breasted suits of a design he’d still be wearing two decades on – that he fancied her. Even so, she was taken aback by the speed with which the pair of them conveyed, within a few short flirtatious conversations, that she would be on for it.
The cliché in her case was true; power worked as an aphrodisiac. There had been something quite extraordinarily exciting, and flattering, about the very act of doing it with the boss-man, with Mr Big. The power which had been able to wrest The Daily Legion from the control of the Duttons, which could move the whole caboodle from Fleet Street to Bermondsey, which could sack the editor and appoint a new one, which could control – or so she, with the rest of the world, supposed – millions and millions of pounds – this power was laid at her feet. They made a strange Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, as he kneeled before her, naked, in that large old panelled room. The dome of St Paul’s was not floodlit in those days, but it seemed so large and so brooding, this great voluptuous tit defiantly erect and randy on Ludgate Hill, that she could almost have reached out and touched it as Lennox Mark’s tongue slurped up the inside of her thighs.
‘I’m doing it – I’m doing this – with the boss!’
The encounters with Lennox were in fact sporadic. She was moved from the deputy editor’s office to the top floor of the building, and she missed her old friends on the paper. Some days, if she brought in the letters or came to take dictation, he would treat her with indifference. At other times, a meeting of the eyes would tell her that she was needed for sex. It went without saying that she never made the first move, and it probably also went without saying that she was never in love with him. Nor did she feel the smallest obligation to be loyal to him. In one week, she had slept with her sports desk friend, with L. P. Watson – who took her to an hotel for the afternoon – and with Mr Mark.
And then – she found herself asking – ‘Why? What in hell am I doing? What is this – this writhing about on top of, or underneath, people I don’t really know?’ It was not a visitation of guilt. There was nothing, as far as she could see, to be guilty about. The erotic obsession had passed, though. She no longer wanted these men and she was at a loss to understand what had been taking place in her own soul, both during the phase of the erotomania, and during the day or two in which it lifted.
At about this time, Lily, who had been working during each night at the intensive care department of the local hospital (and thereby allowing Mercy’s nocturnal escapades to pass unnoticed), announced that she was taking a week off work to attend the parish mission at St Mary’s, Crickleden. The mission was to be conducted by none other than the famous apostle of African liberty, Father Vivyan Chell.
This was fifteen years or so before Father Vivyan left Africa and returned to England, to become parish priest at that very church. The set-up at St Mary’s in those days was much more conventional. A celibate priest, a secular, with his curate shared the large clergy-house, which no parishioner ever entered. The services were conducted in the old-fashioned way which Lily enjoyed, with perhaps fifty or so coming to the high mass on Sundays, and a handful – which included, when possible, Lily – to the low masses on weekdays. The sick, the old, the imprisoned were all dutifully visited but there was little sense of the place being of much interest to those outside the Anglo-Catholic fold. Those who did visit the parish from outside came because they believed that it was the site of a medieval place of pilgrimage – though the Shrine of Our Lady of Crickleden, which formed a separate chapel or side-aisle to the barn-like brick church, had not in fact been built until 1911, its ornamental ironwork being among the best work of the Arts and Crafts architect and designer Oswald Fish.
The parish still retained loose connections with the Community of the Holy Redeemer. Monks from the monastery at Kelvedone sometimes came to help out when the vicar was away or to conduct retreats or quiet days.
The fact that Father Vivyan was to be conducting a parish mission, however, attracted considerably more excitement. His books – first the paperback about the church in Africa, Lift Up Your Eyes!, and his later books about the spiritual life – were popular with a wider public. He was one of a handful of Christians throughout the world whose voice was attended by the secular press. As Lily had predicted to Mercy, the conferences which the monk was to give each evening in the large church would be packed out.
The mission, which lasted three days, took a set form. After an evening mass at seven p.m. each day, the preacher spoke for about half an hour. He would then be available for an hour afterwards to speak to anyone who chose to see him privately. In the morning, he would say the morning prayers with the parish priest, and he would again be available for anyone who wished to hear him. At midday, beside the clock tower at the end of the High Road, the missioner would speak in public. In the afternoon, h
e would again be available for confessions, private consultations and the like from individuals.
Mercy did not accompany her mother to the first of the evening conferences, though she heard all about it when Lily returned to the flat … ‘Beautiful … such beautiful words.’ While being hard to please, Lily also had a need to venerate. She appeared to believe in the sanctity of almost every priest she had ever met, though this did not stop her pulling holes in their sermons. Given the theme of the mission – ‘Liberation’ – it was surprising that she had such an enthusiasm for the preacher. In all senses, Lily was a conservative.
This was, as we have seen, a time when Mercy was passing through an emotional change, and wondering why she had been so completely out of control in the previous months. Did it conceal some fundamental lack of self-confidence: or was there some need to meet the father who had deserted her and her mother during her early childhood? Confused in her mind about this, she had overslept one morning and telephoned the office to say that she was not coming to work.
She was in two minds about whether to attend any of the mission. On the one hand, she would like to see the famous monk. On the other, it irked her at that stage of her life to do anything of which her mother would have wholeheartedly approved.
To walk towards the High Road at about noon and see whether Father Vivyan had collected a crowd by his open-air preaching would be a compromise between hovering around the church with the devotees and missing him altogether. Afterwards, when she tried to remember how many had collected near the clock tower to hear the monk, she could not. All she remembered was him. This tall, emaciated figure, his eyes sunk low in his skull giving something of the effect of a bush-baby, the nose beaky, the hair brushed back like a matinee-idol in a 1940s romantic movie.
‘Jesus Christ came into this world to make us free! But we do not want freedom, we men and women. So, everywhere we make shackles for ourselves. We tie ourselves down – to jobs, to mortgages, to pointless conventions. We persuade ourselves that we want the things on offer in the shops. That we won’t be happy until we have had the holidays in the brochures … And we find ourselves imprisoned, going on journeys not of our own choosing, wanting to escape. But it takes courage to be ourselves, to be free … It takes courage to break loose …’
It was not particularly the words of Vivyan Chell, it was his manner of delivery, his urgency. He made Mercy feel that whatever shackles were binding most of his hearers, he had broken loose. He spoke of religion, ‘Not as some voodoo trick – believe in Jesus and you’ll no longer be responsible for your own actions! Believe in God and He’ll let you off the punishment for your sins which you deserve. No! That’s not what Christian freedom is! That’s making Christianity into voodoo, it’s superstition. Believe in the law of Christ and you will be free to do as you want. Love is the fulfilling of this law. Follow the law of love and all the other laws become pointless …’
He told his hearers about life in Zinariya. They were hopeful days. The old days of colonialism were over. The country had a new leader. Father Vivyan knew him. Joshua Bindiga had been at his parochial school as a little boy in Louisetown. He had gone on to Sandhurst, and though General Bindiga no longer claimed to believe in the Gospel, that Gospel was more powerful than we as individuals understood.
‘Bindiga is a minister of the Gospel – oh yes, my friend.’
A man with a strong cockney accent was yelling that Bindiga was a savage, who had killed hundreds of people in the civil war and would kill hundreds more.
‘Jesus Christ preached liberty to the captives, and the people of Africa have been captive too long … from the early days of slavery, through the period of European colonization …’
This got the audience going. Mercy remembered that, though what, precisely, was said on either side, she forgot. In the light of what happened later it was not surprising. She went along to the parish church afterwards and joined the queue of those who were waiting to have private interviews with the monk in the vestry. There were many, many people waiting to see Father Vivyan and afterwards she found it hard to explain to herself exactly what had drawn her there. When she eventually found herself at the head of the queue and entered the parish vestry-room, she simply felt within her an urgent need to talk. Almost before she had sat down opposite the monk, she had begun to talk.
During this interview, Father Chell was wearing a long cassock which buttoned down the front. Mercy was wearing a red fluffy jumper which greatly emphasized the shape of her breasts, and a black mini-skirt, black tights and knee-length black leather boots. She found that she was talking about the last few months of frenzied sexual activity – and wondering aloud whether it was an example of the ‘freedom’ of which the monk had been speaking in his public speech, or whether sex itself had become a slave-master.
‘It must be wonderful to be like you – to have put all that away from you.’
She said the words, but as she did so, she was aware of an extraordinary psychological moment having passed between her and this tall, slender and in his angular way fascinating-looking man of fifty. She knew that although she was speaking, or intending to speak, as an anonymous parishioner to a man of God, she was in fact allowing her toothy smile, and her come-to-bed eyes, and her sex-appeal to work their spell.
In a half-choked whisper, the man was replying, ‘You must know, it never leaves you – never – the need.’
‘But – you’re’ – she said the words meaning to dampen him down but she knew they would be bound to have an opposite result – ‘you’re a holy man – you’re a monk.’
‘I’m a man,’ said the choked voice.
This was all too obvious from the tumescence beneath the cassock.
‘Oh, you poor man!’
And wordlessly, she knelt down in front of him, and he allowed her to unbutton the cassock.
What followed lasted about ten minutes. She heard herself muttering words she had often used – ‘Oh my sweetheart, you need it, you need it so much’ – but never had she felt it to be so true. While she said these words, the priest had murmured in a language which was not English. She guessed, in after years, that it was Hausa, and wondered how often, in the course of his African ministry, such moments had occurred. She knew also, at the time of the fuck, with something like mystic certainty, that this was her very strange and distinctive way of saying goodbye to a phase of her life when she would be an erotomaniac. Thereafter, she would be in quest of a man for domesticity, children, hearth and home. This last frenzied fuck was unlike any other which had gone before in her life, and it would be unlike any thereafter. When she felt him come inside her, she felt explosions of joy and ecstasy which she had never imagined would be possible.
She attended the two mission sermons on the last two evenings, and after the final one, there was a ‘bun-fight’ in the parish hall. Father Vivyan’s words, as so often in his life, had been taken up and quoted in the newspapers. Never before had ‘liberation theology’ been so radically applied, by an Anglican, to the world political scene, to the English political world, to the church. There were therefore many from outside the parish clustering around the priest in the hall afterwards, while others shoved forward for sausages, egg sandwiches and fairy cakes, which had been spread out on trestle tables by Lily and her friends.
‘We must have a short word.’
Somehow, in the middle of all that crowd, Father Vivyan had broken away and managed to walk back with her into the church. They paced along side by side in the darkened empty brick aisles.
‘I’m ashamed about what happened,’ he said.
‘Don’t be. Your little treat.’
‘Is that really how you see it?’
He turned and looked down at her – her face reached the middle of his chest – and took her long fingers in his own.
‘Yes – but it’s changed me.’
‘How has it changed you?’
‘It’s made me serious,’ she said. ‘No’ – with a giggle –
‘I mean it. I’m gonna go straight – I’m not gonna sleep around no more.’
‘I abused my position …’
‘No, you didn’t.’
She tiptoed up to him and kissed him gently on the lips. They never had another intimate conversation until years later, when Father Vivyan had come back to England permanently. He left the parish the next morning and returned to the mother-house at Kelvedone.
By the time he was back in Zinariya, two weeks later, Mercy was beginning to fear that she might be pregnant.
She did not want to marry any of the men with whom she had slept in the previous month. There were four possible fathers: Lionel Watson, the boy on the sports desk, Father Vivyan Chell and Lennox Mark. The notion of settling down with any of them never passed through her mind, and she had no intention of humiliating herself by admitting that the father could be any one of four.
In his very nearly sixteen years of existence, Peter d’Abo had been an object of such unreserved and unqualified love that the question of his father’s identity had rather faded in his mother’s mind. There had been bigger problems – such as, after she had married, and had children by Trevor Topling, how these new males in her life could come to terms with her first great love, her primary love for Peter. And there had been the behavioural problems, which had begun to cause such anguish.
If, after a few interviews with the boy himself, and with the mother and grandmother, Kevin Currey had not suggested that a remedy would lie in a frank declaration of the name of Peter’s father, Mercy would never have considered disclosing it. Since Father Vivyan had returned to London, to be Lily d’Abo’s beloved parish priest, there was no possibility of Mercy upsetting everyone by naming him. She could not remember the name of the boy on the sports desk, and she hardly wished to saddle Peter with a hopeless old roué like L. P. Watson as a father. That left – assuming that she went along with Kevin’s idea, and assuming that she told the truth – only one possible candidate. (She thought of stretching a point and naming Stan, the cartoonist, who was now dead, or one or two other friends on the newspaper, but honesty compelled her to admit that she’d had a period since making love to any of them.)