by A. N. Wilson
That was why, when Akule told Father Vivyan that he had received another e-mail, recounting a successful blast in the mines, the monk said a quick prayer for the souls of those slain, and thanked the Soldier Christ in his heart.
Now, in the darkness of the Crickleden night, he prayed that Lennox Mark should be converted, should return to the condition of heartbroken penitence which he had known when he saw the conditions of those children in Louisetown forty years ago.
Chell prayed in the darkness to the invisible God – My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say, Where is thy God? Somewhere glimmering in the darkness of this world there was a means – so he believed – by which each human being could seize the capacity to fulfil the Divine Will. Throughout his ministry in Zinariya, he had felt himself hindered by his own sins. He believed himself – or ‘believed’, for he knew it was a superstition, and he was almost able to see it as a superstition of very great egotism – that the whole furtherance of Christ’s Kingdom in Zinariya had been hindered by his, by Vivyan Chell’s, besetting sin.
He had tried to abstain, but some specious argument inside his head had always corrupted him in the end, combined with an overwhelming physical need. If any would condemn him as much as he condemned himself, let them know how overpowering this lust was.
The most corrupting thing the devil ever told Father Vivyan was that this erotomaniac indulgence kept him humble, by reminding him continually of his need for grace and divine forgiveness. The most realistic thing the priest found to say in his own defence was that he would never have raped someone, or forced himself on them against their will. The women had only to say no. The trouble was, they had seldom done so. He thought, for example of Mercy d’ Abo when he had come to St Mary’s to conduct the parish mission sixteen, seventeen years before. Her mother Lily was one of the most faithful members of his congregation – what old-fashioned clergymen would call a ‘pillar’. She came to daily mass. She helped to arrange the flowers. She polished candlesticks. She visited the sick and the housebound, while still working as a nurse at the local hospital, and assisting Mercy with the upbringing of a ‘difficult’ grandson. When this good woman came to him to make her confession, revealing thereby her innocence and goodness of heart, Vivyan Chell felt lacerating self-reproach. What would she think if she knew what had gone on between the priest and her daughter?
As often happened with his ‘brief encounters’, he had blotted out the memory of what, precisely, had taken place, but he would always remember Mercy’s smile when he met her eyes, and her evident enjoyment of the sex, and her kindness when they met afterwards. He would compose speeches to her in his head – If I have done you any wrong or caused you any hurt, I am so sorry. But he rejected these words as patronage and condescension. The women were grown-ups. They enjoyed it as much as he did. And those who were not his ‘brief encounters’, but who had had long-standing affairs with Vivyan, had remained on good terms with him.
‘You’re just a randy old devil and you need it,’ one of them had said, as they went to it.
No doubt it squared oddly with his profession as a monk, and he would love to have been rid of it, this overriding, addictive lust for women, especially for black women. During his last days in Africa he had enjoyed a particularly intense and happy relationship with a woman called Nontando. Parting from Noni had been deeply painful, and he had wondered, in his prayers, whether all the public and political rows with Bindiga, his campaigns on behalf of the mine workers, his faithful following of the summons home, his acceptance of the parish of St Mary’s Crickleden – whether all these outward obediences to God were a preliminary to the real renunciations which were required of him. God was perhaps preparing him for a great ordeal. Could it be the case that his great work for Christ was not as a public campaigner on the part of the oppressed, but as a private human soul, renouncing with great difficulty a lifelong vice? Since coming back to England, Father Vivyan had been chaste. For two and a half years he had seen the response in women’s eyes; he had feasted, visually, on the sight of their hands stretched out for Communion, on the shape of their breasts, their thighs and bottoms, and although the sight and smell and sound of them had sometimes made him almost pass out with lust, he had been loyal to his vow.
In the darkness of his night prayers, he had offered all this frustrated lust to God, and the extraordinary sense had grown in him that he was being prepared to follow in the Via Dolorosa. In Africa, his role, and that of the Community of the Holy Redeemer, had been that of John the Baptist, preparing and making way for the Lord, unpicking as much as they could of the colonial attitude from their African pupils, preparing them mentally – thirty years after political independence – for true personal independence, enabling them to become Africans again.
He had believed at first, when the Bishop offered him a slum parish in south London, that a similar role of leadership was required of him. That was, indeed, how he conducted the parish life, trying to make the church a centre of political activity, a microcosm of the coming Kingdom where all should care for each. But in the moments of aloneness, and sometimes when he slept, the text came into his mind:
From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day …
He owed it to his people, to the people of Zinariya, to help them continue with the struggle, and he would do that until his dying breath – through speeches, and campaigning, and raising money. All available collection money at St Mary’s went to the freedom fighters. He had no qualms about getting money from his brother and his richer relations for the ‘missions’. Nor did it trouble his conscience that some of the ‘asylum seekers’ in the vicarage – the two Albanian medical students, for example – helped train the Happy Band. But something told him … was it merely the onset of old age which made him feel this? … that his own personal journey was to be detached from this great cause.
Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach here also: for therefore came I forth. He had preached from that text at his first mass in Crickleden – and had often preached from it in his African ministry. So did we all come forth, bringing Christ into the world, making him flesh, in our own town, our own village, our own settlement, till the earth was full of the glory of God.
He still waited in the darkness for an explanation of these two apparently contradictory movements in his life, the calling to lead the fight for freedom, not only in Zinariya but in poor, benighted Britain – stinking, corrupted modern Britain with its subservience to America, its sheer material greed – and the calling to suffer.
Surely, before the first steps were taken on the Way of the Cross, God would allow the Christian warrior one last tussle with the High Priest’s soldiers before the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane? (What good cause had ever been won without a fight? Did not the Prince of the Apostles cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant?)
Then – guided by one of those psychic hunches or imaginative leaps which had led him throughout adult life – then he could surrender to the Divine Will. But first the struggle! Would not God let him have one last fight with Lennox Mark – expose the filthy lies in The Daily Legion, denounce the paranoid dirt which it peddled every day about asylum seekers, about poor people, about Africans and Europeans? O Lord, let there be one last battle before I surrender myself into your will, let that extravagant Tower of Babel, LenMar House, fall even as Babel fell into confusion …
In the darkness, he fumbled beside the deckchair for a whisky bottle and took a slug. The house, with its many inhabitants, murmured and groaned, snored and muttered as Father Vivyan’s stream of thoughts swam prayerfully in the shadows of his room.
Downstairs, he could hear the front door opening, as it often did during the night. Wanderers of various kinds, in different stages of inebriation or none, blundered in. Someone was usually there, ofte
n Father Vivyan himself, to look after their needs. Two of the young monks from Kelvedone were staying in the house at present, and part of their job was to attend to such vagrants, where necessary offering tea or sleeping bags, and leading them, where possible, in the direction of lavatories. (This was not always successful, which explained the mingled smells of urine and carbolic in the house.)
‘Where are you going?’
He could hear one of the novices whispering the question urgently.
‘It’s bally urgent,’ whispered back Bertie Wooster.
The priest could hear the long strides of the boy as trainers took the uncarpeted stairs three at a time.
The door of his room opened.
‘Is it all right if I come in, Father? Father?’
‘Tuli.’
‘Oh, Father!’
The door had closed, and the tall youth, a shadowy wraith in the dark room, took shape as he stepped into the light shed by street lamps, a somehow flat light, so much less luminous than that of the moon, but enough to show the boy’s face, the wide, large, frightened eyes. The distinguished straight nose, the well-cut sideburns, the firm line of his jaw.
‘Is it all right to visit you, Father?’
The monk stood up and hugged the boy.
‘Come and sit beside me, Tuli. Sit on the floor while I sit in my chair.’
For a while they were silent in this posture, the older man returned to his sitting posture, the youth leaning against the priest’s knee. Father Vivyan’s hand rested on the youth’s shoulder and stroked his thick springy hair. Slowly, the anxious, very rapid breathing slowed.
‘I’ve been out, Father. I’ve done bad things.’
‘Tuli – Tuli, my son.’ He rubbed the hair with a rapid playful gesture. ‘What bad things? Tell Father.’
EIGHTEEN
All night long the rain fell on London – on Knightsbridge, where it washed the blood off the pavement in Redgauntlet Road, on the great serpent-shaped brown river, on the Tower of London, on St Katharine Docks, on the waters of Docklands, and far beyond, a mile down river on the Surrey side, on the unresting bright lights of LenMar House. The rain echoed on rooftops, waking and tormenting such insomniacs as L. P. Watson in Clapham or Trevor Topling in Streatham. At half past five in the morning it splashed the windscreens of the delivery vans of the wholesaler, which set out across south London to take the bales of newsprint to the innumerable newsagents in those few square miles.
By six, Ali Hussein, who had been awake all night, came from the flat above his small shop, drew back the bolts and dragged the cellophane-wrapped parcels inside.
With automatic gestures, he stabbed with his Stanley knife at the thick cellophane, then at the plastic ribbons which held the newspapers in place.
His wife, crushed, weighed down with fear, worry and tiredness was upstairs. Ahmet was asleep. They had not even kept him in the hospital overnight. Just a bandage, some painkillers …
The Stanley knife broke the last tape, and Mr Ali reached for The Daily Legion – MARTINA THE BRAVE! A doll-like woman, her head resting against the shoulder of a fat man with grey hair, smiled out at Mr Ali. ‘Police yesterday evening praised the courage of Martina Fax, Legion columnist and wife of the proprietor Lennox Mark, when she fought off three masked intruders into the couple’s Knightsbridge house …’
Mr Ali scoured the story for some mention of his boy – his frightened, maimed boy who lay upstairs in a narcotically induced state. What sort of example would this set to Ahmet’s younger brother and sister? He was doing so well, studying computers at university, Crickleden University, and working to pay his way. The job for Granville Stoppard made them all delighted. No ordinary delivery boy, their Ahmet, no pizza bikes, no takeaway curry for him! The fact that so many of the shop’s clients lived in SW7 or SW3 or W8 had made both parents sure that it was quite safe. Only the rich lived there. And now some bastards had …
He stabbed furiously as he thought about the revenge he would like to take. Three Timeses, three Guardians, twenty Suns, twenty Mirrors, seventeen Mails, ten Expresses and thirty Legions. The Telegraph had a picture not of the Markses as a pair, but simply of Martina, smiling at the cameras. This paper, and the Mail, actually noted that the delivery boy had been attacked. Presumably Ahmet’s name had been given by the police, since both papers said that Ali Amit had been attacked. At least these papers had tried to give some account of what happened. The Independent reported some doctor who said the boy’s condition was satisfactory and that he had been discharged from hospital.
‘Try having your own ear sliced off by a fucking maniac,’ said Ali Hussein, ‘before you tell my boy it is satisfactory!’
The Times had ‘Wife of Newspaper Proprietor Held at Knifepoint’.
The Daily Mail, quick off the mark with a comment piece, wondered whether the ‘gangs of marauding Turks’ who now roamed the cities of the old East Germany were not straying over to England? How many more delivery boys get stabbed in the eye in London before the Home Secretary admits that his policy on asylum is insane?
The Guardian did not mention the incident at all on its front page, leading instead with a story about the copper industry in Zinariya being threatened by gangs of youths, who marauded and rioted in the mines, and who were believed to be responsible for the recent destructive explosions.
NINETEEN
Having grown up in a police state, Martina knew the strategic usefulness of misinformation. It had helped openly to lie, even – or especially – to members of the Court. ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ went round in a twitter for days believing that they were going to appoint a woman to succeed Anthony Taylor as editor of The Daily Legion. The household of L. P. Watson had been thrown into excitement by the prospect of him succeeding. (Mary Much had maliciously telephoned his wife, Julia, to ask if she thought he’d be interested, and although neither Lionel himself nor Julia thought of him as an editor, there had been a few days of thinking about the substantial salary, the chauffeur and other attractions of the post.)
The Prime Minister himself was interested to the point of obsession in the appointment. His press secretary had rung Tony Taylor for clues, but the outgoing editor was kept in the dark as much as anyone. (He guessed, correctly, though, that Worledge had been offered the job – the brutal Worledge, editor of an extremely downmarket Sunday tabloid.)
When Lennox saw the PM – it was on the last morning of Taylor’s editorship, and the announcement was still not official – it was clear that the man could think of little else. He wanted Lennox first to confirm that the new editor would be Worledge, next that Worledge would continue the present very harmonious relationship between the Legion newspapers and Number Ten. Lennox, who liked nothing better than to watch senior politicians gasping for his favours, was not going to offer the Prime Minister any comfort until he’d got a few reassurances about other matters. There was the little matter of the Commonwealth, which Lennox wanted nobbling, and, not being in a position to do it himself, he thought the Prime Minister was the likeliest nobbler he could find.
Shirt-sleeved, sweaty, jet-lagged from a recent trip to Pretoria, the PM shuffled uncomfortably in his chair.
‘It’s not gonna be easy, y’know, Lennox.’
Lennox produced a cigar from a case and began to roll it about between thumb and finger, sniffing and caressing it while the politician stared in alarm. The difficult matter under discussion, Britain’s defence of Zinariya’s continued membership of the Commonwealth – was outweighed by this new crisis: the impending disaster if the cigar were to be lit. To the pure, all things are impure. In that Cabinet Room, where Churchill had incinerated a thousand of Havana’s finest, the air was now unpolluted. For a visitor to ignite a cigarette or a cigar would be to defy an almost sacred tenet; why, the poisonous blue clouds might hover in the air, drift down corridors or staircases, seep through connecting doors and, most horrible, reach the nostrils of children.
‘Doing right is never easy,’ said Lennox, ‘th
at’s what the leader in this morning’s Legion emphasized, Prime Minister.’
‘And I’m grateful for what you said, Lennox, very grateful.’
The mercurial sheepishness in the PM’s face could, if viewed from another angle, look like slyness. Lennox enjoyed this shadow-boxing. Martina, discussing the matter the previous evening with her husband, expressed a conviction that ‘in the end the little turd will cough.’ The displeasing mixture of metaphor summoned up a spattered lavatory-pan in the mind. She meant that the PM would eventually give Lennox a peerage, or as she said, laying prior claim to the honour, ‘his peerage’. Meanwhile there were motions to be gone through. If the entire Commonwealth decided to gang up against General Bindiga, what could Britain do? The Legions both had an unambiguous answer to that. Britain should remind the Commonwealth that if a country were expelled for the gross abuse of human rights, there would not be many heads of state left to dance the cha-cha-cha with Her Majesty when she had them all to dinner at Windsor Castle.
Let’s avoid gesture politics [The Daily Legion had urged]. It’s a rough old world and no one is pretending that President Bindiga is a saint. But is it really worth putting at risk the economy of one of the most prosperous West African countries … The Prime Minister has so Jar shown real leadership … In this election year, let us hope …
On page three of the Legion there were some unsubstantiated stories about Professor Galwanga, leader of the opposition Alkawari! party running up huge hotel bills in Park Lane.