by A. N. Wilson
After the moment in the wine bar, when L.P. had told Rachel that his wife wanted a divorce, they had gone back to the flat and attempted to make love. As had quite often happened in recent times, this was not successful. She had felt all the more tenderly towards him, hugged his naked form, stroked his shoulders, told him she loved him, opened a bottle of rather good white Burgundy, which they drank sitting up in bed. They had both been naked at first, though as the conversation went on, she had put on a dressing gown. She had told him that she would like to meet Julia, to ask her forgiveness, but also to see if she could not explain to L.P.’s wife that perhaps the moment had come when they should all move on. If Julia and L.P. really were very unhappy perhaps it was a good thing that they were getting divorced. But surely it could be done without rancour and without blame. If Rachel was to become L.P.’s acknowledged partner she would like to meet his children, get to know his friends. It would be so much better if she could form some kind of civilized friendship with his wife, or former wife.
L.P. had resisted this plan of Rachel’s with uncommon vigour, rising to anger. There was nothing which could be more cruel, he maintained, than for a mistress to write or telephone a man’s wife and crow. But, she had persisted, Julia was not his wife, she was his ex-wife, and the sole reason for this was his love affair with Rachel. Even as she was saying this to her crestfallen, drunken old lover, something like the truth began to dawn on her. He had lied in the wine bar. Julia did not know about his affair with Rachel, or about the flat he had bought her, or about any of it. She wanted the divorce for some other reason.
Over the years, Rachel had heard – because her own affair was such a closely guarded secret that people gossiped freely to her about him – many indiscreet conversations among fellow-journalists about L.P.’s promiscuity. She discounted it, largely disbelieved it, or chose to think, because she knew one important fact unknown to the gossips – the fact that she was his lover – that the other stories were false – that he’d slept with Martina Fax, or with Peg Montgomery, or that he went with prostitutes.
The conversation over the Meursault extended to an acrimonious interrogation lasting the rest of that day. Really, there was no need for any more talk after he had admitted to being the ‘occasional’ (whatever this meant) lover of Mary Much. When he confirmed that he had indeed slept with Peg, it made Rachel think she might hate him. By the time he was really drunk he was admitting to his habit of going to massage parlours when in need of ‘something simple like an old-fashioned housemaid’s wank’.
She would go back later, send a van, for the books, the few pictures they’d chosen together, the kitchen utensils – the ‘things’. How sad the word was. On the TV news, when the idiocy or wickedness of politicians had forced another great section of humanity into a position where home was a place of dread, one saw them queuing at borders, streaming down dusty roads or railway tracks, many an Aeneas with old Anchises on his shoulders, refugees, old women bundled in prams, flyblown babies. And always such bedraggled figures in flight had grabbed, quite arbitrarily perhaps, their ‘things’. Why in such circumstances of despair had they bothered to take anything at all, unless it was that merely clutching at an object, as a child clutched a comfort-blanket, offered in inconsolable circumstances a faint alternative to consolation? In such a spirit she had left the flat with a couple of suitcases, a few clothes, and gone to stay with her parents in Barnes.
She had no desire to talk about any of this – the end of the affair, nor the decision to leave the Legion – with Sinclo. She had chosen to sit opposite him because he had known Kitty – that was all.
‘Would you like a paper?’ he asked, with a gentle smile.
She tried to smile back, but she couldn’t.
PM defends British Arms Sales to Zinariya was the headline in the Telegraph. The Guardian had British Jobs or African Lives: The Dilemma for the Arms Trade. She did not want a newspaper. She felt she might be very happy never to read a newspaper ever again.
WILL IT NEVER STOP? was the Legion’s headline, some nonstory about the wet weather.
‘I’m okay, thanks,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’
He sounded so tender. He was looking so kindly at her. She was determined not to weep. He reached across the table which divided them and touched her hand.
She withdrew it instantly with a sharp, ‘Please—’
The train hurtled on through the storm towards Swindon.
THREE
You change at Pewsey for Troon, the nearest station to the Throxtons. It was a two-carriage affair. Normally it was all but empty in the late morning of a weekday. Today, the little train had standing-room only for funeral-suited mourners. Rachel knew that if Kitty had been attending a similar lugubrious occasion she too, like them, would have been engaging in party chatter, but their London socialite voices grated on Rachel’s ear. She noted, and realized how keenly Kitty herself would have noted, the varieties of style, ranging from dark City suits (only one man wore a morning coat) to ‘Goth’ style-statements, Victorian frock-coat and black jeans. Some of the women wore elaborate hats.
The weather was unrelenting. By the time they had all piled into the waiting charabancs and been driven from Troon to the village of Throxton St Martin, the passing scene was invisible, the bus windows steamy and rain-spattered. It was about five years since Rachel had made this journey – with Lizzie, Kitty’s publishing sister. Old Monty Longmore, their father, had met them at the station.
All around her now on the coach, the voices were as relentless as the rain. Some were talking of their own lives. Many were rehearsing the coverage of Kitty’s death in the papers – some deploring it, others merely assessing it, as though the various sensationalist and inaccurate reports had been reviews of a play or novel.
‘She got a good one in The Independent,’ one voice said.
Rachel shivered when the coach finally stopped at the church gate. The wind and rain were cold, but she felt an absolute spiritual chill at the sight of the hearse, empty of its load, parked beside the churchyard wall, and four undertakers’ men sheltering in the lych-gate with cigarettes in their mouths.
She followed the crowd into church and succeeded in shaking off Sinclo Manners. His attempt to paw her on the train had been unwelcome. She wished now, as she entered the ancient medieval building, to be alone with her thoughts of her dead friend.
The coffin, draped with a black velvet pall, was at the far end of the church. There was a smell of lilies and of damp. When attending the weddings of friends (she had never before attended a funeral), Rachel always felt, as in the chapel of her boarding school, the spirits of her Jewish ancestors clustering round her. Both her parents were agnostic and religion had played absolutely no part in her upbringing. She was herself not so much agnostic as a very definite atheist. Not only did her mind reject the notions of a Mind Behind the Universe, a Loving Creator – concepts which seemed unnecessary and indeed quite unsustainable in the face of the world’s suffering – she had a profound aversion from the ‘religious temperament’. Religions, with their offers of consolations of various kinds, seemed to her to appeal to quite base insecurities and fears. Yet she knew that religions too were tribal markers, and she recognized that the Chells were tribal Anglicans. Their house, Throxton Winnards, had been visited by Charles I, who prayed in the chapel there. Cromwell had besieged the house in 1648, Charles II stayed there after his escape from Worcester. Sir Sacheverel Chell, who fought at that battle, and followed the King into exile, was given a baronetcy. Pro Rege et Ecclesia was the motto on their coat of arms, and their loyalty to their High Church religion had cost them. (The earldom did not come until the nineteenth century, one of the Chells – Edwin, fourth baron Winnards, being part of the Young England movement and a friend of Disraeli’s, who gave him an earldom with a seat in his first Cabinet.) Many of the Chells had taken Holy Orders. Some had become bishops. One of them – the present Earl’s younger brother – was a monk.
The Chells’ Anglicanism was something which Rachel recognized (little as she empathized with it) as being deeply entwined with their spiritual roots, rather as she knew, regardless of unbelief, a great sense of kinship with the Warsaw rabbis in her own background. While disliking and disapproving of religion, Rachel also saw that it was one way of trying to acknowledge life’s seriousness, and to this extent she had more sympathy with some religious persons than with the A. J. Ayerheads.
Nevertheless, the words, both of the hymns and of the readings during Kitty’s funeral, struck Rachel as completely alien. A clergyman, presumably the local vicar, read ‘All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial …’ This seemed not so much unbelievable as grotesque. And the famous words which followed, about Death being swallowed up in victory, left her cold, shudderingly cold. After a hymn, which was printed on their service sheet and in which Rachel did not join, the old monk, Kitty’s uncle, the one who had taken her and Charles’s wedding eighteen months before, ascended into the Laudian carved pulpit, and stood, hood-eyed, lantern-jawed, for some moments in silence before he opened his mouth.
‘We are here to grieve for Kitty and to pray for her, and to offer her soul back to God, who made her and loves her. That is work – the Work of God. All of us bring our own griefs, our own memories of Kitty. She was my god-daughter. Some of you – particularly if you have read the disgusting things written about her in the newspapers – will think that I did not do a very good job. I have heard about these lying newspaper reports, but I made a decision long ago, which I commend to you as good advice, not to read them. Poor Kitty was always made so unhappy by what she read about herself.
‘Kitty was a loving girl, who retained so much of the child in her. The world saw a playgirl. Who is to say that God did not see a girl at play? Sometimes it was pointless, or even dangerous play. Sometimes it was innocent and fun-loving. God does not forbid fun.
‘She did much good, and good by stealth. When she came to see me in Crickleden, she would often stay the night, and bed down in a sleeping bag, and wake early the next morning to help prepare and serve the breakfast for my house guests. She spoke unaffectedly and easily with them. There was nothing of de haut en bas about her. Perhaps she, and they, understood something which is hidden from people who have chosen to make Money or Success their gods.
‘Children have no sense of time, no sense of self-importance, no sense of life as defined by how much money we have made or how many hours we imprison ourselves each day in an office. Kitty and the Gentlemen of the Road were able to see that.
‘Kitty died’ – the old man’s voice broke, but he regained control – ‘Kitty died because she was with child, so it is in a sense two deaths that we mourn, two souls for whom we pray. Every thing, every single thing, printed about her – that she killed herself, that she died of an overdose – is a lie, a wicked lie, a deliberate lie. But let us be candid. In any human soul, good and evil are intermingled. In some, demons very obviously do battle.
‘Perfect love casts out fear, but none of us can love perfectly. So demons of fear remain. They express themselves in different ways, for the names of the devil are legion, and he is many. Those of us who drink too much, or drug too much or are plunged into the psychological hells of eating disorders are not necessarily more self-obsessed than those who are addicted to different drugs, such as success or power or wealth. Some of us have stared into the pit, and been unable to endure what we saw. Kitty had been down into the pit.’
There was a long silence, and some in the congregation supposed that the monk had finished talking. Yet no one stirred. The church was so silent that you could hear the faint phutt as one of the candles near the coffin spluttered and consumed a globule of wax which had formed itself into a lump near the flame.
‘Where is God? At a time of desolation like this, how can we say that we believe in a God of Love? Where is He? Let us remind ourselves what God is not. The world put to death the God who explains things, the Creator God who sewed up the Universe and had an explanation for every blessed mystery. The world put that God to death on Calvary. On Good Friday they said, the God of the Philosophers is dead. How can you reconcile a God of absolute power and a God of Love? You can’t. To try is to insult the suffering of innocent humanity. That God is dead. To try to believe in Him is a blasphemy.
‘And our faith went to the Garden in the darkness of dawn three days later. Our faith did not find explanations, nor did it find fake consolations. It found a new God. The new God was to be found not in control, but in loss of control; not in strength but in weakness. He was no longer an explanation for what happens, He was now a person – a mysterious person who only the minute before had looked very much like the gardener sweeping the path. That has the profoundest implications for the human race and for human history for as long as it lasts. For we can no longer look to an imaginary God to hand out morality, to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to refashion the world along just and equitable lines. That is our responsibility now, and if it seems like a Godless world, we shall be judged – we, not God.
‘The Twelve did not recognize the friend who had been killed, brutally and savagely killed – they did not recognize him at first. But the one who doubted most of all saw, with the eyes of hindsight, that his Lord and his God was to be found not in the highest heavens and heaven of heavens but in a wounded human body: in bleeding hands, and pierced feet, and wounded side. It was in the presence of that abject vulnerability that Doubt was cast aside, and Faith could say, My Lord and my God! ’
FOUR
Throxton Winnards – it simply takes the name of the hamlet of which it was the manor house – is a seventeenth-century survival. Young Sacheverel Chell had been at the Court of Charles I; his father’s tomb in the parish church of Stanton St Leonards shows him kneeling and facing his wife. Various Chell offspring, alabaster renditions of the Children of the New Forest, kneel behind the parents. The tomb, crowned with the coat of arms, is ingeniously embellished with astrological, and heraldic, devices, some of them punning on the surname Chell. (Cockle-shells, scallops and mussels in black marble and pink alabaster cluster around the capitals.) Inigo Jones, who rebuilt Whitehall for Charles I, was undoubtedly Sache verel’s inspiration for the rebuilt Throxton Winnards. Earlier generations believed that the little square courtyard, with its Tuscan columns, and the Italianate arches of its cloistered arcade, was the work of Inigo Jones himself, but this view is no longer held by architectural historians.
Because of the family’s loyalty to the House of Stuart, the Chells sank into poverty during the Hanoverian era. This is the reason that Throxton Winnards survives as so unspoilt an example of early seventeenth-century architecture, without additions from later ages of taste.
Since it was an ‘important’ building, there had been various attempts by well-meaning architectural societies to persuade Lord Longmore to conserve or restore the house. So far he had resisted the offers of English Heritage to – as he thought of it – bugger the place up.
The funeral party, about eighty individuals, walked in the rain up the rutted drive, trying to distinguish between shallow puddles and deep pools. At the first turn of this drive, which was half a mile long, the house came into view, its mellow grey limestone sodden and blotched. Many of those who caught that first view of the house framed by the dripping beeches of the avenue felt a shock of pleasure which was something more than simply aesthetic delight. The mullioned and transomed windows, the great portico with its twisted stone columns, the castellated front are undoubtedly beautiful. But there is a further quality of Throxton Winnards, felt by all but the most insensitive of visitors, that one is stepping back into the past itself. This feeling intensifies as you walk through the portico and find yourself in the arcaded square courtyard. Over the front door in its niche is a crumbled stone bust of the Royal Marty
r looking as if carved in Cheshire cheese. His darkened portrait – oil on board after Van Dyck – hangs in the Great Hall, which you enter on passing the front door.
The high walls of this hall, which date from the time of Henry VIII, are panelled in black oak, so that the antlers, horns, spears, helmets, targes and firearms hung on display were only semi-visible glimmering in the chiaroscuro. Local caterers were responsible for the food, which by London standards was unsophisticated – rice salads, ham sandwiches made with sliced white bread, segments of rather tasteless quiche. One of Kitty’s sisters and some of her Oxford contemporaries, including Rachel Pearl, were still tear-stained, but for most people in the room, ink-black as their clothes might be, the event took on the atmosphere of any other social gathering. Conversation murmured. And when two or three glasses of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay had been consumed, the noise level rose. There was even laughter.
Sinclo could see across the crowded room that Rachel, redeyed but not actually weeping, was in deep conversation with Father Chell. He wondered what these two very different people could possibly be finding to talk about. The tall monk, clad in his grey habit, was canted over to listen to her, and her lips were quite close to his ear. It would almost have been possible to believe – had Sinclo not happened to know that she was an atheist of Jewish background – that she was, like some Russian peasant in the presence of a staretz or holy elder, making confession of her sins. The priest was nodding vigorously at what she said, and then putting his hand against his mouth he bellowed something back into her ear.