by A. N. Wilson
You mean that one there, Father?
Those Uzis are toys – pea-shooters. I mean the machine-gun.
Is that you, Father Vivyan?
The machine-gun. It’s on the coffin just behind you. What’s in that coffin?
Bones, Father.
And?
He laughed, for a while uncontrollably.
A skull … Some old geezer’s skull. Nice ashtray, Father. Stuffed it with butts – in the eye-sockets, stuffed it full of butts.
And?
Ammunition.
Bless you, my child. What is the ammunition for?
You tell me, Father – are you God or Father Vivyan?
I am God. You must tell me what that ammunition’s for, what that machine-gun is for …
Killing!
The boy was shouting now, out of the tomb to the driving rain, smiling ecstatically, as the quiet calm voice continued, the unmistakable, upper-class English voice of God Himself.
Kill Mr Fat. Kill that shit who left Mum and me when I was a baby. Shoot the yid who wrote ‘bout Father Vivyan ‘n’ me. Kill, shoot – fucking kill.
Yes, my dear. If any of them come for you, you must kill them. Is that clear? Kill them.
Yes, O Heavenly Father.
THIRTY-ONE
On the bus-ride, changing at Catford, Rachel did not concentrate on her book. She stared through the raindrops on the window, thinking of Vivyan, and his absolutely maddening character. It would surely have been possible to refute each of the libels in The Daily Legion, and, moreover, to have used the services of a lawyer to get the paper to publish a retraction, and to offer substantial damages. Instead he was determined to maintain the silence of Christ before Pilate. He had refused to deny the story, even to Mrs Thorn. When that disagreeable woman had offered her ultimatum to Monty, Vivyan had smiled, agreed that she was free to withdraw her labour until he left the house, said he would go. Monty had protested. The telephone calls had been made, however, and within a few hours, the elder brother was driving the younger to the station at Troon.
‘Had to buy his ticket, of course – the bloody ass won’t carry money. He has to cross London, for God’s sake.’
‘It’s King’s Cross – the station for Kelvedone?’
‘That’s where he said he was going.’
‘I want to find that boy before he does,’ Rachel had said.
‘My dear, do you think that’s wise?’
She had left for London herself that afternoon. Telephone calls to the monastery yielded no information. Unsurprisingly, given the amount of unwelcome press coverage received by one of their number, the monks had refused to give anything away. They would not say that Father Vivyan was there, or not there; that he had arrived or hadn’t arrived; that he would be staying or leaving. After two or three attempts to speak to different monks (who was head man? Searching her memory from Chaucer, she’d asked to speak to the Abbot – there wasn’t one), Rachel found that the cunning men of God had diverted all calls to an automatic answering service.
She was maddened by his failure adequately to defend himself. She was more maddened simply by him and it was difficult to articulate this feeling, to bring it into focus. What she had witnessed in action at Crickleden – Vivyan’s miniature Kingdom of God, in which the ordinary self-protective securities were not observed – was unlike anything she had witnessed before. No locks, no personal property, no privacy: this had shocked her at first. Then she had asked herself whether his refusal to be self-protective was separable from a demand – Hey, you! – to be noticed. Was his Christ-like life lived for others anything more than an ego-trip? How were they helped, all those waifs and wanderers, among whom she had been numbered, who had come to Father Vivyan to talk, to share their inmost lives with the man who sat in the deckchair, listening, listening? Yet she knew she had herself been strengthened by her time in the vicarage. It gave her confidence. Her old fears, when still at the Legion, of losing the security of job and flat, her pathetic addiction to L.P. – she’d been cured of these. Security was no security. That was a lesson learned and she had learned it, apparently without imbibing any of that – another reason for being maddened by Vivyan – that damned religion.
Crickleden was the same: the clock in the little Festival of Britain-era clock tower at the end of the High Road was still stuck at quarter past eleven. The halal butchers were still a focal point of loud conversation in Urdu. The artificial hair still hung in skeins in the windows and along the peg-boarded walls of Afro-Styles and in Iceland the same zomboid shoppers pushed the same trolleys of frozen food. The rain continued to fall on the just and the unjust. It was only in the vicarage drive that change was discernible. There were still two camper-vans, but they no longer had a detritus of belongings littering their environs. And, as she squelched to the front door, Rachel noticed that flower-beds had been weeded. Two new green wheely-bins had been installed beside the creosote fence. And most remarkable of all, the front door – a new front door of hideous fireproof thick ply – was locked. A tidy notice informed the visitor that soup and simple meals were served ‘AT THESE TIMES AND ONLY AT THESE TIMES’ in the adjacent church hall. Those in need of accommodation were likewise directed to the hall.
It was nice to see a friend when Lance opened the door. He was the young Jamaican (dreadlocks, a thin, intelligent face) who had shared with Rachel the distinction of being arrested on the night of Vivyan’s arrest. (Both had been released the next day with a caution.)
THIRTY-TWO
Lance had a sensitive face which conveyed at once, without words having to be spoken, that great changes had come upon the place since Father Vivyan had departed.
‘He’s been suspended by the Bishop, but the police aren’t pressing charges. They’ve nothing on him,’ said Lance. ‘Obviously … Meanwhile, we try to keep things going. The soup lunches … the teas … Father Aidan’s organized dormitory accommodation for thirty in the parish hall.’
‘But he’s put locks on the doors.’
‘Yeah, well’ – Lance shrugged – ‘that’s kinda inevitable, isn’t it?’
‘Lance, I’m looking for Peter.’
‘Yeah?’
Lance continued to smile, and to look at his mug of tea.
‘Peter d’Abo,’ she added.
‘Yeah, well.’ He laughed gently.
‘I gather he’s gone missing, but surely someone can find him? His mother, his grandmother – neither of them seem to know where he is.’
‘He’s sad,’ said Lance slowly.
‘The point is … it could be so easily cleared up, this whole sorry mess,’ she said briskly. ‘I feel that if someone could simply get hold of Peter and say to him, “Look, we’re not blaming you, but you must issue a denial, you must tell the police, the newspapers, everyone, that you were not telling the truth, that Vivyan hasn’t …” ’
‘Yeah, well …’ Lance laughed gently.
‘I don’t see what the problem is with that,’ she said earnestly.
It was irritating to her that he merely looked back at her and smiled.
Then Sinclo Manners entered the room.
It was awful to see the goofy expression on his face.
There had been times, when they were colleagues together at the Legion, when Rachel had found Sinclo an almost reassuring figure. Then, as far as she believed or could understand, he had sold his soul to the devil and organized the police raid on Vivyan. That was how it had seemed at the time, and she had not seen any need since to revise her judgement.
‘Sinclo.’
She resisted the obvious question, and did not ask him what he was doing there.
She saw in his face an abject love which at this particular moment was merely irritating.
Lance said, ‘Rachel’s looking for Peter.’
‘Ah … er … of course … splendid.’
‘What’s splendid?’
‘I mean, not at all,’ he said, blushing.
Rachel had been in love bef
ore, but she had never been in the mental condition which she knew to be afflicting Sinclo. Eight years ago, she had been girlishly overexcited by L.P.’s attentions, but there was no period of unrequited love. All too soon, and too readily, as she now believed, she had become L.P.’s lover. It was only later that love began to cause her pain, when she suffered acute jealousy of his wife and other lovers; and when she began to see that whatever the direction taken by their love affair, it could hardly avoid making her suffer.
This adolescent, medieval troubadour routine, this loving from afar, was just too embarrassing. It was all the more irritating when it came from a man who she believed was responsible in some measure for the present misery. Had he not come to Crickleden in the first instance as a spy for ‘Dr Arbuthnot’?
‘It’s not, necessarily …’ he began. ‘I mean … Peter d’Abo, gosh.’
‘I’ve tried to tell her,’ said Lance.
‘Neither of you have tried to tell me anything. You have tried to keep me in the dark and you have both succeeded triumphantly,’ she said.
‘We don’t know ourselves, do we?’ Sinclo asked mysteriously.
‘Know what?’ asked Rachel.
‘Anyway,’ said Sinclo, ‘splendid. Lovely to see you. Lovely. Are you staying?’
‘I’ve gotta go,’ said Lance. ‘If you’re coming back later?’ he asked Rachel.
She hummed and hawed.
‘Anyway,’ said Lance, ‘see you around.’
‘Thanks for the tea,’ she said.
He said, ‘Take care,’ and she was left alone with Sinclo.
They sat, as they had so often sat in wine bars and restaurants, looking at one another across a table. She saw a man who was good-looking, not completely idiotic, of good family, kind. She had a strange thought. She thought, If we lived in a culture where there were arranged marriages, I could do worse than to marry this man. He is in love with me. It would probably be nice to make love to him. But she did not love him. Whatever the mysterious thing called love was, whatever had been making her so unhappy for the last eight years with L.P., it did not exist with Sinclo, and she doubted whether it ever would.
‘Are you here writing a story?’ she asked.
‘I was sacked by Blimby,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Good thing, really. Can’t blame him. Can’t say I miss the work. Thought I’d come down here and work as a volunteer … Take a leaf out of your book.’
She did not want any leaves removed from her book; she disliked the sense of being followed.
‘Oh, Sinclo.’
‘What?’
‘What a mess.’
‘Have you seen Vivyan?’
‘Who wants to know?’ she asked with immediate suspicion. ‘No one. Me. I just wondered … I mean, it seems a reasonable … There was some story, probably absolute rubbish, that you’d … Throxton … probably rubbish.’
‘Yes,’ she said unkindly.
She actually liked Sinclo, and in other circumstances she would be prepared to be more friendly, but this was not what she wanted now, or here.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was a nice cup of tea.’
‘Don’t go,’ he suddenly said.
‘I think I’d better.’
‘Rachel.’
She knew with a sinking in the stomach that he was about to be embarrassing.
‘I know you think I was somehow behind the arrest of the Mad Monk … of Vivyan, and I do assure you …’
‘I don’t think that necessarily.’
‘It isn’t true … Rachel, the thing is … I know you have always known this, but I just wanted to say … You once said it was terribly embarrassing when someone told you they were in love with you, but …’
‘Please, Sinclo.’
‘I know I haven’t got a hope …’
‘Please.’
‘I’ve never felt like this before about anyone.’
‘Like what?’
‘In love,’ he managed to say.
It was quite sweet, and quite flattering, but this was the sort of conversation you expected to have when you were in your teens, at latest in your first year at university. And yet, as he said the ridiculous and predictable words, she found herself suffused with happiness. After all the anxieties and unhappinesses of the last two or three months, these words made her happy.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Of course … no, no …’
‘You see, you don’t mean it.’
‘I’m deadly serious, Rachel. I mean this … I … love you.’
She wanted him to go on and on saying it. She could not hear the words often enough.
‘Oh, Sinclo,’ she said. ‘Do grow up.’
And she ran from the kitchen.
THIRTY-THREE
There are so few monks and nuns in the Church of England that the members of the various religious orders (a diminishing band) constitute something of a freemasonry. They all know, or know of, one another and their various houses. When in need of somewhere to stay in central London, Vivyan Chell, since he first became a monk, had retreated to a religious house behind Westminster Abbey. There is no secret about the existence of this place, and yet, like the existence of the religious life itself in England, it is not much noticed. Tucked in a narrow street just opposite the old gate into Dean’s Yard, it houses about six monks, who chant the liturgical hours, who celebrate mass, and who are available for those who wish to see them.
As soon as it became clear that he could not stay on with his brother at Throxton, Father Vivyan had made for this place. He could have gone back to his own monastery, Kelvedone, the large Victorian house by the North Sea. He knew it was fairly unlikely that any journalist would be sufficiently clued up to pursue him there. But some might. No one, he was fairly sure, would think of looking for him in Westminster.
He fitted into the lives of the other monks silently, and anonymously. Indeed, it was impossible to tell from their demeanour whether they knew of the articles which had appeared in The Daily Legion. They seemed to know about his having been suspended from the parish, since their Superior asked him, on the first evening, ‘Now, what’s the position about you saying mass?’
That was the only allusion to his ‘troubles’.
Chell had replied that he was allowed to say mass but that until the suspension was lifted, he could not do so in public, so he was unable to help out in the little chapel, either with mass or confessions.
It was some years since he himself had been to confession, and he wondered whether he wished to do so now. Only after he had been in the cool, silent house for a few days was he aware that he was approaching one of those personal crises in his life, after which he would be different. There had been the moment when he had joined the army. There had been the Call in Africa, when he had been aware of the presence of God. There had been a number of other, minor moments of strange certainty about his own destiny, which corresponded in his mind to Hamlet’s ‘Sir, in my heart, there was a kind of fighting/That would not let me sleep.’
Such a strange moment had occurred when he knew, after a lifetime in Zinariya, that he was going to leave Africa and accept the job in Crickleden. But something further was in prospect, of that he felt certain. He sensed it, like a hunter. It was not, therefore, cowardice which made him hold back from going to confession. The moment was not yet right. When he did so, or if he did so, he would confess things which he had not perhaps himself personally confronted. Naturally, he would confess to lust – though since his return to England, until the embrace of Mercy in the park, there had not been any lapses. What he was waiting to see, if he did lay bare his soul with the absolute honesty required of the exercise, was how much would be left of his religion, his actual belief.
He knew that the last time he had confessed – to another of the monks, just before he left Africa – he had been shocked to discover that he was confessing a lack of faith. By this he did not mean that he had spent much time weighing the various arguments in favour of th
e existence of God. These spurious mental exercises had always seemed to him an obvious waste of time since you only had to look at the lives of saints to see that religion flourished in spite of argument. Human minds of supreme intellectual distinction, such as Bonhoeffer’s or Simone Weil’s, embraced Christ as readily as did the monk’s simplest parishioners. What he meant by faith, when he confessed to its lapse, was the preparedness to live as if God were really there.
All his life as a priest (and before that, as a soldier) Vivyan’s difficulty had been a lack of trust of others. He had found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to delegate responsibility to others. He had wanted to be the king of his own show.
Belief in God would surely entail a preparedness to live quite passively; to live as if what came to us was sent from Heaven. We would not necessarily strive to make things happen. This was the real area of doubt and difficulty for him. It was not so much the obvious difficulty of believing how an omnipotent God could possibly be loving, or how a loving God could allow suffering. These were intellectual games which, for men and women of faith, were overcome by the way they lived. The thing which a man of such bursting energy as Vivyan Chell found most difficult was what one of the spiritual writers had called ‘abandonment to Divine Providence’. When actually faced with a choice between letting God control events, and seizing control of them himself, Vivyan was not sure that he would really trust God, any more than he would trust the dozens of parish helpers, curates, voluntary aid workers, NCOs and others whom in the course of his life he had under his supervision.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
There was something unequivocal about this, and he had never been able to be the passive, quasi-Buddhist type. In Africa, he had felt fulfilled, because he had always been able to organize, to make things happen, or seem to happen. He had hugely enlarged the parish schools, raised money from overseas for the hospital, and campaigned first in favour of the nationalist victory of Bindiga, then, when his tyranny began to make itself manifest, against the corruption, and the enslavements. Chell had not been very successful, but he had known some success. And he had taught, in season and out of season, that Christians were not men and women who allowed God to do everything; they did God’s work for him.