by James Wood
I was not keen to join him for a cigarette because my parents had never known about my smoking, and I had never had the courage to tell them. Whenever I went home I simply stopped smoking for the length of my stay, a fact which has always amazed Max. Curiously, when staying with them I felt less like a smoker who was lying to them than like a virtuous nonsmoker. Whatever the cause, I quickly lost my addiction to tobacco when at home. My addiction to alcohol, however, increased. My parents were rather abstemious drinkers, and I felt constrained by their limits. My mother, in particular, perhaps because her parents were teetotal, treats alcohol as a kind of revolution-in-waiting that can be contained only by rational and enlightened administration. When Peter was alive she used to drink from her glass and say to him, slightly anxiously, “Oh, this is delicious wine, it has a wonderful taste!” in the manner of someone making concessions to the enemy. Peter was more relaxed, but he never indulged himself. One glass of anything visibly affected him.
So it was impossible for me to take as much of my parents’ wine and spirits as I wanted to. Hence my return to The Stag’s Head and hence my decision, since the pub was too expensive, to buy a bottle of Scotch and bring it to my bedroom. It would be useful for the silent afternoons.
One day, a hurtful package came in the post from London. Jane had sent my most recent credit card bills, bank statements, Inland Revenue letters, and the bill for the absurd charge card I had at the university bookshop. A note read: “I can’t deal with this. It is your problem now.” I was indebted to everyone. These were bills I had simply chosen not to open for months. I owed the Visa people almost £800, the bank £400, the Inland Revenue £700 (of the original £1,000 I had owed them, and on whose behalf I had told the lie about my father’s death), and the university bookshop £120. Total: £2,020. But I had an idea about what to do. Philip Zealy’s new financial services firm was advertising all over the place for just my kind of person. Add up your total debts, the advertisements said, and ask Zealy to pay them off, then help you to manage the debt into easy low monthly payments. I had to act. Zealy, the man, was a shady figure, no doubt about that. His broad face and fat nose, pitted like an orange skin, told you all you needed to know, and I had been watching that face stare at me from various venues for twenty years. But presumably, I said to myself, the firm is separate from the man. A contract would be issued, all would be above board. Surely he wouldn’t be so popular if he did not deliver? I took my parents’ car and drove to Durham. The Zealy office was in the town’s marketplace.
A pleasant, professional young woman had me fill in a form. I admitted to my debts, and listed as many sources of income as I could think of (or invent), including private tuition, which I have never done. The woman went away, and returned with an older woman, who told me that, in addition to the management of my debts, Zealy would be able to lend me a sum of money, whose repayment could be added to my monthly payments. She had a soft Durham accent.
“I’m going to be a wee bit poky, and ask you right on—you could handle a bit of extra cash?” She said the last word as only a northerner can, making the hard “c” as hard as coal, and the soft “sh” as tough as steel.
“Yes, but could I afford your terms?”
“Well, pet, the terms would all be pursuant to you getting our approval of you in the first place, but looking at this form, I cannat see any reel problem. The secret is that we pay off your debts straight away, and then you pay us back over a reely long time. Prob’ly over two years. That chops them monthly payments right down.”
“How much do you think the monthly payments would be?” I asked anxiously.
“Eee, pet, I haven’t a clue!”
When I returned three days later, I learned that my debt had been approved, that I would take away a cheque for £1,000, and that I would pay the firm of Philip Zealy Ltd. (Financial), £226 a month for twenty-four months. Obviously, it was the purest usury, but it offered my only hope, and it put money in my pocket.
I hadn’t wanted to tell my parents, but they came upon some of the bills Jane had sent, and to allay their alarm I told them it had all been taken in hand. They were horrified, of course, that I had gone to Zealy.
“He’s a bloomin’ moneylender, Tom,” said my father. “He’ll have your guts for garters.”
I explained the terms.
“Why didn’t you come to us, dearest?” said my mother. “We’re not rich, but we might have been able to help. It’s all so shabby, going to a firm like Zealy.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. You know, there are thousands of perfectly happy customers, I presume, who have had their debts worked out by firms like Zealy’s. It’s almost banal.”
“Ha! Almost banal! I like that,” said Peter.
“Oh, Tom, this would only happen to you,” said Sarah.
“No, it could have happened to anyone,” I said.
“Yes, but it happened to you, darling,” said Sarah.
“Mum, you’re being illogical.”
“She means that what happened to Oedipus could have happened to anyone, but it happened to Oedipus,” said Peter. “We are all oedipal, no doubt, but only Oedipus was warned ahead of time that he would be oedipal.”
Father looked at me with his big eyes. A smile seemed to dance there, a tiny merry loiter, and I felt him to be irresistible, deeply lovable, for all that I disliked what he was saying. I felt the infection of him. He was grinning, and looked down at the carpet. Then suddenly he shook with mirth, and his face, like a woodcut of sunrise, broke into spreading beams.
“Dear, it’s obvious to everyone that Zealy is jolly bad news,” said Mother.
“You were just reading a different newspaper from everyone else,” said Father, and again he laughed. “Oh dear, dear, I’m not laughing at you, Tommy, but you have to admit you walked into this one.”
“Look, Zealy is a total crook, but he’s also a total businessman. I have the paperwork upstairs. Unless I default on the payments, no one is going to come hammering on my door with baseball bats or shoot me in the street from a motorbike.”
Strangely, my worldly but unworldly parents, for all their knowing talk about Zealy, were shocked by such language, and firmly resisted the idea that he was a crook.
“Zealy’s a bit queer but he’s not wicked. You mustn’t put thoughts like that into our heads,” said my mother.
“You’re speaking like a criminal,” said my father.
“Well, what on earth do you think Zealy is?” I said in frustration.
Peter sighed. “Oh, well, he’s a bit sinister, he ‘digs with the wrong foot,’ as we used to say in the army, but he’s certainly not a criminal. He wouldn’t be in business if he was.”
So my parents thought of Zealy as a kind of criminal while denying that he was one; and no doubt thought of me as one while reproving me for speaking like one. It made me laugh.
And then, as ever, after a few good weeks, work stopped going well. Suddenly I had nothing to say in my BAG, and every time I looked at the box of papers that constituted my Ph.D. I felt like being sick. All the bad behaviour began again. I lounged in bed until midday, stopped shaving, grew irritable and spiteful with my generous parents. Harboured by my parents’ emotional stability, their resourcefulness and Christian optimism, I should have been able to relax into their sanity. Instead, I felt reproached, tormented, seduced, frustrated by the easiness with which they seemed to live. I kicked up a storm just to prove that the harbour was not safe. I’m sure I was not pleasant to have around in those months I spent with them. They stopped inviting parishioners to Sunday lunch. I longed to get to my bedroom so that I could get out my BAG and swallow a glass of whisky. Around the whisky I danced a set of routines. I would put, I told myself, one more entry in the BAG before I poured myself a little wave of amber. I lifted the bottle, felt its cold sliding weight, and suddenly a golden trench had filled the glass, sprouting sharp aromas. That, I thought, is just the amount of Scotch that wanted to be freed.
Unlike
the childish glass of urine that my mother had never noticed all those years ago, she did find the bottle of whisky under my bed, at the end of February, and informed my father. Peter ambushed me in the car, on the way back from Durham one day. We seemed at first to be speaking normally. Peter was talking about the Thurlows, and how they had hoped that Max would go into academic work rather than journalism.
“Colin especially doesn’t have any time for journalism. He dates the decline of the West from the year 1896.” My father looked at me. “You don’t know the significance of that date, do you?”
“Yes, Dad, I know all about it, thanks! Colin asked me exactly the same question last September when Jane and I went over to The Oratory. Since Colin doesn’t take a newspaper and doesn’t have a television, I don’t know what right he has to comment on the news. He just fears the sting of something alien. It’s like a … it’s like a fish commenting on lemon.”
“He says it’s because news disturbs him too much. By the way, when did you last shave, old fellow?”
“How would he know? Have Max’s parents actually ever seen a minute of TV?”
Father laughed. “Oh, Tommy, your memory’s slipping. The Forsyte Saga, remember? How old were you then? Six or seven? The BBC did it, a huge series, it felt longer than the bally war but was getting awfully good reviews from all and sundry, and after the third or fourth episode Colin a bit shamefacedly hinted that his colleagues at the department were banging on about it, and could he and Belinda come and watch it with us? Mummy was terribly amused, if you recall, and imitated Colin’s request—a cross between Oliver Twist and a student who wants an extension for his essay: ‘Please, sir, can I have a little telly?’”
Father drove in the manner I had known all my life, with bursts of emotion, using the accelerator as a kind of church bell on which to register his irregular vitality. We were silent and awkward.
“It’s been good for me to be with you and Mum,” I said, half-meaning it.
“Has it?” said Father quickly. “Why do you say that?”
“Why would you doubt what I say?” I asked.
“Well, Tommy, because your mother found a nearempty bottle of Scotch in your bedroom two days ago, and I am old-fashioned enough to think that a man who snorts whisky on his own and in secret”—his voice had risen slightly—“is not at all happy.”
We were now on the road to Sundershall. Father would not, could not, look at me, and used the road ahead as his excuse.
“If it’s any consolation, it’s not my parents who have driven me to drink.”
“I don’t find that as funny as you do.”
“I’m stating a fact. In case you hadn’t noticed, Jane and I seem to be in the process of separating. I suppose I have been drinking a certain amount since coming up here. But it’s all perfectly controllable.”
“That wasn’t the sense your mother and I had at the Christmas party.” Father became sad. “You were such a happy child.”
“Was I?”
“Your mother and I thought so,” he said, seemingly defensively.
“Oh, I’m not contesting you, I was interested, that’s all.”
“Yes, when you were a baby we called you Grinaldi, or sometimes the Duke of Grinaldi because you were always grinning.” I raised my eyes from my lap and saw my father’s hands on the steering wheel. Those hands had seemed large when I was a child.
“I’m not unhappy,” I said slowly. “Obviously I’d like to get my Ph.D. finished.”
Peter seemed very relieved by the turn of conversation. “Well, obviously,” he said, with new vigour. “Once we get the Ph.D. out of the way, everything should resolve itself properly. How, ah … how … long do you still need, do you think?”
“Not long, Dad, not long now. It’s very well advanced.”
“Oh, I’m so pleased to hear that.”
We were passing through Towmoor, the village before Sundershall. It was a dark, ugly place, as ugly as Sundershall was pretty. Mother used to joke that the two villages were like sisters, “but Towmoor is the one who never married.”
Suddenly my father said with earnest passion, “So you give me your word of honour that you are not an alcoholic? I can honestly say this to your mother?”
“Of course not, Dad, don’t be absurd.”
We were silent again.
“But, Tommy, why would you need to drink?”
“I’ve told you, Jane and I have been fighting. Look, you and Mum wouldn’t know anything about this kind of situation. To you, peering into our marriage is probably like opening someone else’s electricity bill by mistake and thinking ‘My god, that family uses a lot of electricity. I’m glad I don’t have to write a cheque that large.’ But we’re the ones paying the bloody bill.”
“You assume a great deal, Tom. I’ve been a parish priest for thirty years. One sees quite a lot of life, you know.” His voice was stern again, and he was frowning in a way that reminded me of his angry face at my grandmother’s funeral, as I lay on the grass of the cemetery and he strode towards me, black-cassocked, a column of night. Just the memory of that childhood moment made me shudder a little. Father’s angry face, his striding legs, parting the black cloth. The driver in his grey cap, approaching from the other side. And Father’s awful strange phrase: Come back to the grave.
“Since we rarely speak like this,” he continued, “since we must be honest, I will tell you that your mother and I worry about your lack of spiritual resources. To me, a whisky bottle under a bed is … is a message in a bottle, really! And that message is telling me that you have no spiritual life.”
“No spiritual life?”
“This is confusing, because Jane and I discussed you at Christmas, and she led me to believe that despite your doubts and scepticism, you were on a path towards God and towards Christ. She said she felt you were still ‘seeking,’ but at least seeking in the right direction.”
I was astounded by Jane’s untruth. So my wife, who had harassed me for years about my lying, had lied to my father about my atheism! For what? To tell him what he wanted to hear? To put his mind at rest? Or more likely as a way of attacking me, of putting me into difficulties. I suspected that Jane imagined that her lie would force me, at a moment such as this, to tell the truth to my father. For this very reason, so that she would not force me, so that I would not be forced, and because I had no inclination to argue with my father, I decided to go along with the lie.
It was a decision taken in less than a second; but once I had embarked on it, I had to see it to the very end, for that is the way with lies.
“Did you hear me talking to Tim Biffen?” I asked. “At the Christmas party?”
“I heard only Tim speaking. He seemed to be rather unsuccessfully getting you to agree that the cathedral was a mistake. I must say that it confirmed a few doubts I have about Tim.”
Oh, these lies, these lies! I wasn’t sure whether my father was now speaking the truth. He sounded a little cagey. But if he was telling the truth, I had entirely misinterpreted his collapsed sad face as he looked at me that evening. He had been sad for Tim Biffen, not sad for me.
“Well, Tim and I had been running through some of the old fundamentals, some of the obstacles to faith.”
“The problem of evil, and so forth,” said Father.
“Yes, evil, pain, suffering, the world that is so clearly not God’s world.”
“Well, my boy, I’m delighted that you might have found a way round these obstacles, if dear Jane is right. But you can know Christ all your life and still these obstacles don’t disappear. There is no melting away, intellectually. The only hope is faith. Faith is the red flower.”
“I like that,” I said. “The red flower.”
“I’m thinking of a little poem I used to know off by heart. ‘My soul, there is a country, far beyond the stars.’ Da da dee, I forget the next bit. Something about a winged sentry. It’s all about heaven. ‘If thou canst get but thither, there grows the flower of peace, the rose
that cannot wither, thy fortress and thy ease.’ Etcetera. I forget it. I think I’d like it read at my funeral.”
We had arrived at the vicarage. In the dark, the house was represented by three yellow windows. On our right was the graveyard, where the permanently darkened residents would not notice the smaller imposition of night. Father stopped the car, but neither of us moved. He continued to look straight ahead at the windscreen, as if still driving.
“You know, not long before you were born, I had a crisis of faith. Curiously, it’s why I became a priest. Or rather, I resolved the crisis by leaving the intellectualism of the university for the devotion of the priest’s life. I didn’t know the answers to any of my questions, and decided in the end that living a Christlike life was the only answer to them. It’s why I am interested in Tim Biffen, because he so reminds me of myself when I was a young man. It’s very very important not to be corrupted by theology.”
“How were you being corrupted?” I asked, genuinely curious. Father had never told me about his intellectual formation. I imagined that he had always been the same kind of Christian, because he had been the same kind of Christian for the whole of my life.
“Theology was encouraging me to think of problems as intellectually soluble; and I saw that I needed instead to see life itself as a problem handed to me by God. I suppose you might say that I had a kind of vision, though Englishmen of my age are not allowed to admit such things. Sarah was pregnant with you—oh, about five months, six months. She was resting, and I went alone to the Christmas carol service at the cathedral. At the service I didn’t feel like standing. I felt like sitting, even when everyone was standing and belting out those blasted carols. All I wanted to do was to sit and think. And the thing I was trying to resolve was not theological, really, but human. There I was, happily anticipating the birth of a child. Not God’s child, Tommy, but mine!—you. Yet I was not sure that I had enough faith—faith in God, faith in the future—to be a father. I felt my faith in God flickering, with the danger of extinguishing itself altogether. I had been having doubts about just those questions which you mentioned just now—evil, justice, original sin, and so on. But how could there be such a thing as a world without God? I couldn’t imagine it. So I tried to feel my way into a defence of God. The first answer I came up with was that if you take God away from the world, the world is no less horrid, no less painful or sinful or unsaved. It is simply painful and sinful without God, without the hope of salvation or succour. The second answer I came up with was that the creation of something out of nothing is an act of love. Even the creation of pain, the creation of evil. For this reason: we do not know why evil exists. We do not know the largest scheme of things, we cannot know God’s plan. We know that evil is evil. But do we know that the existence of evil is evil? Do you see my point? In other words, do we know what evil exists for? We do not. And this is for the same reason that we do not know what the opposite of evil exists for. Why does goodness exist? Why happiness? Just as with evil, we don’t have the faintest idea. But we do know that love cannot be a faculty that simply involves no pain at all. Love is not just kindness; love may also rebuke, command, punish. You don’t know anything about this because we have never really had to punish you, you lucky thing! But you would know if you had a child, Tommy. And life is love. That we would rather be alive than dead, even if life is painful, is proof that there is more love in the world than pain.”