by David Lodge
There was also such a thing as plenary indulgence, which was a kind of jackpot, because it wiped out all the punishment accruing to your sins up to the time of obtaining the indulgence. You could get one of these by, for instance, going to mass and Holy Communion on the first Friday of nine successive months. In theory, if you managed to obtain one of these plenary indulgences just before dying you would go straight to Heaven no matter how many sins you had committed previously. But there was a catch: you had to have a “right disposition” for the indulgence to be valid, and a spirit of calculating self-interest was scarcely that. In fact, you could never be quite sure that you had the right disposition, and might spend your entire life collecting invalid indulgences. It was safest, therefore, to dedicate them to the souls in Purgatory, because the generosity of this action would more or less guarantee that you had the right disposition. Of course the indulgences wouldn’t then help you when you got to Purgatory, but you hoped that others down below might do you the same service, and that the souls you assisted to heaven would intercede there on your behalf. The Church of Christ was divided into three great populations, connected to each other by prayer: the Church Militant (on earth), the Church Suffering (in Purgatory) and the Church Triumphant (in Heaven).
Do the young people gathered together in the church of Our Lady and St Jude on this dark St Valentine’s Day believe all this? Well, yes and no. They don’t believe it with the same certainty that they believe they will have to sit their Final Examinations within the next three years; and about some of the details in the picture they are becoming a bit doubtful (most of them, for instance, have given up collecting indulgences, as something rather childish and undignified), but in outline, yes, they believe it, or at least they are not sure it is safe not to believe it; and this deeply engrained eschatological consciousness (eschatological, another useful word, meaning pertaining to the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and hell) is probably the chief common factor behind their collective presence here at mass. Only Miles, the tall, sleek figure swaying slightly on his feet during the Credo like a reed in the wind, tilting a handsomely bound old missal to catch the feeble electric light, is positively relishing the service, and he is a convert of fairly recent standing, so it is all delightfully novel to him – the gloomy, grubby ornateness of the church interior, the muttered, secretive liturgy (for only certain parts of the mass are in dialogue, and the Prayer of Consecration to which Father Brierley now turns is his alone), the banks of votive candles flickering amid frozen Niagaras of spent wax, and the sanctuary lamp glowing like an inflamed eye, guaranteeing the presence of God Himself in this place – all deliciously different from the restrained good taste of the chapel at his public school. As to the others, most of them will not be displeased when mass is over and they can hurry off to a day of largely secular concerns and pleasures. They are here not because they positively want to be, but because they believe it is good for their souls to be at mass when they would rather be in bed, and that it will help them in the immortal game of snakes and ladders.
But it is not doing Michael’s soul any good at all if, as he thinks, he is in a state of mortal sin. For no matter how many good deeds or acts of devotion you perform, you get no heavenly credit for them if you are not in a state of grace. But is masturbation a mortal sin? There are times when he thinks it can’t be. Is it possible that if he should die in the act (an all too vivid picture of himself discovered in bed, frozen by rigor mortis like a plaster statue, with his eyes turned up to the ceiling and his swollen member still clasped in his fist) that he would suffer eternal punishment just the same as, say, Hitler? (In fact there is no guarantee that Hitler is in Hell; he might have made an Act of Perfect Contrition a microsecond after squeezing the trigger in his Berlin bunker.) It seems self-evidently absurd. On the other hand, you could argue by the same method that, say, having proper sex with a prostitute isn’t a mortal sin, either, and if that isn’t, well, what is? Just thinking about it gives him a huge erection under his conveniently baggy coat, at the very moment when Father Brierley elevates the Host at the Consecration, thus heaping iniquity upon iniquity, sacrilege upon impurity. He could, of course ask a priest’s advice on the problem – but that is part of the problem, he can’t bring himself to confess his sin for shame and embarrassment. (And is that so surprising – would you, gentle reader? Did you, gentle Catholic reader?) This means that he can’t go to Communion either, for one may only receive the Eucharist in a state of grace, otherwise it is a sacrilege. Therefore, when the Communion bell rings at these Thursday masses, Michael is the only one left kneeling in his pew. At first, when this was noticed, he used to hint that he had broken his fast – swallowed water when he brushed his teeth, or thoughtlessly nibbled a biscuit; and when this excuse wore thin he ingeniously pretended to have Doubts about the doctrine of Transubstantiation. He kept coming to mass, he confided to the others, in the hope that one day his faith would be restored. Father Brierley tried to convince him that he was being over-scrupulous, upon which Michael rapidly developed Doubts on other major doctrines, such as the Trinity and Papal Infallibility.
The others are rather impressed by Michael’s Doubts, and Polly, catching sight of his pale and mournful visage as she herself returns from the altar rail, is apt to recall the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins (she is reading English):
O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there!
All go out of their way to be nice to Michael and to encourage his failing powers of belief. In fact, of course, he believes the whole bag of tricks more simply and comprehensively perhaps than anyone else present at this mass, and is more honest in examining his conscience than many. Polly, for instance, frequently comforts herself with a moistened forefinger before dropping off to sleep, but wouldn’t dream of mentioning this in Confession or letting it prevent her from taking the Sacrament. After all, she only does it when she is half-asleep and no longer, as it were, responsible for her actions. It is almost as though it belongs to someone else, the hand that slips under the waistband of her Baby Doll pyjamas and sliding between her legs rubs, rubs, gently, exquisitely, the little button of flesh the name and nature of which she does not yet know (though years later she will join a women’s gynaecological workshop whose members squint through optical instruments at their own and each other’s genitals, looking for signs of cystitis, thrush, polypi and other female afflictions, and will know her way around the uterus as familiarly as she now knows the stations on the Inner Circle line between her digs and College). Of course, she does not bring herself to climax – not the panting, writhing kind of climax demonstrated in films such as those Michael will read about twenty-one years later. Rather, she rocks herself to sleep on wavelets of sensation rippling out from the secret grotto at the centre of her body. When she wakes in the morning she has wiped the act from her memory. It helps her to do this that she has no name for it. “Masturbation” is not an item in her vocabulary – or Michael’s, for that matter, though he does have his own idiomatic phrase for it, which Polly does not. Neither does Angela, who does not need one anyway, because she doesn’t indulge in the practice. She has imbibed more deeply than Polly the code of personal modesty impressed upon convent-educated girls. She keeps her body scrupulously clean, she dresses it carefully and attractively, but she does not examine it or caress it in the process. Her movements at toilet are brisk and businesslike. Her complexion gleams with health. She has scarcely ever had an impure thought, whereas Polly has had quite a few. Admittedly, Polly’s convent school, a rather posh one in Sussex, for boarders, was a less chaste environment than Angela’s in which to grow up. There was inevitably gossiping and giggling and smutty talk between the girls when they were left on their own, whereas Angela went to and fro between school and home every day, with scarcely a moment free, what with studying, games, and helping with housework and the shop, for idle thoughts
or words.
As for Ruth, the thickset, bespectacled girl in boots and a school-style navy raincoat, kneeling in the front row, she has put the whole business of sex behind her long ago, i.e., at the age of sixteen. For a while in early adolescence she daily inspected her pimply, pasty complexion, her thick yet flat-chested torso, her lank, colourless hair, wondering if she was merely going through “a phase”, whether she would break through this unpromising chrysalis one day and emerge a beautiful butterfly, as she had seen other girls do. But alas, there was no such metamorphosis, she was stuck with her plainness and resigned herself to it, became a great reader and museum visitor and concert-goer, got interested in religion in the sixth form and, much to the surprise of her frivolous and vaguely agnostic parents, announced one day that she had been taking instructions from the local Catholic priest and was intending to be received into the Church.
All the young people present at this mass (and, of course, the celebrant) are virgins. Apart from Michael and Polly, none of them masturbates habitually and several have never masturbated at all. They have no experience of heavy petting. These facts run directly counter to statistical evidence recently tabulated by members of the Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research in Indiana, but these young people are British, and in any case unrepresentative of their age group. They carry a heavy freight of super-ego. To get to the University they have had to work hard, pass exams and win scholarships, sublimating the erotic energy of adolescence into academic achievement; and if ever a sultry evening or a bold glance took them off-guard and set them yearning for nameless sensual satisfactions, the precepts of their religion taught them to suppress these promptings, these “irregular motions of the flesh” as the Catechism called them. They are therefore sexually innocent to a degree that they will scarcely be able to credit when looking back on their youth in years to come. They know about the mechanics of basic copulation, but none of them could give an accurate account of the processes of fertilization, gestation and birth, and three of the young men do not even know how babies are born, vaguely supposing that they appear by some natural form of Caesarian section, like ripe chestnuts splitting their husks. As to the refinements and variations of the act of love – fellatio, cunnilingus, buggery, and the many different postures in which copulation may be contrived – they know them not (with the exception of Miles, who attended a public school) and would scarcely credit them were they to be told by Father Austin Brierley himself, who knows all about them in a theoretical way from his moral theology course at the seminary, for it is necessary that a priest should know of every sin that he might have to absolve. Not, he thanks God, that he has ever had to deal in the confessional with any of the more appalling perversions described in the textbooks, veiled in the relative decency of Latin – unspeakable acts between men and women, men and men, men and animals, which seem to someone who has voluntarily renounced ordinary heterosexual love not so much depraved as simply unintelligible.
He is not thinking of such matters now, of course, he is thinking of the mass he is celebrating, the sacred privilege he enjoys of changing the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Redeemer. It is very hard to generate an appropriate sense of awe towards something done so often – once a day every day and three times on Sundays. Concentration is so difficult, distraction so easy. When he turned to face the congregation earlier at the Offertory, for instance, he couldn’t help checking who was present and feeling a little twinge of disappointment that Polly’s dark curls and rosy cheeks were missing; and then, as he turned back and heard the unmistakable tiptap of her high heels, he had to suppress a smile which might have been caught by his server, Edward. Edward is a first-year medical student with a humorous, rubbery countenance, hung between a pair of oversized ears, that stands him in good stead in comic opera and rugby-club concerts, but for liturgical purposes he twists it into an expression of such impressive solemnity that Austin Brierley almost feels nervous when celebrating mass under his scrutiny.
When Father Brierley pauses sometimes like this in the middle of the celebration, he is not, as Edward and the others suppose, rapt in private prayer, but struggling to eliminate from his mind such extraneous thoughts as Polly’s late arrival, and to concentrate on the Holy Sacrifice. This is hard precisely because of the rapport he feels with the students. The congregation on an ordinary Sunday, mostly made up of poor Irish and Italians employed in the catering and hotel trades, is just a dense, anonymous mass, coughing and shuffling and shushing their babies behind his back, so that it is easy for him to shut them out from his mind; but these students are different – they are intelligent, well-mannered, articulate, and not very much younger than himself. They have no idea how much he depends upon them for human contact, how the New Testament study circle and the Thursday masses, which for most of them are quasi-penitential exercises, are for him the sweetest hours of the week.
Now the moment of his communion has come. He holds the consecrated host in his left hand while beating his breast with his right fist, as he recites the “Domine, non sum dignus.” Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof.… Behind him, summoned by Edward’s bell, the little congregation has gathered at the altar rail, and they join in the prayer: “sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea.” Say but the word and my soul shall be healed. Having reverently received the host and drunk from the chalice, the priest pauses for a moment in silent thanksgiving before turning to face his little flock. He holds up a host before them. “Ecce Agnus Dei; ecce qui tolit peccata mundi.” Behold the Lamb of God; behold Him who taketh away the sins of the world.
Looking, as it were, over his shoulder, at the congregation, you can remind yourselves who they are. Ten characters is a lot to take in all at once, and soon there will be more, because we are going to follow their fortunes, in a manner of speaking, up to the present, and obviously they are not going to pair off with each other, that would be too neat, too implausible, so there will be other characters not yet invented, husbands and wives and lovers, not to mention parents and children, so it is important to get these ten straight now. Each character, for instance, has already been associated with some selected detail of dress or appearance which should help you to distinguish one from another. Such details also carry connotations which symbolize certain qualities or attributes of the character. Thus Angela’s very name connotes angel, as in Heaven and cake (she looks good enough to eat in her pink angora sweater) and her blonde hair archetypecasts her as the fair virtuous woman, spouse-sister-mother figure, whereas Polly is a Dark Lady, sexy seductress, though not really sinister because of her healthy cheeks and jolly curls. Miles, you recall, is the ex-public schoolboy, a convert; his handsomely bound old missal bespeaks wealth and taste, his graceful, wandlike figure a certain effeminacy. There is Dennis, Angela’s slave, burly in his dufflecoat, the scar tissue on his neck perhaps proleptic of suffering, and Adrian, bespectacled (=limited vision), in belted gaberdine raincoat (=instinctual repression, authoritarian determination), not to be confused with Ruth’s glasses and frumpish schoolgirl’s raincoat, signifying unawakened sexuality and indifference to self-display. On the altar is Edward, his rubbery clown’s face locked into an expression of exaggerated piety, the first to receive the wafer from Father Brierley’s fingers, shooting out a disconcertingly long tongue like a carnival whistle. Back in the pews there is Michael, haggard in his baggy wanker’s overcoat and his simulated Doubts, his head weighed down with guilt or the hank of dark hair falling across his eyes, his features slightly flattened as though pressed too often against glass enclosing forbidden goodies; and a girl you have not yet been introduced to, who now comes forward from the shadows of the side aisle, where she has been lurking, to join the others at the altar rail. Let her be called Violet, no, Veronica, no Violet, improbable a name as that is for Catholic girls of Irish extraction, customarily named after saints and figures of Celtic legend, for I like the connotations of Violet – shrinking, penitential, melancholy – a diminu
tive, dark-haired girl, a pale, pretty face ravaged by eczema, fingernails bitten down to the quick and stained by nicotine, a smartly cut needlecord coat sadly creased and soiled; a girl, you might guess from all this evidence, with problems, guilts, hangups. (She is another regular masturbator, by the way, so make that three, and she is not quite sure whether she is a virgin, having been interfered with at the age of twelve by a tramp whose horny index finger may have ruptured her hymen, or so she confided to Angela, who was shocked, and told Ruth, who was sceptical, having received from Violet an entirely different story of how she had been painfully deflowered by a holy candle wielded by her cousin in the course of an experimental black mass in the attic of his house one day when their parents were out. Really, you didn’t know what to believe with Violet, but she was certainly a source of interest.)
Let’s just take a roll call. From left to right along the altar rail, then: Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian, Ruth, Miles, Violet. Michael kneeling in his pew. Edward and Father Brierley on the altar. And of course the two old ladies, who have somehow levered themselves into the central aisle, and shuffled forward with painful slowness on their swollen feet to stand (for if they should kneel they might never be able to get up again) at the altar rail, their heads nodding gently like toys on the parcel shelf of a moving car, their eyes watery and myopic, their facial skin hanging from their skulls like folds of dingy cloth. No one takes much notice of them. Austin Brierley knows them as regular attenders at early weekday mass and as parishioners whom he occasionally has to visit at home, carrying the Blessed Sacrament into their depressing bedrooms when they are too ill to go out. Good women, pious women, but of no interest. Both are widows, fortunate enough to be looked after by their grown-up children. There is nothing he can do for them except give them the sacraments, listening to their mumbled, rambling confessions of trivial peccadilloes (sometimes they dry up after the opening Act of Contrition, unable to remember a single sin, poor old dears, and sensing their panic, he prompts them with a likely venial sin or two, though it is becoming increasingly difficult as they grow older and feebler, almost as incapable of envy and anger and covetousness as they have been for decades of lust, gluttony, sloth) and administering Communion, fighting back his own distaste at their trembling, discoloured tongues and loosely fitting dentures. He does so now, giving them Communion first so that by the time he comes to the end of the row they will be at least started on the slow journey back to their pew. Edward, holding the paten under their quivering jaws, scans them with professional curiosity, diagnosing arthritis, anaemia, noting a large growth, presumably benign, on the throat of one; but to the rest of the students the two old ladies might be part of the church’s furniture, the dark stained oak pews and the dusty plaster statues, for all the notice they take of them. Which is surprising, in a way, when you consider that, as explained above, a principal reason why they are all gathered here is that they believe it will stand them in good stead in the next world. For here are two persons manifestly certain to die in the near future. You might think the young people would be interested to observe the disposition in which the old ladies approach the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, would be curious to determine whether a lifetime’s practice of the Catholic faith and the regular reception of its sacraments has in any way mitigated the terrors of that journey, imparted serenity and confidence to these travellers, made the imminent parting of the spirit and its fleshly garments any less dreaded. But no, it has not occurred to any of them to scrutinize or interrogate the old ladies in this way. The fact is that none of them actually believes he or she is going to die.