Paradise Walk

by Mary Malloy

  “That works for me,” Lizzie said. “Let’s finish this!”

  The modern road was now also the path of the ancient road, past Bleen and Dunkirk and into Harbledown, where they left the motorway. The exit ramp led to the top of a hill and around a gentle curve. Below them, Canterbury Cathedral came into view, shining blue in the distance, its towers rising above all the surrounding buildings.

  Lizzie felt her throat grow tight when she saw it. Each of the great cathedrals along the way had a distinct color in her memory: Wells was a warm brown, Salisbury was white from every vantage point and all distances, Winchester was a solid grey, but Canterbury shone blue.

  They crossed a road with a sign pointing to the “North Downs Way”—Belloc’s Old Road from Winchester. When they got out of the car to walk the rest of the way, they were at a place where the Weaver had walked, and all other pilgrims, except the ones in Canterbury Tales. The book ended just before the party arrived at their destination, frustratingly frozen in time just outside the city.

  Lizzie pushed Alison’s wheelchair as they went through the west gate in the medieval wall and onto the main street of Canterbury. Many of the old half-timbered buildings leaned over the roadway. There was a pub called “The Archbishop’s Finger” just inside the gate and Lizzie stopped. She touched Alison on the shoulder and pointed and they both laughed.

  It was not far to the magnificent carved “Christ Church gate,” and through it was the first close view of the Cathedral. Lizzie was feeling a combination of sensations, of which exhilaration, agitation and exhaustion were all a part. When Alison reached a hand up over her shoulder to touch Lizzie’s hand on the handle of the wheelchair, Lizzie realized that her friend was feeling it too. This was not the end of their project, but it was the place where the Weaver’s pilgrimage ended, and the journal that described it, and it was deeply symbolic to them both.

  They entered the Cathedral and looked up the length of the long nave, which rose up and up to the empty space that had once held the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Beyond it, at the very eastern tip of the cathedral was the “corona,” or “Becket’s Crown,” the place where the severed cap of Becket’s skull had been kept in a separate reliquary. The ceiling seemed impossibly high.

  The party began a slow procession down the center aisle of the church. At one point Martin stopped and pointed down to the stone of Osbert Giffard; it was an ancient version of the one at St. Martha’s church near Guildford. They passed the place where the altar had once stood, the site of Becket’s murder. The name “Thomas” was carved into the stones of the floor.

  The church was crowded with tourists, as it had been since medieval times. When the Weaver made her pilgrimage in 1387, she was one of 200,000 people who visited that year.

  They approached the steps up to where the shrine had been and George and Martin each took a handle of Alison’s wheelchair and lifted her from step to step as Lizzie followed them. The steps were worn into hard waves by the tread of millions of pilgrim feet.

  At the top of the steps, the golden shrine of Henry IV and his bride momentarily drew their eyes away from the place that was the destination of the pilgrimage, and then there it was—a broad sweep of vacant tiles with a large candle burning in the middle

  Lizzie put the brakes on Alison’s wheelchair and stood beside her.

  “I used to think that the power was in the thing, in this case the relics. But the absence of them is also powerful.” She felt it was more effecting to look at the vast empty space in Canterbury Cathedral that had once held the shrine with Becket’s remains, than it was to see the reproduction shrine of St. Swithun in Winchester, or even the real shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, crowded in among multiple monuments.

  George and Martin stood behind them at a distance. Lizzie had regretted that Edmund couldn’t join them, but now as she stood with Alison, she felt the power of their pilgrimage together and did not feel that they needed the presence of men. She would rather have had Jackie and Kate here, a quartet of strong women who shared a bond with the Weaver, and she mentioned it to Alison.

  “Let’s do that,” Alison said. “When our book comes out let’s bring them here. By then I’ll be walking again.”

  “I’d like that,” Lizzie answered.

  “And I think I’m going to abandon Geoffrey Chaucer as well.”

  Lizzie gave her a puzzled look.

  “When I first read the journal I felt that I needed to somehow make a statement about the Weaver, that she was better than Chaucer depicted her, but that just doesn’t seem important anymore. Her work can stand on its own.”

  “And the poor Wife of Bath never got to this spot, never felt the resolution of the pilgrimage that the Weaver did. Chaucer’s pilgrims only got as far as Harbledown, without taking the last few necessary steps to bring them here.”

  Lizzie asked Alison if she was sorry that the relics were gone.

  “They’re not gone,” she answered. “They are still here somewhere, we just don’t know where.”

  “And that’s good enough for you?”

  “Absolutely. I think it would have been good enough for my father too. We will reveal what he knew in our book and people will argue over it, as they will argue over the Chaucer connection, and the dialog will continue and we will have done our job as scholars.”

  “Thank you for bringing me into this. It has been a remarkable experience.”

  “And so it is back to teaching for you?”

  “Until George can find me another life-threatening historical research project.”

  “History is not for the faint of heart, is it?”

  Lizzie laughed. “There is much to wrestle with when you take on the past, but I’d like for it not to be quite so filled with thrills as I have found it recently.”

  George came to take over as Alison’s engine, and Martin stood next to his wife.

  “Are you satisfied?” he asked.

  She turned to him. “About what?”

  “About the pilgrimage.”

  “I am,” she answered, slipping her arm through his. “Belloc wanted to feel some powerful religious experience here, and even timed his journey so that he would arrive on the evening of December 29, on the day and at the hour of Becket’s murder. He wrote that he feared to find, and then he did find, nothing but stones. It was all a huge let down.”

  “But not for you?”

  “Not at all. I am feeling rather exhilarated, actually. I wanted to walk where the Weaver walked and now I have. I wanted to do a good job for Alison, and I have exceeded both our expectations in finding new and exciting information.”

  They paused and turned again to look at the empty space where the shrine had stood.

  “What do you think the Weaver felt when she came here?”

  “She had just found a new husband so I imagine she felt pretty good.”

  “And of course her fabric went around the bones of a saint.” He paused. “But be serious, was she looking for the same spiritual fulfillment as Belloc? And was she more likely to find it because the bones of Becket were right here in front of her?”

  “Those are questions I cannot answer,” she said. “Alison the Weaver never wrote in her journal about her private thoughts. What I can say is that she was a talented artist and a patron of other artists, and I believe she had an adventurous spirit.”

  They stood silently. He resisted the urge to ask her about Tyler Brown and Hockwold Bruce and their violent attacks against her and Alison. He would never be convinced that their secret was worth killing to protect, even when they actually knew the exact location of Becket’s bones.

  Lizzie’s thoughts were more philosophical. She thought of how many people had stood there over more than a thousand years, and she was pleased to be among the company.

  Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote

  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

  And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

  Of wh
ich vertu engendred is the flour; …

  Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…

  And specially from every shires ende

  Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

  The hooly blisful martir for to seke

  That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

  Afterword:

  The Author’s Pilgrimage and Quest

  In 1997 I walked across England from Bath to Canterbury, following a path that could have been traveled by Geoffrey Chaucer’s character, the Wife of Bath. The story of this book was not yet born, but I was intrigued by the fact that Chaucer had created an extraordinarily interesting and independent woman in the character, and then mocked her as a fool. At the time we meet her in Canterbury Tales, Dame Alison has already traveled on pilgrimages to Rome, Bologna, Cologne, Santiago de Compostella in Spain, and been to Jerusalem three times! I began to ponder how differently she would be perceived if a historical model were found for her, and decided to make one up so that Lizzie Manning could have another research adventure.

  My own research, both before and after my month of walking, followed much of the same path that I gave to Lizzie, and I incorporated some of it directly into this book. Dante Zettler’s lecture on sources for the Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, comes from Sigmund Eisner’s 1957 book, A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Other sources mentioned in the text are listed below; for a more complete bibliography, see my website at www.marymalloy.net.

  Like Lizzie, I was given copies of both Hilaire Belloc’s Old Road and Alfred Wainwright’s A Pennine Journey before I set out on my walk, and I couldn’t resist addressing them in this novel. Wainwright was such a sexist jerk that it was impossible to read his book (published in 1987!) without feeling that I was being thrown from the twenty-first century back into Chaucer’s time in terms of attitudes toward women. The persistent question of how a woman should behave as a wife was still being addressed after more than half a millennium, and Wainwright had not traveled very far down the road to enlightenment. Here is what he wrote as he stared at a pile of rocks:A neat girl is to me as pleasurable a sight as a cairn of stones on a hilltop. To a young man seeking a wife, I would say that neatness is the first essential; a trim appearance, a dainty body, a precise outlook. Intelligence is the next virtue to seek, and it is a rare one; it is the comparative deficiency in intellect that makes woman’s claim for equality with man pathetic. Next in importance is a sense of humour. But the girl who laughs loudly is to be avoided; look for one who smiles rather than laughs, whose heartiest guffaw is never more than a quiet chuckle. Good looks don’t matter a great deal, and don’t last, anyway; I have a partiality for blue eyes, to me they make the face look honest...keep away from the massive women, for they will go worse, and make you labour like a beast... If you picked blindfold, you could be pretty sure of getting a wife who would keep the home tidy, have your meals ready promptly, give you an amazing baby now and again, and be entirely devoted and faithful.

  Poor Mrs. Wainwright!

  When I returned from England, I went to visit my family and my sister Sheila told me to bring my slides along as she was going to arrange an English tea party where I could share them with all my close female relations. At the party were my mother, four sisters, the wives of my two brothers, my six nieces and my great-niece (who had been born while I was in England). Seventy-five years worth of women in my family; no men or boys were invited and I don’t think we had ever been assembled in quite this way before. At the top of the invitation, in Old English lettering, was the question: “What Is the Thing That Women Most Desire?” (Obviously, Sheila had been reading The Canterbury Tales in my absence.)

  I decided to make my own quest for the answer to that question which was so dominating my reading material, and several months later I started with the women who had been at this party. Here are their answers.

  Mother: “Romance.”

  Sister #1: “Intimacy.” (Not meaning just romantic love with a man.)

  Sister #2: “Financial Independence” (Ability to travel, not to have to work.)

  Sister #3: “Freedom.”

  Sister #4: “Balance.” (Elaborating, she said that she meant a “balance between personal and professional fulfillment” or something like that. She was clear that she did not mean stability, which is, she said, “what you fall back on when you can’t get what you really desire.”)

  Sister-in-law #1: “Love, and to be treated with respect and dignity. (Which is different than being loved and treated like a slut.)”

  Sister-in-law #2: “Peace in my heart—and a pair of shoes that is equal parts cute and comfortable.”

  Niece #1: “Self-certainty.” (Feeling totally at home in the world.)

  Niece #2: “To be understood.”

  Niece #3: “Success.”

  Niece #4: “Mental and physical strength.”

  Niece #5: “Power and equality.” (She also wanted to acknowledge that the answer would be different for every woman.)

  Niece #6: “To be independent.”

  As a control group of one, I decided to ask my Aunt Theresa, who is a nun, and could therefore be expected to answer the question without regard to relationships with men. Her answer: “Love.”

  “You were meant to be my control group,” I told her. “I thought that since you are a nun you wouldn’t answer ‘love.’”

  “I wasn’t answering as a nun,” she said. “You asked what ‘women most desire.’”

  “Okay,” I said, “so if you were answering as a nun, what would you say.”

  “Love.”

  We both laughed.

  “It doesn’t just mean love of a man,” she continued. “It can be love of God, love of family.”

  I then asked my mother-in-law, who answered “stability.” When I asked her this question we were at a lecture and one of her friends was with us. The friend interjected that she was surprised that “love” would not be every woman’s first answer. “If I was widowed though,” she added as a second thought, “I guess I might say stability.” (My father-in-law had died about nine months previous to this conversation, and the comment was not made thoughtlessly, but with the understanding of intelligent friendship.) My mother-in-law thought about it a bit more and changed her answer to “Love, and stability.”

  Peg Brandon, who accompanied me through much of my walk across England, said that “partnership” was what women desired—a relationship with equality. Soon after we talked about this, she was at the dentist’s and decided she should ask her hygienist, whose instant response was “a husband who vacuums.” On greater reflection she said that a woman wants “good health for her family.” On still greater reflection she added, “not to have to work.” I was then inspired to ask my own hygienist and on my next visit to the dentist I asked all three of the women who worked in the office. Their answers were “love,” “to be loved,” and “good health.”

  Another of my friends to whom this question was addressed actually submitted her answer in writing.

  What do women really want? They want a lover who makes them laugh.

  No seriously. I’ve thought more about your question, and here’s my answer: What women really want is independence. We (at least, I) want to not have to ask anyone’s permission to be the person I want to be (career-wise, choosing motherhood or not, being someone’s wife or being single, choosing men or choosing women as my sexual/life partners)—and I don’t want to have to beg society’s pardon for my choices, either. To quote Virginia Woolf, one does need “a room of one’s own and five hundred pounds a year”—one does need independence—to be able to choose one’s life course. Call it independence, call it self-determination. I prefer “independence,” because it implies the financial means and social means of putting self-determination into practice.

  Feeling I needed a wider test group, I determined to ask a women from every continent. The women surveyed ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-seven, and had c
hildren ranging in age from newborn to fifty-four. They represented women who were single, married, widowed, divorced, remarried; working, looking for work, retired from work; their occupations included lawyer, social worker, sea captain, student, artist, housewife, teacher, museum curator, writer, musician, waitress, dental hygienist, receptionist, librarian, nurse, nun; the level of education ranged from high school student to Ph.D.; four of them had faced life-threatening bouts with cancer (and none of those four answered “good health”).

  Several of the women I surveyed asked if theirs was the right answer, and I told them about the “mastery over her husband” response. Invariably they laughed. “Good joke, but what is the real answer,” they’d say. The nearest that any came to an answer that even resembled the one in the Wife of Bath’s tale was “a husband who vacuums.” They all want self-determination and love in some balance. They do not wish to dominate men, they just do not want to be dominated by them. In fact, what they want is exactly the same things that men want.

  Except men like the beastly Wainwright, of course. He really does believe that men must have mastery over women.

  There is the grotesque female who screams for equality with men: give her all the privileges she demands and let her demonstrate her right to be considered an equal, if she can; then at least she may creep quietly back to the kitchen where she belongs. Her protest is not against lack of opportunity: it is man’s dominance she resents. Man’s dominance is not of mushroom growth; it has been developing through the ages, and his gradual expansion has seen inculcated in him qualities which the ladies might possibly acquire when they have spent as long a time in apprenticeship, not the least of these qualities being a sense of fair play, to which at present they are strangers.

  What do I want? A world without Wainwrights!

  I am going to give the last word in this book to my great-niece, who was born while I walked across England and is now fourteen years old. When I asked her what she thought women most desired, she asked if she could submit her answer in writing and put a great deal of thought into it. “A woman most desires to contribute something unique to society, or to expand the boundaries of a certain field. She seeks individuality and to, at some point, with something, stray off the common path.”