Paradise News

by David Lodge

  It was a fairly prosperous community, as English Catholic communities go. Unemployment caused less havoc in that part of the country than elsewhere in the early 1980s. The cost and scarcity of housing made life difficult for young married couples, but there was no real poverty, or the serious social problems that go with it: crime, drugs, prostitution. It was a respectable, modestly affluent society. If I had been sent to a parish in Saõ Paolo or Bogota, or even one of the more depressed areas of Rummidge, things might have worked out differently. I might have thrown myself into the cause of social justice, made what the liberation theologians call a “preferential option for the poor” – though I doubt it. I was never cast in a heroic mould. But in any case, this was Metroland, not South America. My parishioners did not need or want political or economic liberation. Most of them had voted for Mrs Thatcher. My role was clearly designated, “supernatural reassurance”. They looked to the Church to provide a spiritual dimension to lives outwardly indistinguishable from those of their secular neighbours. Perhaps fortunately for me, the great row about birth control and Humanae Vitae, which dominated Catholic pastoral life in the sixties and seventies, had died down by the time I came on to the parochial scene. Most of my parishioners had settled the question in their own consciences, and tactfully avoided raising it with me. They wanted me to marry them, to baptize their children, to comfort them in bereavement, and to relieve them from the fear of death. They wanted me to assure them that if they were not as prosperous and successful as they might have wished, or if their spouses deserted them, or their children went off the rails, or they were stricken with fatal illnesses, it wasn’t the end, it wasn’t a reason to despair, there was another place, another time out of time, where everything would be compensated for, justice done, pain and loss made good, and we would all live happily ever after.

  That, after all, is what the language of the Mass promised them every Sunday. “Have mercy on us all; make us worthy to share eternal life with Mary, the virgin Mother of God, with the apostles and with all the saints who have done your will throughout the ages. May we praise you in union with them, and give you glory for ever and ever.” The Second Eucharistic Prayer. Dip into the Missal at random (I have just tried the experiment on the missal in Ursula’s bureau, a newish-looking copy bound in white leatherette, with “holy pictures” between the gold-edged pages) and you will encounter the same theme, endlessly repeated. “God our Father, may we love you in all things and above all things and reach the joy you have prepared for us beyond all imagining.” (Opening Prayer, 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A.) “Lord, we make this offering in obedience to your word. May it cleanse and renew us, and lead us to our eternal reward.” (Prayer over the Gifts, 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.) “Almighty God, we receive new life from the supper your Son gave us in this world. May we find full contentment in the meal we hope to share in your eternal kingdom.” (Prayer after Communion, Holy Thursday, Mass of the Last Supper.)

  This has always been the basic appeal of Christianity – and no wonder. The vast majority of human lives in history have not been long, happy and fulfilled. Even if progress should one day achieve such a Utopia for everyone, which seems unlikely, it cannot compensate retrospectively for the billions of lives already thwarted, stunted and damaged by malnutrition, war, oppression, physical and mental illness. Hence our human longing to believe in an afterlife in which the manifest injustices and inequalities of this life would be redressed. It explains why Christianity spread so rapidly among the poor and underprivileged, the conquered and the enslaved, in the Roman Empire of the first century. Those early Christians, and, it would seem, Jesus himself, expected that the end of history, and with it the end of injustice and suffering, was imminent, in the Second Coming of Christ, and the inauguration of His Kingdom – an expectation that continues to inspire fundamentalist sects to this day. In the teaching of the institutional Church, the Second Coming and the Last Judgment were indefinitely postdated, and emphasis put on the fate of the individual soul after death. The appeal of the Gospel message, though, remains essentially the same. The Good News is news of eternal life, Paradise news. For my parishioners, I was a kind of travel agent, issuing tickets, insurance, brochures, guaranteeing them ultimate happiness. And looking down at their faces from the altar, as I pronounced these promises and hopes week after week, looking at their patient, trusting, slightly bored faces, and wondering whether they really believed what I was saying or merely hoped that it was true, I realized that I didn’t, not any longer, not a word of it, though I couldn’t put a finger on exactly when I had passed from one state to the other – so fine, it seemed, was the membrane, so slight the distance, that separated belief from unbelief.

  All the radical demythologizing theology that I had spent most of my life resisting suddenly seemed self-evidently true. Christian orthodoxy was a mixture of myth and metaphysics that made no kind of sense in the modern, post-Enlightenment world except when understood historically and interpreted metaphorically. Jesus, insofar as we could disentangle his real identity from the midrash of the early Gospel-writers, was clearly a remarkable man, with uniquely valuable (but enigmatic, very enigmatic) wisdom to impart, infinitely more interesting than comparable apocalyptic zealots who were characteristic of that period of Jewish history; and the story of his crucifixion (though not historically verifiable) was moving and inspiring. But the supernatural machinery of the story – the idea that he was God, “sent” by himself as Father from heaven to earth, born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and returned to heaven, from whence he would return again on the last day to judge the living and the dead, etc., well, that too had its grandeur and symbolic force as a narrative, but it was no more credible than most of the other myths and legends about divinities that proliferated in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the same time.

  So there I was, an atheist priest, or at least an agnostic one. And I didn’t dare to tell anyone. I went back to the radical Anglican theologians, John Robinson, Maurice Wiles, Don Cupitt and Co., whom I used to deride in my Introduction to Theology lectures, and re-read them with more respect. In their work I found a kind of justification for carrying on as a priest. Cupitt, for instance, talked about “people who are quietly agnostic or sceptical about Christian supernatural doctrines, while nevertheless continuing to practise the Christian religion to striking effect.” I thought I would be one of those people. Cupitt, who was less than quiet about his own scepticism, and had been publicly denounced as an “atheist priest”, particularly fascinated me as, in a series of books, he grimly sawed away at the branch he was sitting on, until there was nothing left between him and thin air except a Kierkegaardian “religious requirement”: “There is as far as we are concerned no God but the religious requirement, the choice of it, the acceptance of its demands, and the liberating self-transcendence it brings about in us.” I used to amuse the students at Ethel’s by turning that sort of language into a Creed: “I believe in the religious requirement …” Now even Cupitt seemed to me to presume a lot. Where was this liberating self-transcendence? I didn’t feel it. I felt lonely, hollow, unfulfilled.

  It was at this point that Daphne came into my life. The circumstances were ironic. She was a senior nurse at a local hospital which I used to visit, in charge of a woman’s ward. We used to chat occasionally about the patients in her little cubbyhole of an office. There was one patient we both took a particular interest in, a nun, Sister Philomena, aged about forty, who was dying of some virulent form of bone cancer. She was in and out of the hospital over many months, often in considerable pain. They amputated a leg, but it didn’t stop the spread of the disease. There was nothing more they could do. She accepted her fate calmly and courageously. She had tremendous faith. She was quite confident that she was going to meet her Maker, or, as the liturgy of her Final Vows had put it, her bridegroom. Naturally I didn’t disturb her with my own doubts, but reflected her faith back to her with simulated fervency. It seems that Sister Philo
mena told Daphne what a source of comfort and inspiration I was to her, and I had to put up with the embarrassment of receiving this totally undeserved accolade at second hand.

  After Sister Philomena had left the ward for the last time, and returned to her convent to die (which she did a couple of months later) Daphne said that she had been so impressed by the experience of nursing her that she wanted to find out more about the Catholic faith. She asked me if she could come to me for Instructions (a phrase she had obviously got from Sister Philomena). I tried to pass her on to my curate, but she insisted that it had to be me. That perhaps should have been a warning signal. But I could see no way of refusing that wouldn’t have seemed both rude and irrational. So every Thursday evening, or on Friday afternoons when she was on night duty, Daphne came to the presbytery and we would go into the front parlour, with its ticking clock and massive plaster crucifix over the mantelpiece, and gaudy mission posters on the walls, and sit down on opposite sides of the polished table, on straight-backed chairs whose upholstered rexine-covered seats had long ago collapsed into shallow, uncomfortable craters, and work our way through the articles of the Catholic faith. What a farce.

  At first, I aimed to get the whole business over as soon as possible, so when Daphne raised some objection or expressed some bafflement about a particular doctrine, leaning forward and gazing earnestly into my eyes, I would shrug and look away and say, yes, it did present problems from a purely rational point of view, but you had to put it in the context of the Faith as a whole; and then pass on to the next doctrine. But soon I began to look forward to her weekly visits. I was, God knows, lonely. I missed the donnish companionship of the staffroom at Ethel’s. My curate, Thomas, was a good lad, a young Liverpudlian not long ordained and seconded to our priest-starved diocese, but his secular interests were mainly football and rock music (he took a keen interest in the Youth Club and conducted a hugely popular folk mass on Sunday evenings) – subjects about which I knew nothing. Our housekeeper was a wizened and arthritic widow called Aggie whose main topics of conversation were the cost of food and the aches in her joints. Daphne was not the world’s greatest brain, but she took an intelligent interest in the news, she watched the more serious programmes on television, she read novels that won literary prizes, and went up to London occasionally to see a play or an exhibition. She had been educated at a good girls’ boarding-school (her father had been a professional soldier, often stationed abroad) and acquired there a rather genteel accent and style of speech that was off-putting to many people (I overheard staff mimicking her behind her back at the hospital) though not to me. We formed the habit of chatting a little about secular topics after we had gone through the prescribed bit of instruction. Gradually the instruction became more cursory and the chat more extended. I began to suspect that Daphne was no more likely to become a Catholic than I was to recover my belief, and that she too was prolonging the course of instruction for personal reasons.

  What did she see in me? I often asked myself that, later. Well, she was thirty-five, and desperate to marry, perhaps to have children. And she was not, one has to say, physically attractive in the modish modern way, or perhaps any way, though it was not something that had occurred to me when we first met, for I had trained myself long ago not to regard women as sexual objects. She was tall and matronly in figure, and looked more impressive in her uniform than when off duty. Her complexion was pale and her face jowly, with a hint of a double chin. She had a sharp nose, and a small, thin-lipped mouth which she usually kept buttoned in a severe straight line, especially on duty (she ran her ward with autocratic authority, and the young nurses in her charge regarded her with respect and, I couldn’t help noticing, a degree of dislike). But when we were together she would sometimes permit herself a smile, exposing two neat rows of rather sharp white teeth, and a pink pointed tongue, which she would pass rapidly across her lips in a way that, as our intimacy grew, I found rather sensually arousing. But she was not an obviously desirable woman, any more than I was a desirable man. Neither of us would score very high in what Sheldrake calls attractivity. Perhaps that was what encouraged her to think that we were made for each other.

  So came the day of the lunch, the fateful lunch, in her flat, a small apartment in a purpose-built private block, the kind occupied by childless couples and young single professionals, with a rubber plant in the lobby and carpeted corridors where the loudest noise is the whine of the lift. It was a raw February day, with a cold drizzle falling from low, grey clouds. The interior of Daphne’s flat looked warm and inviting as she opened the front door – and so did Daphne. She was wearing a soft velvet dress I hadn’t seen before, and her hair, which she usually wore in a rather severe chignon, was loose and freshly washed, smelling of scented shampoo. She seemed pleasantly surprised by my own appearance: I was dressed in a pullover and corduroys, and it was the first time she had seen me out of clerical black. “It makes you look younger,” she said, and I said, “Do I normally look old, then?” and we laughed, and her pink tongue flickered over her lips in that feline, coquettish way she had.

  We were both a little self-conscious, but a glass of sherry before lunch eased our stiffness and a bottle of wine with the meal removed it entirely. We talked more freely, more personally, more interestingly than ever before. I can’t remember what we ate, except that it was light and palatable and a vast improvement on Aggie’s greasy stews. After lunch we had coffee, sitting side by side on a sofa that Daphne pulled up to face the fire, one of those gasfires with remarkably convincing simulated coal, and we talked. We talked on as the winter afternoon turned to dusk and the room became darker and darker. At a certain point Daphne moved to turn on a lamp, but I stopped her. I was seized by a powerful impulse to tell her the truth about myself, and it seemed easier to do it in the semi-darkness, as if the room had become a confessional. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said, “I can’t go on giving you instruction any more, because, you see, I no longer believe any of it myself, it would be wrong to continue, bad faith in every sense of the word. There, it’s out, and you’re the only person in the world that I’ve told.”

  In the light from the fire I saw her eyes widen with excitement. She took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m deeply moved, Bernard,” she said (we had been on first-name terms for some weeks). “I know how important this is for you, how much it matters. I feel really privileged to receive your confidence.”

  We sat in solemn silence for a few minutes, staring into the fire. Then, with Daphne still clasping my hand, I told her the whole story, more or less as I have told it here. At the end I said, “So I’ll have to hand you over to Thomas, now. He’s a bit callow, but his heart is in the right place.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, and leaning across, kissed me on the mouth, as if to silence me, which it certainly did.

  Monday 14th

  A meeting this morning with Ursula’s lawyer, a Mr Bellucci. His office is in what is called downtown Honolulu, the financial and business district. Like Waikiki, it has a slightly unreal quality, as if it was all built yesterday, and might be dismantled and cleared away overnight for something quite different to be erected tomorrow. You take a turnoff from a rather scruffy stretch of the Ala Moana Boulevard, a mile past the Shopping Center, park in a multi-storey, and walk out on the other side into a maze of pedestrianized streets and plazas linking sleek tower blocks that look confusingly alike, all built of the same stainless steel, smoked glass and glazed brick. The offices, or “suites”, are lavishly furnished with wood panelling and fitted carpets, chilled by relentless air-conditioning, and screened by venetian blinds lowered over tinted windows, so that minutes after you have stepped inside off the hot bright pavement it is hard to believe that you are still in Hawaii. Perhaps it is a deliberate effort to create an artificial microclimate conducive to work, and to overcome the lethargy of the tropics. Bellucci and his staff certainly seemed to be playing parts in a simulation of office life in some commercial capital of t
he northern hemisphere. He wore a three-piece suit and tie; his secretary a severe long-sleeved frock, stockings, and high-heeled shoes. I felt sloppy and unbusinesslike in my slacks and sports shirt.

  Mr Bellucci greeted me gravely at the door of his room and gestured me to sit down in a green buttoned-leather armchair that, like the rest of the furnishings, looked brand-new and curiously inauthentic. “How you doing, Mr Walsh?’ he said. I told him briefly of my problems, Daddy’s accident, etc., and he clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Sticky wicket,” he said. “Isn’t that what you say in England? Sticky wicket?” I told him the meaning of the phrase in cricket. “No kidding?” he said with mild incredulity. “You gonna sue the driver?” He seemed disappointed when I said no.

  He called his secretary to bring in the power-of-attorney document, and smoked a cigar while I read through its four pages. The text was written in typical legal jargon designed to cover every possible eventuality – “to purchase, sell, bargain, or contract for, encumber, hypothecate, or alienate any property, real, personal or mixed, tangible or intangible …” But the drift was clear enough. It had to be signed by Ursula in the presence of a notary public. I asked how that could be managed, since she was confined to bed, and Bellucci told me the notary would come to the hospital. “The hospital social worker will set it up for you.” Which indeed she did. To my astonishment the business was all completed by three o’clock this afternoon, after a brief little ceremony at Ursula’s bedside. I now have total power to manage her affairs. My first task was to pay Mr Bellucci’s not inconsiderable bill, $250.00.