by A. N. Wilson
—Have you got the radio on? he asked suddenly.
—No.
—Someone singing in the background.
—It’s Penny Whistle. He’s started early this morning.
For a short while they paused, and could hear the distant baritone –
In tarr-y dress
We reached Stromness
Where we would go a SHORE
With the whalermen so scarce
And the water even less
We’ll have to take on MORE!
Was the bond between father and daughter too close? Did she take the job in Aberdeen, not to escape Doug, who had already gone to North Carolina for a three-year stint, following his successful sabbatical there – but as a breather from the much closer relationship with Ronald? Is that why wise old Uncle Lesley had advised her to accept the offer of the Deanery of Aberdeen – because he could see that she was too close to Dad? She did not feel it as an oppressive relationship. But, once she had left England and come to the Island, she did wonder whether it had been fair on Doug, really. Why have my sisters husbands if they say they love you all?
What was this whole ordination thing, her wish to be a priest, if it wasn’t in some way a wish to BE Dad, or please Dad, or walk in Dad’s shoes? She even looked a bit like Dad had done when he was young, and she had the same voice, which to our Huia ears sounds almost ridiculously posh, almost like the Queen, and the same light laugh.
It was only after she had been married for a couple of years that she realized quite how deeply the two men disliked one another. She was in love with Doug in those days. This was a difficult thing to recognize – now. With love had come a total lack of realism about what she had done to both men by marrying Doug. She had condemned the two people she liked best in the world to eating Christmas dinner for the rest of their lives with a person they utterly detested. The month-long holiday together in the Welsh cottage, always one of the high points of the year when it was just the three of them – her, Mum, Dad – had become, now it was another trio – her, Dad, Doug – a torture. For the four or five years that she was in love with Doug, however, optimism blinded her to the emotional reality. She supposed that because they were both clever, well-meaning men, they would grow to like one another. Human kind, as her favourite poet said, cannot bear very much reality.
Doug had known Digby and Eleanor Bartlett of course, but I wonder, did he ever get the hang of them? Did he understand what was going on, as – again, no swanks – I did, almost from the first? Me and the Quake sorted out that pair, made them face up to the truth of things. Maybe, when she got together with Doug, she just wasn’t ready for that realization? He loved Digby, that’s what I think, and he did not even begin to understand Priest Eleanor. Did she become a priest – partly – as a gesture of defiance, of independence from Doug? I dunno. I never met Doug – though I so nearly did, that momentous day in Winchester, England – of which more anon!
We have seen Dean Eleanor Bartlett in the Dyce Gallery, beginning an unwise flirtation with Charles Nicolson. And we’ve had a glimpse of Digby in the arms of my supervisor (ex-lover) Barnaby Farrell. Maybe it’s time to ask whether Doug had ever really engaged, clicked, with Eleanor at all? Wasn’t the truth that it was Digby he had been in love with all along, Digby he betrayed, Digby who broke his heart, and he hers? While Eleanor Bartlett, of the light laugh, crossed the world as a priest of the Chosen Frozen, Digby had to come with her. There was no choice. But there were far harder choices for Digby than for Eleanor.
When Eleanor was offered the Deanery of our Cathedral, E.L. Digby had taken a post as a research fellow in Classical Literature at our University. The Cathedral staff were scarcely aware of Digby. A room in the tower was assigned to her, where she could work unimpeded on her book, Euripides and the Masks of God.
In one of their Skyped conversations, Eleanor’s dad had remarked that he would not wish to be immured in that tower if there was another quake, and Eleanor had replied that there wasn’t going to be another quake. Dad had answered,
—Lesley is not so sure.
—Since when was Uncle Lesley an expert on seismology?
—He saw a programme about Aquila. It was really too dreadful. And at the end they went through all the other places in the world which had been built on a fault line – San Francisco, and so on. Too dreadful.
The move from England had affected Digby much more than it did Eleanor. Eleanor, for one thing, had her duties and concerns as a priest to numb the culture shock. She was in charge of running the Cathedral, supervising its music and liturgy, discussing its preservation with the fabric committee, performing civic duties, meeting such figures as Rex Tone, the go-ahead mayor who devised a brighter and ever brighter future for us in his tall white concrete tower-block City Hall. Digby, by contrast, had given up the fellowship of an Oxford college, a weekly routine of lectures and tutorials, and regular attendance, at least during vacations, in the Lower Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. All this was now over. True, Banks University in Aberdeen had been extremely welcoming, and, as well as conducting her Tragedy class with Barnaby Farrell, she was supervising a few graduate students who were working on the Greek tragedians. She had given lectures in the faculty. For the time being, however, the formal ‘career’ was on hold. She was using the time to set in order the book which had engaged her, with different degrees of intensity, for the previous twenty years.
The work had its origin in her DPhil thesis, which had been a commentary on Trojan Women, a searingly painful play in which some of the principal figures of the Trojan horror story prepare to go into exile as the sexual slaves of their conquerors who destroyed their city and killed their husbands, sons, brothers. The women of Troy are Hecuba, the widow of Priam and mother of the slain Hector; Cassandra, her crazy daughter, who had predicted the whole disaster, and was now in a state of frenzied hyper-excitement, even relished the prospect of losing her status as a virgin priest and being ravished by Agamemnon, her new master; Andromache, the widow of Hector, who was to be forcibly married to the son of Achilles, the son of the man who murdered her husband; and then, perhaps the most pathetic of all the ‘Trojan’ women, namely Helen, whose abduction by Paris had started the war a decade previously.
The whole story, as told by Euripides, rippled with ambiguities. Even more than Homer, his principal source, Euripides emphasized the quasi-divine status of many of these characters, or their involvement with the gods. The human beings were not ‘ordinary’ humans, any more than the gods were remotely like the Jewish ‘God’. Achilles was the son of a sea-nymph. Helen was the child of Leda and the Swan (who had been Zeus in disguise) and had hatched from an egg . . . and so forth.
Digby was fascinated by Greek religion, but partly as a weapon against the Christian theology which so fascinated Eleanor. Indeed, the chief difference between them was in the matter of religion. Eleanor was a tribal Anglican who had been ordained as a priest. Every day in the Cathedral, she took part in prayers, sometimes the traditional ones in the old Prayer Book, and sometimes the newer liturgies, devised by our Island Synod – for we are an independent, autocephalous Church, with our own primate, Yvonne, the Archbishop of Carmichael, and our own hierarchies.
Digby has nothing to do with any of this. To judge from the draft chapters of The Masks of God, she would appear to be a complete atheist. Terrible events happen. The gods are projections of the pitilessness of things, of natural forces or uncontrollable passions over which the human characters in the Euripidean dramas have no control. Prayer has no effect on them. Yet, Digby sometimes seems to suggest, Euripides is not undermining the pagan mythology so much as making use of it. He is saying – yes, this is the way things are: wars break out, plagues, earthquakes, famines. Why? Because ‘the gods’ decree these things. What matters is how you respond to these things as human beings. Do you do so with cowardice? Do you submit blindly to fate? Or do you, as in some of Euripides’ greatest lyrics and choruses, do you question the nature
of things, do you assert the dignity of human beings in their suffering? Do you lament the degradation of women by war, and by the nature of society? Nothing, exactly speaking, happens in Trojan Women. The four chief protagonists have to stand there while history and war and nature and men hurl misfortunes at them. That is the nature of things . . . no? No incantation in a shrine, no incense-offering, is going to help them.
It was a potential embarrassment that Eleanor and Digby were so bonded. Yet without one the other would have died. When Eleanor was offered the Deanery of our Cathedral in Aberdeen, Digby had been part of the deal. Digby would come too. The two were, after all, inseparable. In the event, the Cathedral staff were scarcely aware of Digby. Like I say, a room in the tower was assigned to her, which had once been used by the early twentieth-century church historian, Archdeacon Otway. This learned cleric, an expert on the Christian Platonists of Alexandria, whose editions of Clement and Origen are still indispensable (apparently!), had a considerable library. Well over three thousand of his books were moved from the solid Arts and Crafts oak shelves (designed by the architect of our Cathedral, Oswald Fish) and replaced by Digby’s own extensive classical library.
Digby’s passionate interest in these books was not shared either by the small Cathedral Chapter or by Bishop Dionne who, such was the way Church matters were conducted on the Islands, had the ultimate say in any such question. The Bishop probably did not know what incunabula were, let alone whether Erasmus’s own copy of Origen’s Contra Celsum, printed in Antwerp in 1512, was of interest or value. Since the Bishop (as far as Digby could make out) was something of a fundamentalist (when it came to the story of the Resurrection, for example), it was unlikely she would have found Origen’s writings to her taste – for that Platonist of Alexandria had held it completely unimportant whether Bible stories were literally ‘true’, reading them as allegories of truth, stories about what was going on inside our heads, myths which contained inner kernels of truth rather than improbable histories which asked readers to contort or massacre their intellect.
Eleanor, who had to work with Bishop Dionne and the rest of the chapter on a weekly basis, did not allow herself to have uncharitable thoughts. Digby, however, found the Bishop’s simplicities excruciating, and worried that the wrong decision would be made about the precious remnant of the Otway library. It would have been so much better to make a start on the restoration of the really interesting volumes – there were about a hundred books which came into this distinguished category – and their value, according to Jill Varley, an antiquarian dealer friend of Digby’s with whom she had been in touch about the books, was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions.
Having sorted the Otway collection, Digby had been enabled to use the old shelves to house her own modern scholar’s library. Unpacking the cases had been an experience which brought conflicting emotions. To see them arranged in their new, well-dusted home – the greens and reds of the Loeb editions, the dark blues of the Oxford Classical Texts, and the very many books, still in their dust-wrappers, from modern university presses – was to be reunited with old friends. At the same time, to see them in Aberdeen was to be reminded of just what a move had been made – not only a move to the other side of the world, but also a decisive change of status. For the first time, the balance had shifted.
Hitherto, Digby’s career had been predominant, and Eleanor’s decision to be a priest had been subservient to that. Now it was different. Eleanor’s priestly role was the reason for Digby’s career having been, if not brought to an end, then suspended. There was a certain quiet relief in this decision, but its felt finality was quite worrying. Immured in her tower with the Book, she was free to ‘get on with it’. Yet there were some days when this very freedom – the absence of tutorials, Governing Body, lectures, and the absence of the whole world of Oxford which had been her habitat for almost a quarter of a century – had a paralysing effect on the writing, and she sometimes found herself sitting quietly at her laptop waiting for words which did not come.
Today, she had put slightly more time than was necessary into the preparation of her pot of green tea from an electric kettle in the corner of the room. Nor had she settled at once to the chapter she was writing on, yet again, Trojan Women, but she had, rather, stood at the casement of her tower window. It was a latticed, Victorian window, with stained glass – the coat of arms of the first Bishop, Bishop Gladstone – a distant cousin of the Prime Minister – with its punning heraldic motto, Laetatus sum.
Outside the window, the hot summer sun of a February day fell on Digby’s face like a blessing. Beneath her, fantails sang and fluttered in the branches of the old eucalyptus tree. She could see beyond the tree, to Prince of Wales Parade, and beyond that, the city, with its streets and squares, its winding river, its creamy white stone Public Library, its redbrick and ashlar Albert Hall, its arterial roads stretching towards wooded suburbs of clapboard houses, and beyond, in another direction, the docks, with their cranes, ships and many masts of yachts and dinghies. Beyond, at sea, she could discern the white sails of those who were taking a day out in their dinghies. It was a scene of peculiar innocence and happiness. She found in this quiet moment an intensity of joy. The uncertainties of her professional career were quite suspended. There was no homesickness; only a sense of life being brimful of possibilities and potential joys. Beneath, so immediately beneath the tower as to be invincible, the blind busker must have been standing, as he stood every day. She could hear his words blending with those of the birds in the eucalyptus tree.
From broadside to broadside, our cannon balls did fly,
Like hailstones the small shot around our deck did lie.
Our masts and rigging was shot away
Besides some thousands on that day,
Were killed and wounded in the fray
On board a man o’ war.
Doug did not believe either. One of the things he had in common with Digby. When Eleanor had told him she wanted to be a priest, he had not stood in her way. They were too distant, perhaps, by then for either of them to stand in one another’s way about anything. She had not stood in his way when he was offered a sabbatical in America – it was, as it happens, the year she was made deacon – the preliminary ordination, which takes place a year before you become a priest. She had known, when Duke made Doug the offer of that year as a visiting professor, that she would not accompany him, and that he did not want her to do so. She had known that, when her husband went away for what was the best part of a year, he would not miss her, and she would not miss him. It was a sabbatical from marriage every bit as much as a respite in Doug’s academic routines. They had both felt a burden lift, from the moment his aeroplane took off. They both knew this, but neither of them would have expressed the thought. She had inherited from Ronald the ability to avoid directness. Doug and she had never discussed their marriage with one another. She had married him when he was forty-one, and she was twenty-three. She was a virgin when they met. She had been flattered by the attention of an older man, she had, initially, enjoyed the sex, and she had liked the fact that, as Doug’s wife, she had a more interesting range of grown-up friends than were provided by her contemporary graduate students.
Only later did she decide, with resignation which gave her no pleasure, that he was unfeeling, and unfaithful. As the sex withered, she became aware of the other women, about whom she did not choose to inquire. And with the coming of computers, she suspected a pornography habit – a suspicion confirmed during that first American year, when Doug emailed her in agitation to send him a file left behind on his old computer. Lecture notes on nineteenth-century fiction. (Doug was a Dickensian. They used to have fun, in their earlier days, with the ambiguity of this sentence, seeing him, with his Pickwickian bespectacled face, as a character in the Master’s oeuvre, as much as its critic.)
She had had no difficulty in finding the file, DICKENS AND THE ART OF POPULAR FICTION, and dispatched it within minutes. In doing so, and
without any desire to snoop, she had found the porn. Simply by clicking – in search of the Dickens notes – on ‘recent items’. Apart from a wave of sadness, she had stabs of anger. There was so much of it. He had accumulated a whole library of the demeaning, horrible stuff. Some of the images, she regretted to admit, were unforgettable. Five years after she had seen them, when she sometimes had difficulty in recalling Doug’s face, she could still remember this stuff – which was, presumably, a part of his mind. Why would anyone WANT their head to be full of this tawdry, disgusting . . . stuff? Though filthy, it was the reverse of what she would have considered erotic. And it was – was this part and parcel of being a Dickensian? – it was so crude.