by A. N. Wilson
The Bible, that prodigious library of poems, legends, history, moral teaching, internalized myth, challenge, was, in any case, only one of the wonderful things which Christianity had handed down from generation to generation through the centuries, together with the writings of the Church Fathers and the mystics, the example of the martyrs and saints, and, when Christianity came to be the religion of the Roman Empire, the wealth of Christian art, mosaic, architecture, music. At the core of it was a real experience, the experience of millions of human lives who, in the Gospels and the Christian tradition, had known God. Somewhere in first-century Palestine, a group of women and men had an experience of an individual whom they believed lived in the breaking of bread. And from this had sprung Christianity – a nobler, cleaner, kinder creed, in Eleanor’s opinion, than the gimcrack paganism of ancient Rome. There used to be corners in the imperial city of Rome where women dumped unwanted babies, the way we dump garbage for recycling. Overnight, when Constantine declared the Empire to be Christian, orphanages opened in Rome. It was because, overnight, the human individual was seen as sacred. And this, for Eleanor, was what made the incarnation of Christ the central event of human history, however unlikely it was that his birth had come about as a result of a virginal conception, or was heralded by a choir of angels.
When she was trying to explain this feeling of hers once, an antagonist said, ‘Yes, but that’s just do-gooding. You are reducing theology to do-gooding.’
And she’d wanted to reply, but did not think of it until a few days later – IS there anything deeper than doing good? Revering the Good? Contemplating the Good? Isn’t our capacity to do good one of the things which distinguishes us, not only from all the bad PEOPLE of history but from the pagan gods, who heartlessly tormented their adepts? Is not one of the strangest, and most beautiful, facts of history, that in the darkest places of history – in the Gulag, or the Concentration Camps – we find examples of outstanding forbearance, self-sacrifice, gentleness? Is not Christianity’s claim one of the most outrageous and extraordinary imaginable? Namely that God discarded Omnipotence and went about doing good, and died the death of a slave? Lesley Mannock used to quote something from Evelyn Underhill’s book on Mysticism – words to the effect that prayer could not work unless you were also actively engaged in acts of charity to other people; it would fizzle. Faith in the incarnation could not be detached, either from contemplation or from deeds of good.
Eleanor knew that Christianity had done terrible things, in its blood-spattered history of heresy-hunts, crusades, burnings and tortures, and its sinister capacity both to suppress sexual impulse and to turn a blind eye to the consequences of that repression – in depressions and suicides and child-molestings.
Anglicanism had been a brutal religion to the puritans of the seventeenth century, true. Prynne lost his ears. The Pilgrim Fathers had been forced to sail to an unknown land to worship without the Prayer Book she loved, and they hated. Exclusion Acts made it impossible for nonconformists to worship according to their conscience. Even in those days, however, Eleanor maintained that what the Church of England was looking for was a Common Prayer – a religion which was inclusive of all.
Historians would dispute that, she knew. She did not consider it her duty to wring her hands in guilt about the past. She knew that she was happy with the Chosen Frozen. When doubts assailed her, as they assail any intelligent being, she still knew herself, in all her instinctual responses to life, to belong to this tradition. For most of the time, she quietly, but not smugly, rejoiced, in belonging to the Church which had nurtured George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, Rose Macaulay . . . This was where Eleanor was at home. More at home than she would have been with, say, Nietzsche, Wagner, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Samuel Beckett, clever as they were.
It was literally home. Anglicanism was the creed of her parents. When she doubted, or when the idiotic utterances of some senior cleric made her wince, she remembered her father, a clever man who could easily have opted for an easy life. He had a first class degree from the University, and it was assumed that he would go on to become a Professor of Theology. Instead, like Lesley Mannock, he had been a clergyman in poor parishes, only at the end of his life accepting a Cathedral canonry. He had lived his life among the poor, as had his Island-born wife Gwen, and their only daughter. They had found Jesus Christ in the poor. The day had begun with her parents reading Prayer Book Matins together. On Thursdays and Sundays, her father had celebrated the early Service, and to the few who attended that rite, he had dispensed the Body of Christ. Later in the Sunday morning, at the Sung Eucharist, his congregations – initially all speaking with West Midland accents, but in more recent times, West Indian and Africans predominating – had sung the words of Cranmer to the music of Merbecke. Christ was there. That was why Eleanor believed. That was the setting in which her religious impulses moved, and were moved. The still small voice spoke to her in the early Communion services celebrated by her father in bleak Midland towns, churches with no beauty, churches and parishes with no glamour. One of her theology teachers once said to her that the only phrase in the Creed which he believed was ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate’. Well, maybe. On a bad day, maybe. But set the creed to Merbecke’s music, and sing it with the congregations in those damp fogbound towns, the thirty-five or so faithful, the Jamaican nurses and their gawky sons, the old women in woollen hats, the inevitable awkward bachelor who had never found a friend, standing there in his anorak, and it became something other. It became like an anthem, a rallying cry. The music had been composed in the reign of Edward VI to accompany the new Prayer Book of 1549, and we had been singing it ever since. There was something more, though. There was a something which could not be defined, but which could be heard, experienced.
There was a something. It was unnecessary to be dramatic about it or to put it into words, there was a something. The still small voice, which spoke to her in the context of the Anglican liturgy, the Anglican worship. It was both quietly mystic and at the same time radical.
In her grown-up life, and especially since she had chosen to become a priest, there was more than this. There was an awareness of the whole Anglican Communion throughout the world. When she still lived in England, she often heard church-people say, ‘Why not let these bigots go their own way?’ – when, for example, the Nigerian Church condemned gay people Eleanor knew this could very well happen – such was the gulf in sympathy between, say, the Church in our Island, or in the USA, and the Churches in other parts of the world. Since coming to be the Dean of Aberdeen, though, she really wanted the Anglican Communion to stay together – not because she thought it was possible for its disparate views ever to be reconciled, but because she thought, au fond, that they all had something profound in common. That something was not an ideology, but the unnameable something, the . . . Unspeakable . . . The unforgettable THING she had experienced when her father said Mass in the light of dawn in those fogbound West Midland towns of her childhood.
O Christ whom now beneath a veil we see,
May what we thirst for soon our portion be.
It was not often palpable, as it had been in her pious adolescence; but sometimes, it was. Sometimes, as she walked about the Cathedral in Aberdeen, she could sense it – the Presence. Even if these feelings only came occasionally, that was enough.
—I thought Deirdre did really well on Island Breakfast.
Digby had only lately discovered, on the grapevine, that he was, or had been, Deirdre Hadley’s lover. He, of course, had never mentioned it to her. She looked across the restaurant table at him.
—Good old Deirdre.
The broadcast to which Digby referred was a debate with Rex Tone about climate change.
—She had a go at the Bishop the other week. That tirade against pekingese. Did you hear it?
They laughed. Her pedantic need to correct error made the words ‘Pugs, not pekes – PUGS’ come to mind, but she managed
not to say them. She stared at him, wondering which would be worse: to extract from him a confession about Deirdre, which would have made her (she realized) jealous, or NOT to receive a confession and to feel he was trying somehow or other to pull wool over her eyes.
They were eating in a nice Vietnamese place where they had been a couple of times before. It was in Manners-Sutton Street. They’d started with some deep-fried spring rolls – Cha Gio – and some salad rolls – Goi Cuon – and then shared a dish of Chicken with Vermicelli – Bun Ga Nuong. He was drinking more than she was of the delicious bottle of Riesling.
—For some reason, she said, I love the Island Riesling. I can’t stand German wine in Europe, but here, it’s . . .
—Light, he said, picking up her hand with the casualness with which one might pick up a fork or a napkin. She allowed this to happen.
They had talked about the success of their course, and discussed what they were going to say in their next – which would be the one about King Lear. She made no resistance as their knees touched under the table. Suddenly he said,
—Why don’t we go back to my place?
She wanted to, but she said,
—What about your little boy? What about Stig?
—He’ll be asleep.
—But, the baby-sitter . . .
—She won’t be asleep. Or anyway, I hope not.
She laughed.
—You know what I mean. She’ll know. She’ll know I’ve come back with you. She stroked the back of his hand with her index finger.
—Well, it’s up to you.
She was thinking, ‘Stig! I would give everything, everything, to have a Stig in my life.’ She was not even, specifically, thinking, ‘Bloody Doug!’, though it could have been said, at this stage of her experience, that her whole life was an expression of those three syllables. Deep, deep within her, the longing for a child, and for lovemaking, and for the fulfilment both uniquely brought, flooded over her, as she looked into his eyes, aware that he could, within an hour at his place, have made all these things possible, and connected her to the planet.
He went home alone, shortly afterwards, and she remained one of the childless, the disconnected ones. They’d had no more than a little cuddle before he strode away, his Man Bag, containing a good recent biography of Seneca which she had lent him, bouncing on his shoulder, and somehow telling her that he was cross. Later, alone in bed at home, Digby so regretted her decision.
CHAPTER FIVE
THEY WERE APPROACHING THE HOTHOUSES OF THE BOTANIC Gardens, Eleanor and Charles. It was a winter day in June, so they would be glad of the warmth. Very light flecks of snow were falling on the grass. All the same, Eleanor felt it had been unwise. Unwise to say she would come for this lunchtime walk with Charles, so soon after that concert. Unwise to come to the Botanic Gardens. Unwise to enter the ferny tropical steam of the glass house. They made a handsome pair – he in a tweed cap over his Mr Rochester locks, and a long tailored black overcoat; she, too, in a black coat, but with a little pink woollen hat. The trouble was, as she noted, seeing their reflections in the glass doors of the hothouse, not so much that they made a handsome pair, as that they made a pair at all. A pair was most decidedly what they were not, and never could be or should be. And yet – she could not help noticing it in that reflected glimpse as he swung the door open and held it for her – they did look like a pair, and she wondered in some way which was both shocking and worrying whether, over the last year or so of these meetings, whether they had become a pair.
It was when they had reached the carnivorous plants – Sarracenia flava – that his manner changed, and she became swoopingly aware that the conversation was going to lurch into territories where frankness was demanded. Hitherto, what had characterized all their meetings, whether they sat beside one another at concerts, shook hands at the Cathedral door, in the company of his family, or walked together, as they were doing today, in gardens or galleries, was the absence of anything too sharply defined or too crudely spelt out. It was a flirtation, and could still remain that way; but they were inches away from the border being crossed into a different land, when all sorts of complications which had hitherto been unmentionable would become explicit. She needed, wanted, to backtrack. She even considered a feigned illness, and then, immediately, there came before her mind, as she painted the scene to herself, that he would then be entitled to place a hand on her arm, her shoulder, her waist. That way led the Land of Chaos. A giant tree fern soared above their heads. He leaned against the twisted wrought-iron of the spiral staircase which led to the gallery above their heads. Then it all blurted out.
—Pamela and I aren’t happy. She’s never made me happy.
—Charles – Charles . . .
—She can’t listen. She literally can’t hear me when I speak. I try to speak to her – when I’ve tried . . . It’s not like the conversations you and I have . . . Eleanor.
They walked for a while in silence. The thing – it no longer had its inverted commas when she thought of it – had now become a nightmare. She had never realized before that she was vain. It was her vanity to which Charles had appealed. He wanted to lay all his misery, all his neediness, at her feet, like a puppy, abjectly bringing a chewed slipper to its mistress. At first, there had been something almost comic about it all. She had mistaken his crush for gallantry. She had ignored Pamela’s glares, when she had gushed, ‘It’s very NICE of you to lend me your husband for the evening. He says you don’t like Poulenc, so I HOPE that’s true!’
She had ignored nearly all the emails, deleted many of them as soon as they arrived. She had never in her life exposed her feelings in this way to another person. During adolescence – the agony of loving Miss Firebrace, her history teacher! And later, at Oxford, there were the few short-lived crushes on male undergraduates. And then Doug, which had begun with the banter and shared jokes of two fellows in the same college. One read about abject love such as Charles’s, and it was, of course, the stuff of opera or cheap novels. There was surely something absurd about it? Later, talking about it in circumstances which made such talk easy, she realized how close she had been, in the hothouse, to behaviour which would have been, well, catastrophic; realized that it was her vanity which had saved her, for, had he been positive, not negative, had he simply spoken of his love for her, rather than his hate for his wife, had he said he wanted to take her away that moment and make wild love, well . . . who knows what might have happened?
But now he was making more than an ass of himself. He was involving her in the pain of an unhappy marriage. That was surely unpardonable, and she was jolted into irritation.
—Charles, if your marriage is in difficulties, maybe you should BOTH look for some help. But I can’t . . . I’m not the person to . . .
—You know I am not coming to you for help, damn it. You know that. You know Pamela. You have seen us together . . .
—I’ve met Pamela, said Eleanor quietly, carefully. I’ve met your children, Charles. Josh is in the Cathedral choir, of course I have met you all.
—Then you know what a farce the marriage is.
—I know nothing of the kind. It isn’t a farce. Imagine what Josh would think if he heard you speaking. Sometimes I look across at his face in the choir during the Sung Eucharist, and I think how lucky you are to have children. You have him, you have Ella. And if Pamela and you are going through a . . . Through a difficult time . . .
—We’re not going through anything. Don’t you see that? We should never have married!
—Never had your children? Never had Josh, whom you love so much? Never had Ella, clever little Ell? If you knew what it was like not to . . . Charles, if you thought, just thought, what a privilege it is to have children . . .
—You are being deliberately obtuse. You know they have nothing to do with what I am saying.
—They have everything to do with it. Imagine what Josh would think if he heard us now.
—I don’t want to.
—We
ll, you should.
—Hundreds of children watch their parents’ marriages dissolve.
—My dear . . . I hate your being so unhappy, but this is making it worse.
—What is?
—These meetings, these walks, these conversations in which we appear to be saying something and not saying anything . . .
The sentence died on her half-open lips. There were many who had been melted by that half-open mouth, and by the row of teeth which so slightly stuck out. When she had pulled back from him, she knew that she had not done so quickly enough. She had felt the lapels of his heavy black winter overcoat pressing against her breasts. The roughness of his chin against her face was exciting rather than unpleasant. The wildness of the kiss, its passionate intensity . . . Doug had never kissed her like that, or if he had, she had forgotten it.
—Charles, we can’t do this.
—We just have.
They walked on in silence for about half an hour. Nor, at the end of the walk, did she say what she should have said – that they must stop meeting at lunchtime, that their occasional attendance at evening concerts must, obviously, stop at once, that she must consider her position – as a dean, as a married woman, and that they must not cause a scandal. She was in a turmoil of confusion.
After the half-hour of silence, he said,
—There’s no turning back now.
—I don’t know what you mean.
—Just now. Your kiss . . . it spoke.
She wanted to say that it had not spoken, that if it had done so, there would have been nothing for it to say. She wanted to say that she should not have allowed him to kiss her, that they must stop, stop, stop.
—I’m going to tell Pamela.
—Tell her what?
—Tell her that we have fallen in love.
That’s where Eleanor was at. And then, there was Digby and her seminars, and her relationship with Barnaby. This is a difficult one to write. Dramatic irony’s the one where the audience knows more than the characters on the stage. We can all cope with that. Just about. Sitting there and wondering – Oedipus, how can you be such a prize banana as not to realize that you have just slept with your MOTHER, for God’s sake?