by A. N. Wilson
When Digby was claiming the Upper Hand over her mind, Eleanor Bartlett would try to hold on to the thought of her father’s, and Lesley’s, faithful ministries in the fogbound Midland towns. If she thought – well, that is all right for THEM, but we can’t live like that NOW, and the world has moved on . . . then she would think of George Herbert. Samuel Johnson. T.S. Eliot. Surely one would rather be at one with them, than apart from them? Surely, whatever some sordid bishop had done to adolescent boys in the 1990s, one could remain at one with George Herbert – at one in a way that non-communicants never quite could be. (You must sit downe, sayes Love, and taste my meat;/So I did sit, and eat.) If the appalling cliché-ridden nonsense of the latest pronouncement of the General Synod made one wish to give up any association with religion in general, and with the Church of England in particular, could not two pages of Boswell’s Life of Johnson draw one back into the robust, moral universe of the greatest English conversationalist? If the vulgarity of the Happy Clappers, or sheer vacuity of a broadcast by this or that Archbishop, the cringe-making infelicity of phrase, made one wish to join the Society of Friends, did not a rereading of Four Quartets make one wish to remain ‘where prayer has been valid’? And if none of these measures could prevent Eleanor from thinking, with Digby, that the whole of Christianity was an unbelievable and unsustainable nonsense, she would think of Jane Austen. Even if there is no one on the planet alive with whom I feel a spiritual affinity, I am, when I go to church, at one with Herbert, Johnson, Eliot and Jane Austen. And this is far more than simple sentimentality about the past. For without the past, we cannot be sane; and if the first few lines of Burnt Norton are true (and, for Nellie, nothing was more true than those lines) then a novelist who died in 1817 had just as much to say to us as one who was still alive. For the first time that day, she prayed – and now they were together, and fused, the prayers of Dean Eleanor and Digby, of Nellie, were more robust, more mystical, looser, less troubled by ‘realism’.
Jane, who in your dying, expressed the thought that you were not sure we all should not be evangelicals . . . Jane, who grew up as I did in a Parsonage House and saw all that was best of our Church of England tradition, its subdued pieties, its respect for the intellect, its unshowy holiness of living . . . Jane, who was always funny, and could not restrain your malicious pen from satire . . . Jane, who has helped me to live alongside Bishop Dionne, and Bob, and the Island Synod . . . Jane, who was wise as well as clever, give me wisdom, give me patience . . . Jane, if Doug has been clumsy enough to stay for the tea and sandwiches in the cafeteria, please keep me calm, please keep me from saying the wrong thing.
He was still there, of course, one of the very few guests who had somehow managed to winkle a glass of red wine out of the waitresses.
It had been a difficult hour and a half in the cafeteria, the whiff of fish paste, or was it smoked salmon, in the air. She never ate fishy snacks at parties for the same reason that she never drank fizzy wine. Those who did so seemed unaware of the fact that it invariably produces appalling halitosis. With her mouth frozen in a party smile, she peered into the faces of those approaching her, hoping that they would not read in her own eyes an absolute ignorance of who they were. Sometimes she could place them – old parishioners of Dad’s, a couple of former curates, wives of ditto, Cathedral ladies who had evidently been ‘kind’ to the canon in his latter days and offered Sunday luncheons and weekday suppers . . . Everyone repeated the same little phrases to her, some venturing on the tactless path of suggesting that she must feel relief that his sufferings were over . . . some blundering around the subject that she had been down on the Island when he died and how strange it must have been to be on the opposite side of the world, others, gentler in their intrusiveness, unrealistically wondering if she would continue to live in the canon’s rented flat. The cousins, one a dentist in Bognor Regis, and a couple called Kath and Simon, relations of Dad’s mother, who lived in a suburb of Bournemouth called Ferndown, spoke more warmly of Ronald, and one of them, Kath, had brought her a photograph of Dad when young, riding a bicycle, which Nellie had been glad to have. Doug had come up to stand beside her during this exchange with Kath, and, because the cousins in her family met so seldom, it was obvious that Kath did not know their circumstances, because she had asked Doug – ‘Well, Nellie is obviously loving the Island, but how do you like it?’ Somehow she had shaken him off, while she finished doing the rounds of the room. She knew from her father’s example that she should speak a few words to every person in the cafeteria. It was a curiously exhausting challenge. When she found herself talking to a woman who turned out to be the Dean’s wife, she realized with a stab of almost humorous disappointment that there would be no one to share this experience with. Ronald would have so enjoyed the fact, as would Jane Austen, that the Dean’s excuse for not being there, conveyed by the curt letter, would just about have been passable, had he not instructed his wife to go as his proxy, and to say afterwards to Nellie that her husband was truly ‘desolated’ not to have been present.
No one afterwards, either, with whom she could talk about the party. The bereavement had not kicked in, but she did, most intensely, miss Dad (which is something rather different) as her companion for a post-mortem. When the last of the clergy-wives and the mysterious old people in their pale grey cagoules and white cardigans shuffled away, she would so loved to have had his commentary on them all. She had always liked Lesley – they were having lunch together on the morrow, at his hotel, before he went home – but she suspected him of being too high-minded to enjoy life’s absurdities or to notice the foibles of others. By the time he had leaned over her and kissed her cheek as, in an avuncular way, he had done for as long as she could remember, she had realized, with some alarm, that the party was breaking up.
It suddenly ended. She had thanked the minor canon for helping with the service and for arranging the party. (It was he, it transpired, who had added the two hymns, including one which Nellie had never liked – ‘Thine Be the Glory’, set to ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’). And there she was, alone with Doug, to whom the minor canon, as a blundering parting shot, had said, ‘Well, you two will probably want to be going.’
That was when Doug said, ‘Will you be coming back?’
She did not want him in her father’s flat, so they walked around the Cathedral precincts a number of times, and then started drifting through the town. It was very Oxford, but also very Doug, that he had not bothered with a suit for the funeral. Just the normal grey tweed jacket, an open necked shirt, flannel trousers, the sort of brown shoes she and her father used to call Cornish Pasties, casual lace-ups with a kind of rim.
—Tell me how things have been, Doug? You are happy at Duke?
Then it had all come out. Or rather, Doug had allowed as much of it to come out as made him seem vulnerable, even pitiable. Only afterwards did she guess that what lay behind the story must have been a failed relationship. Some graduate student or the wife of a colleague had either demanded too much of him, or given him the heave-ho. Doug had retained his college fellowship while he did a stint at North Carolina, now coming to an end. So, he could return to England in the autumn. There was a readership at Oxford for which he felt he would be eligible. He had not been idle in the United States. A new book – to Nellie it sounded a rather tired repeat of the old one, but of course she did not say so – was complete and had been accepted by Oxford University Press. It was about Dickens’s narrative techniques. Ye Gods, does anyone want to read another such book? Just when everyone else had quietly confined them to the dustbin of history, Doug had begun to apply the techniques of ‘Theory’ – Derrida, Barthes and friends – to his rather laborious readings of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.
She allowed Doug to prose for some time about it. Being an academic herself, Nellie knew the need, from time to time, to bore about one’s subject, regardless of whether one’s audience was remotely interested.
—It came upon me when I was working
on Barnaby Rudge.
Whereas the rest of the world read and reread the novels of Dickens for pleasure, Doug ‘worked on’ them.
—There’s that passage where he says – Dickens, that is – Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they list, to come and go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their soarings up and down, all obstacles of distance, time and place . . .
—Where’s that? She was struck by it, but listening with half an ear.
—Barnaby Rudge – some ‘edge’ in his voice, as he had turned into a tutor, impatient with an inattentive undergraduate . . .
—Sorry. Yes. You said.
—And I was really struck by the narrative sophistication of that. It’s so modern, for God’s sake. If Nabokov had written it, or Beckett, we’d not be surprised, but Dickens is aware of how the novel takes on these different narrative voices and vantage-points . . . It’s something the novel, as a form, is uniquely placed to do, actually.
—What about the Chorus in a tragedy?
—You couldn’t get that ambiguity in a drama – he brushed the remark aside with some testiness; her job, surely she remembered, was to listen to him, not to pick holes – because the Chorus is on the stage, there, in front of you, so to that extent, the Choric voice HAS TO BE TRUSTED, whereas the . . .
She allowed the lecture to go on. It was better than an analysis of their marriage. But, then, he repeated,
—So, Nell, are you going to come back? Are we going to try to make a go of it together?
Staring very hard at the ground, she paced silently.
They had taken a turning down a street behind the Cathedral, followed a crumbling sandstone wall, and come to the playing fields where about five games of cricket were still, at that late afternoon hour, in progress. She walked out, a little ahead of him.
—Nell! Are we? You have no future in the Dominions.
He had adopted this whimsical way of describing our Island ever since she had received the offer of the Deanery at Aberdeen. She looked at him, the beads of sweat on a bald forehead, the specs and the clever eyes, the imperfectly shaven round chin, the teeth which an American dentist had not straightened but had, miraculously, cleaned. The paunch, incipient when he had set out to the USA, had become a four or five month baby in the womb. There were splodges of red wine on the very slightly pongy shirt. Doug at Sixty. She asked, or perhaps the prayers of Jane Austen allowed her to ask, whether, for more than five minutes, she would have considered him a desirable match if she had met him that afternoon for the first time in her life.
—I thought marriage meant something, he had begun to say, earnestly.
Meant something to whom, she wanted to retort. Now was not the time to recall Sammie, or Lanka that Indian graduate who was doing an MPhil on The Moonstone, or some of the others which might have been mere flirtations, but which still had possessed, at the time, the power to make her feel stabs of humiliation and pain. Nor was it the time to tell him what, of course, pride had always forbidden, that she had seen the porn on the laptop – seen its extent.
—It can’t be easy for you, being . . . well, separated, or whatever we have been, the last few years.
Again, this did not seem worthy of a rational response. Jane was continuing to pray.
—I have not kept up with what the clergy think of conventional morality any more, I suppose, he said, with a pompous harrumph. It was a college noise.
At this point, she did turn, and say,
—I beg your pardon?
—Sorry, it was a thoughtless . . . I just thought of this Bishop . . . I mean, some of us thought it was just the Papists who weren’t to be trusted with the nippers.
—I don’t get your drift, Doug, she said coldly.
He did what he often did if he realized he had strayed into tactlessness. He supplied a quotation.
—You should not take a fellow eight years old/And make him swear to never kiss the girls . . .
—Shall I walk you to the station, Douglas?
He said he would rather walk alone. Oxford was only an hour away by train. He had begun to rehearse gastronomic options. If he caught the five something, he had told her, as if it were a matter of concern to her, there would be time for a college dinner. Otherwise, a new Thai had opened near the station which he was keen to try out. One of Doug’s many rules of life with which she profoundly disagreed was that ‘you can’t go wrong with a curry’.
It had been blessedly easy to shake him off, but later that evening, when, presumably, drink had been taken, he had sent an email, saying what he had not been able to put into spoken words that afternoon. He really hoped she would consider returning to England to be his wife. He missed her. He felt they had not given their marriage a chance, and she had just seemed to, well, to walk away from it. He was sorry that he had made what sounded like cheap gibes against the Church, but he had actually meant what he said rather sincerely: he had assumed that as a priest she would take her marriage vows seriously.
This from Doug who had admitted to her on a number of occasions that he was an unbeliever, had never been a believer, and only attended college Evensongs and the like in the same spirit that he would attend a garden party, as a traditional olde tyme English ‘thing’, a ritual.
Nellie’s mum, in allusion to the title of an amusing Maurois novel she and Ronald both used to enjoy, would talk about Les Silences de Lesley Mannock. Certainly, as a child, Nellie remembered them, when he would come over for Sunday supper. Even quite trivial inquiries – ‘Did you have a decent day, Lesley?’ – could be greeted with long pauses as he meditated the question. Sometimes three minutes would pass before he would reply, ‘Yes. Yes, I think I HAVE’, and then smile broadly. Ronald considered his friend holy. Gwen had not disputed this, but she had considered the holiness was scarcely an excuse for the maddening uselessness of the man. When his sister Jean, a doctor in Malvern, had been widowed, he had caught the train at once and sat with her in silence all afternoon. When he had asked her if there was anything she would like him to do, she had replied that there were two lightbulbs which needed changing (Jean is a short woman); and she was so tired, she would be really grateful if he could make them some scrambled eggs. He had smiled helplessly, and spread out his hands in that gesture of wonder and openness to spiritual adventure with which he often accompanied his conversation – when the talk began.
—He could not change a lightbulb. He could not scramble an IGG, Gwen had said with great Huia emphasis on the monosyllable as she recounted this moment in Lesley’s life, which she often did, always with much affectionate laughter.
People nowadays, and especially male people, could not get away with personal incompetence on this scale – could they? Or were teenagers all like this, and was it only Nellie’s generation, rising in age as far as the baby-boomers, who were actually capable of holding down jobs, mastering basic DIY and domestic skills? Being childless, she did not know.
Anyway, lunch at Lesley’s hotel, before he caught his train, promised to be a stiff affair, if he was in one of his silent phases. This turned out to be wrong. Without asking what she wanted, he had ordered two large schooners of Amontillado sherry, which were on the table in front of him in the bar when she arrived and found him there.
Lesley Mannock is a tall man, always well dressed in the manner of the old-fashioned clergyman, a charcoal grey suit with a hint of pinstripe, and a soft linen clerical collar. (The Principal of Cuddesdon, when Ronald and Lesley trained for the priesthood, had said that only a true gentleman could get away with wearing black. To be on the safe side, charcoal grey: think how common Roman Catholic priests always looked.) He beamed at her as she entered the bar, and for the first time during that visit to England she wondered if she was going to burst into tears. Lesley was the last real contact with her parents, the last link with childhood. He had always been there, every few weeks of her life, between the time of her birth and her going up to the University. Many of the harmless shared jokes
which she had enjoyed with Ronald had been ones which, she realized slowly, had also been shared with the old man who now sat opposite.
But after the first two or three sips of the sherry, she realized that this was a conversation which she would never ever be able to have with anyone else, ever again in her life. Here was a Christian priest of deep experience, total integrity, who had known her all her life. She did not want to go to confession, though she could imagine, if she did, no wiser confessor than Lesley. But she did want to be totally honest.
Over the lunch – a salmon mousse sort of thing, tasteless as it sat in its little salad nest, the inevitable ‘pan-fried sea-bass’ (how do you fry, other than in a pan?) and (for only optimists expect much from a ‘Desserts Menu’) the cheese board, washed down with a Muscadet which was too cold, the ice bucket killed the taste of the wine – her tongue was loosened. She told the truth.
It was me who made up the two figures – E.L. Digby and Eleanor Bartlett, who only came together when the tower collapsed. That was just my way of trying to say something true about you, Nellie.
What she told Lesley Mannock, though, was basically that she had always been two people – on the one hand, the ardent Greek scholar, who was a religious sceptic, and on the other, the pious little girl who had been in love with Ronald; and not only with Ronald, but with the Church, its language and liturgy, its spiritual tradition, its mystics, its theology, its hymns, its architecture.
And now that she was beginning to recover from the Earthquake, and was also facing up to the death of her father, something had happened. The two sides of her nature had coalesced. She no longer needed to shield the priest Eleanor from what Digby was thinking about the gods, or about God. She could let Digby read the New Testament, and still inhabit the body and soul of Nellie the priest. The priest could admit that she was lonely, and desperate for some sex. The Greek scholar could stop being so priggish about her secretly held, almost Victorian scepticism, and allow that she loved hymns. The lover of the Gospels – both their varied Greek – Mark’s so plain, so stark, John’s so elaborately Semitic, while employing Hellenic tropes, Luke’s so much as you imagine the conversation in the Koine Greek (i.e. the common Greek lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean) of some civil servant or merchant – and of their crazy, ragamuffin anarchism. This lover of the Gospels, however, could not believe – did it horrify Lesley to hear this? She could not believe in God.