At once I seized the opportunity to ring the bell for the nurse. The ward-sister appeared, took one look at her patient, who was now sobbing uncontrollably, and said to me: “We’re as well as can be expected but it’s only natural that we should still be very upset.”
Dido shrieked: “That’s the one who tried to rub my nose in the corpse!” and began to scream.
The sister advised me without expression to cut short my visit. Giving Dido a quick kiss I declared I adored her and fled.
Darrow was outside in the corridor. He was talking to a large woman of the type who can always be relied upon to arrange the flowers in church each week.
“Aysgarth, this is the almoner, Mrs. Collins.” He gave her the smile he kept specially for women. Mrs. Collins simpered. Darrow, my personal tank, was once more carrying all before him. “Mrs. Collins has offered to take you to see the baby before we sort out the paperwork.”
“Ah yes.” After the scene with Dido I felt that even seeing a dead baby could be ranked as a pleasure. “Thank you, Mrs. Collins.”
The woman expressed the usual words of sympathy before leading the way downstairs. Outside the main building we crossed a lawn which unexpectedly sloped to the banks of the river. In Starbridge the river was forever turning up in unexpected places; it not only looped around the town but also, with the aid of a tributary, twisted through it so that one was never far from the water. One was never far from the Cathedral either. Beyond the flowering cherry trees which flanked the river-bank, beyond the chimney-pots of the distant buildings, I could see the spire shimmering against that dazzlingly cloudless sky.
On the other side of the lawn the almoner took us into an unnamed named modern building and opened the first door on the left of the hall.
“I’ll wait here,” said Darrow, planting himself by the nearest wall.
I followed the almoner into a room where a little lump lay under a blanket on a table.
“I’ll wait with Father Darrow outside,” said the woman in the hushed voice people reserve for churches, and to my relief I found myself abandoned.
The door closed. I eyed the blanket. No one was watching. I didn’t have to look underneath. I made up my mind not to look, but then I remembered Darrow. If I failed to look, he would know. I had no belief in telepathy, of course, but I knew he would ask a prying question, gauge my reaction and put two and two together before I could even say “white magic.” The thought that he now knew exactly how I felt about Dido was enough to make my blood run cold. He would tell no one, I was sure of that, but the very fact that he knew suddenly seemed unbearable. I suffered a violent urge to escape from him before he could uncover my lack of paternal feeling towards the corpse, but I knew very well that I needed my personal tank, flattening every obstacle in my path, if I was to survive.
Thinking of survival reminded me of the little lump to whom survival had been denied. Gritting my teeth, I raised the blanket and took a quick look. The baby was very small, very ugly and very dead. I dropped the blanket but then realised I still had no idea of the child’s sex. I had to find out. Supposing the almoner were to uncover my ignorance as we wrestled with the paperwork? What would she think of such crass indifference to my own flesh and blood? I shuddered from head to toe.
Reluctantly I raised the blanket again, but the baby was encased in a cloth which I could not bring myself to unwrap. By this time I was feeling so nauseated that I noticed the corner basin with relief. What was this room? Why hadn’t the baby been left in a side ward until I had been through the farce of viewing the body? And why, after Dido’s bout of hysterics which had preceded my arrival, had the baby been whipped out of her room and dispatched straight to the mortuary? Was an autopsy to be performed? Or was the removal merely in accordance with regulations about dead bodies in hospitals? I had no idea. No doubt Mrs. Collins would enlighten me later, but meanwhile here I was, standing in a building which must be a mortuary and staring around at a room which seemed to be specifically for viewing corpses. But if the room had really been set aside specifically for the viewing of corpses, who was the fool who had painted the walls such a repulsive shade of yellow?
I vomited neatly into the corner basin. That made me feel better, and as I sluiced away the mess I made a new resolution to behave in an orderly Christian fashion. Returning to the corpse I noticed there was a little label attached to the cloth. The inscription read: AYSGARTH (MALE). I was looking at my son.
Folding my hands I closed my eyes and tried to pray. As a Protestant I disapproved of prayers for the dead, but I thought I should pray for forgiveness for my part in his death. Unfortunately I seemed quite incapable of an ex tempore prayer. I decided to embark on the Lord’s Prayer instead, but seconds later I realised I was reciting the General Confession. Obviously I was on the point of climbing the repulsive yellow walls. How could any clergyman in his right mind decide to recite the Lord’s Prayer and wind up halfway through the General Confession? Perhaps in my guilt I had subconsciously decided that the plea “forgive us our trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer was inadequate. Or perhaps the aberration was merely further proof that I was thoroughly worn out.
In despair I wished I could sense the presence of Christ. Then I would be in command, infused by the power of the Spirit, and all would be well. It occurred to me then that if Jesus had been physically present he would have picked up the corpse, and the baby, transformed by love, would have been beautiful. Nerving myself to clasp the bundle I held it in my arms, but the child remained ugly.
As my despair deepened I said aloud to my unnamed flesh and blood: “Sorry. Awful mess. Better off where you are.” But as I spoke these idiotic words I thought of him being “with Christ,” as the symbolic saying goes, in some dimension of ultimate reality which lay far beyond the scope of the human imagination to conceive, and suddenly I saw Jesus clearly in my mind, not the effeminate romantic of those sentimental Victorian paintings and not the magnetic leader I usually pictured, but an idealised version of my father, who had loved children and who had transformed the bleak hills above Maltby into a paradise when he had taken us for walks on those summer afternoons long ago. And when I glanced down again at the corpse I saw it was no longer just a dead body but a person—and not just any person but someone special, as special as all the other grandchildren whom my father would have loved if only he could have lived to see them, and as I remembered my father’s love the vile repulsive room became suffused with light, my despair was smoothed away and for a single moment my wasteland was transformed, just as the Yorkshire countryside had been transformed long ago when my father had been alive and I had walked with him in paradise.
I said aloud: “You’ll be all right now,” and when I spoke I heard not the idiotic utterance of a demented man but a symbolic communication with my father’s grandson, a unique individual whose memory would be valued and cherished. Putting the baby back in his resting-place, I stood motionless for a long moment as I grieved for all that had been lost. Then drawing the blanket for the last time across that unforgettable face, I walked abruptly from the room.
2
In the hall I said to Darrow before he could speak: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then I noticed the almoner’s absence. “Where’s Mrs. Collins?”
“Gone on ahead to her office.”
We went outside. The sun felt hot after the chill of the morgue. The grass was a radiant green.
“I can deal with Mrs. Collins once you’ve signed the forms,” said Darrow. “You can wait in the car.”
“Thanks.” Keeping my gaze firmly on the main block of the hospital ahead of us, I said: “There’s to be no anonymous disposal. He’s not to be swept under the rug.”
“I’ll make that clear to her.”
“And he’s to have a proper birth certificate. He’s not to be passed off without a name just because he was born dead.”
“What name should I give?”
“Arthur. And if there’s no space on that piece of paper
they allocate to stillborns, the name must be written in the margin or on the back. He’s to have a proper name and a proper funeral and a proper grave and a proper headstone with ‘Arthur’ on it.”
“I’ll organise the undertakers. Don’t worry, Aysgarth, everything will be arranged exactly as you wish. Just you leave it all to me.”
3
As we drove away from the hospital Darrow said: “Congratulations. You appear to have survived that ordeal surprisingly well.”
“Curiously enough, seeing Dido wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. That was just another exercise in fantasy. It was seeing Arthur that nearly finished me off. That was reality.”
“It was important that he should have become real to you. One can’t surmount a painful experience unless one first faces it directly.”
I considered this statement with care. Then I said: “I daresay I shall always feel some degree of guilt, but it’ll be a guilt I can live with because I know now he’s all right. And the very fact that I know this means I’m forgiven.” This obscure assertion sounded oddly familiar, and again I experienced the déjà vu phenomenon which had been haunting me for so long. In an effort both to clarify my feelings to Darrow and to grope in my memory for the prior image which had made the words so eerily familiar, I said slowly: “When I saw him he became special and the alienation caused by guilt dissolved. It was like the automatic working of a law of science.”
“Ah, you Modernists!” said Darrow. “Always so ready to worship at science’s altar! Why can’t you just say that love has the power to cast out misery and generate forgiveness? Or if that’s too direct for you, why not merely say: ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’? Why drag in science?”
“We belong to different generations, Darrow.”
“Yes—and mine was the one infatuated with scientific advances! I’d have thought that your generation would have recovered from that love affair by now, particularly after Hiroshima.”
I suddenly identified the missing half of the déjà vu experience: Alex had used almost identical language in expressing his relief that I would be keeping a benign eye on his secret family if Ashworth failed to come home. He had seen the easing of his anxiety about Lyle’s boys as a sign of God’s forgiveness. They, like Arthur, would be “all right.” He no longer needed to worry about them. They had become a symbol of God’s saving grace and atonement.
“By the way,” I said abruptly, thinking of Lyle, “how’s Charles Ashworth?”
“Much better. He’s going to spend some time with me later this week.”
“It’s a miracle he’s alive. I never thought he’d come back,” I said, for Ashworth had survived not only the prison camp where he had spent the months following the fall of Tobruk, but the concentration camp to which he had been transferred in 1944 after aiding fellow-prisoners to escape. Once he had passed through those gates he had sunk to the status of a missing person, unable to write letters and beyond the reach of the enquiries made by the Red Cross. In 1945 after the liberation of the camp he had been obliged to spend some time in a military hospital, but now he had been discharged and Lyle, leaving her temporary home in Starvale St. James, had resumed her married life in Cambridge. I thought of little Charley, shining-eyed, waving his Union Jack. Amidst all the bereavement I encountered as a clergyman it was heartening to hear of a family who had not hoped for a reunion in vain.
“What made you ask about Charles out of the blue like that?” said Darrow curiously as I drove under the archway into the Close.
I could hardly talk about Alex’s secret family and my guilty memories of Lyle. “You mentioned Hiroshima,” I said, “and I thought of the prisoners of war in the Far East, able to come home as the result of the bomb. Then I thought of the POWs in Europe.” In an effort to change the subject I asked: “What happens now?”
“Drive to the College, please. You can leave your car there and come home with me for a few hours. I’ve made all the arrangements.”
I boggled. “You’re not working this afternoon?”
“By a fortunate coincidence I’d already arranged to take the afternoon off. I’ll tell you about that later.”
“But what about my work? I’m supposed to be making a visitation at—”
“So your senior curate informed me. It’s been cancelled.”
“Well, in that case perhaps I should stay at home and catch up on my other work. Quite apart from the usual pile of letters which have to be answered, I’ve got to write a homily for a wedding next Saturday, a sermon for Sunday Matins, a draft report for the diocesan committee on—”
“There’ll be time for all that later—the weekend’s still a long way away. I’m sorry, Aysgarth, but I’m not letting you out of my sight at the moment. It’s too dangerous. You might start drinking again.”
“I must say I find that a most offensive statement!”
“Are you going to pick a fight with me? Save your energy and just accept that you’ve been removed from circulation for twenty-four hours!”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“After you’ve passed the afternoon with me at Starrington Magna you’ll take the five-thirty train to London to see Aidan and spend the night at the Fordite headquarters. Everything’s arranged,” said Darrow, and dimly I grasped how relieved I was that he was still playing the tank in his characteristically highhanded fashion. Some unexpected emotion stirred within me. For a moment I was unable to identify it. Then I realised it was gratitude.
Feeling weak and confused but improbably compos mentis, I began to drive down the North Walk to the Theological College.
4
No sooner had I turned into the North Walk than I spotted the vast black Rolls-Royce waiting for us outside the College entrance. This magnificent motor, which I had long secretly coveted, belonged to Darrow’s second wife, the wealthy landowner whom he had swept to the altar soon after he bounced out of his monastery in 1940. It was typical of Darrow that he had wound up marrying a Rolls-Royce and a manor house in addition to a woman twenty-eight years his junior. Darrow never did anything by halves. He usually managed to avoid flaunting the Rolls and was careful to stress how much he enjoyed bicycling (like many men of his generation he had never learnt to drive), but there were times when he commandeered the motor and brazenly left it lying around in the Close to scandalise the inhabitants. Clergymen are just not supposed to swoop around in chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces. Dr. Ottershaw used to cringe whenever a sighting was reported to him.
“I sent for the Rolls to save time,” said Darrow airily. “I have an appointment at home with an architect at quarter-past three.”
“I see,” I said dryly, parking my car a respectful six feet from the Rolls’s noble bumper.
The ancient chauffeur crept out of the front seat and raised his cap. I wondered how fit he was to be in charge of a car, and as I slumped onto the sumptuous upholstery I tried not to eye the steering wheel with longing.
“What’s all this about an architect?” I said in an attempt to divert myself from covetous thoughts.
“I wanted to talk to you about that.” As the motor glided away from the curb Darrow said to the chauffeur without raising his voice: “Can you hear me, Jarvis?” but there was no response. “Poor old boy!” said Darrow, although the chauffeur was probably only a few years his senior. “He’s very deaf, I’m afraid, but at least we can talk in privacy. Now let me explain how I’ve managed to take you out of circulation for twenty-four hours. I’ve told everyone you’re conducting an urgent enquiry into my new plan for the Theological College, an enquiry which obliges you to stay overnight at Starrington Magna. The Bishop was a little startled to hear I had a plan, but I told him I’d explain everything later.”
My heart sank. I feared the worst. I only hoped Mrs. Ottershaw had replenished her husband’s supply of indigestion tablets.
“Might I be so bold as to ask,” I said, “precisely what plan you have in mind, or am I to be kept temporarily in igno
rance, like Dr. Ottershaw?”
“That’s up to you. We don’t have to discuss the matter today if you don’t feel like it.”
“It sounds like a splendid diversion from my troubles. Keep talking.”
The Theological College was in fact a private institution which should have been independent of the diocese, but since its nineteenth-century endowments had long since depreciated in value it had turned increasingly to the diocese for financial support and was now firmly under diocesan control. The Bishop was always a member of the Board of Governors, and the Archdeacon of Starbridge was obliged, as the Bishop’s henchman, to keep an eye on the place. I began to suspect my eye was about to be sorely tried.
By that time, the May of 1946, the College was facing the problem of accommodating all the men who had received a call to the ministry during the war and who were now free to embark on their training. In an effort to meet this challenge Darrow, I was now informed, had conceived the idea of opening a temporary extension of the College at his home and had invited an architect to call that afternoon to estimate the cost of converting the unused east wing into a suitable habitation for the ordinands. It was typical of Darrow that he should have engaged an architect without bothering to consult the Bishop, but Darrow was an old hand at riding roughshod over Dr. Ottershaw.
I was unable to stop myself saying: “The diocesan funds may well be unable to afford such a scheme—wouldn’t it have been better to present your idea to the Bishop before roping in an architect?”
“But how can the Bishop and I have a useful discussion unless I have some idea of the expense involved?”
“I take your point, but the conversion of the building would be only one of many expenses. How are you going to provide for these new residents? You’ll need extra domestic staff, extra—”
“Those are the expenses I can calculate without seeking professional help, and naturally I shall allow for them when I draft my proposal.”
Ultimate Prizes Page 24