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CONTENTS
Chapter I: Coming
Chapter II: Assembling
Chapter III: Men and Women
Chapter IV: Conferring
Chapter V: ‘The Voice of thy Brother’s Blood’
Chapter VI: The Dawn comes up like Thunder
Chapter VII: Chief Inspector Plunkett
Chapter VIII: The Morning After
Chapter IX: ‘All This’
Chapter X: Bishop to Knight
Chapter XI: New Broom
Chapter XII: Girding up Loins
Chapter XIII: Confrontation
Chapter XIV: Scenes from Clerical Life
Chapter XV: Father Confessor
Chapter XVI: Breaking Up
Chapter XVII: Going
CHAPTER I
COMING
THE COMMUNITY of St Botolph’s lies five miles from Hickley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, set in rolling moorland country, glorious in summer, bleak in winter, and treacherous at all times. The walls of the Community stretch impressively far in all directions, and sheep belonging to the brothers graze both within and without them. Like all the other buildings within them, the walls are of comparatively recent date, having been built early in the present century, but they have already harmonized with their setting, and are often talked about by the younger locals as if they dated back to pre-Reformation times.
The locals, in fact, have very little to do with the Community, and know almost nothing about it. Now and then a taxi from Hickley station does the five-mile journey for the benefit of a solitary Anglican coming for a week or fortnight’s retreat. The driver charges exorbitantly, for most of the retreaters are solidly middle-class, and don’t like to haggle at the gate of one of the Lord’s houses. Now and then, perhaps once a year, a larger retreat is arranged, a sort of symposium for ten or so participants, with a set topic for prayer, meditation and discussion, and then the taxis do good business, and use various dodges to drive the delegates out there singly, rather than in groups. The drivers report back to their wives that clerical gentlemen are notably careful in the matter of tipping, and that some prefer stepping it out on the windy moorland roads. And though the latter gentlemen probably think this walking admirably consonant with their pastoral function, the wives shake their heads, and say that the clergy have sadly declined in class over the past few years.
It was such a symposium, attended by Anglicans and fraternal delegates from other parts of the world, that took place at the Community of St Botolph’s in the last week of July, when the heather lay like a purple blanket over the moorlands, and a large proportion of the local population were baking uncomfortably and loathing the food on the Costa del Sol.
• • •
The Right Reverend Henry Caradyce Forde, Bishop of Peckham and Dulwich, looked what he was: a bishop in the prime of life. He had reached the age of heart attacks and thoughts of mortality without it having any radical effect on his temper. He gazed out on the world, bland, benign, and sceptical.
The world, in the present instance, was a first-class compartment on the train that was taking him on the first leg of his journey to Hickley and the Community of St Botolph’s. But he was not observing it. As usual when he looked most benign, his thoughts were elsewhere. Usually he was planning the next chapter in one of the little paperback volumes in which he questioned — gently, quizzically, devastatingly — every aspect of conventional Anglican faith, volumes which had brought down on his head the righteous anger of the Sunday Express. Today he was composing a short opening speech for one of the discussion sessions at St Botolph’s.
The subject for the week-long symposium had appealed to him: ‘The Social Role of the Church in the Modern World.’ It had presented, it seemed to him, unlimited opportunities for dressing up truisms to look like paradoxes, as well as the chance to make some agreeably sly references to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. The speech, which should be as informal as possible, blossomed in his fertile brain.
‘At first sight,’ he said to himself, ‘it would seem paradoxical that we should meet to discuss the social role of the Church in the midst of a community which has withdrawn itself from the world, has said, in effect, that it wants nothing to do with it. Yet is it, after all, so paradoxical?’
He paused, dissatisfied. Too much like an address, a sermon. How difficult it was to get out of the habit of sermonizing. But this was to be an informal group, meeting for discussion and prayer. Something less well-phrased was called for. He prepared to remove the clerical stilts from his phraseology, but he was distracted by some stirrings in his vicinity. He knew the signs, and with an inaudible sigh he returned to the present.
He was not alone in his compartment, and he had purposely given no greeting or encouragement to converse when he got into it to the other occupant, who was a muddly, middle-aged woman of the sort who is invariably attracted to clergymen, without being attractive to them. He had not expected a totally silent journey, but he had hoped for a rather longer period of meditation before he was interrupted.
‘You will excuse me speaking, won’t you?’ said the lady, flustered, and patting purposelessly the various items of luggage that were scattered around her. ‘I wouldn’t have done as a rule, of course, but I saw you were a clergyman.’
The Bishop was peeved. ‘A clergyman’, indeed! He had assumed she had recognized him. She should have recognized him. What was the use of all those television engagements if people didn’t know who you were? He suppressed his bile, however, and smiled benevolently at her.
‘It’s just that I have been so troubled recently, and I’m alone, you see, no one to talk it over with, and it would be such a relief — it’s Cassandra, you see, my pussy, she died, and — ’
Oh, Lord, mused the Bishop, it’s the one about whether animals can go to heaven. It was one of the most common subjects for spirit-wrestling among the laity, and he was accustomed, in such cases, to administer comfort rather than theology, because comfort was quicker. He therefore interrupted the flow of her discourse to reassure her.
‘Not beyond the bounds of hope . . . God in His infinite mercy . . . It may well be that a place will be found for a beloved pet. . .’
The smooth phrases flowed automatically, and it was only after some time that he realized that the woman was looking at him with an expression of puzzlement on her face. He stopped in his tracks.
‘But I’ve never had any difficulty in believing animals can go to heaven,’ said the woman with unusual force. ‘I’ve always found it much more difficult to believe human beings go there. No, my problem is quite different. . .’
As she resumed her flow, the Bishop sighed again, this time not quite silently.
• • •
The Reverend Stewart Phipps, vicar of St Luke’s, Blackburn, cycled in the direction of Hickley. He was a practised, passionate pedaller, and his thin body put into this activity the same sort of burning zeal that he had put into everything he did since he had become a Christian at the age of fourteen.
His conversion had taken place in King’s College Chapel, on a sunny spring day, at dusk, and at the time he had been inclined to ceremony, pageantry and Roman theatricals. He had even believed passionately in the celibacy of the clergy. Some years later, in his late teens, he had felt stirrings in himself which he suspected strongly to be the sexual instinct. After agonies of conscience he came to rearrange h
is priorities, and a new passion took hold of his lean, wiry frame: radical politics. It was his fiery (indeed tedious) devotion to all known causes of the left, and a good many of his own devising, that had persuaded his superiors to send him to the industrial North for his first preferment, though he himself was from Surbiton.
It had not been a happy choice. The parishioners of St Luke’s had not welcomed young Phipps’s determination to use the pulpit to elaborate on themes which he had already taken up in letters published and unpublished to Peace News, Tribune, and the Morning Star. Far from it. They themselves voted Conservative, when they did not vote National Front, and they did not believe in mixing any politics except their own with religion. Their anger and contempt acted like a drug on the young Reverend Phipps: he only thrived on opposition. He had flung in their faces terms like ‘bourgeois democracy’, ‘freedom fighters’, ‘the corruption of the masses’ and any other catch-phrase which came to hand, especially any that could express his infinite contempt for them, their opinions and their way of life. And he did it with such icy oratorical gusto that his parishioners, groping for comparisons, came up most frequently with the names of John Calvin and Michael Foot. The high point of his incumbency to date had been his call to the congregation to offer their prayers for the work of the Baader-Meinhof gang, when the half-empty church had emptied itself in seconds. What a glorious triumph that had been!
Memories of the outrage on the faces of the parishioners as they left the church brought a near-smile of pleasure to the face of Stewart Phipps, but the lighting-up was momentary. For the rest he pedalled on concentratedly in the direction of Hickley, his eyes aglow with faith and Socialism.
• • •
In his little Mini, speeding bumpily from his draughty rectory in the depths of Lincolnshire towards Hickley and the Community of St Botolph’s, the Reverend Ernest Clayton had a problem not unlike that of the Bishop of Peckham. He had picked up a hitch-hiker — something he did fairly frequently, for the bulk of his congregation was on the wrong side of fifty, and he missed the contact with the young, or told himself that he missed it. He certainly felt rather younger than most of his parishioners: he was a spare, vigorous man, and had a puckish expression that made him look like the sort of cleric that used to be portrayed in films by Wilfred Hyde-White. When people said he had a wicked look in his eye, though, they meant no more than that he had a sharp sense of humour.
That sense of humour was being tried to the uttermost at the moment. The hitch-hiker had turned out to be a young man (you never knew) of around twenty, wearing the regulation clothes of his generation and sporting the regulation non-hair-cut. The oldest thing about his person seemed to be his knapsack, which bore approved slogans from the last twenty years all over it, from ‘Make Love Not War’ (a foolish commandment, Ernest Clayton thought, since people through the ages had so conspicuously managed to combine both activities), through various ecological pieties, to some recent ones that he tried not to read. The boy’s face was that of a corrupted cherub, an idea accentuated by the thick halo of fair hair. And he was insisting on talking about religion.
He put himself up, as young people often do, as the spokesman for his generation. What I think, everybody thinks, he seemed to say. He spoke in an incongruous public school accent — incongruous because, to someone of the Reverend Clayton’s generation, a public school accent implied certain clothes, certain standards, certain destinations in life, all of which gave the possessor an accepted place in a clergyman’s Almanach de Gotha. This young man certainly occupied no such place, and neither was his religion any of the accepted brands. It was a mish-mash of Shelley and Lawrence, dredged through the minds of various American poets and popular sages — a series of diktats of permissiveness which at best seemed a form of gross self-indulgence, and at worst a determination to wallow in vileness for its own sake.
‘If you did but know it, the only sin is self-repression,’ said the boy, turning his big blue eyes in the direction of the Reverend Clayton to see what effect his effusions were having, and allowing a knowing smile to play around his lips. ‘If you want to do a thing, you’ve got to follow the impulse through right to the end of the road, because if you stop yourself you’re killing something — it’s worse than murder, because you’re killing part of yourself.’
From this odd statement of values, the cherub went on to his view of the after life, the spiritual value of various drugs which enabled you to enjoy premature participation in the hereafter, and various other matters too abstruse or jargon-bound to hold the Reverend Clayton’s attention. Why on earth, he thought to himself, does everyone think they have to talk religion when they meet a clergyman? If you meet a plumber, you don’t feel you have to talk about plumbing. Then the thought struck him that when he met a plumber he generally did talk about plumbing, since that in his rectory was primitive in the extreme and had to be fixed by himself, his stipend not running to the sort of professional attention it obviously needed.
He wafted his attention back towards the grubby Shelley in the passenger seat beside him, who seemed to have sensed that he had lost his audience. He had let a pout appear on his unpleasantly full lips during a pause for thought, and he had then turned to the subject of sex, as a sure-fire recipe for getting back his listener’s attention.
‘Your generation got hung-up on sex,’ he jeered.
‘Well, we certainly didn’t talk about it quite so much as yours,’ murmured the Reverend Clayton.
‘You thought about it more, though. Nasty little secret thoughts.’ (The Reverend Clayton wondered whether he was right, but found he really couldn’t remember.) ‘My generation’s had to do what your lot only thought of doing, and wanted to do, and didn’t dare. And we’ve done a few things you didn’t even dream possible too. Your lot lived their lives in one long wet wank.’ He turned round with a taunting smile. ‘You might say you didn’t have the courage of your - - - - convictions.’
He had used the gerundival form of a four-letter word which in the Reverend Clayton’s youth would only have been heard by those unfortunate young clerics who opted or were sent to carry the faith into the more savage parts of London’s East End. Ernest Clayton pressed his right foot down on the brake, leaned over the be-jeaned and sweat-shirted figure beside him, and opened the passenger door.
‘Get out,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ protested the young man, with his evil-choirboy smile. ‘You said you were going to Hickley. I’m going to Hickley. What’s gotten into you?’
The Reverend Clayton summoned up the authority of years in the pulpit and as chairman of frequently acrimonious committee and board meetings.
‘Out,’ he said, ‘before I throw you.’
Rather to his surprise, the cherub obeyed. With a contemptuous laugh to hide any disappointment he might feel, he slouched out, and banged the door to. As he started his Mini in motion, Ernest Clayton bent towards the open window, and shouted: ‘I was just obeying my impulse, you know, just obeying my impulse.’
As he drove down the road, he saw the fair-haired figure take up his position by the side of the road again. He had to admit that he hadn’t felt so pleased with himself for a long time.
• • •
The Bishop of Mitabezi sat on his aisle seat in the Boeing 727 that was carrying him from the World Council of Churches meeting in Geneva to London, there to change planes for the North of England and, ultimately, by car, for the Community of St Botolph’s at Hickley. The Bishop was as near asleep as made no difference, but his fleshy, substantial, episcopal frame still seemed impressive and powerful, as it chafed against the confines of his plane seat.
The meeting had been a success, that was certain, and a feeling of personal achievement pervaded his somnolent form: large sums of money had been voted to various African independence groups, guerrilla fighters struggling to establish legitimate black oppressions; many passionate and blood-thirsty speeches had been made; the Anglican representative from the mo
ther country had been positively apologetic in all the speeches he made about racial matters, and his lead had been followed by most of the European delegates except the Scandinavians, who were too smug on the subject of race to be apologetic. In fact, as far as he was concerned, a jolly good time had been had by all.
There had been some theology talked too, and here the Bishop never felt at his happiest. But he had, surprisingly, made a considerable impact with a speech towards the end of a debate concerning certain niceties of the communion service, where he had described himself as a worker and a teacher, rather than a thinker, and had appealed for brotherhood and unity and Christian charity and all manner of goodies. Perhaps it was the contrast with his strident truculence in the earlier sessions that had made the delegates receive his speech with a gentle hum of approval. How fortunate that much of the speech could be given again, almost word for word, to the delegates at the St Botolph’s symposium!
As he drifted off into total sleep, fragments of the meetings he had just attended, impressions of the world around him, and anticipations for the future merged in his mind:
‘Our brothers in Christ fighting for their independence in . . . legs . . . the body and blood of Our Saviour . . . white legs . . . death to the white oppressors . . . air-hostess’s legs . . . blood and devastation . . . the body and blood of Our Lord . . . blood and fire . . . blood . . .’
• • •
On the second-class seat sat the travelling clergyman, his ticket protruding from the breast pocket of his once-smart corduroy jacket, and his keys jingling in his twill trousers. He might have been thought less fortunate than the Bishop of Peckham, for he was surrounded by Liverpudlian youth, all travelling, like him, towards Yorkshire. But, far from minding, he seemed to be revelling in their talk.
Philip Lambton was a clergyman for the young. He was, he thought, young himself, or youngish. Thirty-seven was no age these days, and he had the happy ability not to look ahead to thirty-eight, thirty-nine. He had a child-like faith in what he was doing, and an enviable faculty of shrugging off unfortunate consequences without a shadow of effort. He loved — innocently — publicity, and he collected his cuttings like any rep. actor.
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