by Stephen Fry
The copse is no more than three or four acres. Beech, ash, oak, brutes like that. Very quiet in that muffled way that woods have.
“You were saying, Davey,” I say as we penetrate the gloom, “that Jane’s leukaemia wasn’t sensitive to touch alone?”
“I’ve always known you see . . . and you swear you’ll keep all this to yourself?”
“Swear, swear and double-swear. Cross my heart and hope to go bald.”
“I’ve always known,” he says, “that the gift—I call it the gift not my gift—I’ve always known that the gift comes from here.”
He stopped, knelt and pressed a palm against the earth.
I nodded. David looked like he was staying on the ground so I got down and sat beside him.
“It’s the power of Everything. The word is ‘channelled.’ The power of Everything can be channelled through me. But I have to be strong, you see. I have to be . . . pure.”
“You see” was becoming his trademark phrase. He wants me to see. He desperately wants me to see.
“Pure, Davey? What do you mean by pure?”
“I’m very healthy myself, you see. I’m never ill and I never get spots or infections or anything like that. This is because I only eat pure food. Not the meat of animals or plant matter that has been artificially forced. My family used to think I was a crank when I was younger. Most children go through a phase of vegetarianism, but they aren’t as committed as I have always been. Now I think they understand. They never talk about it though.”
“So you believe that this diet in some way makes your body purer for this channelling?”
“That’s only part of it. You see, there are other kinds of purity. My spirit must be pure. It cannot afford to be contaminated by anything impure.”
“So you think there are spiritual equivalents to meat and non-organic vegetables?”
“You could put it that way, I suppose.” Davey lay back and looked at the roof of the wood.
“A pure mind in a pure body, then?”
“Yes. But you see I am human, aren’t I? I mean, I am a human being.”
I was glad he was sure of that. I couldn’t have coped if he’d claimed to be an angel.
“And as a human being,” he went on, “I feel hunger and cold and pain like everyone else. All kinds of hunger.”
Ah. I dimly saw what he was trying to say. He needed assistance, here, I felt. Mother came to the rescue with polished ease.
“You mean that you worry about your other hungers? Fleshly hungers, shall we call them?”
“Mm hm.” He nodded. “When I first had a wet dream . . . it was only a year ago, which is late, but so what?”
He threw out this embarrassing fact like a challenge, giving me the impression that he had been teased at school for lagging behind in development.
“So what indeed? I didn’t mature in that way till I was sixteen,” I lied helpfully.
Davey was not interested in Mother’s genital development. “I caught up anyway,” he mumbled. Mother was aware of this. Mother knows how to inspect a trouser bulge, I hope.
“Anyway,” said Davey, “I had one of those dreams. When I woke up I didn’t know what to do. I knew that I couldn’t allow such a terrible waste.”
“Er . . .”
“It’s not just my hands, you see. I knew that every part of me could heal. My blood and my . . . my . . .” He broke off, unable to find a word.
“Seed?” I suggested.
“Mm. My seed. So I couldn’t afford to waste any of it with cheap . . . you know.”
Wow!
“So, are we perhaps saying, Davey,” I said carefully, as if I were Socrates exploring a premise with Alcibiades, “that the ‘way in’ to someone’s body you talked about earlier might in fact be through your seed?”
“Of course,” said David. “But just so long as I am pure and only use its grace to heal. I must never use it to give pleasure to myself.”
“So . . .” again the utmost delicacy seemed to be required, “. . . so in Jane’s case the only way to help her was . . .”
David sat up and looked straight into my eyes. Hypnotic little baggage.
“We talked about it very fully,” he said. “Jane understood what I was suggesting. She decided that even if the gift were not to work, at least it would be something . . .”
“At least it would be a kind and helpful experience for you and a comfort and pleasure for her?”
“Exactly!” Davey smiled. “I wasn’t very . . . anyway it doesn’t matter, the whole point was to heal Jane, not to ‘make love’ in that sense.”
“And so your seed entered her body.”
“That was on my last night before I had to go back to school. We’d arranged I should visit her bedroom late.”
So intrigued had I been, Daisy, by the prospect of these two cousins at it like knives in the stilly watches that the other, obvious, thought hadn’t entered my head.
Lilac . . .
I’d have to tread carefully here.
“And we know,” I said, “how wonderfully that particular . . . er, treatment . . . worked in Jane’s case. So when it came to helping Lilac, you no doubt . . . ?”
“The same thing, that’s right.”
All inhibition gone now. Said as matter-of-factly as you could wish. Amanda Amazement and Diana Disgust were denied any access to my features as I reacted to this. It was necessary to react as though he were telling me about nothing more remarkable than a trip to the sea-side.
“So that would have been last night,” I said.
“Yes. Last night.”
A wistful grin now, true love recalled.
“I know some people would find it disgusting,” he went on. “A human and a horse, I mean. But they don’t understand the connection between life and nature and grace. It was truly the most natural thing in the world.”
I hastened to agree with him and he lay back again, content to have his secret shared.
Where did all this leave Mother, you’ll be wondering, Daisy mine. Well, Mother was heating up like a milk pan in a kiln. If this fifteen-year-old faun with the curling lashes and take-me-now lips was the future of medicine in Great Britain, then a lot of people were going to be queuing up for a cure if ever word got out.
“And Michael and Anne. Your parents. They don’t know about this . . .” I searched for a neutral phrase, “this aspect of your healing?”
He shook his head.
“It would worry them. Daddy’s quite proud of me, I think. He values the gift. But Mummy’s frightened, I can tell.”
She’d be frightened a whole size bigger if she knew, thought I.
There he lay and there I sat. All that power swimming in his fuzzy little ball-sack: all that fatty deposit lining my aorta and waiting to be cleansed away.
I’ve always tried to be honest with you, dear Daisy. I told you about the felching episode in the Finsbury Park nightclub. I was manly and frank on the subject of the bondage queen who tried to bite off my nipples in his flat in Hyde Park Gate. I confessed openly that I allowed that gorilla of a policeman in New York to slap my legs with a towel and call me his bitch-pig slave. I can be honest here too, and admit that even if I had not been diagnosed as suffering genuinely from angina pectoris I should have laid claim to it there and then without a moment’s thought.
God, it has to be faced, can be astonishingly sweet. When I was a priest, and I’d be the first to admit that I only joined up because I liked the bells-and-smells aspect, the cotters, the thuribles and the sung versicles, I thought God was a capricious prig. Here was I, burning and yearning to serve, and there was the horrid, horrid Bible, never a book that I thought much of, telling me how damned and abominable I was. Couldn’t have been pleaseder to hand in my notice and flounce from the chancel never to return.
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sp; But—and you know this, Daisy, better than anyone, you who know my inmost heart—there was what we can only call a Void in Mother’s life. I’ve tried my bloody best, I’ve fought with my tiny fists for the oppressed and the hurt in the world, I’ve put my talent into things that matter and I’ve made an effort—unlike Wallace—to live a decent life. I know lots of nasties wouldn’t think being pissed on in New York or rimmed behind a bush on Hampstead Heath is decent, but you and I know, Daisy, what decent means.
Now, here was Glenda God giving me the chance to be physically whole in a way that exactly suited the very passion that Big Brenda Bible had always claimed to be unclean. God makes things fit, you have to hand it to Her.
I said to David.
“I’m unwell. Do you think . . . do you think you could help me?”
I prayed a little prayer that angina wasn’t the kind of affliction that a laying-on of hands could cure.
Davey smiled. “Of course I can help you, Oliver. It’s what I’m here to do.”
A great smarting wave of blood rushed up the nape of my neck. When I spoke, my voice was husky.
“Here? Now?”
David shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ll visit you tonight. That would be better.”
“I’m in the Fuseli Room, slap next to Ted Wallace. I can hear his snoring clearly enough so . . .”
“All right then, you come to my room. You know where it is?”
I nodded, not liking the way such practicalities lent the tryst a squalid air.
We got back in the car, tea-ed at the Scole Inn and returned to Swafford singing the praises of Unforgiven, which I’d seen and in whose details I gave David a good briefing.
Well, Daisy. Here we are. It’s a quarter to two. Thank God I never travel without my breath-spray or a spare tube of Man Glide. I’m off to Davey’s Den. Wish me luck, my darling.
III
Astonishingly, Mother Mills came down to breakfast after me on Thursday morning. A man takes pride in always being the last one down and I didn’t enjoy being beaten.
“Morning, Ted,” Oliver trilled as he came into the dining room.
“You’re revoltingly cheerful,” I said, propping the Telegraph against the marmalade jar.
“Am I? Am I? Yes, I suppose I am,” he replied with a giggle, practically skipping to the sideboard. “I could eat a horse. Which, let’s face it, darling, we all may well have been forced to do had little Lilac not made such an am-az-ing recovery yesterday.”
Hell and turds, I thought. Here we go. “With the best will in the world, Oliver,” I said with a firm rasp, “can we please find something to talk about this morning other than bloody miracles?”
“You still can’t bear it, can you, baby? The proof that there truly are more things in heaven and earth than your puny, fusty, narrow philosophy ever dreamed of.”
“I wonder if a man in your condition should be stuffing himself with quite so much fried food,” I said, eyeing with revulsion the heaped kidney and sausage that he plonked down on the table next to me.
“Ho-ho!” he said, returning to the sideboard. “A man in my condition?” He began to fill another plate, flourishing the serving-spoon like a cocktail waitress. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by ‘a man in my condition.’ What condition?”
I stared up at him, quite unable to hide my dismay. “Oh, no . . .”
He beamed with what he no doubt considered an inner radiance and I considered a vile smirk.
“Oh yes. Oh yessy-yes-yes.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve had the bloody laying-on-of-hands treatment as well?”
“I’m whole, Ted. As cured as this bacon and twice as hot and sizzling.”
“Well,” I gave him a sour look as he sat down beside me with a wince, “the little Miracle Worker doesn’t seem to have had the kindness to heal all your infirmities, does he?”
“Meaning?”
“You’ve got the piles that afflict us all, I note.”
“Oh those,” he said, with a smile, “they’ll pass in time no doubt.”
“Humph. I’d be more inclined to trust good old Preparation H myself.”
He waded in on his gargantuan breakfast. Despite my irritation I found myself impressed by the confidence of his demeanour and the unquestionably genuine sparkle in his eye.
“Be serious, Oliver,” I said. “Do you honestly believe that you have been cured? Completely cured?”
“I’ve thrown away my pills, Ted. I feel . . . oh, it’s impossible to put into words how I feel. Davey is a gift from God. A gift from Glenda herself.”
“And his touch . . . did you feel this warmth that everyone talks about?”
“Darling,” said Oliver, a forkful of kidney hovering in front of his mouth, “it is simply the hottest thing I have ever felt in my life. It burns like a soldering iron. My word, how it burns. Right inside the deepest deeps it burns.”
I knew now that I had to do that thing that I hate most to do. I had to think. I had to sit, close my eyes, press my hands to my ears and analyse, like a chess-player or a code-breaker. The most dreaded activity a man can undertake. I hadn’t done it since last I wrote a decent poem.
I decided that the Villa Rotunda would make the ideal cogitarium, but that it would be madness to go there without fortification. I left Oliver to swim in the riotous grease of his breakfast and his self-satisfaction and made my way to the library.
Morning drinking times are matters of great debate. The threshold moves inexorably the more alcohol becomes a habit. I can remember a time when I thought it was impossible to take a glug of anything stronger than tomato juice before twelve o’clock. Twelve o’clock became half past eleven, became eleven, became half ten, became ten and so on. This was before the great puritan backlash of course which has made drinking a private vice never to be shown the light at lunch-times. Alcohol is the great secret of our age. If the public knew, if they had the remotest idea of the amount of drinking done by our politicians and leaders, they would be shocked to their boxers. Fortunately, journalists, as is better known, are inebriates too, so they have an interest in keeping a lid on things. The number of Members of Parliament who aren’t what doctors would call a functional alcoholic is astoundingly small. Alan Beith is a teetotaller, I seem to remember, and Tony Benn gets by on tea and pipe-tobacco; they are the only dry parliamentarians I can think of for the moment. Any others are doubtless abstemious because they have been told by their doctors that one more smell of brandy would kill them. I’ve seen Chancellors and Prime Ministers pissed as rats, judges too and newsreaders and chairmen of transnational giants. A well-known television political commentator told me at the Harpo once that the war in Bosnia, from which he had just returned, was run exclusively on alcohol. Skirmishes and strategies are entirely ordered according to supplies of slivovitz and vodka.
Alcohol is the prime determining factor of human history: the dethronement of British Prime Ministers, civil strife in Russia and the ruin of whole financial structures can be traced back to the glass. We are led to believe that it is only football hooligans who can’t handle it; the fact is that it’s too big an issue even to think of confronting. Thank God. For, having said all that, we get by on it far better than we manage without. Total abstainers make rotten leaders of men and incompetent husbands, lovers and fathers. Drunkards hiccup, belch, fart, vomit and stain the front of their trousers with piss. Puritans never reveal any of their functions, and it’s a short step from denying the world access to your own base physicality to denying others the right to any base physicality of their own.
Special pleading on my part, no doubt. Perhaps we hear once more the light footfall of Pudoria, Goddess of Guilt. I think, as much as anything, that I had become annoyed with myself for taking such a noticeable drop in drinking since I had arrived at Swafford. Not annoyed wit
h myself, more infuriated by the kindly approval of everyone else.
“Ted, you look so well!”
“This seems to have been something of a rest cure for you, Ted.”
“Wendy Whisky is becoming offended by your inattentions, dear.”
That kind of junk. It took a considerable effort to remember to have an ostentatious drink from time to time, merely in order to stop them from strewing rose-petals in my path and chalking up another cure to Davey.
I headed for the library therefore to see if I couldn’t push a couple down my throat before giving myself over to thought.
I believed I had the place to myself, but a snivel from a deep wing-chair in the corner told me that I had female company.
“You all right, Patricia?” I said, coming up behind her. Should have coughed my approach, I suppose, for I gave her one hell of a turn.
“Please, Ted! You shouldn’t sneak up like that.”
She had been crying steadily for some time.
“Very sorry,” I said. “Everything all right?”
“Well, what does it look like, you fat idiot?”
“Contrary to popular belief,” I said, “it only makes it worse to take it out on someone else. I don’t think you’ll find insulting me very helpful.”
“Is that your attempt at sympathy?”
“It’s practicality, which is kinder than sympathy.”
She wiped her nose. “Well, I certainly don’t need a cross between G. K. Chesterton and a fucking calendar motto.”
“You still thinking of that Martin Rebak?” He was the underling of Michael’s who had ditched Patricia.
She nodded. “Got a letter from him this morning. I thought perhaps he might have tired of his new infatuation. He’s just married her.”
“Then clearly he has tired of her,” I said.
“Oh, give it a rest, Ted.”
“Well, what do you want me to say? That he is not worth your tears? That you’ll get over it? That it’s always darkest just before the dawn and that time heals all wounds?”