Glamorous Powers, page 24
I was lured into further confidences. ‘First of all I ordered everyone to clean themselves up; men get slovenly without either women to look after them or a discipline to keep them up to the mark. Then we all took part in cleaning the house from top to bottom; nobody can work well in a filthy environment.’ I paused, remembering the odours of stale sweat, stale urine, stale food and the sight of thick grease, thick dust, thick grime. The details came back to me abruptly: the underclothes in holes at the garment inspection; the stained chamber-pots used as shaving-bowls to enable their owners to avoid ‘the trough’, the long narrow basin in the central wash-room where all monks but the abbot (who had his own basin in his cell) were obliged to shave; the sheet of noughts-and-crosses tucked under the hassock in the chapel to betray how at least two of the brethren had spent the time supposed to be devoted to worship; the dog-eared copy of The News of the World which lined the basket of the flea-bitten cat; the three-tiered cream cake brazenly sitting in the larder; the chocolate-box hidden behind the blackboard in the scriptorium, and – worst horror of all – the empty brandy bottles stacked high in the crypt.
‘Then I changed the diet from a gourmet cuisine to predominantly vegetarian meals,’ I heard myself say to Miss Fielding, ‘restricted wine to feast-days and ordered that everyone, even the oldest monk, was to take some exercise every day. I’m afraid that at the start of my rule I was highly unpopular with the lazier members of the community.’
‘I’m sure the good men were relieved to have a firm hand at the helm again.’
‘The relief was mixed with resentment. They didn’t like the Abbot-General’s decision to bring in someone from outside to rule the community,’ I said, and the next moment I was remembering my debilitating sense of isolation, my homesickness for Ruydale, my struggles to avoid any self-centred expression of misery as I wrote the weekly report Father Darcy had demanded for the first six months of my tenure.
However the next moment I was diverted from these difficult memories when Miss Fielding asked with curiosity: ‘What happened to the alcoholic Prior?’
‘He was transferred permanently to London so that the demon drink could be exorcized by the Abbot-General.’
‘A fate worse than death?’ said Miss Fielding with a smile and I laughed before replying: ‘Father Darcy was certainly formidable.’
‘Darcy!’
‘No relation to the famous Jesuit. Different spelling.’
‘I was thinking of Jane Austen’s hero.’
‘Father Darcy was a hero to many of his monks but heaven only knows what Jane Austen would have thought of him.’
‘Was he a hero to you?’
‘No, he was my mentor. That meant our relationship had to be grounded in reality, not fantasy.’
‘Well, I hope he gave you a pat on the back after you’d transformed the Grantchester house! How long did it take you to put everything right?’
So she had sensed I had no inclination to say more about my complex relationship with Father Darcy. With gratitude I answered readily: ‘The worst difficulties were ironed out quickly enough but it took at least six months to reduce the minor irritations – the endless pettiness, the foolish squabbles, the incessant twittering in corners whenever the slackers thought their superior was out of earshot … The Fordites aren’t Trappists and the rule of silence is never rigidly enforced, but gossiping is forbidden and personally I can’t endure people twittering about nothing.’
Miss Fielding at once said: ‘How difficult you must have found it to adjust to all the twittering at Allington!’ and before I could stop myself I was confessing: ‘To be honest I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve adjusted to Allington at all. I’m supposed to be giving serious consideration to my future, but so far I’ve found my attempts at meditation singularly unproductive.’ However as soon as these words had been uttered I felt driven to exonerate Allington. The fault’s mine, of course,’ I said. ‘I’m failing to make a satisfactory adjustment to normal society and that’s why I persistently feel that I’m in the wrong place.’
‘But maybe you are in the wrong place,’ said Miss Fielding unexpectedly. ‘I can see why you came here, but surely in your case a community like Allington can only seem a travesty of the type of community where you’ve learnt to feel at home? I almost wonder if you’d be better off in some remote rural guest-house where you’d be the only visitor.’
This struck me as a most perceptive observation. ‘You may well be right,’ I began, and then broke off as I suddenly realized which way the conversation was drifting. My heart seemed to beat a shade faster as I said with immense care: ‘Miss Fielding, please don’t take this amiss; I wouldn’t like you to feel that I was engaged in some form of unwanted pursuit of you, but do you by any chance know of a remote spot in the Starbridge area where I might find the peace and quiet I need?’
There was a long silence. Miss Fielding was staring at the wild ponies grazing in the distance and she was still staring at them when she eventually said: ‘I think I do know of a place which would suit you.’
I waited, not hurrying her, and at last she turned to face me. ‘It’s a manor house,’ she said. ‘It’s at Starrington Magna, twelve miles from Starbridge.’ Looking away from me again she began to trace a pattern on the grass with her finger. ‘The owner lives there alone apart from the servants,’ she said. ‘It’s a big house. You could be as secluded there as you wished, and there are twenty acres of walled grounds which are ideal for solitary strolls.’
Five seconds elapsed before I was able to say with a theatrical calmness: ‘Can you tell me … is there a chapel in the grounds?’
Her eyes widened. ‘Yes,’ she said surprised, ‘as a matter of fact there is.’
‘And is there a ruined ivy-clad building behind it?’
I saw the colour fade from her face. ‘The chantry,’ she whispered. ‘Yes.’
‘And is the chapel Victorian but built in the style of Inigo Jones?’
By this time she was beyond speech. She was barely able to nod.
My voice said: ‘Miss Fielding, forgive me for playing what must appear to be yet another psychic parlour-trick, but this place is of the greatest importance to me. Who’s the owner of this manor house? I’d like to get in touch with him straight away.’
In the silence that followed, the world seemed entirely still; it was as if even the breeze had ceased to blow. But as Miss Fielding took off her glasses at last, like a soldier removing his camouflage after some complex battle, the truth hurled itself against my shattered mind and smashed awake my sleeping psyche.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ I could hardly speak. ‘The chapel belongs to you.’ And when, mesmerized by my emotion, she offered no denial I covered my face with my hands and silently thanked God for this great deliverance from the torment of my doubts.
FIVE
‘Our real self is not the captive of Space and Time.’
W. R. INGE
Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934
Mysticism in Religion
I
My emotion was so profound that I felt a need to be alone, and rising to my feet I crossed the heather to the stack of rocks which crowned the Tor. The wild ponies regarded me with mild interest but soon resumed their grazing. I looked back. Miss Fielding had been watching me but I saw her avert her gaze as if she wished to give me every privacy. Slowly I circled the rocks before retracing my steps through the heather.
When I reached her I began: ‘Miss Fielding –’ but she interrupted me.
‘My name’s Anne Barton-Woods,’ she said. ‘Fielding is the name of my aunt who lives in Starbridge. I’m sorry I lied to you but I have such a horror of fortune-hunters that when I’m on holiday I find I can’t relax unless I take on a false identity.’ And as an afterthought she added: ‘Of course you’ll now think I’m a hopeless neurotic’
Again I was aware that there was a taut fearful underside to the psyche which existed beneath the veneer of her self-confidence, and at once I said: ‘I suggest we forget the word “neurotic”, which is one of those fashionable modern words which are so frequently misused, and consider your situation from a calmer, more rational perspective. If you have a horror of fortune-hunters, how clever you are to retreat to an ecclesiastical backwater like Allington where any normal fortune-hunter would die of boredom within twenty-four hours! And how sensible to adopt a false identity so that no abnormal fortune-hunter, lurking among the clerical collars, can pursue you once you leave! This all sounds most closely reasoned to me.’
Miss Barton-Woods was sufficiently encouraged to say: ‘I wish I could dispense with holidays altogether, but I find I need them. I work very hard running my estate.’
‘No doubt you’re wise to take an annual rest, but I do see that it must be an ordeal to spend two weeks among strangers.’
‘Shakespeare helps,’ said Miss Barton-Woods. ‘After I arrive I always read Henry V –’
‘“Once more into the breach –”’
‘Exactly. Then later I read the light-hearted plays, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors –’
‘The plays in which a lost brother is found.’
She gasped but before she could speak I asked: ‘How long have you been running your estate?’
‘Since my brother died six years ago.’ She hesitated, then added: ‘The estate’s been in the hands of my family since the Civil War – we were roundheads taking over from cavaliers – but now the family’s died out and there’s no one left except me. My aunt in Starbridge is on my mother’s side of the family.’ She began to clear up the debris of our picnic, and as she tilted her cup to spill the dregs of her tea on the ground the gesture seemed to emphasize the bleakness of her situation, drained as it was of family life. ‘For a while I thought I would marry,’ she said, ‘but when I was engaged I found I wasn’t much good at all that sort of thing – so you see, I don’t just put on this mask to avoid the fortune-hunters. I put it on to keep all men at arm’s length because I never want to get engaged again.’
‘Of course. That makes perfect sense.’
She gave me a suspicious look. ‘You’re probably now thinking I’m just suffering from sour grapes because my fiancé broke off the engagement.’
‘That would be Braithwaite’s explanation, no doubt, but I’m not Braithwaite. My explanation would run like this: your broken engagement, combined with the loss of your brother, brought you profound suffering; you transcended that suffering by using it as a base on which to build a new life set in opposition to the old – a move which made celibacy not only desirable, after the tragedy of your broken engagement, but essential to complete the process of “metanoia”, the turning aside into the new life which would enable you to survive.’
She said simply: ‘You’re the only person who’s ever understood,’ and opening the picnic-basket she replaced the thermos as if she feared it might shatter in her hands. ‘But I knew you’d understand,’ she said, ‘and that’s why I’m willing for you to stay at the Manor. You won’t be a nuisance and you won’t mind me being –’ She bit back the word ‘neurotic’ ‘– eccentric.’
‘My dear Miss Barton-Woods,’ I said, ‘if you’re still willing to offer me hospitality after my psychic parlour-trick just now I shall think you’re the most courageous of women and you can be just as eccentric as you please! But now let me follow your confession about your identity with a far more bizarre confession of my own …’
II
I made no attempt to translate the spiritual quality of the vision into words, but this was not only because mere words could never have reflected satisfactorily that glimpse of ultimate reality as I journeyed beyond the borders of finite time. It was also because I was aware that my story was already so unusual that I shied away from any inadequate descriptions which might well have aroused her incredulity. Indeed so outrageous did my clairvoyance sound as I recited the bare facts that I feared she would inevitably judge me either mad or wicked or both, using my psychic powers to slither my way first into her confidence and then into her bank account.
‘… and a light began to shine through the north window. As the light increased in power I knew it was the light of God. I then realized I was called to leave the Order,’ I said colourlessly in the tone employed by the gentlemen reading the weather forecasts which I had heard on Ruth’s wireless. I had been amazed when the announcers had droned on with such impressive lack of emotion about the numerous gales poised to ravage the North Sea.
Miss Barton-Woods was silent and inscrutable. I watched the breeze disturb her short dark hair which was shaped into a point at the nape of her neck. Her skin was lightly freckled; I noticed the small mole above the square line of her jaw, the shine on the tip of her wide nose, the dull unpainted red of her mouth. She looked no prettier without her glasses but there was a stronger impression of a striking individuality. I thought it not unlikely that she was one of those women who appear at their best not in youth, when their unusual looks preclude them from conforming to fashionable notions of beauty, but in middle-age when the unusual looks can be seen as ‘distinguished’ or even ‘handsome’. Picking up the glasses I saw that the lenses were clear. The glasses had been part of the camouflage she had worn to protect herself, part of the degrading of the personality perhaps not so different from the degrading I myself had employed when to protect the privacy of my inner self I had referred to my vision as a parlour-trick.
At last I said abruptly: ‘Do you believe me?’ and she answered surprised: ‘Of course.’
Greatly relieved I confessed: ‘I was afraid you might think I was a confidence trickster.’
‘That thought had, of course, occurred to me,’ said Miss Barton-Woods, ‘but the Warden knew you when you were at Grantchester so obviously you are who you say you are. I suppose it’s just possible that you might now be sinking into iniquity, but I think if that were the case you’d have taken care to get the details of the chapel right.’
I forgot my fear of her distrust. ‘What did I get wrong?’
‘There’s no wide space between the doors and the last pew; the pews do go all the way back. There’s no plain altar-table with a wooden cross; the chapel’s not deconsecrated but it hasn’t been used since my grandmother died, and my father, who wasn’t a believer, gave the altar-table to a local church before selling the altar-furnishings at Sotheby’s. As for the memorial tablet …’ She hesitated before saying: ‘That’s really most odd. It does exist; it commemorates my uncle who was killed in the Boer War, but no one’s placed lilies there since my grandmother died in 1919.’
‘So the past was mixed up with the present and future. That happens sometimes.’ I was so absorbed by these new facts that I barely noticed the astonished lift of her eyebrows.
At last she ventured awkwardly: ‘This is all very –’ But she could not find the word which would have expressed the quality of her amazement and fascination. ‘I suppose I should feel frightened,’ she said, ‘but I don’t feel in any way endangered.’ She groped for words again before concluding: ‘It’s because you’re benign. There’s no wickedness here for me to fear.’
‘Father Darcy would have said that’s because the vision came from God and not from the Devil.’
‘In that case is it vulgar to say I feel exhilarated?’
‘Certainly not! No one thought a spiritual exhilaration in the least vulgar until the religious philosophers of the Enlightenment made “enthusiasm” a dirty word.’
We smiled at each other before Miss Barton-Woods closed the picnic-basket and stood up. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Give me twenty-four hours so that I can talk to my housekeeper and have one of the spare rooms made habitable.’
I stared at her. ‘But you can’t possibly cut short your holiday!’
‘Why not? I’m fed up with Allington and after last night I’ve got the perfect excuse to leave.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘If you take the noon train on Tuesday from Ashburton to Starbridge you can get the three-thirty train from Starbridge to Starrington Magna. I’ll send my chauffeur to the station to meet you. You don’t want to walk a mile with your baggage, and the village taxi’s always breaking down.’
I almost baulked at the prospect of a chauffeur but managed to pull myself together. ‘How very kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much. But are you sure that my arrival won’t cause awkwardness for you?’
‘What kind of awkwardness?’
‘Well …’ I found myself floundering in the face of what I suspected was an aristocratic indifference to certain conventions. ‘I was thinking of your neighbours,’ I said. ‘Might they not judge it a little unseemly if you were to grant hospitality to a man whom you’ve only just met?’
‘Oh, good heavens!’ exclaimed Miss Barton-Woods, confirming my suspicions. ‘Surely it’s only the lower classes who spend their lives worrying about what the neighbours might think!’
Old wounds broke open in my psyche. ‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but my background is very different from yours, Miss Barton-Woods, and I’m afraid you must make allowances for my tediously bourgeois anxiety.’
She looked stricken. Furious with myself both for upsetting her and for revealing my ineradicable sensitivity on the subject of class I said rapidly: ‘I’m sorry. You were being refreshingly honest and I was being tiresomely inhibited.’
‘No, I was being snobbish and you were quite right to reprove me for it. But don’t worry about the neighbours,’ said Miss Barton-Woods, resuming the casual confidence which can only be acquired from an upbringing in privileged surroundings. They wouldn’t cut me unless I did something quite beyond the pale.’
‘I think offering hospitality to a clairvoyant cleric might be construed as pressing the pale to its utmost limits.’
‘We’ll keep quiet about the clairvoyance and play up the clerical collar,’ said Miss Barton-Woods smiling at me, but added in panic: ‘Or are you trying to create an excuse for refusing my invitation?’
