‘But was there so much to worry about once you’d entered the Order? Your daughter’s marriage has been a success, you’ve always said, and your son’s certainly not been a failure as an actor.’
I said: ‘I’m very proud of both my children.’
‘Nevertheless it must have given you a jolt when Martin decided to go on the stage.’
‘It was hardly a bolt from the blue. He’d always excelled at acting, and when he decided to make a career of it I felt it would be churlish to stand in his way.’
‘What a model father! If he’d been my son I’m quite sure I shouldn’t have behaved with such saintly resignation … How old was he?’
‘Eighteen. It was the year I entered the Order. Martin was determined to support himself by taking part-time jobs while he was earning a pittance in repertory. My daughter was married. I was free to go my own way.’
‘Eighteen’s very young. Are you absolutely certain there was no row when he declared his thespian intentions?’
‘Martin and I don’t have rows! Our relationship has always been excellent!’
‘Yet last month, on the day before your vision, you and he had what you described as a “disagreement”. Will you now tell me, please, exactly what happened?’
I had rehearsed this moment many times. ‘He disclosed to me that he wasn’t leading a Christian life. Naturally I was upset.’
Francis looked at me over the top of his spectacles. ‘He’s thirty-five now, isn’t he? Isn’t that rather old to be sowing wild oats?’
I said nothing.
What’s the problem? Trapped in an eternal triangle?’
I heard myself say in an obstinate voice: ‘Martin must choose how to live his life. He’s a grown man and I’ve no right to interfere.’
‘But if the life he’s chosen to live is unChristian –’
‘Well, of course I pray for him to be brought back to Christ. Of course.’ Despite my rehearsals I was finding the conversation difficult to sustain.
‘Has he been leading this unChristian life for some time?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Yet you had no idea?’
I shook my head.
‘Despite your so-called excellent relationship with him?’
I wanted to shout: ‘You bastard!’ and hit him. The violence of my reaction shocked me. Bending my head I stared down at the obscene luxury of the Indian carpet.
After a pause Francis said gently: ‘I’m sorry. Obviously the revelation was a great shock to you,’ and I knew my defences had been destroyed. I could cope with Francis being worldly, cynical, aggressive, snide and downright bloody-minded. But I could not cope with him understanding my misery and being kind.
I stood up. That was wrong. When a monk is seated in the presence of his superior he should never stand until he has been given permission to do so, but now, compelled to turn my back on Francis in order to conceal my emotion, I crossed the room and stood facing the clock on the mantelshelf. My voice said: ‘I made a mess of that scene with Martin. I should have communicated by showing compassion, by forgiving. How can anyone be brought to Christ if Christ’s representative fails to display a Christian face?’
As I stopped speaking I found I was focusing my entire concentration on the clock in an effort to expel my pain by projecting it in a stream of power from the psyche. The clock’s hands quivered; I saw the pendulum falter, and as the present began to grind to a halt the past overwhelmed me, not the recent past but the distant past when I had prostituted my powers in order to ‘get on’ up at Cambridge. ‘I can make your watch stop just by looking at it …’ The girls had worn watches as brooches in those days, and half the fun of stopping a watch had lain in the erotic adventure of putting a hand on the feminine breast to jolt the mechanism back into action.
In panic I realized I had allowed my psychic discipline to slip. My voice said shattered: ‘I’ve stopped the clock,’ but Francis at once retorted: ‘Nonsense, it just gave a hiccough. It does that sometimes,’ and to my relief I realized that the pendulum was still moving. I said confused: ‘I thought –’ but Francis interrupted me.
‘Now Jonathan, it’s no good trying to play that old parlour-trick
because I’m well aware that you never stopped any of those watches in the old days – you merely hypnotized all those gullible girls into thinking that you did. Come back here, sit down and behave yourself – you’re acting like a half-baked novice.’
This robust approach, so reminiscent of our mentor, at once steadied me. I returned to my chair.
‘Have you heard from Martin since the quarrel?’ said Francis after allowing me a moment to regain my composure.
‘No, but I’ve written and I know that eventually he’ll write back. Martin’s always been so good at keeping in touch and sharing his world with me.’ But of course he had not shared it. Grief threatened to overwhelm me again.
‘How old was he when his mother died?’
‘Seven. Poor Betty … After the scene with Martin I thought how upset she would have been about him, and I kept thinking of her, thinking and remembering –’ I broke off. Then I added abruptly: ‘Forgive me, I’m digressing. My marriage has nothing to do with my present crisis.’
But Francis only said: ‘Hasn’t it? Yet you’ve just confessed that it was most vividly resurrected in your mind shortly before you had your vision,’ and as we stared at each other in silence we were interrupted by the rapid clanging of the chapel bell proclaiming an emergency.
‘Air-raid drill,’ said Francis casually. ‘We’d better set a good example by retiring speedily to the crypt. I must say, Jonathan, you’ve picked the most tiresome time in the history of the world to embark on a spiritual crisis.’
After the drill had unfolded in a tolerably well-ordered manner there was no time to resume our interview before Vespers and I found I was greatly relieved by the postponement. I was beginning to be alarmed for the future. If Francis’ preliminary talks could so effortlessly destroy my equilibrium, how would
I fare when his inquiry became an inquisition? Fear and dread ravaged my psyche, and touring my room I put away all small objects in the chest of drawers. I was afraid that I might be on the brink of generating that activity popularly attributed to poltergeists, an activity caused by bursts of energy from a powerful but poorly disciplined psyche under stress; at such times this energy can move objects, often with considerable force, and if the psyche cannot control itself sufficiently much damage can occur. During my troubled early months in the Order, it had been the poltergeist activity, breaking out in the Grantchester community with alarming violence, which had driven Abbot James to seek help in bringing my disturbed psyche under control.
Memories sprang to life in my mind; I saw myself as a forty-three-year-old postulant summoned to the Abbot’s office for an interrogation. I had planned exactly what to say to James to win his soft-hearted sympathy, but when I entered his room I found my plans had gone astray because James was absent and behind his desk sat a stranger, a man in his early sixties, hard-eyed, thin-lipped, ice-cold. The coldness was so extreme that it seemed to burn with heat, and as I at once recognized the powerful psychic aura I experienced a curious mixture of fright and relief. The fear was because I knew this was the one man I could never manipulate and I felt powerless; the relief was because I knew he would heal my disorder. In fact so great was my relief that I forgot to wait for permission to speak but said rapidly: ‘I’m causing the trouble but I can’t help it because my meditation techniques don’t work.’
He sat in his chair and looked me up and down. Then he said: ‘Do you know who I am?’ and without hesitation I replied: ‘You’re the Abbot-General.’
‘I’m not just the Abbot-General,’ he said. ‘I’m the one man who can get you out of this spiritual cesspit of yours. Now answer me this: do you want to be a monk or don’t you?’
When I immediately answered: ‘I don’t just want to be a monk – I want to be the best monk in the Order,’ he smiled.
‘What ambition!’ he exclaimed. ‘But of course your pride
would hardly let you settle for less.’ Then the smile vanished, the aura of ice intensified and he said: ‘Stand up straight, fold your hands properly, keep your mouth shut until you’ve been given permission to speak and wipe that arrogant smirk off your face. You’ve been three months in the Order – are you so unreachable that you haven’t yet learnt how to behave? No doubt you think you’re such a wise mature priest with your Cambridge degree and your twenty years in Holy Orders, but I’m here to tell you now that psychically you’re no better than an ignorant spoilt child and that as a monk you’re at present only capable of play-acting.’
He waited in case I dared to argue with him but I was speechless. This interview was far removed indeed from my cosy chats with Abbot James.
‘Shall I explain to you,’ said the brutal stranger, ‘what’s really going on here? Like many people whose psychic powers are freakishly well developed you’re used to manipulating people whenever you want your own way. What you want here is to be petted and pampered so you’ve entranced your Abbot, you’ve tied your poor Novice-Master into a humiliating knot, and now, just like a spoilt child, you’re calling attention to yourself by being disruptive in the hope that by causing chaos you’ll make everyone realize how special you are!’
‘But I swear I’m not doing this deliberately –’
‘Of course that’s what you swear! You’ve hypnotized yourself into believing in your own innocence, hypnotized yourself into believing you can’t control these ridiculous outbursts of energy! But this is where the hypnosis ends if you want to survive as a monk. We’ve no room in the Order for confidence tricksters who perform psychic parlour-tricks! What you’ve got to understand is that there’ll be no spiritual progress unless you learn humility and obedience, no hope of acquiring true charismatic power unless you starve that crude psychic force of yours of the pride which makes it so destructive. How can you expect God to use you as a channel for the Holy Spirit when you not only invite but welcome the Devil into the driving-seat of your soul?’
I attempted a defence. I said I was not wicked, merely
disappointed and unhappy. I told him the community was lax, that Abbot James was weak and that the Novice-Master was a fool.
Then the stranger rose to his feet. He was not a tall man but at that moment he seemed twice as tall as I was. I flinched. I believe I even took a step backwards. But he never raised his voice. He simply said: ‘And who are you to pass judgement on this community? Obviously you’re in an even worse state than I’d feared and radical measures will have to be taken. You must be taught a lesson in humility, a lesson you’ll never forget, and afterwards you must begin your life as a monk all over again elsewhere.’
Then he had taken me to London and after a night spent in the punishment cell where I had been taught the lesson I would never forget, I had been dispatched to Ruydale to make my fresh start.
The memory terminated. I returned to the June of 1940, but I continued to think of Father Darcy and after a while I closed my eyes so that I might imprint his image more accurately on the retina of my psyche. To attempt to call up his spirit was out of the question; such practices are dangerous as well as arrogant and in my opinion the Church is entirely right to discourage them. It is not for us to interfere in our hamfisted way with the great reality of eternal freedom which lies beyond our brief existence in the prison of time and space, and such discarnate shreds of former personalities which linger within the prison walls are usually either trivial or demonic.
So I made no attempt to summon Father Darcy but when I had constructed his memory as accurately as possible I tried to imagine his response to my current dread that stress would seriously impair my psychic control, and at once the word DISCIPLINE was firmly imprinted on my mind. Finding my timetable I stood looking at it. Then sitting down at the table I opened my bible, made an intense new effort to concentrate and began to read St Paul’s mighty episde to the Romans.
‘Further to our conversation which was so rudely interrupted,’ said Francis the next day, ‘I’d just like to clarify a couple of points about this unfortunate interview with your son. Presumably you were very distressed after he left. What did you do?’
‘I dashed off a letter of apology to him. Then I forced myself to make my usual appearances in the chapel and in the refectory, but after Compline I retired to my cell again and read
Romans.
That always calms me. I think of St Augustine and Luther reading it and going on to change the course of history; it makes me feel I’m close enough to draw strength from people of great spiritual power. I didn’t sleep before the night office but by the time I went downstairs to the chapel I knew I was in control of myself again.’
‘And after the office?’
‘Then I admit I had difficulties.’ I paused to drum up the courage to be honest. ‘Once I was faced with the task of sleeping all the symptoms of stress returned. I felt isolated, unhappy … If I’d been a married man I’d have turned to my wife for consolation.’
‘But as you weren’t a married man –’
‘I behaved like an ill-disciplined novice and consoled myself, as I implied earlier, with my wife’s memory.’
‘You mean –’
‘I gave way to temptation, obtained the relief I needed and fell asleep around three. How Father Darcy would have despised such a failure of the will! I shall always remember him saying that the body should be an obedient servant, not a tyrant balking at the most rudimentary discipline.’