‘But I’ve told you – I didn’t care about any of those disadvantages! All I wanted was a morally acceptable outlet for my sexual inclinations –’
The trap sprang shut.
‘How very humiliating for your wife,’ said Francis brutally, and at once I was slammed on the rack.
Francis saw his shot had hit the mark and allowed me no time to regain my equilibrium. ‘Tell me more,’ he said, ‘about how unsuited you were for matrimony. I can quite believe that an immature young man who treats his wife merely as a cheap sexual receptacle would make a far from ideal husband.’
I tried to devise a strong response but I was unable to think clearly. I began to twist my abbot’s ring round and round on my finger.
Francis said briskly: ‘The truth is, isn’t it, that you made each other very miserable. When did you first realize you’d made a mistake?’
‘You’re completely misrepresenting the situation –’
‘How can I be when you admit marriage left you cold?’
‘It didn’t leave me cold. It left me deprived of psychic space. That’s different. It wasn’t Betty’s fault. As I keep telling you, it was marriage, not Betty, that made me unhappy.’ I had stopped twisting my ring but my fingers were tightly interlocked. ‘Even before I entered the Order,’ I said, ‘I needed a great deal of time alone in order to meditate and pray, and frankly I had no idea that the daily routine of marriage would be so hostile to any attempt to sustain a rich inner life. Nothing had prepared me for such chaos. My parents were quiet people; our home was very orderly, very peaceful, very conducive to developing a talent for using solitude constructively. But as soon as I married I found myself in a different atmosphere. Betty was
seldom still. She was always rushing hither and thither, continually invading my psychic space, laughing, crying, endlessly chattering … And then the children came. Of course I was pleased and proud, but the noise, the mess, the constant destruction of any interlude which encompassed peace and order –’
‘You were born into the wrong class, Jonathan. My parents cheerfully abandoned their children to nannies and governesses and enjoyed numerous delightful interludes with their lovers.’
‘My dear Francis!’
‘Will you kindly stop trying to undermine my authority by addressing me by my Christian name?’
‘I’m sorry, but I was so appalled by your light-hearted attitude to such adulterous irresponsibility –’
‘Good heavens, can’t you see I was trying to signal my sympathy to you by making a joke about my own melancholy experience of family life? No, obviously you can’t and I must apologize. I shouldn’t have forgotten how sensitive you are on the subject of class … But let’s return to your marriage. You’ve admitted you were in a situation which would have driven me, if not you, to drink. How did you make life bearable for yourself?’
The rack creaked. Once more I found myself groping unsuccessfully for a strong response.
‘Come along, Jonathan! Obviously you had to take drastic measures to preserve your sanity –’
‘I volunteered for service at sea.’
‘What a brilliant solution! But didn’t the authorities try to tell you that a married chaplain should remain ashore with his family at the Naval base?’
‘I talked them out of that. I said I’d been called to serve on board ship. I was very convincing.’
‘And how did your wife feel about being abandoned?’
‘She was no more abandoned than any other Naval wife! Anyway I made it up to her – whenever I came home our reunion was as good as a honeymoon.’
‘But how did you get on at sea? There was little privacy and peace, surely, on board ship –’
‘I had my own cabin. Once the door was closed I had the psychic space I needed and I was happy. That was when I finally faced the fact that I couldn’t serve God properly as a married man, yet on the other hand –’
‘– on the other hand you had a wife and two children and no doubt you still couldn’t imagine giving up intimacy entirely. What an exceedingly difficult spiritual position! You led this divided life, you had no adequate spiritual direction, you must have become increasingly isolated –’
‘But I’m a psychic! I was used to isolation, used to no one understanding, used to struggling unaided with my problems –’
‘Nevertheless what a relief it must have been when she died!’
Silence fell after this ultimate turn of the screw. My psyche, jarred and jolted by the rack, flashed a warning to my brain that the strain was proving too much but before I could stop myself I was saying: ‘It was terrible when she died.
Terrible.
If you think I was glad you couldn’t be more wrong.’
‘The dark side of bereavement lies in the guilt beneath the grief.’
‘Why should I have felt guilty? She loved me, I did everything in my power to make her happy –’
‘You’re wonderfully convincing, Jonathan, and I can almost smell the red roses and hear the Strauss waltz, but unfortunately my sceptical streak means that I have a deep-rooted resistance to romantic fantasies. However I’m always willing to listen. Come back tomorrow and spin me another romantic fantasy about your chaste life as a widower.’
I stared at him. He stared back. I was acutely aware of my file bulging on the desk between us.
‘Francis, I really can’t see what relevance such a conversation can possibly have to my present predicament –’
‘It’s my business to see the relevance, not yours – and for heaven’s sake stop calling me Francis! That’s a privilege I’ll allow you if you ever leave the Order but meanwhile I’m your superior and I don’t want either of us to forget for one moment that I’m responsible for the care of your soul …’
I dreamt about Hilda that night. In my dream she was committing suicide by hanging herself, but I was bound hand and foot, unable to save her. She was hanging herself on the gallows of the prison where I had worked as a chaplain, and as I watched the body twitching on the end of the rope I realized that I was lying in a pool of blood.
‘You look a trifle pale,’ said Francis when I returned to his room the following afternoon. ‘I was sorry to see when I passed your door at three o’clock this morning that your light was on.’
‘Why were you spying on me at three this morning?’
‘Why should you automatically assume I was spying on you? What vanity! As it happens, I was summoned to the infirmary to attend to my poor little novice who hears voices. I’m afraid his place is in a hospital, not a monastery.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a salutary reminder that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people who hear voices and see visions are mentally ill. Now,’ said Francis, having tested the rack and found it in good working order, ‘let’s return to the subject of your past. We’d established that your marriage was a nightmare –’
‘It was not a nightmare! It simply had difficult aspects!’
‘Were you faithful to her?’
‘Of course I was faithful to her! How could I have gone on as a priest if I’d committed adultery?’
‘Was she faithful to you?’
‘Yes, she loved me.’
‘Even after you ran away to sea? It sounds to me as if she was either mad or mesmerized. Were you abusing your psychic powers to keep her under control?’
‘Certainly not, and if you hadn’t known me during the most shameful period of my life it would never have occurred to you to ask such an obscene question! After my call to the priesthood no woman ever played Trilby to my Svengali – and anyway
there was no need for me to play Svengali to ensure Betty’s devotion. She loved me almost too much as it was.’
Francis at once made a note. I tried to read it but could only decipher the words ‘unreciprocated love’ and ‘additional strain’.
I said: ‘I think you’ve still got quite the wrong impression of my marriage.’
‘Have I? Then before you start getting upset all over again let’s now leave the subject of your marriage and examine your life as a widower.’ Opening my file he turned to the page he had already marked. ‘I’m going to read you another passage from James’ notes,’ he said. ‘The dear old boy writes:
‘“Today Jon made a full confession prior to his entry into our house tomorrow. I must admit I was privately shocked and saddened that he should have drifted so deeply into error, but I remain certain that life in the Order will solve this problem of his by preserving him from temptation, and my original opinion that he will make a good monk remains unchanged.”’ Francis closed the file and waited but when I remained silent he said not unkindly: ‘Jonathan, I promise I shan’t be censorious. You confessed these sins to James, he gave you absolution and from a spiritual point of view the matter’s closed. I only raise the subject now because I want to see how far your difficulties as a widower contributed to your desire to be a monk.’
‘Yes, Father.’ I tried to pull myself together. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘If I hesitate it’s because I’m still ashamed, even now, that I failed to live as a priest should.’
‘I can quite see how difficult it must have been for you. You were accustomed to an intense intimate relationship and you were in a state of spiritual weakness after years of a divided life … Did you never consider remarriage?’
‘Never. I did try hard to avoid women and for most of the time I succeeded. But at the end …’ I fell silent again.
‘Yes?’ said Francis. ‘What happened at the end?’
‘I met this woman. It was 1923 but I didn’t know when I met her that I was going to be able to enter the Order later in the year. I thought I was going to have to support Martin up at Cambridge. If I’d known he had no intention of going I might
have resisted the temptation, but as it was … I felt I couldn’t bear my unhappincss any longer.’
‘But you’d had mistresses before 1923, surely?’
‘I wouldn’t call them mistresses. There were incidents during the War when I was on my own somewhere a long way from home. But Hilda … That was quite different. She did voluntary work for a charity which aided discharged prisoners. I met her when I was calling at the home of a prisoner who’d just been freed and she was there too, visiting the wife and children … We were both immediately attracted. Chastity soon became quite impossible.’
‘Did you ask her to marry you?’
‘No, I told her from the beginning that I was only marking time until I could be a monk. But of course she never believed I’d go through with it.’
‘How did you eventually extricate yourself?’
‘I … No, I really can’t describe the ghastliness of it all except to say that she threatened suicide and I nearly died of guilt. I hadn’t hated myself so much since that poor girl died up at Cambridge.’
Francis printed: ‘GUILT. HATES HIMSELF’ on his sheet of foolscap and said without expression: ‘Did she in fact commit suicide?’
‘No.’ I wiped the sweat from my forehead. ‘She married someone else eventually.’
‘And during this agonizing time did it not once occur to you,
not once,
that you might give up all thought of being a monk and marry this woman?’
‘Oh no,’ I said. The affair with Hilda confirmed what I already knew: that I couldn’t stay in the world and remain a good priest. My only hope of fulfilling my vocation lay in entering a monastery.’
‘Obviously your call was very strong but a satisfactory intimate relationship is no mean driving force either. I’d have thought –’
‘Marriage was an impossible dream,’ I said impatiently. ‘I could never have borne the burden.’
Francis’ pen paused in mid-sentence. ‘Burden?’
‘The burden of guilt that I’d married despite my knowledge that I was unsuited to married life.’ Unable to look at him I glanced around the room until my gaze rested once more on the clock. The temptation to reduce my tension by projecting it in a stream of power from the psyche was very strong.
‘But you’ve just admitted that you nearly died of guilt when you jilted her,’ Francis was saying. ‘Are you now implying –’
‘Yes. The guilt would have been even worse if I’d married her. I chose the lesser of two evils.’
‘How far were you able to set down the burden of all this guilt when you entered the Order?’
‘The relief was instantaneous. I was finally at peace after years of torment.’
‘How very odd! I wouldn’t have thought that merely walking through the door of the Grantchester house would have made so much difference – in fact surely your problems were only exacerbated when you wound up in such a mess as a postulant?’
‘I agree I got in a mess and was miserable, but it was a different kind of mess and a different kind of misery. Grantchester was quite the wrong house for me, of course – but not, as I thought at the time in my arrogance, because it was spiritually slack. It wasn’t, not then; James ran the place well enough in his own mild idiosyncratic way until old age made him lose his grip, but I was beyond being helped by a mild idiosyncratic rule. I needed the austerity of Ruydale, and Father Darcy realized that as soon as he met me.’
‘So once you met Father Darcy –’
‘I was happy.’
‘Even when he followed that first meeting by flogging you in the London punishment cell?’
I stopped staring at the clock and swivelled to face him. ‘Nobody enjoys being flogged!’