My own feelings on the subject were as mixed as my mentor’s. As a Christian I did my best to regard the authoritarian monolith of Rome with charity; as an Englishman I could not help but regard it with distaste, and as a mystic I could only regard it with horror. Profound religious truths are eternal; the man-made divisions of Christendom, trapped in time, are subject to corruption, and because of this no man-made institution should be allowed to interpose itself in a dictatorial fashion between the mystic and his God – indeed no man-made institution can effectively do so, and this, of course, explains why mysticism has so often been a running sore on the body politic of the Roman Church. No authoritarian regime likes the rebels who by circumventing its power cut it down to size.
Mystics, as I had told Janet, need the framework of organized religion, but when the organization can only offer a framework which insists on conformity at all costs then mysticism, if not crushed or driven underground, will flourish not because of the organization but in spite of it. The monastic life of the Fordites certainly had its authoritarian aspects, but the watchwords of the Church of England are liberty and tolerance, and certainly no one in the Order had tried to suppress or distort my spiritual gifts in the name of dogmatics. I had known then that although I was a Catholic I would remain an English Catholic and that the Church of Rome would always be alien to me.
So I abstained from attending mass at the local Roman Catholic church, but on the penultimate day of my visit to Starmouth I padded downstairs after reading Prime, stole a crust from the bread-bin in the larder, filched a drop of sherry from the drawing-room decanter and retired to my room to celebrate the Holy Communion. Afterwards I felt comforted,
and it was in a strong tranquil frame of mind that I once more nerved myself to face the breakfast table.
‘Daddy,’ said Ruth purposefully as she delivered my eggs and bacon, ‘I want to talk to you.’
My strength and tranquillity instantly evaporated. I had, of course, realized by this time that Ruth’s devotion to housework and her new refrigerator could indicate the existence of a vacuum elsewhere in her life, and I had, of course, noticed that she and Roger talked only on the most facile of levels, but I had instinctively pulled down the shutters over my perceptive powers – and not because of any praiseworthy parental desire to avoid meddling in an adult daughter’s private life. I had been driven by sheer cowardice buttressed by a strong sense of self-preservation; so debilitated did I feel by Martin’s problems that I shied away from debilitating myself still further by embracing Ruth’s.
‘There’s no need to look so alarmed,’ she was saying with an exasperated affection. ‘I just wanted to tell you about a lovely idea that I’ve had. Do you remember me mentioning last year that we thought of converting the space over the garage into a games-room? Well, we never actually got around to it, but why don’t we now convert the space into a little flat for you? I know living “en famille” doesn’t really suit you, but if you had a room of your own, quite separate from us, with your own bath and a little pantry-kitchen – well, you might come to visit us regularly, mightn’t you, and later when you’ve retired … Well, Daddy, let’s be realistic! You’ve got no private income and no prospect of any money when you retire except for the old age pension and some pittance from the Church, and I simply can’t bear to think of you all alone and miserable in some sordid old people’s home –’
‘Isn’t this fantasy a little premature?’
Premature! How could it be? Daddy, you’re sixty
–sixty years old –’
‘Quite.’ I somehow managed to muzzle my rage.
‘– and there might well come a time in the not-too-distant future when you’ll need to be looked after, and as I like looking
after people and as we do have the space over the garage –’
By a superhuman effort I mastered my temper and said in my gentlest voice: ‘It’s certainly not impossible that one day I might welcome such a generous and unselfish offer, but meanwhile I feel I’ve plenty of* work to do before I can consider retirement and so it seems only sensible that I should continue to stay here “en famille” during my visits. I wouldn’t want to put you to the expense of providing separate accommodation for me only to find that I was seldom able to use it.’
Her face crumpled.
‘Ruth …’ I was in despair. The memory of Betty encircled my psyche with a strangler’s grip, and suddenly the guilt that I could not love her in the way she wished was more than I could bear. Pushing aside my untouched plate of eggs and bacon I stood up. ‘Ruth, please – no more emotional scenes –’
‘You hate it here – the visit’s been a failure –’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Then why can’t you accept my offer?’
‘The real question is not why can’t I accept your offer but why can’t you accept my refusal.’ Suppressing the urge to walk out I sank down again in my chair. That cost me so much energy that I barely had the strength left to say: ‘The truth is that your distress here isn’t rooted in my response to your offer. It lies in the fact that your children are growing up, Roger’s absorbed in his own activities and you’ve begun to feel your family don’t need you any more.’
But this glimpse of reality was much too painful for her to face, and at once she rushed sobbing from the room.
The fault was entirely mine; I had committed the error, unforgivable in an experienced counsellor, of confronting Ruth with a truth she was unable to digest, and I knew I had to give her time to resurrect her damaged defences. Accordingly I retired to the garden with my copy of
The Cloud of Unknowing
but I
made no attempt to read it. I merely waited and after a while she came outside to join me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, standing up to meet her. ‘Your offer was so good and kind and I feel almost criminally at fault for being unable to find the right words to refuse it. But you mustn’t think I’m either ungrateful or uncaring.’
She struggled with her tears again but at last she said: ‘I just wish I didn’t find you so baffling. I don’t understand a single thing you do – why you went into the monastery, why you’ve come out of it, why you’ve got to go off tomorrow into the blue when you could stay here with your family and be comfortable and loved and well looked after –’
‘I think my monks at Grantchester felt much as you do and I can only tell you what I told them: I must do what I believe God requires of me. But how guilty I feel that you’ve never been able to express your bewilderment until now! I must try and make it easier for you to talk to me.’
‘But I talk to you all the time!’
‘I wasn’t referring to the kind of conversation in which you tell me all about your new refrigerator. I was thinking of the kind of conversation in which you’d tell me your problems and I’d do my best to be helpful.’
‘But I don’t have any problems! I’m so lucky – I’ve got so much to be thankful for!’
‘Yes, but –’ Automatically I fell back on a technique of which I was a master. Combining my practical experience with my psychic eye I picked a hidden subject, a subject which had hitherto remained unmentioned between us, and trailed it in front of her to lure her into self-revelation. ‘But this is a frightening time, isn’t it?’ I said sympathetically and paused before adding the key words: ‘Particularly for mothers of sons.’
At once she shuddered. ‘If there’s no invasion perhaps the war may last for years, and there’s Colin, eighteen in two years’ time –’
We were, as I believe they say in racing parlance, ‘off and running’, galloping away down the opening strait. I murmured: ‘That’s certainly a terrible prospect for you,’ and waited, not
unpleased by my skill, for the confession inevitably to unfold.
‘I try to shut out the anxiety,’ said Ruth, ‘I try not to think about it, but I worry and worry and worry and Roger says I must stop, worrying does no good, I’m simply making myself ill, but it’s easy for him to say that, he’s got plenty of distractions, out all day at the office or at the golf club, and I’ve got nothing to divert myself with except cleaning, and I clean and I clean and I clean, but sometimes I feel I can’t bear the strain, I love Colin so much – well, I love Janet too, of course, but she’s been a bit peculiar lately, I suppose it’s the onset of the awkward age and I’ve got to accept that she’s not a little girl any more, but – oh, how I wish I had another baby! I always did want another but when we had our boy and our girl Roger said all right, that’s it, that’s all we can afford if we want to live comfortably in a nice home – although as things have turned out we could perfectly well have afforded one more, and now sometimes when I’m cleaning I find I’m thinking about it, the baby, I mean, the baby that never was, and I feel so sad and I start crying but that makes Roger so irritable and off he goes to the golf club and then I feel worse than ever, so sad and so alone, although of course I keep telling myself how lucky I am to have such a nice home and lots of smart clothes and the very latest refrigerator –’
‘Why don’t you go ahead and have it?’
‘Have it? Have what?’
‘The baby. You’re only thirty-six. There’s no problem now about money. What’s stopping you? Would Roger object?’
‘No, no, of course not!’ she said at once, but when I saw her hands clench in her lap I knew the intimate side of their marriage had ceased. ‘It’s a lovely idea, certainly … I’ll have to think about it.’ Giving me her brightest smile she rose to her feet. Well, I mustn’t sit here gossiping about trivialities when I’ve got all the washing to do! If you’ll excuse me, Daddy …’
‘Of course,’ I said, and feeling profoundly distressed I watched her hurry away across the lawn.
My first reaction to Ruth’s pathos was the primitive one: I felt angry with the man who had made my daughter unhappy. But then I remembered those stern words: ‘Judge if ye be not judged’, and found myself asking whether Roger’s failure to be an attentive husband was any worse than my own failure thirty-five years ago; when I had failed to make Betty happy I had regularly abandoned her for a far longer time than it took to play a round of golf.
Scraping together a professional detachment – a well-nigh impossible exercise in the circumstances – I tried to imagine why marital intimacy should have ceased. Late nights at the office and repeated absences at weekends did not necessarily indicate an adulterous husband; perhaps after years of overindulgence in food and drink Roger had been plagued by recurring impotence until in humiliation he had abandoned sexual intercourse altogether. His absorption in his work and his golf could thus be seen not merely as a device to avoid his wife but as a method of blotting out his sense of failure.
I toyed with this plausible theory for some time. I liked it because it enabled me to regard Roger with compassion and to see Ruth as an innocent victim, but after a while it occurred to me to speculate how far the marriage had been dislocated by Roger’s inclination to acquire inanimate possessions instead of additional children. Such behaviour by a husband could have a crippling psychological effect on the wife; I could well remember the sailor who had confided to me many years ago: ‘As soon as my wife was told she couldn’t have more children, padre, she lost interest in you-know-what.’ However before I could dwell on this new theory another memory seeped into my mind. I saw a young priest whom I had counselled at Ruydale and heard him saying to me in despair: ‘I’ve tried so hard, Father, but she absolutely hates it.’ I could remember his wife too. He had brought her to see me once; I had told him I could not counsel
a woman but I had thought it might help me to counsel him if I had some idea what kind of woman she was, and I could see her now, young and pretty, charming and delightful, a girl who had responded to my friendly enquiry about her parents by talking reverently, eyes glowing with hero-worship, about her father.
Standing up abruptly I began to walk around the garden. The top layer of my mind was still thinking of the poor young priest, one of my failures, someone I had been unable to help, but the next layer of my mind was contemplating my own guilt. By not loving my daughter adequately I had aroused in her an obsessive need for an attention which was paternal, not marital, and the need had destroyed the core of the marriage. Ruth’s troubles were all my fault, I could see that now, just as I could see that Martin too was still suffering from my shameful failures as a father long ago.
Depression overwhelmed me again and sapped the last shreds of my spiritual strength. I wondered how Francis could ever have counselled me to keep an open mind on the subject of marriage, and as I sank down once more on the garden-seat I decided my mind had to be not open but resolutely closed. Remarriage was impossible. I was utterly unfit. A celibate life was the only answer, but how was celibacy going to be possible for me outside the walls of a monastery?
I knew myself too well not to experience another wave of despair at this point, and suddenly I was reviewing with a bleak clinical eye all my sexual responses to the world to which I had returned. They had ranged from the innocent pleasure of watching a pretty girl cross a road to the salacious stimulation of seeing scantily-clad women in newspaper photographs, from the harmless day-dreams of courting an ideal woman to the obsessive knowledge that it was now within my power to dress as a layman, take a ‘bus into central Starmouth and commit fornication. In the cloister I could have confessed all the ‘impure thoughts’, poured out all my difficulties and somehow, with sympathetic counselling, won the battle for serenity and self-control. I would have been helped also by having my work to
distract me, and in caring for others I would have been too busy to waste time agonizing over myself. But now I was alone, without work, without regular spiritual counselling, without, so far as I could see, any hope of a conventional happiness in the future. For one long moment, as my spirits hit rock-bottom, I doubted my ability to survive as a priest.