Finally the worst happened. Guests arrived who were incapable of either tact or discretion, and I was obliged to engage directly with their curiosity.
I had arrived at Allington Court on a Wednesday. On Saturday several guests departed and various newcomers took their place. At my table the retired priest Mr Staples and his ingenuous wife left after breakfast and at luncheon I found that their vacant chairs had been claimed by a middle-aged churchwarden called Braithwaite, a tiresome officious fellow who I had no doubt was a sore trial to his vicar, and by his wife, a woman who made Trollope’s Mrs Proudie seem humility personified. As soon as they found out who I was they besieged me with questions. Why had I become a monk? What was the point of it? Didn’t I think it wrong for an able-bodied man to be idle when he could be doing something socially useful? Didn’t I think the monastic hatred of women was unhealthy? Didn’t separation from women and the world lead to a grossly abnormal existence? How had I survived for seventeen years in such an environment? Significantly it occurred to neither of them to ask why I had left the Order; they merely leapt to the conclusion that I had at last come to my senses after a prolonged aberration.
When I was given a chance to reply to their bigoted, ignorant and ill-natured tirade I said with an iron courtesy: ‘First, I became a monk because God called me to do so; argument would have been not only impertinent but irreverent. Second, the point of being a monk is primarily to obey the great commandment: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might,” so I most certainly wasn’t idle. Also, in addition to worshipping God for several hours each day, I worked at various times as a
domestic servant, a farmhand, a carpenter, a teacher, a counsellor and a managing director. I could even claim to have been “socially useful”, since I helped various people in the world to overcome their problems, but even if I hadn’t been “socially useful” why should that have invalidated my work for God? You can’t define what God requires of us in terms of social utility, and indeed it’s perfectly possible for work to be socially useful yet spiritually irrelevant. As for monastic mysogyny I can assure you that if monks do hate women they shouldn’t, and indeed from my experience I believe that monks are more inclined than their brothers in the world to believe the great Christian proclamation that men and women are of equal value in God’s sight. Does separation from women and the world lead to a grossly abnormal existence? It leads to a fundamentally different existence, certainly, but I suspect the people who would call it grossly abnormal are merely frightened of a nonconformity which calls their own so-called normality into question. You ask how I survived for seventeen years as a monk, and I’ll tell you: I survived because I was happy and fulfilled, doing the work which I had been called by God to do, and because I was healthier in mind, body and spirit than I had ever been in my life before.’
‘Well said, Darrow!’ exclaimed Professor Haydock, who had clearly taken a dislike to the newcomers. Only the previous day he had been mooting the idea that monasticism had no place in the modern world.
‘Well, I’m sure none of us would question your sincerity, Mr Darrow,’ said Braithwaite, grudgingly retreating an inch from his entrenched position, but his wife had resolved to stand firm. ‘I still say,’ she declared, ‘that it’s not a natural life for a man.’
Professor Haydock said dryly: ‘I rather doubt that it’s theologically possible for God to call a man to an unnatural life. How would you define “natural”, may I ask, madam?’
‘Being natural,’ said Mrs Braithwaite, bristling with hostility, ‘means living with a wife and two children in a nice little house and going to church on Sundays – and if you’d ever done
that,
Mr Darrow,’ she added, turning on me, ‘we might find your defence of the monastic life more convincing.’
‘My dear Mrs Braithwaite,’ I said, ‘before I became a monk I spent nine years of my life living with my wife and two children in a nice little house and going to church on Sundays.’ Tossing aside my napkin I rose to my feet, murmured: ‘I wish you all a pleasant afternoon,’ and walked away.
‘Game, set and match …’ breathed Miss Tarantino enrapt, and I heard the Professor give his short caustic laugh.
Ten minutes later, feeling thoroughly disturbed, I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree which lay by the lake on the far side of the grounds, and contemplated my latest failure to adjust satisfactorily to the world. I was well aware that I had behaved badly. I should have resisted the urge to make Mrs Braithwaite look ridiculous; I should have met her bigotry with a charitable silence – or at the very most with a quiet observation that I had once been a married man – and feeling not only ashamed of the anger which had impelled me to humiliate an ignorant and possibly unhappy woman, but also profoundly worried by my persistent sense of alienation from those around me, I decided to retire to my room to pray.
Retracing my footsteps I entered the house by the garden-door and walked down the corridor to the hall. No one was about. In the middle of the afternoon at Allington the guests were either reading, resting or outside enjoying the hot August weather. I was deep in thought as I endeavoured to recall a suitable text for meditation, and as I crossed the hall I might well have remained unaware of my surroundings if some mysterious antenna had not twitched in my psyche.
I stopped. I knew I could not go on without glancing around the hall. Slowly, very slowly, I turned my head towards the front door and there, far away by the door of the Warden’s reception room, stood the beige suitcase with the dark brown corners.
I waited for it to vanish but it remained visible and – apparently – tangible. At once I thought I was hallucinating. I knew I was in a troubled, psychically unreliable state. If this vision
was another ‘showing’, sent by God to strengthen my faith, why was the suitcase still visible? It should have been wiped from the retina of my mind within seconds, but there it remained, as solid and three-dimensional as any other object which existed in a temporal spatial world. My mouth was dry. Sliding my tongue around my lips I squeezed my eyes shut, took a deep breath and nerved myself to have another look.
The suitcase was still there. Moreover every other item in the hall looked wholly real. I saw no distortion of colour, no six naked women prancing on the carpet. My heart was now beating with unprecedented violence. Moving awkwardly, in the manner of a man wading upstream against a swift current, I reached out to touch the bannisters. They were solid. I edged forward just as the grandfather clock chimed three. Without doubt I was in finite time, and the suitcase, already substantial, became even more substantial as I edged closer. I could see the Cunard label clearly enough to realize that it was exactly as I had perceived it during my spasm of clairvoyance in the infirmary, and tied to the handle was the brown label which I knew would reveal the name of the owner.
Running the last six paces I sank down on one knee and grabbed the suitcase with both hands.
It was real. The expensive leather, a little scuffed in places but still in good condition, was sumptuously smooth beneath my fingers and as I caressed it I was suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that God should have finally brought his communication out of my psyche into the world of the five senses. For a second I was well-nigh paralysed with relief, wonder and above all an intense gratitude. Then just as I had pulled myself together sufficiently to grab the brown label to unlock the mystery of the owner’s identity a cool voice demanded behind me: ‘Can I help you?’ and I knew the intuition I had voiced to Francis had been correct.
The owner was a woman.
‘The mystic always finds it difficult, if not impossible, to describe what he has seen and felt. An experience recollected is not the same as an experience felt … If he wishes to make it available for other people, he must reconstruct and interpret and translate, as it were, into another language.’
W. R. INGE
Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1954
Lay Thoughts of a Dean
I leapt to my feet. The woman had obviously just emerged from the Warden’s reception room for the door was now ajar, but my absorption in the suitcase had been so deep that I had failed to hear either her approach or the distant voice of the Warden as he conducted a telephone conversation which, as I now realized, was still in progress.
I stared at her. If I had expected to see someone as alluring as Miss Tarantino – and of course I had – I had been doomed to disappointment. This woman was tall and somewhat stout. She wore a felt hat crammed down over short dark hair, hornrimmed spectacles, a coat and skirt of a severe shade of grey, a white blouse devoid of frills, thick brown stockings and a pair of heavy walking-shoes. I classed her as a forty-five-year-old spinster, probably a schoolmistress, possibly a missionary newly returned from organizing the natives in some obscure comer of the Empire. Then I noticed that her neck was unlined, her skin was fresh and her eyes were uncrinkled at the corners. Knocking fifteen years off her age I decided she was a business-woman,
the private secretary of some gentleman who required a plain employee in order to allay the fears of a jealous wife. On the other hand the woman’s voice, which was not merely well-bred but ‘county’, suggested I was confronting a lady of leisure. I was aware then of a mystery, a conundrum.
All these thoughts raced through my mind in seconds while simultaneously I tried to decide how I could explain my bizarre embrace of her suitcase. At last I said: ‘I do beg your pardon but I thought I’d seen this bag somewhere before.’ It takes a great deal to make me behave like an embarrassed schoolboy but I felt more gauche than I had felt for over forty years. I even wondered in horror if I were blushing. My face felt abnormally hot.
The Warden chose that moment to emerge from his room. ‘So sorry to keep you waiting!’ he said to the woman. ‘It’s amazing how often the telephone goes at the wrong moment – ah, I see you’ve just met Mr Darrow! Or are you perhaps already acquainted? No? Then let me introduce you: Mr Darrow – Miss Fielding; Miss Fielding – Mr Darrow.’ He beamed at us, stooped to pick up the suitcase, winced at its weight and set it down again. ‘One moment, Miss Fielding – I’ll just summon Arthur,’ he said, naming the burly yokel who was employed to flex his muscles when required, and bustled off towards the green baize door.
I said to Miss Fielding: ‘How do you do,’ and held out my hand.
‘How do you do,’ said Miss Fielding, clasping and dropping it without enthusiasm. Behind her glasses her eyes were a cold suspicious blue.
‘Arthur! Arthur!’ the Warden was calling in the mellow bass voice which resonated so impressively in the chapel during the daily prayers.
I said to the woman: ‘If you’ll excuse me –’
‘Of course.’ She turned aside as if she had completely lost interest.
I have no memory of the journey to my room. All I remember is slamming the door, slumping on the bed and shuddering
with amazement as I asked myself if the key to my future could possibly lie in the hands of such an exceedingly unprepossessing young woman.
Since my arrival at Allington I had consistently avoided afternoon tea, a meal which I found both tedious and unnecessary, but that afternoon I was already loafing in the drawing-room as the waitress wheeled in the urn. The decision had been made to serve the meal on the terrace in order to take advantage of the fine weather, and I was just helping the Warden’s wife to steer the trolley of crockery and cucumber sandwiches through the French windows when Dr Sheen himself crossed the lawn towards us.
Having cornered him I asked what connection his latest guest had with the Church, but to my disappointment he was vague.
‘She comes from Starbridge where everyone seems to live in the shadow of the Cathedral,’ he said, ‘but otherwise I know of no reason why she should stay at a clerical establishment like Allington.’
This is her first visit?’
‘No, she’s stayed here every August for the past five years, although of course I only met her when I took up my appointment in ‘38. However I regret to say I know her no better now than when I first met her. She keeps herself very much to herself and I’m afraid she’s dreadfully shy, poor girl.’
‘She didn’t strike me as shy. In fact I thought she was unusually self-confident,’ I said, but the Warden had been diverted by a summons from his wife and at that point our conversation ended.
Accepting a cup of tea at the urn I waited for Miss Fielding to arrive but all that happened was that I was buttonholed by various guests with whom I had no wish to converse. Finally Miss Fielding made her appearance, but before I could detach
myself from my group she had collected her tea, grabbed a sandwich and retreated to a seat on the far side of the lawn.
‘That’s Miss Fielding,’ said the shrewd clerical widow Mrs Digby unexpectedly. ‘She was here last year – a very strange woman, anti-social to the point of rudeness. Puzzling, I thought, because she’s definitely a lady and one would expect her to behave with more grace.’
‘Maybe she’s shy,’ said Miss Tarantino. ‘I’m shy myself sometimes – it’s so disabling.’ She smiled up at me. ‘Why are you so interested in the new arrival, Mr Darrow? You’ve been watching her ever since she came out of the house.’
‘Anti-social people interest me,’ I said vaguely, and beat a swift retreat to my room.
From my window I continued to observe Miss Fielding. When she returned her cup and saucer and headed back across the lawn towards the woods I padded downstairs again, slipped out of the garden-door and made an elaborate detour to avoid being seen by the people on the terrace. Then I plunged into the woods in pursuit of my quarry.