I had booked a room with an adjoining bathroom at the Crusader, the most comfortable hotel in Starbridge. I still had no money of my own, but when I had recently opened a bank account in the city the bank manager had had no trouble persuading himself that he should be obliging to a priest who gave the Bishop’s name as a reference. Anne had offered to contribute to the cost of the honeymoon but I had refused. Years of bringing up a family on a modest clerical stipend had taught me how to make a little money go a long way, and although I deemed it essential to spend lavishly on the all-important first night I had made more modest arrangements for the remainder of the honeymoon.
As soon as we had been shown to our luxurious chamber I took Anne in my arms, kissed her and said: ‘I don’t want to wait a moment longer.’
She seemed to find this statement eminently reasonable.
We went to bed.
At the risk of sounding calculating I must confess that I had spent much time plotting the opening manoeuvres of my honeymoon, and I had come to the practical if unromantic conclusion that my first task was to attend not to Anne’s nerves but to my own. To put the matter bluntly, one cannot rescue the maiden in distress unless one’s rescue equipment is in working order, and although the evidence suggested that advancing years and a celibate life had not resulted in a fatal atrophy I was still haunted by the knowledge that I was a sixty-year-old man who had not been intimate with a woman for seventeen years. Impotence, that dread state, is so often born not in the body but in the mind, and my mind, chaotic with passion and anxiety as soon as the blind was drawn, was at that moment hardly an example of masterly self-control.
I tried to concentrate on essential matters. I let her keep on her petticoat, first because she made no move to take it off and second because I thought she might be more inclined to relax behind some camouflage; her nakedness was a non-essential delight which could be saved for later. I myself took off all my clothes but that was for utilitarian purposes. I wanted nothing to obstruct my movements or mar my concentration.
It was essential, I considered, that we should be in a sensual environment so I was relieved to discover that the double-bed was wickedly soft while the linen sheets were voluptuously smooth. So far so good. It was also good that Anne was willing – shy, anxious but willing; I had been afraid of a last-minute panic. I wondered whether I should murmur something soothing in order to encourage the willingness and damp down the
anxiety, but I was too afraid that words could only be banal in such circumstances so I remained silent.
As I began to kiss her I became aware that I was sweating. That worried me. Honest sweat has its place in the human condition but that place is not, I fear, between the sumptuous sheets of a double-bed on the first night of a honeymoon. I started to wonder feverishly about strokes and heart attacks, but managed to convince myself that hypochondria, like Anne’s nakedness, was merely a non-essential refinement which could be saved for later.
By this time I had obtained the only physical reaction which was of any importance but before I could savour my relief I found myself plunged into the anxiety that I might be incompetent. The anxiety was heightened by the fact that I was now confronting the difficulty of consummating the marriage without causing pain; Anne’s virginity might be non-existent but I was sure her bad memories were doubling by the second. I tried to stroke her soothingly but the next moment I realized I was dicing with disaster by attempting a postponement, and after seventeen years of celibacy I was in no position to dice with anything. I pressed on. My psyche was reeling as if it were punch-drunk. Emotion roared through my body like a tidal wave.
To my relief Anne continued to cling to me but she was so tense that I knew I must be hurting her. Deeply troubled I paused, trying to decide how I might best help her relax, but when she moved, unnerved by my stillness and wanting, I knew, only to please me by an active response, the moment came and the wave broke. I had been inside her for no more than a dozen seconds.
I kissed her, rolled on to my back, stared up at the ceiling, thanked God that the marriage was at least consummated, and realized I was exhausted. I would have felt happy but I was too worried about Anne. Rolling over towards her again I gathered her in my arms and told her how much she was loved.
She said in a small voice: ‘But I wasn’t much good, was I?’
‘Don’t steal my lines – and don’t talk as if you’re a performing
seal at a circus! We’re here to love each other, not to bring an audience cheering to its feet.’
She smiled. Using my last particle of strength I smiled back, kissed her again and sank like a stone into oblivion.
I awoke when the scars on my back began to tingle. For one confused moment I thought I was back in the London punishment cell, and shouting: ‘No!’ at the top of my voice I sat bolt upright in bed.
Anne, who had been caressing the scars with her forefinger, gasped in fright and at once I pulled her into my arms. Then I waited for her to ask about the scars. Betty would have asked. Hilda would have asked. Every other woman I had ever known except my mother would have asked, but Anne was silent and suddenly my good fortune overwhelmed me. I had waited sixty years for the right woman and finally I had found her. It seemed almost too good to be true. Perhaps it was indeed too good to be true. Perhaps it would all end in disaster. Perhaps –
‘Anne, don’t leave me.’
‘Don’t
what
?’ Anne was justifiably astounded by this idiocy, but although I struggled to pull myself together I could only tighten my clasp and remain silent.
‘Silly man!’ said Anne at last, wisely deciding to gloss over my insanity by adopting a brisk practical manner. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ And when she stroked my hair to soothe me I belatedly remembered that I was supposed to be soothing her.
Propping myself on one elbow I said firmly: ‘Don’t worry about anything. What happened just now was a mere handshake. The real dialogue has yet to begin, but there’s no rush. We’ll let it develop at its own pace.’
I saw her relax. No threatening demands were being made; our marital relationship would evolve steadily; there was plenty of time.
‘I’ll be all right in the end, won’t I?’ she said, touching in her vulnerability.
We’ll both be all right,’ I said with all the confidence at my command, and when she smiled at me in relief I felt sure I could ring down the curtain on her past as successfully as I had rung down the curtain on my own.
After this bout of arrogance had lured me into underestimating the problem some time elapsed before I realized that Anne’s liberation from her past was going to prove more difficult than I had anticipated. Perhaps I was too busy weaving my new experience into the fabric of my life; I found myself thinking often of the Order, of the difficult days which had resulted in spiritual growth, and I felt glad that I could still recall my years as a monk without any sense of time wasted. My monastic experience had made me the man I was and that man was the man Anne loved. I wondered if she would have loved the unhappy priest who had jilted Hilda, and thought not.
I remembered my past with Betty too and wondered if the scars on my psyche would be finally cauterized by my new marriage or whether they would always remain, like the scars on my back, to remind me of past suffering. However such speculation was difficult, reminding me that I had not been honest with Anne about my children, and soon I gave way to the urge to consign all thought of my first marriage to the very back of my mind.
On the morning after our wedding we departed by train for Dorset where we were received at our small, modest but not uncomfortable inn (recommended by Charles) with a very civil hospitality. To our pleasure we found that our room faced across the low cliffs to the sea and was marred only by the presence on one wall of a sentimental canine portrait which, much to Anne’s amusement, I immediately incarcerated in the wardrobe. Despite the existence of indoor plumbing I did suffer
a pang of anxiety that Anne might find the inn too primitive, but to my relief she insisted that the simplicity delighted her.
The October weather was dry, enabling us to take long walks along the cliffs above the shingle beach, and the sight of the sea affected me deeply; I forgot the horror of the Battle of Jutland and thought only of the good times I had enjoyed in the Navy when the sea had represented freedom and the chance to draw closer to God. I began to talk in more detail to Anne about my years in the Navy, and when I told her I had decided to be a sailor at the age of eight after my mother had taken me on an excursion to the seaside, she began to talk not only about her own mother, whom she had already described in loving detail, but about her adored dead brother as well. Then gradually as she talked a third figure began to permeate the conversation until suddenly I saw that here at last stood my true adversary as I struggled to sever Anne from her unhappy past. The fiancé had certainly been a disaster for her, but the seeds of his destructive behaviour had fallen on ground well-cultivated to receive them. Beyond the fiancé, beyond the broken engagement, lurked the household idol called DADDY whose influence lingered on malignly so many years after his death.
That was when I realized that healing Anne was going to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The straightforward ravages of the fiancé could be erased by a sustained diet of patience and gentleness, but the subtle sinister crippling wrought by DADDY was far more difficult to obliterate, and as the picture emerged of an arrogant autocrat who had given her such a poor sense of her own worth as a woman a terrible truth began to crawl out of the darkest corner of my mind into the light. I realized that DADDY was not unfamiliar to me; in fact he was a man I knew all too well.
‘Daddy did love me,’ said Anne, ‘but he loved my brother better because Gerald was the boy and more like him than I was. I tried so hard to please him, but no matter how hard I tried I never felt I was succeeding and that made me feel so sad
and upset. It was as if he never saw
me
at all – he just saw a girl who wasn’t the sort of child he wanted, and then I’d feel so humiliated, so second-rate, such a failure. Of course he pretended I was wonderful, but I knew it was just a pretence; it was as if he couldn’t accept me as I was so he had to pretend I was someone quite different, and looking back I can see he made the same mistake with Gerald when he set him up on a pedestal and idolized him …
‘I’m glad Gerald wasn’t younger dian I was. If he’d been younger I’d have hated him for being the favourite, but as he was five years my senior I grew up hero-worshipping him and the hero-worship elbowed all jealousy aside. It took me a long time to see how flawed he was. He was so athletic, so good-looking, so charming – and I was so plain, so shy, so hopeless at games and so useless with animals that I couldn’t even learn to ride properly. Poor Daddy! I was such a disappointment to him. No wonder he preferred Gerald …
‘The situation got even worse when I was an adolescent. It was so awful when Mummy died – well, I don’t have to tell
you,
do I, what hell it is to lose one’s mother when one’s fourteen – but it was awful for me in all sorts of stupid ways which used to depress me so dreadfully and make me feel more inferior than ever. For instance, there was no one to advise me about clothes and I’m sure I always looked a fright and I never knew how to endure parties. Coming out was a nightmare – ugh! How I hated it! Poor Daddy was quite mortified by my lack of social success, and I felt so miserable because I knew I was letting him down.
‘Gerald was a great social success, but although his girlfriends thought he was a story-book hero, all glamour and courage, he wasn’t. He wasn’t like that at all. Underneath the glamour he was frightened, frightened of not being the sort of man Daddy wanted him to be, frightened of being a failure and a disappointment …
‘I thought he’d be better once Daddy was dead – I thought we’d both be better – but I was wrong. We still felt guilty, I because I hadn’t been the kind of daughter Daddy had wanted
and Gerald because he knew he couldn’t live up to this idealized image which Daddy had created. So we both tried in different ways to escape from our guilt. I fell in love with Hugo; I think I knew from the start that there was something off-colour about the romance, but I just thought how pleased Daddy would have been that I’d got off the shelf. Then Gerald tried to escape by abandoning the estate and leading a wild life in London. He got in a mess in the end, of course – some woman or other, and I knew he was drinking too much – and when my engagement was broken off he was relieved to have a good excuse to turn his back on his problems in order to take me on holiday.
When he was drowned I – no, I never thought it was suicide and the verdict was accidental death, but sometimes I think it was as if he subconsciously preferred death to life. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? But I think that sometimes the truth is very terrible and there’s nothing one can do but stare it straight in the face in order to master it and go on.
‘And I did go on after Gerald’s death. The estate was in the red and I knew I had to save it because it was all I had left, but after a while I became aware that I wasn’t acting through self-interest or even on account of a pious family feeling. I was saving the estate in order to show Daddy that I wasn’t the second-rate creature he’d always thought I was; I was saving it to show him that in the end it was the despised daughter, not the idolized son, who was following so successfully in his footsteps. Isn’t that odd? I was behaving as if he were still alive to see me, and sometimes I feel almost as if he
can
see me, although I don’t truly believe he’s a disembodied spirit perpetually looking over my shoulder … Jon, what does happen to the dead? What do heaven and hell really mean? What do you think really goes on?’