‘That sounds as if you want to have a holiday from me.’
‘Oh you silly man, don’t talk such nonsense!’
‘I’m not complaining about my work – please don’t think I’m complaining –’
‘I know you’re not and sometimes I worry about that too. I don’t think it’s good for you to bottle everything up and pretend that everything in the garden’s lovely –’
‘Everything in the garden
is
lovely,’ I said firmly. ‘I just have one or two little difficulties at the moment, that’s all.’
But although Anne made no effort to argue further with me I suspected that I had only partially alleviated her concern.
That night I was unable to consummate my marriage. It was not the first time such a failure had occurred after a long hard day’s labour in the parish, but now in my depression I felt doubly humiliated, doubly angry and – worst of all – doubly frightened about the future.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I muttered to Anne, although she had given no indication that she was about to speak, and then before I could stop myself I was sliding into the most shameful tantrum. ‘How I hate being sixty!’ I burst out. ‘I hate it, hate it, hate it!’ But immediately I despised myself for being too exhausted to suppress the urge to complain.
After a while Anne said: ‘Am I allowed to speak now?’
‘Yes, but don’t tell me not to mind about being sixty.’ I was so miserable that I sounded like a thoroughly irascible old man.
Anne said gently: ‘I was going to remind you of our honeymoon. Do you remember when you said: “Don’t talk as if you’re a performing seal in a circus”?’
‘Maybe one day you’ll decide you’d be better off with a performing seal.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jon!’ Understandably she lost patience. ‘Stop being so damn ridiculous!’
Fear grabbed me by the throat and settled there in a lump. Burying my face in her breasts I tried to apologize but no words came. I was quite unable to speak.
‘Silly man!’ said Anne, somehow recapturing her patience and even lovingly stroking my hair. ‘What’s one night? As if it mattered!’
But it mattered to me.
I lay awake worrying in the dark.
Two days later at Matins every pew was occupied and afterwards a long queue of people formed to shake my hand as if they wanted to sample my ‘magic touch’. A beaming Mrs Purvis announced: ‘I told everyone how your hands gave off those funny electric shocks, Vicar!’ and her husband, who was clearly enjoying his wife’s new fame, declared admiringly: ‘Reckon we’ve got a magician for a parson!’ I did say austerely that the practice of magic would hardly have been a fitting occupation for a priest, but nobody was listening. My parishioners were too busy asking me to call on aged relatives housebound by rheumatism, arthritis, lumbago, sciatica and a host of other debilitating complaints, and although I was careful to refer to the doctor anyone who had not received a professional diagnosis, I promised to call on the chronic cases which could no longer be helped by orthodox medicine.
I regret to say I found this deep interest in me immensely stimulating, and that afternoon when I should have been praying quietly in preparation for Evensong I was in such good spirits that I retired to bed with my wife and made amends in no uncertain fashion for my failure two days earlier.
‘Thank goodness you got over that depression!’ said Anne afterwards. ‘But after all the hordes in church this morning it’s small wonder that you’re in a good mood. Don’t you think it’s obvious now that you’re being called to the ministry of healing?’
I knew the correct reply was: ‘I must continue to pray for guidance,’ but when I saw the passionate enthusiasm in her eyes the words were never spoken. I could only bask in the warmth of her unstinted admiration and eventually I found myself reflecting that it did indeed seem as if my new call had begun to unfold.
I could do little for the housebound old people although they all seemed determined to believe that I had relieved their pain to some degree. I suspected that they derived comfort principally from the fact that someone in authority was prepared to listen sympathetically to their troubles, but by this time the village was more than ready to believe their parson had miraculous powers and I was just wondering how I should deal with the continuing stream of requests for help when I received a visit from the local doctor.
Dr Garrison was a man in his fifties with a bluff hearty manner and a resolute atheism courteously expressed. At our first meeting he had said: I wish you well, Darrow, and if there’s anything I can do for you let me know, but I’m afraid you won’t see me in church because I’m a practical down-to-earth fellow who hasn’t time for theories which can’t be scientifically proved.’ In other words he acknowledged only five senses and was determined to justify this limitation by embracing logical positivism. However plenty of excellent people are logical positivists, and since he had tried in his own way to give me a friendly welcome to the parish I had seen no reason to dislike him.
‘Well, I won’t beat about the bush,’ he said, bustling into the vestry and flinging himself down in the visitor’s chair. ‘What’s all this I hear about faith-healing? I wouldn’t have thought a man of your distinction would dabble in quackery, Darrow!’
‘You thought correctly.’
Garrison at once became irritated, and beyond the irritation I sensed his fear of matters which defied conventional explanations. Then perhaps you’d be good enough to explain the incident with Mrs Purvis,’ he said abruptly. ‘How did you remove the symptoms of her lumbago?’
‘I offered myself to God as a channel for the healing power of the Holy Spirit.’
He went scarlet. ‘Don’t joke about this, please. It’s a serious matter.’
‘I don’t joke about God. I’m a priest.’
‘You may be a clergyman – why do you have to use a damn Papist word like “priest”? – but you’re behaving like a witch-doctor! Don’t you know that removing symptoms by hypnosis can lead to a serious illness remaining undiagnosed?’
‘You diagnosed the lumbago in this case. I would never attempt to help anyone who hadn’t first consulted a doctor, nor would I ever attempt to help anyone solely by using hypnotic techniques. The charism of healing can’t be reduced to a parlour-trick.’
‘No? It looks damnably like a parlour-trick to me!’
‘Dr Garrison,’ I said, ‘you may choose to confine yourself within the narrow boundaries of medical science, but I fail to see why those you can’t help should be similarly confined.’
He was incensed. ‘That’s a highly offensive remark!’
‘Not half so offensive as your accusation that a gift from God is a man-made trick. Now may I suggest we conduct the conversation in a calmer, more rational manner? I’m not trying to steal your patients. I’m simply offering comfort to sick people by praying that the Holy Spirit will use me to ease their dis-ease, and if you’re the sensible down-to-earth fellow you’re always claiming to be you’ll now ask yourself why we shouldn’t work in harmony.’
‘I’m not lending my support to any goings-on which reek of superstitious quackery, and if I find you’re wreaking havoc among my patients I’ll bloody well lodge a complaint with your Bishop!’
‘Why are you so upset, Garrison? What is it you’re really afraid of here?’
‘
Afraid?
Damn you, I’m not afraid of anything!’
‘Then may I suggest you stop behaving as the Church behaved when the scientists first suggested the world wasn’t quite so flat as everyone had always thought it was?’
He stormed out and slammed the door.
‘Silly old duffer!’ said Anne that evening.
‘He did indeed behave very stupidly, but I should have resisted the temptation to put him in his place.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Anne. ‘It’ll do him good! He’s become much too bossy, and I’ve a good mind to transfer my allegiance to Charles’ friend Dr Romaine in Starvale St James.’
This certainly was a development I had not anticipated, and my instinctive response was one of alarm. Dr Romaine ‘had a past’, as we used to say so euphemistically in the 1890s, and although he had been living a life of flawless respectability with his third wife for some years I could not help but feel lukewarm about the prospect of him attending an attractive young woman of thirty-two who also – and here, of course, lay the rub – happened to be my wife. However since all my information about Romaine had come from confidential talks with Charles, I was unable to explain my feelings to Anne and had to content myself with remarking: ‘Romaine’s in his late sixties. Wouldn’t you prefer a younger man?’
‘No,’ said Anne, responding in a way I might have predicted if I had been less absorbed in thoughts of Romaine’s ‘past’. ‘I like doctors to be fatherly.’
‘I’m sure Garrison will start behaving sensibly once he calms down –’
‘I doubt that very much,’ said Anne frankly, and her doubt was soon justified. When my offer of peaceful co-existence was spurned a second time I decided I should leave him to wrestle alone with his secret insecurity, and at that point Anne, exasperated by Garrison’s pigheadedness, called on Dr Romaine.
As I well knew from my conversations with Charles, Romaine was a man of considerable charm and guile. The result of the interview did not surprise me but I did not like to think of Anne being charmed and beguiled by a member of my own
generation, and it cost me a great effort to retain a benign expression as she embarked on her paean of praise.
‘He was absolutely delightful!’ she exclaimed. ‘We talked for ages – he’d heard all about you from Charles, of course, and almost before I knew what was happening I was telling him about the healing. Darling, he was fascinated! He told me some amazing stories of healers in the East – apparently he lived for years in Hong-Kong, and his second wife was a Chinese Christian who firmly convinced him that all healing came from God –’
That was the moment when I bowed to the inevitable and acknowledged that Dr Romaine, clever Dr Romaine, had acquired another devoted patient. However I feared the rift with Garrison would become impossible to heal now that my wife had abandoned him, and my gloom increased the next day when I heard he had been invited to dine with Pitkin. The thought of a Pitkin-Garrison axis was most depressing.
By this time I was so frequently interrupted by parishioners in search of healing that it was becoming difficult for me to work in the vestry, and I was just toying with the idea that I might hold a special service in order to satisfy all the sick simultaneously when something happened which deflected me abruptly from any thought of my new calling.
Anne, returning from a second visit to Dr Romaine, announced that she was having a baby.
There had been physical indications that conception had occurred but I had dismissed them as mere passing phenomena which were of no significance. I knew that part of Anne’s interest in Romaine might have stemmed from his reputation as an obstetrician, but I had chosen not to dwell on this aspect of his practice. The truth was that by this time I had successfully hypnotized myself into believing I was sterile – once a man turned sixty surely fertility if not potency abruptly declined? –
and fortified by this new-found faith I had regularly dismissed as impossible any hint that I might still be capable of begetting a second family. With this pathetic defence now brutally shattered, I found myself confronted by a truth I was unable to endure. Mechanically I tried to tell myself that God had seen fit to bless my marriage in the best possible way, but I found this statement represented a platitude which was beyond my power to believe. I could only reflect with horror that having bestowed on me the great blessing of a loving wife God had now decided to crush us both by imposing a burden I was quite unfit to bear.
I panicked. My guilt about the past, laced now with a terror of the future, produced a lethal despair. I felt rebellious towards God – a disastrous state of mind for a priest – and my rebellion cut me off from him. Hell is being cut off from God. I was in torment.
But of course I could disclose no hint of this torment to Anne.
‘How very exciting!’ I said as soon as she broke the news, and before my face could betray me I drew her into my arms for an embrace.
‘Now look here,’ said Anne, giving me a jolt by disengaging herself and adopting her sternest voice, ‘it’s going to be all right. You’ll still have your peace and privacy – you won’t be drowned this time beneath a tidal wave of disorder – and the baby will quite definitely be a good thing. It’ll keep you young in outlook and soften the awfulness of being over sixty.’
‘My dear Anne, you’re preaching to the converted! I’m absolutely delighted by the news, and it gives me the very greatest pleasure to see you so happy.’
I retired to my cell. Prayer was impossible. I could only sit on my wooden chair and wrestle with the demon despair. My psyche was writhing like a flogged snake. I tried to stroke it with various meditation techniques but when it became more contorted than ever I began to be afraid of uncontrolled bursts of kinetic energy. I tried to expel the energy by willing my pencil to fall off the table, but nothing happened. I was unable
to channel the energy effectively, and rising to my feet I decided to go to Starwater to talk to Cyril.
But then I sat down again. What could a man who had never been a husband and father know of the terrible conflicts which were now grinding my psyche towards dementia? I thought how I enjoyed and needed marital intimacy yet often found it a physical strain and an emotional burden which interfered with my inner life; I thought how I wanted to give Anne a child yet recoiled from all thought of fatherhood; I thought how my great longing for solitude was juxtaposed with my deep fear of losing Anne’s companionship. How could I even begin to explain these tortuous paradoxes to either Cyril or Francis? No childless celibate, no matter how sophisticated, could possibly understand. Indeed so bizarre did the paradoxes seem that I began to doubt that anyone on earth was capable of understanding them. It was at this point that I automatically turned back to God, and overwhelmed by the compulsion to bridge the abyss which separated us I decided to retreat to the chapel to make another desperate attempt at prayer.