The Philosopher's Pupil (23 page)

Saint Paul's Church, Victoria Park, built in 1860 by an admirer of William Butterfield, was a huge barn-like structure, without side aisles, dominated by the towering gilded reredos. (The rood screen, by Ninian Comper, has been added later.) The dwindling worshippers sat in some stocky modern pews near the east end, leaving the large space behind to be occupied by Victorian ghosts. There were four suitably bedizened side chapels, mere recesses however, not the encrusted caves which Father Bernard would have preferred. The walls of the church were decorated by a large solemn play of reddish and yellowish bricks and tiles, now revealed almost in its entirety since many of the Victorian funeral monuments had been shaken down by the wartime bomb which destroyed the tower and the Rectory. Post-war austerity had not restored these relics which languished in the crypt, ignored by Father Bernard who found the walls quite glorious enough as they were, assuming that they could not be covered by oriental hangings. The floor was paved by matching tiles, bearing many ingenious geometric devices and stylized flowers, from which Father Bernard had stripped away the senseless modern carpets installed by his predecessor. Persian rugs would have been acceptable, but the days of rich patrons were over. There was, one of the last donations, one lonely tapestry hanging under the west window, designed by Ned Larkin, representing Christ as a very pale clean-shaven young working man, holding with evident anxiety the tools of a carpenter. (The same donor had contributed a John the Baptist by a pupil of Eric Gill.) The exquisite rood screen had been miraculously undamaged by the bomb, as had the Victorian glass which a zealous rector had taken down and stored. It was without special merit but ensured darkness.

Father Bernard loved his church and its high Anglican tradition which he did not let down but rather quietly elevated as far as he was able. (Mr Elsworthy at St Olaf's catered for the lower brethren.) He had however suffered various defeats at the hands of his bishop. He no longer heard confessions, although there was a beautiful confessional, gaudy as a sedan chair, which a devotee had brought over from Germany. His plain-song choir had ceased to be, and he now only said one Latin mass a month. He still otherwise made exclusive use of Cranmer's Prayer Book although he had been expressly told not to. In return for being allowed to muffle the crucifixes during Lent, he had surrendered no less than three plaster madonnas. He did this, however, with feigned reluctance, since he was not interested in the cult of the Virgin, and it did no harm to have a grievance. Someone, he did not know who, appeared to be informing on him to the bishop. He did not yearn for the big Victorian rectory but lived modestly in a small ‘clergy house' where he looked after himself, could reasonably dispense with pretentious ‘entertaining', and was able to practise his private cults unmolested. He had no curate: better so, any curate now would be an episcopal spy. He was well aware of his reputation for being ‘not a priest but a shaman'. He did not mind. Salvation itself was magic: total redemption by cosmic act of the whole visible world. His own cruder spells, material symbols of a spiritual grace, were surely acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Father Bernard had ceased to believe in God. As he paced often alone in his large handsome church he felt increasingly conscious of the absence of God, the presence of Christ. But his Christ was a mystical figure, the blond beardless youth of the early Church, not the tormented crucified one of flesh and blood.

Some of his parishioners once complained that Father Bernard's sermon on ‘prayer' consisted of advice about breathing exercises. Yet Father Bernard had once chattered freely to the Almighty; not to the stern Jewish God of his childhood, but to a milder and less manly deity. He had been a student at Birmingham where he studied chemistry and gained a black belt at judo. The hated chemistry was the last thing he did to please his earthly father, whose heart he broke-soon afterwards by his conversion to Christianity. Father Bernard carried that unhealed wound (that crime) secretly within him. His father, never reconciled, was dead now. Father Bernard could no longer commend him to God since that channel of communication was also closed. He often thought about his father, and about his darling mother who had been so dreadfully taken from him before he collapsed into the arms of Christ. He sat and breathed. He knelt and breathed. And every day, by the magic power which had been entrusted to him, he changed bread and wine into flesh and blood. He continued to revere this mystery and to find it endlessly and thrillingly arcane.

Father Bernard had long ago decreed solitude for himself: that included celibacy. He did not disapprove of homosexual love, and would have made the same decision if he had been heterosexual, which he was not. After messing about with human sexual adventures he decided to devote his love, that is his sexuality, to God. When God passed out of his life he loved Christ. When Christ began, so strangely, to withdraw and change he just sat, or knelt, and breathed in the presence of something or in the presence of nothing. He was never now seriously tempted to break his vow of chastity, but he remained, in the common abject sense, a sinner. He had considerably disturbed the equanimity of a young chorister whose hand he had sometimes held in the dark empty church after choir practice. (This was in the days of the plain-song choir, conducted by a Jonathan Treece, sadly gone from Ennistone. The musical art now depended on the simpler skills of lady organists.) Worse still, alarmed by his own feelings, Father Bernard had hurt the boy by suddenly ‘sheering off' without an explanation. This child, now a youth and no churchgoer, worked in London but occasionally, on visits to Ennistone, met Father Bernard in the street and cut him. This caused the priest much pain and obsessive sessions of planning how to ‘retrieve' a situation which was, he always had to conclude, better left alone. He could but hope that the main damage was to his own vanity. There were of course young men whom he simply could not get out of his head. Tom McCaffrey was one. Father Bernard had seen Tom grow from a schoolboy into a student. They met frequently. He would very much have liked to take Tom in his arms. Instead he lowered his eyes. Did Tom know? Perhaps.

Father Bernard was well and fairly calmly aware that in many ways he was a perfectly rotten priest. He celebrated, to his own personal satisfaction, the rites that pleased him, often with no one present but himself. He did not go round visiting, as his predecessor had done, and as he had done himself in his early days in the parish in Birmingham. He was uninterested in politics. He did not run debates, or discussion groups, or encounter groups, or a youth club, or a mothers' union, or a Sunday school. He liked to have his evenings to himself, after evensong, which he celebrated every day, usually alone. He wanted plenty of time to meditate and to read theological books which he perused with a kind of unholy excitement as if they were pornography. Occasionally he spent the evenings having long emotional talks with special penitents. He enjoyed that. He did not go out seeking sinners, but remained comfortably at the receipt of custom in case they should come seeking him. He had steady vaguely sentimental relationships with a small number of women (Diane was one, Gabriel would have been one too if it had not been for Brian) wherein he allowed himself a little bit of hand-holding. He knew how confoundedly lazy and selfish he was. But although this troubled him a little more than his heresy did, it did not trouble him very much. He knew the things which he absolutely must not do. He did not seriously consider that he ought to leave the priesthood. Only very lately had he begun to feel sometimes insecure. Was scandal possible, disgrace, banishment, after all?

Mass being over, he processed himself off the scene, took off his glittering vestments, and reappeared in his black cassock at the west door of the church in case anyone wanted to talk to him. Three of his communicants were there, Hector Gaines, Benning (whose first name was Robert) and Diane. Father Bernard made a bee-line for Benning, who was thin and large-eyed and looked touchingly starved, and shook him by the hand. ‘Glad to see you again, Bob. Do we call you Bob?'

‘Bobbie,' said the youth, blushing a little and holding on to the priest's hand.

‘That's good,' said Father Bernard, briskly releasing him. ‘Come again, won't you, Bobbie. Church is home.'

He turned to Diane, giving a friendly wave to Hector, which indicated to that intelligent fellow, with whom the priest was on close and amicable terms, that he did not want to talk to him just now.

Hector and Benning turned away together into the cold morning wind which was blowing a little rain.

‘Rum jerk,' said Bobbie.

‘Who?'

‘The parson.'

‘He's a
very nice
jerk,' said Hector, ‘and he knows
a lot of things.
'

They continued to walk together, Hector thinking about Anthea Eastcote (to banish whose image he had been hoping to enlist clerical assistance), and Bobbie Benning wondering gloomily how on earth he was to go on teaching a subject which he had lately realized was far too difficult for him.

Father Bernard turned a switch at the door, darkening the altar lights, leaving only the red sanctuary light, and led Diane back down the aisle. They sat side by side, the priest holding her hand, kneading it gently. ‘Well, little one?'

Diane squeezed his hand, holding it for a little longer, then letting it go and drawing back. She found the priest attractive but utterly strange; he was so unlike other men, so devoid of the coarseness which men had. She liked touching him but was always nervous in case George, whose absent presence always haunted her, should suddenly appear from behind a pillar. She valued her friendship with Father Bernard, especially since George tolerated her church-going.

In reply to the priest's question, Diane, still overwrought by the emotions attendant upon receiving the sacrament, began to cry.

‘Now, now, stop it, you can, have a bit of courage.'

‘Courage! I'm nothing, I'm a jelly. A jelly can't have courage.'

‘A jelly can pray.'

‘I can't.'

‘Be quiet and breathe God. Seek help. Ask and it shall be given. Knock and it shall be opened.'

‘Ask what, ask who?'

‘If you really ask, you are certain to be answered. You must fight your own demon with your own Lord. He knows. Lo, thou tellest my flittings, put thou my tears in thy bottle.'

‘I'm so worried about George,' said Diane. ‘I'm so
miserable
for him. He isn't really so bad, it's just a myth people keep going. All right, he did push that man out of the window — '

‘I hadn't heard that one.'

‘It was an accident, he didn't mean to, and I don't believe he tried to kill his wife like they say — '

The priest had heard various recitals of George's misdeeds. They varied considerably. It was true that people
wanted
to think ill of him. Of course Father Bernard was interested in George, in what Brian called his ‘predatory' way, but he found this lost sheep very difficult to think about, as if what he thought was constantly falsified at the start. His heart, usually a trusted guide, did not guide him here. He would never have said so to Diane, but he was afraid of George. He sensed something unusual in him, a sort of liberated malice. Yet this too could be an illusion.

‘If only he'd stop drinking,' she said, ‘he'd get better. Oh I do wish you'd do something for George.'

The priest stared at her with his light luminous shining eyes. He was feeling tired and hungry. He had been in the church fasting since five-thirty. He said, ‘I can't.'

‘You can. Summon him.
Order
him to come and see you.'

‘He wouldn't come.'

‘He would. It's just the sort of thing that would amuse him.'

‘Amuse him! You think he'd come to scoff and remain to pray?'

‘Once you started talking to him — '

‘George is beyond me,' said the priest. ‘I'd better not meddle.' He snapped his fingers softly.

There was a familiar scraping sound, then a loud creaking, then a metallic clang. It was the west door opening and shutting. Father Bernard moved a little away from his penitent. His eyes, accustomed to the dim light, were dazzled for a moment by the gleaming reds and blues of the tall judging Christ, who, leaning upon his sword, was represented in the west window. A heavy tread, a bulky form was coming down the aisle. Father Bernard rose to his feet.

John Robert, his vision even more affected by the sudden change from light to dark, made his way towards the risen figure which was slightly illuminated by the sanctuary light, and in spite of the different garments which it was now wearing, recognized it as the man who had been pointed out to him at the Baths by Bill the Lizard. He approached the priest and said, ‘Rozanov.'

This sound, muttered in John Robert's odd voice, might have conveyed nothing were it not that Father Bernard had, on the same occasion, had the philosopher pointed out to him by several people.

‘How do you do,' said Father Bernard, ‘I am Father Bernard, the Rector, I am glad to see you.' His heart made itself felt, large and warm. ‘This is Mrs Sedleigh - perhaps you already — '

Diane had now also risen. She had of course never met John Robert, though she had occasionally seen him. She stood in breathless trembling panic like a doe which has suddenly smelt the close proximity of a lion. (There was actually a musty animal odour coming from the philosopher which Father Bernard's fastidious nostrils had also detected.) This big man, who had come so alarmingly near to her, held George's fate in his hands, the power of life or death. As Diane shuddered with this sudden intuition she wondered, does he know who I am? (In fact he did not.)

John Robert nodded. Diane murmured that she must go and went, her light swift feet tapping almost noiselessly upon the tiles as she ran toward the west door.