Ultimate Prizes (33 page)

“In what way do you feel called to serve God as a clergyman? Is it your way? Or His way?”

“My way is His way. I mean, His way is my way. I mean—”

“Which Neville is it who’s called to serve?”

“Neville Three. Well, Neville One as well—and Neville Two, I can’t do without Neville Two—”

“You say you’re in a wasteland. Who led you there?”

“No one. That’s why I simply can’t understand how I could have wound up like this—”

“Was it God who led you there? Or was it the Devil?”

I shifted, deeply embarrassed, in my chair. “I’m sorry, I’m a Modernist. I find all talk of the Devil rather—”

“The Devil doesn’t care whether or not you’re a Modernist. You can’t ring down the curtain on the Devil by waving the word ‘Modernist’ around like a magic wand.”

“Well, of course I recognise that evil exists, but—”

“What about sin?”

“Sin?”

“Sin. S-I-N.”

“Yes, well, of course sin exists too, as we all know only too well, but I never think it’s very helpful to harp on it. Most people are good and decent and try to do what’s right. They may have their minor faults, but—”

“You’re describing yourself, I think. But which self?”

“Neville Two. No, Neville Three, who tries very hard to be a good man—although I admit he makes mistakes occasionally, little slips—” I suddenly felt hot as I remembered Lyle.

“So what you’re really saying is that none of the Nevilles is responsible for your presence in the wasteland. You’re saying: ‘The prisoners at the bar plead innocent!’ ”

“
Prisoners at the bar?
”

There was a silence. I stared at him, and as he stared back, exuding a formidable air of authority, I realised he was experimenting, just as Darrow had experimented earlier, by switching from a mild to a tough approach in order to gauge the most effective way of communicating with me. Automatically I tried to dredge up a fighting response. “Why should you imply I’m on trial?”

“We’re all on trial. We’re all sinners. We all stand at the bar and await God’s judgement.”

I leapt into the attack. “I’m surprised to find someone like you dabbling in that kind of Protestant neo-orthodoxy! I may be a Protestant but I’m a Liberal Protestant, and in my opinion—”

“There you go again, pulling down the curtain and trying to hide behind theological labels!” With a speed which took me aback he then sloughed off his stern manner and became sympathetic again. The experiment had been concluded, the results noted and a new strategy planned. I was beginning to feel like a lump of clay in the hands of a skilled artist. “It won’t do, you know, lad,” he said regretfully, and as he spoke he slipped still deeper into a Yorkshire accent. “Neither Barth nor Calvin possesses any patent on discussions of sin and judgement. Christians were debating those particular matters long before anyone dreamed up the title Crisis Theology and started talking about neo-orthodoxy.”

“Yes, but if you ignore the Liberals’ emphasis on the forgiveness and compassion of Christ—”

“Who said anything about ignoring it? But what use are the forgiveness and compassion of Our Lord unless you repent? And how can you repent unless you frankly acknowledge you’re a sinner and try to understand why you’ve sinned?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just have no sympathy for this kind of talk. It’s alien to my intellectual approach to God.”

“And what about your spiritual approach?”

“Now look here, Mr. Lucas—”

“Ah yes, you’re going to get angry with me, aren’t you? I thought you would. Getting angry would make you feel better, give you a chance to expel all the difficult emotion, a chance to ease the pain … The pain’s very bad, isn’t it?”

“What pain?”

“The pain you keep behind the curtain.” Without warning he clasped his hands and bent his head in prayer. To my astonishment I heard him say in a firm voice: “Lord, grant me the power to help this man and ease the suffering which has crippled him.”

In the ensuing silence the concentration behind the prayer seemed almost tangible. My astonishment was rapidly succeeded first by embarrassment and then by a confused emotion which I found hard to identify. I could only think, as Darrow had thought before me: Here’s someone who really cares.

Lucas let his hands fall and looked me straight in the eyes. In the same firm voice he had used for the prayer he said: “It’s a question of facing the pain.”

“What pain?” I said again, but this time I was making a genuine effort to understand. “The pain of the past? Or the pain of the present?”

“It’s all one.”

I gasped. Time suddenly began to run backwards, like some bizarre stream cascading uphill, and as my father moved silently to my side my voice whispered: “It’s all a unity. It’s all one.”

Some moments passed before I realised I had covered my face with my hands. Panic assailed me. I had to pull myself together, show no sign of weakness, drum up some aggression to protect myself. How had I wound up in this repulsive confessional situation? Why was I letting this old man manipulate me in the manner of a cat dedicated to unravelling a ball of wool? How dare he unmask me as vulnerable and how dare he treat me as if I was sick? Nasty, meddlesome, interfering old monk, slipping into a Yorkshire accent to slide under my skin … I was convulsed with rage and shame.

“I’m calling a halt to this monstrous interrogation,” I said strongly, but to my horror my voice shook. “I refuse to answer any more questions!”

“Now, isn’t that fortunate!” said Lucas without a second’s hesitation. “I was just thinking you needed a rest from my tiresome prying, and I’d decided to do something I would never normally do in this situation. I’m going to talk about myself. Not at all good practice for a counsellor, but your case interests me so much that I believe a touch of unorthodoxy would be justified. But before I begin, may I offer you the olive branch of peace in the form of a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks,” I said shortly, but in fact I hardly knew what I said. I felt as if all my rage and shame had been soaked up by a piece of blotting paper which was now being lightly tossed into the wastepaper basket. I groped for words but could find none. I groped for a new attitude to adopt in place of the rage and shame, but I seemed to be in an emotional vacuum. All I could do was sit passively in a docile silence. Dimly I began to realise I was being tamed.

“Well, if you’re quite sure you don’t want tea,” Lucas was saying, “relax in your chair and I’ll tell you the story of the two Victors who became Aidan. It won’t take long but it’ll give you a rest, and perhaps—who knows?—you may even find it instructive.”

Wily old fox. Clever, cunning, perspicacious old masterpiece. Bound hand and foot by my curiosity, tranquillised by the benign warmth of his manner, I could only wait, a willing prisoner, for him to spin the parable which would bring me closer to the truth.

2

“I had a happy time as Victor One,” said Lucas, embarking on his narrative with an air of casual good humour. “We weren’t a religious family but my parents were decent hard-working people. We used to go to church once a year to hear the Christmas carols. I believed in God until I was fifteen, when I decided it would be smart to be an agnostic. Agnosticism was all the rage in those days, and I liked to think of myself as being modern and clever. I’d won a scholarship to the grammar school and so of course I had a very good opinion of myself.

“My ambition was to go south, but my parents weren’t wealthy and I knew I’d have to make my own way. After leaving school I worked on the local newspaper, and within five years I’d reached London. The
Daily Standard
has been dead for a long while now, but back in the nineties it was one of the biggest newspapers in Fleet Street.

“I was a great success in London—such a success that I decided to forget ingenuous provincial Victor One. That was when I became Victor Two, the sophisticated man-about-town. No more God, of course. God was for provincials. And no more agnosticism. Agnosticism was just for intellectuals too weak to chuck away religion entirely. I was an atheist, untrammelled by all the old superstitions. Then finally in 1901 I was appointed a special correspondent and sent out to Africa to cover the Boer War.

“Well, that was the end of my deluded masquerade, as I daresay you can imagine. That was when I realised my life in London had nothing to do with reality at all. When I went to South Africa God destroyed my ignorant self-absorption and showed me such horrors that I knew I could never be the same again.

“I didn’t actually see much fighting. It was mostly guerilla warfare anyway. But what I saw were the concentration camps. The British invented them, you know. It suits us now to forget that, but at the turn of the century I discovered that the greatest nation on earth, a nation which called itself Christian, was destroying innocent people on a massive scale. I wrote my horrifying dispatches. I sent report after report. But not one word was published and eventually I was recalled.

“I remember shouting at my editor: ‘You’re refusing to expose a very great evil! You’re condoning a sin against humanity!’ But he just said: ‘You’re talking like an Evangelist, Vic, ranting away about evil and sin! Take yourself off to the seaside for a fortnight’s holiday and then we’ll put you to work on a nice cheerful subject like the Royal Family.’

“I resigned. My mistress couldn’t understand it. ‘Why are you making such a fuss about the people in these camps?’ she said. ‘They’re only Boers.’ That was when I knew I could never be intimate with her again. I left her—and then I realised I had to leave London too, so I took the train to York. I was obliged to change trains there, but I never did go on to Scarborough. Victor One was there to meet me at York station, and when he led me through the streets to the Minster, Victor Two was vanquished at last and I saw the new life I was being called to lead.

“I was eventually ordained—but I didn’t live happily ever after. Victor Two, who had been vanquished but not, unfortunately, destroyed, kept tugging at my sleeve, and in the end I decided that I’d have a better chance of slaying him once and for all if I battled with him on his home ground. So I returned south to London and worked in an East End mission. It was the heyday of the Anglo-Catholic work in the slums, and I felt I could use the power of Anglo-Catholicism as a suit of armour which would protect me from Victor Two whenever he laid his corrupting hand on my sleeve.

“I worked and I worked and I worked until at last—inevitably—my health broke down under the strain and I was sent here, to the Fordite headquarters, to recuperate. That was when Aidan was conceived. I met the man who was shortly to become the Abbot-General—you’ve probably heard of him: Father Cuthbert Darcy. He died in 1940. He was an extraordinary man. At the end of his life he became very tyrannical and difficult, but when I met him in 1907 he was at the height of his powers, a man of great intelligence, remarkable charm and an uncanny intuitive perception into spiritual dilemmas. He was the monk assigned to help me find my spiritual way again. We used to sit in a little room, just like this one, and face each other across the table, just as you and I are facing each other now, and engage in battle after battle.

“We battled because I didn’t want to face up to the truth; one never does when the truth is very painful. ‘Why were you working so hard?’ Darcy would ask over and over again. ‘Why did you have to drive yourself day and night until you collapsed with exhaustion?’ And over and over again I insisted: ‘Because I wanted to serve God.’

“But that wasn’t true. It was myself I’d been serving. Working so hard that I had no time to think—that was my way of pulling down the curtain on truths I couldn’t face. Finally Darcy said: ‘It’s a question of facing the pain.’ ‘What pain?’ I said, but I knew. It was the pain of knowing good people could do evil deeds. But I said to Darcy: ‘I’m not responsible for the camps in South Africa! The responsibility belongs to the Government—it’s got nothing to do with me!’ Darcy just raised an eyebrow and said: ‘Whom do the Government represent?’ And when I started to protest he said: ‘We all share in the guilt of man’s inhumanity to man. We all stand at the bar and await God’s judgement.’

“At once I said: ‘How can I be on trial? I’m a good man. Of course I’ve made mistakes in the past—little slips—but now I’m a priest and I know that by the grace of God I’m forgiven.’ Darcy just leant back in his chair and said: ‘Then why are you now in hell?’

“I fought him and fought him. On and on we battled. And then gradually as he took me through my past life I saw all the sins I’d never faced. I was forced to recall how I’d cut myself off from my parents, never bothering to write to them. I was forced to recall the husband whose wife I’d taken. I was forced to recall all the selfish acts, all the casual cruelties I had committed in the pursuit of my ambition. Worst of all I was obliged to confront my shortcomings as a priest: the bouts of irritation towards my colleagues, the contempt and revulsion which lay behind my ostensibly noble behaviour towards the poor, the endless temptation to blot out my restless boredom by resorting to fornication … A good man? Outwardly perhaps. But inwardly? And as I began to see myself as a good man capable of evil deeds I realised that the concentration camps were only a manifestation on a huge scale of the disorder which has the power to cripple each human soul. It was all one. Evil was an ever-present reality, a reality which Christ had conquered, and when I asked myself how I could best attempt to master that reality myself, it became clear to me that I had to live in imitation of Christ; I knew then I had to be a monk.

“However, it’s most important to stress at this point that I didn’t succeed in becoming Aidan merely by adopting a way of life which would be unsuitable for most priests. I was able to become Aidan first by facing the pain and then by transcending it so that I could finally serve God as he wished me to serve him, in honesty, with humility and by faith. Then as soon as I started serving God and stopped serving myself, the second Victor lost his power over me, and once my fear of his power was dead I found I could forgive him at last for leading me so far astray. In practical terms this meant that I could unify my personality; Victor One was able to embrace Victor Two and live with him in harmony—or, to express the matter in the familiar religious way, I felt that God had forgiven me for my sins by showing me the way forward into a new life, and once I knew I was forgiven I could be at peace with myself at last.”