Glittering Images (33 page)

I made a great effort. ‘You could say to him: “All’s well. Journal safe. No letters”.’

Darrow wrote down the message, snapped shut his notebook and said briskly, ‘Good. So much for the Archbishop. Now the next thing we have to decide is whether you’re fit to begin discussing your problems today.’

‘I’m fine now.’

‘Fit enough to begin the task of confiding in me informally so that I can help you approach your formal confession before God?’ said Darrow, clarifying the issue in case I was under the illusion that a talk between us would mean a mere sociable conversation. ‘Fit enough to talk about this commission in Starbridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very well, go ahead and tell me about it.’

There was a long silence. Eventually when the tears blurred my eyes again I said in despair, ‘I must be mad because I can’t stop crying and men never cry unless they’re off their heads.’

‘That’s a very powerful myth in our culture and a myth which can produce extremely unhealthy results. Which is better: to express grief and pain by using tear-ducts specially created for the purpose or to express grief and pain by enduring a silent secret haemorrhage of the soul?’

I said as the tears began to fall, ‘I feel so overwhelmed by the memory of all my unfitness.’

‘Very well, perhaps so far you haven’t served God as well as you might have done. Perhaps you’ve even longed to put matters right –’

‘I have, yes – oh, indeed I have, I’ve prayed and prayed for help but –’

‘Then your prayers are being answered, aren’t they?’

I stared at him. ‘Answered?’ I looked around the room. I was barely able to speak. ‘I’ve broken down so utterly that I’m unable to continue as a clergyman, and you say
this
is God answering my prayers?’

‘Of course. Do you think God’s been unaware of your difficulties and the suffering you must inevitably have endured? And do you think He’s incapable of reaching out at last to bring you face to face with your troubles so that you can surmount them and go on to serve Him far better than you ever served him in the past?’

I understood but was unable to tell him so, and as I covered my face with my hands I heard him say, ‘God hasn’t sent this ordeal to destroy you, Charles. He’s come to your rescue at last, and here in this village, here in this house, here in this room where you’ve hit rock-bottom, here’s where your new life finally begins.’

He cut short the interview at that point, but he rejoined me at five o’clock that afternoon as I was sitting on the wooden seat facing the herb-garden. The air was warm and scented, the sun was shining fitfully and a breeze was stirring the last pages of Miss Underhill’s book in my hands.

‘I telephoned the Archbishop,’ said Darrow, sitting at my side. ‘He thanked you for your message which he said was quite sufficient for the time being, and said he was delighted to hear you were making a retreat. He told me he always worried about young clergymen who were unusually successful by worldly standards, and he was sure a retreat could only prove beneficial. Finally he sent his good wishes along with his approval, and said he would be keeping a special place for you in his daily prayers.’

Such affectionate sympathy triggered a guilt that I had rejected him. With great difficulty I said, ‘Dr Lang’s been very good to me in the past.’

‘And in the present?’

‘He hasn’t changed. But I have. I’ve drifted away from him. He’s not a man I feel in tune with any more.’

‘Whom do you feel in tune with now?’

It was no use trying to hide my distress. I merely sat motionless, radiating misery, but when Darrow made no attempt to press me for a reply I became increasingly aware of my need to lance the misery by communicating with him. I said, ‘At Starbridge –’ but no more words came, and I was just contemplating in despair the utter failure of my attempt at communication when he said idly, ‘I’ve never met the Bishop of Starbridge, but I heard him preach once when he was Vicar of St Mary’s, Mayfair.’

By a miracle of intuition he was transforming my failure into a triumph, and suddenly I sensed the line of communication, fragile but undeniably real, floating between us on the fragrant breeze from the herb-garden.

‘That type of preaching is a special gift,’ reflected Darrow, ‘and like all charisms it can be dangerous if abused. I remember my spiritual director saying to me when I was a young man, “Beware of those glamorous Powers, Jon, the Powers which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!” Dr Jardine’s a fine preacher and certainly when I heard him he had his gift immaculately disciplined, but I thought he was potentially a dangerous man.’

I shuddered but the line of communication was no longer a fragile thread; it was a thick rope which was steadily hauling me out of the abyss of silence.

‘A volatile temperament,’ mused Darrow, ‘a hypnotic edge to an attractive appearance, a brilliant mind, a God-given genius for homiletics – it’s an explosive mixture, isn’t it? In fact I’ve often wondered in recent weeks how I would feel if I were Archbishop of Canterbury and had to deal with a bishop whose latest hobby was creating havoc in the House of Lords.’

My fingers closed on the cross below my neck and it was as if I grasped Darrow’s hand at last after my long haul upwards on the end of the rope. I whispered, ‘I feel as if he annihilated me,’ and slowly, very slowly, I began to talk about my commission in Starbridge.

The talk covered many sessions and was punctuated by periods of rest; I realized later that Darrow could judge with uncanny precision how much conversation I could tolerate without breaking down and how long I needed afterwards for recuperation. However as the days passed I became stronger, and by the time I had completed a detailed account of my first visit to Starbridge I felt anxious to continue the story without further interruptions. It was an irony that I then encountered the formidable obstacle of my afternoon with Loretta. My narrative became disjointed; I lapsed into silence. It was late at night, and the only light in the room came from the bedside lamp which left Darrow’s face in shadow as we sat facing each other at the table.

‘Just say: “There was an interval”,’ he said at last but when I remained unable to continue he commented not unsympathetically, ‘“Strait is the gate and narrow is the way” – but perhaps a little too strait and narrow for you at present. Very well, we’ll leave the story there for a while.’

I realized then that I was being a coward, pointlessly holding my tongue when the nature of my error must by that time have been so obvious, and making a new effort I said: ‘You’re using that quotation in the context of truth, just as you did when we first met. “High and wide is the gate”, you said, “which leads to self-deception and illusion, but for those seeking truth strait is the gate and narrow the way – ”’

‘“ – and brave is the man who can journey there”.’

Crawling out from the shadow of my cowardice I told him what had happened in the spinney.

‘… and it was as if I was giving myself shot after shot of morphia. Every time the morphia wore off I had to give myself another shot because I was too frightened to face up to what was happening.’

‘And how would you define what was happening?’ Darrow, who had registered no emotion during my confession, now permitted a note of interest to enter his voice as if I had made a statement which was worthy of a detached discussion, and I was so relieved by the absence of censure that I had no trouble replying, ‘My celibate life as a widower had utterly broken down and I couldn’t see how I was going to go on.’

‘How old were you when you married?’

‘Twenty-seven. Having no gift for celibacy I was tempted to marry immediately after my ordination, but since marriage then would have put me in a financial strait-jacket and limited my opportunites –’ I broke off in shame. ‘How calculating and ambitious that makes me sound!’

‘It’s not a sin to be prudent. It needn’t necessarily be a sin either to be ambitious in God’s service.’ He smiled at me. ‘But if you didn’t rush to the altar in your early twenties, how did you solve the problem of chastity at that time?’

‘More by luck than virtue. Not long after my ordination I became one of Dr Lang’s chaplains, and soon there I was, living at Bishopthorpe with the Archbishop watching over me like a lynx-eyed chaperon –’

‘But surely if you had no call to celibacy this role of secretarial monk must have become increasingly irksome?’

‘Yes, I left the Archbishop eventually, returned to Laud’s where I was a Fellow and began to teach. That was when I began to make a name for myself with my lectures on the Early Church.’

‘You were looking for a wife, of course.’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t find anyone who was entirely right. However then I had the most astonishing piece of luck: Dr Lang recommended me for the headmastership of St Aidan’s at Eastbourne, and soon there I was, twenty-seven years old, headmaster of a Church of England public school with a splendid salary – and a wife. She was the daughter of the retiring headmaster and I met her when I went down to St Aidan’s for the interview.’

There was a pause but Darrow said nothing and at last, driven by the need to terminate the silence I said rapidly: ‘We were married three years and then she was killed in a car accident. She was pregnant. It would have been our first child. The shock was terrible, I … well, it took me a long time to get back to normal. I left the school and returned to Laud’s to sink myself in research. I wrote a book –’

‘I’ve read it. Very lucid. Arianism disembowelled with a chilling surgical skill.’

‘I wanted to disembowel something – it stopped me thinking about what had happened, so I worked and worked until my whole life revolved around that book to such an extent that I began to worry about what on earth I’d do when it was finished. However in the end I didn’t have to worry; there was no time. The book was a big success in academic circles and I was awarded my doctorate and suddenly I found myself being lionized –’

‘– by the ladies, no doubt, as well as by the enthusiastic scholars.’

‘Yes, the celibacy got harder and harder, but somehow …’ My voice trailed away. Again Darrow waited and at last I was able to say, ‘… somehow I’ve never quite managed to remarry. Yet I do want to remarry – in fact I’m desperate to remarry, but … I don’t.’

‘It sounds as if you’re caught in some mysterious way between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. I can quite understand why you might regard the celibate life as the Devil if you’ve no call to celibacy, but why should you regard marriage as the Deep Blue Sea?’

‘But I don’t! I was very happy with my wife – my marriage was the most splendid success!’

‘Then if the problem doesn’t lie in marriage
per se
where do you think it does lie?’

There was a long silence.

‘Well, never mind,’ said Darrow at last. ‘That’s not important for the moment. Now I suggest we call an end to the discussion at this point and –’

‘The problem lies in me,’ my voice said. ‘
I’m
the problem. I’m so unfit and so unworthy that I feel no woman would ever be able to cope with me.’

‘And do the women you meet appear to share this view of you?’

‘Oh no! But then they never meet the man I keep hidden. They just meet the man on public display.’ I hesitated but added, ‘I call him the glittering image because he looks so well in the mirror. But beyond him –’

‘Beyond him,’ said Darrow, never batting an eyelid, ‘stands the angry stranger who appears in the mirror whenever the glittering image goes absent without leave.’

‘Yes. He’s a destroyer. No woman could cope. Except Lyle. I think – yes, I really do think that Lyle could cope –’

‘We’ll stop there,’ said Darrow.

‘She copes with everything, you see – everything –’

‘We’ll talk about her later but not now – you’re exhausted. And anyway before we start discussing the dramatis personae you must reach the end of your story. At present we’re still with you and Loretta at Leatherhead.’

I rubbed my eyes futilely at the thought of Loretta but when I whispered in despair, ‘Stupid tears. Such a coward,’ Darrow said, ‘Nonsense! You’ve begun to squeeze through the narrow gate. You’re being just as brave as you could be,’ and once again he gave me the strength to go on.

‘… and then Jardine said, “Let me try to bring you closer to what I’m afraid will prove a very unpalatable reality,” and he began to make this speech … I can’t describe it – it was a nightmare – he tore up my glittering image and rejected my other self beyond – I’m sorry, that doesn’t explain anything –’

‘Oh yes it does,’ said Darrow.

‘– but I can’t find the words to convey the horror, the absolute
horror
–’

‘You don’t have to tell me any more than that for the moment. Just say, “After Jardine had made his speech …”’

It was afternoon, that period of the day following the monks’ dinner when there were no offices to be sung and they were free to attend to other work. Darrow and I were again sitting at the table in my room. We had hoped to hold the conversation in the herb-garden but the arrival of wet weather had made this impossible, and I was sorry to be confined to the house. At Darrow’s suggestion I had been doing a little gardening in the afternoons; monks are always aware how much energy is required to sustain an adequate spiritual life and how much needs to be expended in physical labour.