Henry and Cato (52 page)

‘You think I'm coarse.'

‘Yes.'

‘Why have you put up with me for so long?'

‘Oh well, I just happen to love you. And because of Ruth. I loved Ruth awfully.'

‘Yes—I know—'

‘Why don't you take up with Gerda?'

‘Hell, no, I'd have to marry her! You aren't jealous of Gerda by any chance? No, no such luck.'

‘Well, why not marry Gerda? It seems to me rather a good idea.'

‘No, no, out of the question. I say, Pat, is it marriage you want? I mean if it is I'd marry you—' Patricia's laughter echoed through the flat.

‘I'm done for,' said John. ‘This is the first time in years that I've seen you really happy.'

‘You aren't taking any books?' said Cato.

‘No.'

It was nine o'clock in the evening and Cato was in Brendan's sitting-room. The contents of the drawers and bookshelves lay about on the floor. The little flat was being dismembered. Brendan was going to India.

‘I got it all out of that young policeman in the end.'

‘So you said.'

‘Sorry, am I drunk?'

‘No, no, have some more.'

‘Colette didn't want me to know. If only I'd done anything, shouted, struggled, anything. God, he might have
laughed.
It's as if—I didn't give him a chance.'

‘You can't know. Colette told the police that Joe was harmless, but he slashed her deliberately and in a horrible way. And it needn't even have been true that he had no accomplices, that it was only him.'

‘Oh it was true—the police were convinced when they searched the place. My father thinks I'm a sort of sick coward. He can't understand how a man could behave as I behaved. I can't understand it now either.'

‘Don't try to—in that way.'

‘Maybe I was right to choose a non-violent role, if only I'd stuck to it—I keep going over and over it all in my mind.'

‘At least you can see you oughtn't to do that.'

‘He respected me once. When I destroyed that respect there was nothing to save him—'

‘Did you see his mother again?'

‘No. Father Thomas is dealing with her. She didn't want to see me any more. I don't blame her. She's got away from that bloody man anyway. He respected me and loved me and I somehow brought God to him—if only—'

‘I hope you don't inflict this on Colette.'

‘No, only on you. Colette doesn't know I know. I don't think Colette will ever forgive me for involving her in that horror. She despises me. So does my father, so does Henry.'

‘Colette loves you and her greatest need is to feel that she can help you. You must meet that need, even by pretence until the pretence becomes real. They all need you.'

‘I can't meet anybody's need, better to keep clear. Who am I, anyway? Perhaps now I shall start jumping on my pupils. A queer in a cord coat, he called me.'

‘Well, accept it. There's nothing wrong with being queer. Only I don't think you should jump on pupils, a teacher has so much power.'

‘I've lost my self-esteem and I didn't ever know how much it mattered. It's a great defence against temptation. Now it's gone I feel every sin can tempt me, you name it, I'll do it. Once that spiritual decor is stripped away there's nothing but a demon left.'

‘I know you feel that.'

‘Oh not even that—I feel I'm nobody, nothing.'

‘You were always that, my dear, it's what we all are.'

‘What will become of me?'

‘You might become an Anglican priest later on, I'm sure they'd have you.'

‘Cocoa after wine?'

‘Cocoa might do you good. You were always a bit of a drunk, you know.'

‘Drunk with Christ, yes.'

‘The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all. Sometimes the first
elan
carries a man right through to the end. Well, that's one way.'

‘And you? Did you “fall in love”?'

‘Oh well. I had the advantage of growing up with a saint.'

‘Who was that?'

‘My mother. She was the sort of saint that no one ever notices or sees, she was almost invisible.'

‘And that somehow defused the drama?'

‘I never conceived of not being a priest. For you, there was a
coup de foudre.
'

‘I wish I believed that Joe was in purgatory.'

‘If you believed it you would not know what you were believing. I wish you would pray for him. I wish you would go on praying. Prayer is the most essential of all human activities, it should be like breathing. You must still feel it yourself, the need to pray, like the need to breathe.'

‘I feel it. But what does breathing prove? You know, when I was there in the dark in that place I realized at last and quite certainly that there was no God. I had imagined that I had thought this before, but I hadn't. It's as if I experienced the non-existence of God as something absolutely positive. Now, don't look like that. You keep trying to pull every experience, every testimony back inside the being of God. It won't do! I know all that, after all I've been years in the game.'

‘You say you've been years in the game. It seems to me you don't know what the game is.'

‘All right, you tell me.'

‘I've told you. You fell in love. That's a start, but it's only a start. Falling in love is egoism, it's being obsessed by images and being consoled by them, images of the beloved, images of oneself. It's the greatest pain and the greatest paradox of all that personal love has to break at some point, the ego has to break, something absolutely natural and seemingly good, seemingly perhaps the only good, has to be given up. After that there's darkness and silence and space. And God is there. Remember St John of the Gross. Where the images end you fall into the abyss, but it is the abyss of faith. When you have nothing left you have nothing left but hope.'

‘
El abismo de la fé.
Brendan, I've heard all this so often. I've even
said
it so often!'

‘Try at least to use it now in relation to yourself. You keep going over and over what happened and picturing it and imagining it otherwise. You mustn't. Repentance isn't a bit like obsessive guilt. Think how often you've said that, in one form or another, in the confessional.'

‘I can't say it to myself.'

‘Your guilt is vanity, it's to do with that self-esteem you were talking about, which you haven't really lost at all, it's only wounded. Repent, and let these things pass from you.'

‘Without Christ I can't. Without the bloody machinery I can't. I thought you might be able to do it for me, but even you can't. I feel damned, I loved that boy and I led him astray and I killed him.'

‘We live by redemptive death. Anyone can stand in for Christ.'

‘You're crazy.'

‘Death is what instructs us most of all, and then only when it is present. When it is absent it is totally forgotten. Those who can live with death can live in the truth, only this is almost unendurable. It is not the drama of death that teaches—when you are there facing it there is no drama. That's why it's so hard to write tragedy. Death is the great destroyer of all images and all stories, and human beings will do anything rather than envisage it. Their last resource is to rely on suffering, to try to cheat death by suffering instead. And suffering we know breeds images, it breeds the most beautiful images of all.'

Cato put down his glass. He looked up at Brendan who while he talked had been moving, sorting books, and now stood beside the empty shelves trailing his fingers to and fro in the dust.

Cato said, ‘Christ cheated death by suffering instead.'

Brendan looked at Cato for a moment, then was silent, leaning back against the shelves and gazing dreamily ahead of him.

Cato said, ‘Oh
no—'

Brendan smiled and flashed his blue eyes and sat down, knocking over a tall pile of books with his foot. Then he actually laughed.

‘But you believe in the resurrection and the life,' said Cato. ‘If I really did now I'd be laughing too. I'm not sure that I ever did believe. You do, which is why what you've just said must be, for you a kind of nonsense, a magic spell, made up, oh I know, for my benefit, like things one says in the confessional, only of course much more sophisticated. After all you believe in a personal God—'

Brendan was silent.

‘Well, you do, don't you?'

After a moment Brendan said, ‘That's another picture. We deal in the idea of persons, we have to. But God is unimaginable and incomprehensible and nameless.
Dysphrastos
and
thaumastos.
Oh all this is the old “game”, I know. But one lives with the game and things change. You've never really lived with it, you've been a provisional priest right from the start. You've been doing the thing on your own terms. Now when at last you might cease to be provisional—'

‘And fall into the abyss.'

‘You talk of giving up.'

‘I don't just talk of it, I am giving up.'

‘Are you? Time will show. I don't mean about your being laicized. You can't escape from God just by going through a few formalities.'

‘But Brendan, do you believe in God or not? I mean, I'm not accusing you of being a fake, you're real, and because of you something else is real—but this doesn't add up to God, I mean even you can't invent Him!
Do
you believe in God?'

‘It's impossible to answer a question truly unless you know what the question means to the questioner.'

‘Oh do stop being subtle. If you don't know whether God is a person what happens to your Christology?'

‘I let Christ look after my Christology.'

‘You should have been a lawyer. I remember Father Bell saying that you were the best theologian we had.'

‘That was years ago, my dear.'

‘Have you given it up then? Have you given up thinking, you who were so good at it?'

Brendan pushed the books around on the floor with a slippered foot. ‘One can get so far but no farther.'

‘What about people in the past? After all, we've all been thinking about it for a long time.'

‘What can we really know about people in the past? We understand so little of minds we only meet in books. Our whole range of understanding and vision is tiny.'

‘The New Testament?'

‘That's unusual. It's unusualness is one of the few clear things.'

‘Your friend Plato?'

‘Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. We are puppets in the hands of God.'

‘He said that?'

‘We can only see Plato through the haze of his ingenious invention, European philosophy.'

‘And all that brilliant thinking that went to make the doctrine of the Trinity?'

‘Brilliant, I agree. Oh we must think, at least some people must. But thinking, in that way, is simply a matter of keeping oneself from slipping back into all sorts of illusions, it's a way of keeping near the truth, even when, especially when, the truth cannot be formulated.'

‘Maybe I'm more like my father than I used to realize. He thinks religion is pure mumbo-jumbo. I'm beginning to think that most of it is.'

‘Oh yes, of course. But, Cato, never mind about reason and intelligence. Just hold onto Christ, the Christ that the Church cannot take away from you.'

‘Now you sound like a fundamentalist preacher. But Brendan, is that why you're going to India, to stop thinking?'

‘No, not like that.'

‘Like what then?'

‘It was time for a change.'

‘Too comfy here?'

‘No, no, one can do Christ's work anywhere. No-many things—'

‘Tell me one.'

‘I was getting too addicted to speculation. I sometimes felt that if I could hang on just a little longer I would receive some perfect illumination about everything.'

‘Why don't you hang on?'

‘Because I know that if it did come it would be an illusion—one of the most, oh, splendid. The original
felix culpa
is thought itself.'

‘That sounds to me like despair.'

‘The point is, one will never get to the end of it, never get to the bottom of it, never, never, never. And that never, never, never is what you must take for your hope and your shield and your most glorious promise. Everything that we concoct about God is an illusion.'

‘But God is not an illusion?'

‘Whosoever he be of you who forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.'

‘I don't believe you've given up theology at all. Theology is magic. Beware.'

‘I know.'

‘I must go and catch my train to Leeds, it leaves at midnight. When shall I see you again?'

Brendan got up and turned on another lamp. ‘I'm going into retreat next week and I'm leaving England immediately after that.'

‘So I won't see you before you go?'

‘No.'

‘Shall I come and see you in Calcutta, if I can raise the money from somewhere?'

‘Well, better not.'

There was silence for a moment. Cato put on his coat. ‘So you're giving me up too?'

‘I'm giving you up too.'

They faced each other.

‘I've always kept you as a last resource,' said Cato.

‘I know. But you mustn't have this sort of last resource. More conversations like this won't help you. What after all would they be about?'

‘Oh hell—' said Cato.

‘I'm going, as it happens, the way things fall out, and I probably won't be back, at any rate not for many years. All sorts of things will happen to you—'

‘Will you write to me?'