The Unburied (5 page)

‘Then I shall play the perfect guest and sit spellbound and frozen with horror.’

He smiled and announced that supper was ready, and handed me a number of plates and dishes to take into the dining-room.

We sat down at the little table – in truth, a card-table hastily covered in a rather grubby cloth to hide its green blushes – and made a good supper: devilled lamb-cutlets with capers and roasted turnips followed by a delicious quince-tart which Austin told me – in case I imagined he had prepared it himself and conceived an inflated view of his culinary skills – he had purchased from the bakery. We both drank freely of the claret – Austin far more than I did. The room was still very close – with the smell of the gas, the food, the coal and something else that was not quite nice – but I had no recurrence of my earlier qualm.

As we ate, Austin oscillated between outbursts of light-hearted chatter and periods of taciturnity when he seemed lost in his own thoughts. I tried to talk of the interests we had once shared but he seemed incurious, and I remembered with a pang the boyish passion with which we had sat up late talking about Plato. I attempted to get him to talk about the town – the school and the little community around the Cathedral – but he evaded my questions.

I found that he did not want to talk about the past, either. It was as if he had forgotten it. When I alluded to people or incidents from the former time, he seemed uninterested. I talked of our fellows at Cambridge and what had become of them, and he smiled and nodded and when I prompted him he told me news of those with whom he had remained in touch but I had not. I told him of my work on Alfred and my interest in his heroic resistance to the invading heathen, and he nodded as if he was not paying much attention. Altogether, his manner made me all the more puzzled about his reasons for renewing our acquaintance.

At last he stood up: ‘We will take our dessert upstairs and ...’

‘Stop!’ I said, raising a hand. ‘I heard the street-door. Someone has come in.’ I was sure I had heard the click of the lock.

‘Nonsense,’ he said impatiently. ‘You probably heard the stairs creaking. This is an old house and it mutters to itself like a dotard. As I was saying, we will go upstairs and I will tell you the story of the restless Canon.’

‘But tell me your own story first!’ I cried. I hadn’t meant to be so frank but the wine – although I had not drunk very much – made me less restrained than usual. For two decades he had dwelt in this town grinding out his mathematics for the benefit of the loutish sons of prosperous linen-drapers, apothecaries and farmers. I had often contemplated his narrow, weary life and wondered whether he thought of me and of how different things might have been.

He looked at me strangely.

‘The story of your life, I mean. The tale of your days here.’

‘I have no story,’ he said shortly. ‘I have been quietly working here at my duties. There is no more to tell.’

‘Is that all you can say of twenty years and more?’

‘What is there to say? I have my friends, some of whom you will meet. Some of my fellows at the school – bachelors like myself – are close friends and I also have acquaintances in the town. Altogether we’re a raffish, slovenly crew of men who sit in public-houses too long because we have nobody waiting for us to come home. And I move in more genteel circles, for I have been taken up as a kind of pet by some of the wives of the canons and the masters.’

I smiled. ‘And have you never thought of marrying?’

He glanced at me with a smile. ‘Oh, who would marry me? I wasn’t much of a catch when I was a young fellow and I’m less of one now.’

I dared not ask more because I didn’t want him to think I was merely curious. I thought of the delicacy with which he had avoided asking me any questions about my life, since we had lost touch, that might wound. It had occurred to me that he had asked me to come because he needed my advice or help on some matter and from what I had just heard in the Cathedral, I believed I had an inkling of what it might be. I would at least give him the opportunity to unburden himself: ‘Is everything all right at the school?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, just that I heard there is some dispute there.’

He stared at me with sudden intensity. ‘What do you mean? Who could have told you that?’

I wished I hadn’t spoken. ‘The old man – the verger – mentioned some sort of difficulty there.’

‘Gazzard? Why on earth do you imagine he knows anything about it?’ He glared at me. ‘It might be better if people paid attention to their own business. Gazzard is a gossiping old woman. Just like most of the canons. They spend their time inventing malicious lies about each other. And about anyone else unfortunate enough to have dealings with them.’

‘What sort of lies?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure you can imagine.’ He turned away and I could see that he was bored with the topic and I remembered how irritated he used to become at my habit of worrying at a subject in an effort to make it yield new perspectives. For Austin a fact was a fact and that was all there was to be said about it. He stood up. ‘We will go upstairs. I’ve lit a fire.’

As we passed through the hall I noticed a package propped against the wall opposite the door of the room. I was sure it had not been there earlier.

Austin picked it up. ‘How did that get there?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied quickly. ‘I left it there before supper to remind myself to carry it upstairs.’

We ascended without further conversation and found a cheerful blaze in the sitting-room. While I seated myself before the fire, Austin put the package on the floor beside the other chair and lighted candles. Then he opened a bottle of rather good port and filled two glasses.

It was like old times and made me think so vividly of what might have been that I was prompted to ask: ‘Do you remember how, when we were undergraduates, we talked of one day being fellows of the same college?’

He shook his head. ‘Did we?’

‘How inspired we were by the idea of devoting ourselves to the life of the mind.’

He smiled sarcastically. ‘I take it you believe that is possible only within a Cambridge – or just conceivably an Oxford – college?’

‘Not at all. For example, I’m sure the canons are intelligent men ...’

‘The canons!’ he interrupted. ‘I have as little as possible to do with them. They are men of very limited capacities, almost without exception. That’s why they are obsessed, most of them, by the outward forms – incense, vestments, candles and processions. The Church is full of men like that, just as the universities are. Men with no emotional life who are intellectually daring – which is easy enough – but emotionally timid.’

‘I’ve heard that the Chapter suffers particularly acutely from the usual conflicts between the Ritualists and the Evangelicals,’ I said, carefully avoiding Gazzard’s name.

‘That’s what lies behind the argument about work on the Cathedral,’ he said with a nod. ‘For some people it is nothing but a beautiful old shell and they want to preserve it unchanged because for them it has no significance beyond its material being.’

I smiled to hide my irritation. ‘Is anyone who loves old churches to be regarded as an infidel?’

‘I’m talking of all those in this age who have made a religion out of things peripheral to, or other than, Christianity: music, history, art, literature.’

He spoke with such resentment that, although the last thing I wanted was to be drawn into an argument, I felt I had to explain my position. ‘Speaking for myself, I would say that I’ve retained the moral meaning of works of art like the Cathedral but separated it from the baggage of superstition.’

He had slumped sideways in the chair so that his legs were dangling over one arm – a habit of his that I suddenly recalled from our youth – and he now stared at me fiercely and rather ludicrously from this undignified position. He slowly repeated my words: ‘The baggage of superstition. You and your like are the purveyors of baggage. What you have done is to put together a jumble of beliefs to produce a new form of superstition that is much more dangerous than anything in Christianity. And of less use. It won’t help you with the great issues: loss, the death of those you love, the imminence of your own death.’

‘Is that what religion should be? A comforting fiction? I’d rather choose the truth – like the Roman Stoics or my beloved Anglo-Saxons before they were Christianized – however harsh it might be.’

‘There’s nothing harsher than Christianity.’

‘Are you a believer now, Austin? You used not to be.’

‘You’re talking of twenty years past,’ he said irritably. ‘Don’t you think some things might have changed in the world outside the confines of a Cambridge college?’

This was a change indeed. We had both been Shelleyan freethinkers, like the most advanced among the thinking undergraduates of our generation. How passionately we had denounced religion as organized humbug. I had not changed and, in fact, my experience as a historian had deepened my conviction that religion was a conspiracy of the powerful against the rest. But my views had mellowed so that I now pitied rather than raged against those who were believers.

‘And anyway, I was a believer when I was at the University,’ he went on bitterly. ‘It was the desire to avoid being mocked by you and your circle that led me to pretend to be an agnostic.’

Austin had arrived as a Tractarian of a very dandyish kind – I believe he was trying to annoy his father who was a Low Church vicar of modest birth and small fortune – but had quickly announced himself to be an unbeliever. Had I converted him without even realizing it? Had he been so malleable? If I had influenced him, it had not been because I was more intelligent but because I knew more clearly what I believed and wanted. Austin had had a kind of laziness which let him drift, giving in much more readily than I to the temptation to self-indulgence. It was that aspect of his personality that had allowed him to fall under the influence of the man who had done me so much harm.

‘As undergraduates we used to talk glibly of Christianity as superstition,’ Austin said. ‘A superstition which had all but evaporated in the light of rationalism and whose final disappearance we confidently predicted. But now I understand that it is the other way around: that without faith, all you have is superstition. Fear of the dark, of ghosts, of the realm of death which continues to frighten us, whatever we believe. We need stories to stop us being frightened. You’ve created your comforting myths and fictions from history – like your idea of King Arthur.’

‘King Arthur? What are you talking about?’

‘Didn’t you just tell me you are writing about King Arthur?’

‘Good heavens, no. I spoke of King Alfred.’

‘King Arthur or King Alfred. No matter. I may have confused them but the point is the same. You are creating your own stories to console you.’

‘In contradistinction to Arthur, Alfred is a well-attested historical figure,’ I protested indignantly. ‘Unlike your Jesus of Nazareth. Much as I respect the moral system associated with his name.’

‘Respect the moral system associated with his name!’ Austin repeated. ‘What I’m talking about is faith, belief, acceptance of the absolute reality of salvation and damnation. You – and others of our generation – lost your faith because you decided that science can explain everything. I believed that myself for a while but I came to understand that reason and faith are not in conflict. They are different orders of reality. Although I understand that now, when I was younger I shared your error. I know now that because there is darkness, there is light. That because there is death, there is life. Because there is evil, there is goodness. Because there is damnation, there is redemption.’

‘Because there is bacon there are eggs!’ I could not prevent myself from exclaiming. ‘What poppycock!’

Austin merely gazed at me coldly with his large black eyes, as if it was not worth the trouble of putting me right.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should not have spoken like that. But you believe that because you want to think that you are saved. You’ve fallen into the trap we always used to denounce. You’ve been taken in by the lure of eternal life and all that nonsense.’

‘What do you know of my beliefs?’ he said softly.

I realized suddenly something that I had half-known since my arrival – that he was a complete stranger to me. And then I felt even more disconcertingly that even the Austin I had believed I had known twenty-five years ago I had not really known. The man who was now gazing at me with such contempt had been in some sense present
in potentia
within the youth I had known, and I had perceived nothing of it.

There was a long silence. Outside, the thick fog was like a clammy comforter wrapping the Close and the Cathedral in a tight but chilly embrace. Austin drank, still watching me over the top of his glass. To avoid his gaze I, too, sipped my wine. He put the glass down on the floor and shifted into a different position. ‘You were to hear the story of the ghost.’

He spoke pleasantly, as if we had not just a moment earlier been on the edge of an open rupture. I responded to his changed mood.

‘Indeed, I should like that.’

Only two days later it came to seem very significant that Austin should have told me the story of a murder within the ancient Liberty of the Cathedral Close, but at the time it seemed a way to revive the cosy intimacy of the old days. After a moment he began to speak: ‘During the last couple of centuries people have frequently seen a tall black-clad figure moving silently around the Cathedral and the Close.’

I nodded, but he said: ‘You look sceptical, but there is physical proof for at least part of the story. That, at least, is something which you can see with your own eyes and even touch if, like Doubting Thomas, you accept only that as evidence, for it is written in stone and is not fifty yards from where we are now.’

‘What is it?’

‘All in due time. About two hundred and fifty years ago, William Burgoyne was the Foundation’s Canon-Treasurer. If you were to open that window – please don’t since it’s far too cold! – and peer out to your left, you would just catch a glimpse of what was at that time the Treasurer’s House. It is now called the New Deanery, though it is no longer that, either. Although not quite as large as the Deanery of that period, and certainly not a third the size of the Bishop’s Palace, it was by far the handsomest house in the Close. Burgoyne’s predecessor had refurbished it from the proceeds of robbing the Foundation, for the post of Treasurer was highly lucrative for a man who was prepared to take advantage of it. Burgoyne never yielded to that temptation nor countenanced it in others. It was precisely because of his probity that he made a powerful enemy. This was an ambitious canon of about the same age as Burgoyne called Freeth, Launcelot Freeth, who was the Sub-Dean. A man deeply mired in materialism.’