Casting Off (68 page)

Their conversations always graduated to philosophy – or, rather, Christian philosophy. For instance, after Christopher had told him about Polly and the blow of discovering that, after her unhappy love affair, she had found someone else who was not him and she was to be married – ‘So she would never have loved me’ – Father Lancing had said, ‘But you loved her, and that was a gift.’

‘A
gift
?’

‘Surely. Love is a great gift.’

‘Like faith, you mean?’

‘Well, you could say that faith was another kind of love, couldn’t you? How does that strike you?’

And so on.

After the conversation about Richard and Nora, he went back to the house full of determination to love them. It was easier to love Richard, he discovered, than his sister. He tried talking to her about Richard, saying that it might be good for him to be allowed some pleasures even if they were not particularly good for him, but she had talked him down at once. ‘I know you mean well, Christopher,’ she had finished, ‘but, unfortunately, meaning well isn’t the whole story. I’ve worked with these people for years now, and I really do know best what is good for them.’

‘
You
mean well, then,’ he had not been able to resist saying and she had answered blithely: ‘Of
course
I do! How could you think anything else?’

By now, he was going to church because he wanted to. He also suggested to Father Lancing that he go to Confession, and the priest said that it was on Tuesdays and Fridays, and gave him a book. ‘That will give you some idea of the form,’ he said.

He went. He had thought to begin with that he had not a great deal to confess but, when it came to the point, there seemed to be a surprising amount. He was also surprised that Father Lancing did not make any moral comment, but confined himself to asking quite practical questions like ‘How many times?’ After it, when he had been given his absolution and penance, he went into the church and prayed, incandescent with good intentions.

He quickly found that they did not last or, rather, that in the wear and tear of daily life, he forgot them. He seemed to be surrounded by sad and unhappy people, and when he found how hard it was to make anything better for them, he resented their unhappiness.

Then one day, when he was in the woodshed, sawing away at a particularly intractable piece of elm, it came to him that he wanted a quite different kind of life, and something that Father Lancing had said that a monk had told him came back. ‘You can put yourself in the centre of the universe, or you can put God. You cannot put another person there.’ At the time, though he had listened politely, he had not thought he agreed, but now, suddenly, it was clear to him. He most certainly did
not
want to be the centre of his universe – and that left God.

He rushed to Father Lancing with this news. It was received calmly; he was almost piqued by how calm the priest was about it.

‘But what do you want to do about that?’ he asked.

‘I thought I should go into some community. I thought I should become a monk.’

‘Did you, now?’

‘Yes. I don’t seem to be much good in the world. I think I’d be better out of it.’

Father Lancing did not reply at once. He was engaged upon knocking out his evil-smelling pipe. Then he said, ‘Well. I don’t think anyone will want to receive you if you’re running away from the world. It’s more a question of running towards something than running away.’

‘Towards God? Yes – that’s what I mean!’

Father Lancing put his hands on Christopher’s shoulders.

‘I could send you to someone who would talk to you,’ he said. ‘It might clarify things for you and it will do no harm.’

So he had gone to Nashtun Abbey. He spent two days there, and had several long sessions about his possible vocation. The place both enchanted and charged him. There he discovered, as well as much else, that if he was accepted, he would spend two to three years as a postulant and eventually become a novice during which he would be free to leave at any time.

He returned to Frensham in an exalted state of mind; he had no doubts, no fears, he
knew
. It only remained for him to be accepted.

Weeks passed, and he heard nothing. He went to Father Lancing.

‘Father Gregory has written to me about you,’ he said. ‘He feels that you need time and instruction to understand more about what you want to do – to know whether you have a vocation. I see your face fall. Do you think you know everything? Well, people do think that. Spiritual fantasy is much like any other kind. Repetition and you always come out on top. Is that it?’

It was a bull’s eye. He felt himself going red.

‘If you want further instruction, I have been asked to give it to you, so don’t despair, St Christopher.’ But he smiled so sweetly when he said this that Christopher was able to laugh with him.

‘You and Father Lancing. What are you up to?’ Nora asked, when Christopher asked for time to go and see him.

‘He’s teaching me things.’

‘Oh, good. He’s a wonderful man, I think. And it makes me very happy that you’ve started going to church.’

Richard was not so happy. ‘I can see you’re getting sucked in. You’ll soon have first-class reasons for denying yourself – and me, come to that.’

‘No, I won’t.’ He’d decided to collude about the cigarettes and he bought half a bottle of whisky every month which he pretended to share with Richard – actually, he cunningly drank cold tea.

He told Father Lancing that he did not want to tell anyone yet of his intention. By now he was having arguments with him, and once, when he had an appointment to see him and he was not there, he felt furiously angry – which, when they next met, Father Lancing knew at once.

‘You’re angry with me because I had to do something else. Why? Are you more important than the next person?’

‘I thought you could have let me know.’

‘Perhaps I could have done that. I was at the hospital, and I didn’t want to leave the person I was with. That’s about the colour of it.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t see, but you will.’

There was the turning to Polly’s street. He looked down it as the bus passed, but he was not sure if he could see her house.

He had not wanted to go to the wedding, and when Father Lancing asked him why not, he said because he was afraid of how it might make him feel.

‘If that is the reason, you’d certainly better go. Anyway, what about your cousin? Didn’t you say she was very fond of you and won’t that mean that she would want you to be there?’

‘Well, yes, but I didn’t think that was the most important thing.’

‘The most important thing is you, is it? Your spiritual state?’

He looked at his friend dumbly, trapped, because he
did
think so and realized that Father Lancing didn’t.

‘I’m trying to give things
up
,’ he said at last.

‘Ah, that’s it. The problem with that is that it’s when your spiritual pride gets a real look in – has a field day, you might say. God can do without you congratulating yourself for loving Him.’ But he said it with such kindness that Christopher found he could bear it.

‘I do see,’ he said. ‘I’ll go.’

It had been a very strange occasion for him. He had knelt in the church, praying that she would be happy – had chosen the right person. It seemed odd that she would have children whom he would never see, that he would know nothing of her from this day on. She had arrived, and was being led up the aisle by her father, followed, he could see, by Lydia and, he thought, Uncle Rupert’s youngest daughter. Her face, covered by a veil, was not visible. But her voice, as she made her vows, was absolutely clear. After they had been into the vestry and she was walking back down the aisle with her husband, her veil was thrown from her face and he saw her and how happy she was.

When, at the reception, he eventually reached the end of the line waiting to congratulate her, her face lit up, and she stepped forward to kiss him saying, ‘Gerald, this is Christopher – my most dear cousin.’

Whether it was the glistening white satin, the veil, the pearls round her throat, her radiant dark blue eyes or all of these things he did not know, but light seemed to stream from her – he felt struck, and speechless from it, and for a second he was afraid that he still loved her. And then he was simply glad that he loved her and this was accompanied by a feeling of living peace.

‘. . . and you must come and stay,’ she was saying. And her husband was smiling and saying of course he must.

He wanted to tell her then, but it was neither the time nor the place. For the rest of the party, during the speeches, the toasts, the general rejoicing, he tried to see as many of the family as possible – say his silent farewells. Clary, thin and with long hair and wearing a green dress, was the only one who regarded him steadily (he had never noticed before how lovely her eyes were), was the only one who noticed that he had changed. ‘I don’t know exactly
how
, but you have. You look as though you’ve found something good,’ she said.

‘I have.’

Then she had grinned at him and looked more like the girl he remembered – whose face was smudged and whose clothes seemed always to be torn or spattered with fruit juice. The Duchy, who seemed a little smaller but otherwise just the same. And Uncle Hugh, who looked so different he seemed almost jolly – ‘The last wedding we met at you were wearing my trousers, do you remember?’ he said – and more cousins. Simon and Teddy, resplendent in morning dress, pleased to see him, and both mentioned that camp in the wood. He’d been trying to get away from things then – he’d always been trying to get away because he had not found what to go
towards
. . .

The bus conductor shouted up the stairs that this was the stop for Marylebone Station, and he got off. My last bus, he thought, not caring, just noting the fact.

‘It does seem to me a way of not facing up to things,’ had been one of his father’s sallies at lunch.

As he walked to the station he thought that, curiously, it had been harder to leave Richard than anyone else. He had told Nora that he was going to a retreat, but she knew too much about these things, and after she had asked for how long, and he had answered he didn’t know, but months anyway, her eyes had widened, and she’d said, ‘Oh, Christopher! I understand now. Oh, I do hope you have a vocation!’ Then she said – almost shyly, ‘One thing. Would you mind
not
telling Richard that you are going for good? He has got rather attached to you, and it would make him so sad. It will be easier for him to know when he has got used to doing without you.’

She did love him – in her way. So he’d agreed to that. He didn’t feel good about it, would rather have been honest, but Richard’s distress about his going at all was so evident that he recognized that perhaps, for once, Nora had been right.

‘I can’t say it won’t be the same without you, because it
will
– it will all be exactly the same. Bloody awful.’

Nora had left them alone together on his last evening – a piece of tact, of which, Christopher recognized with shame, he had not thought her capable – and they’d had a last drink together and Richard had smoked three cigarettes.

‘It’s not just the booze and the fags,’ he said. ‘I like
talking
to you. Still, if you’re coming back, I’ve got something to look forward to, which I suppose is the next best thing to having it in the first place.’

On impulse, he’d bent down and kissed Richard on leaving, and Richard had started – almost as though he’d
hurt
him. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he’d said.

Perhaps he could write to Richard. But, then, Nora would have to read the letter to him and that, he knew, would change the sort of letter it could be. If I’m allowed to write letters at all, he thought, and was possessed with a nervous dread of what might lie ahead.

But once in the train, with his small suitcase on the rack, he returned to the sense of adventure and challenge that this journey to the interior – the centre of his universe – exacted, and he thought then that the things he had to give up were not either things or even people who had been in his life, but mysterious, as yet not known things, that lay inside himself, for only that could make room for a new inhabitant.

Four

1946–47

Until now, he had always thought that if one could not make up one’s mind about what to do, it was because one was not sure what one wanted. How untrue that is, he thought, as he drove down the familiar lane, away from the cottage, through the wooded bit and then past the drive leading up to the station. Three miles away . . . He could still turn back, but he knew that he would not. He would continue the boring, well-known, dull road all the way to the suburbs of London and thence to his empty ill-kempt flat. Six weeks was not so very long, he said, as though to someone else. It seemed interminable. But this morning had been the last straw. Seeing her naked in the kitchen with her burned hand – the imagination of a body in no way impaired the impact of a first sight of the real thing – had brought home to him as nothing else had seemed to do, that he could not continue this life with her which had become so beset by dishonesty.

If he tried to think about it, he could not pin down the moment when he had begun to love her. Certainly, when he had come back from France and found her so wrecked and desperate, he had dropped everything to care for her, had managed to put aside or at least conceal his fury and loathing for the wretched man who had caused her such anguish. Was this love? Or was it simply that he
knew
her – her intense, whole-hearted capacity for love, and the deprivation she had already endured? He could think of no one less equipped to withstand total rejection and pregnancy. The first thing that he had known about her, before he had even seen her, was that she had lost her mother. He remembered how, on one of those long walks in France with Rupert, shattered by Isobel’s death, there had come a moment when he had been able to suggest to him that the daughter, the little girl, Clarissa, wasn’t it?, must also be very bereft and needing his love. And Rupert had said: ‘There’s the boy as well, two of them.’ And he had said, ‘The boy is a baby. The girl is old enough to grieve. You must go back and see to her.’