Glamorous Powers (32 page)

W. R. INGE
Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934
Mysticism in Religion

My emotion was so profound that I felt a need to be alone, and rising to my feet I crossed the heather to the stack of rocks which crowned the Tor. The wild ponies regarded me with mild interest but soon resumed their grazing. I looked back. Miss Fielding had been watching me but I saw her avert her gaze as if she wished to give me every privacy. Slowly I circled the rocks before retracing my steps through the heather.

When I reached her I began: ‘Miss Fielding –’ but she interrupted me.

‘My name’s Anne Barton-Woods,’ she said. ‘Fielding is the name of my aunt who lives in Starbridge. I’m sorry I lied to you but I have such a horror of fortune-hunters that when I’m on holiday I find I can’t relax unless I take on a false identity.’ And as an afterthought she added: ‘Of course you’ll now think I’m a hopeless neurotic’

Again I was aware that there was a taut fearful underside to the psyche which existed beneath the veneer of her self-confidence, and at once I said: ‘I suggest we forget the word “neurotic”, which is one of those fashionable modern words which are so frequently misused, and consider your situation from a calmer, more rational perspective. If you have a horror of fortune-hunters, how clever you are to retreat to an ecclesiastical backwater like Allington where any normal fortune-hunter would die of boredom within twenty-four hours! And how
sensible to adopt a false identity so that no abnormal fortune-hunter, lurking among the clerical collars, can pursue you once you leave! This all sounds most closely reasoned to me.’

Miss Barton-Woods was sufficiently encouraged to say: ‘I wish I could dispense with holidays altogether, but I find I need them. I work very hard running my estate.’

‘No doubt you’re wise to take an annual rest, but I do see that it must be an ordeal to spend two weeks among strangers.’

‘Shakespeare helps,’ said Miss Barton-Woods. ‘After I arrive I always read
Henry V –’

‘“Once more into the breach –”’

‘Exactly. Then later I read the light-hearted plays,
Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors
–’

‘The plays in which a lost brother is found.’

She gasped but before she could speak I asked: ‘How long have you been running your estate?’

‘Since my brother died six years ago.’ She hesitated, then added: ‘The estate’s been in the hands of my family since the Civil War – we were roundheads taking over from cavaliers – but now the family’s died out and there’s no one left except me. My aunt in Starbridge is on my mother’s side of the family.’ She began to clear up the debris of our picnic, and as she tilted her cup to spill the dregs of her tea on the ground the gesture seemed to emphasize the bleakness of her situation, drained as it was of family life. ‘For a while I thought I would marry,’ she said, ‘but when I was engaged I found I wasn’t much good at all that sort of thing – so you see, I don’t just put on this mask to avoid the fortune-hunters. I put it on to keep all men at arm’s length because I never want to get engaged again.’

‘Of course. That makes perfect sense.’

She gave me a suspicious look. ‘You’re probably now thinking I’m just suffering from sour grapes because my fiancé broke off the engagement.’

‘That would be Braithwaite’s explanation, no doubt, but I’m
not Braithwaite. My explanation would run like this: your broken engagement, combined with the loss of your brother, brought you profound suffering; you transcended that suffering by using it as a base on which to build a new life set in opposition to the old – a move which made celibacy not only desirable, after the tragedy of your broken engagement, but essential to complete the process of “metanoia”, the turning aside into the new life which would enable you to survive.’

She said simply: ‘You’re the only person who’s ever understood,’ and opening the picnic-basket she replaced the thermos as if she feared it might shatter in her hands. ‘But I knew you’d understand,’ she said, ‘and that’s why I’m willing for you to stay at the Manor. You won’t be a nuisance and you won’t mind me being –’ She bit back the word ‘neurotic’ ‘– eccentric.’

‘My dear Miss Barton-Woods,’ I said, ‘if you’re still willing to offer me hospitality after my psychic parlour-trick just now I shall think you’re the most courageous of women and you can be just as eccentric as you please! But now let me follow your confession about your identity with a far more bizarre confession of my own …’

I made no attempt to translate the spiritual quality of the vision into words, but this was not only because mere words could never have reflected satisfactorily that glimpse of ultimate reality as I journeyed beyond the borders of finite time. It was also because I was aware that my story was already so unusual that I shied away from any inadequate descriptions which might well have aroused her incredulity. Indeed so outrageous did my clairvoyance sound as I recited the bare facts that I feared she would inevitably judge me either mad or wicked or both, using my psychic powers to slither my way first into her confidence and then into her bank account.

‘… and a light began to shine through the north window.
As the light increased in power I knew it was the light of God. I then realized I was called to leave the Order,’ I said colourlessly in the tone employed by the gentlemen reading the weather forecasts which I had heard on Ruth’s wireless. I had been amazed when the announcers had droned on with such impressive lack of emotion about the numerous gales poised to ravage the North Sea.

Miss Barton-Woods was silent and inscrutable. I watched the breeze disturb her short dark hair which was shaped into a point at the nape of her neck. Her skin was lightly freckled; I noticed the small mole above the square line of her jaw, the shine on the tip of her wide nose, the dull unpainted red of her mouth. She looked no prettier without her glasses but there was a stronger impression of a striking individuality. I thought it not unlikely that she was one of those women who appear at their best not in youth, when their unusual looks preclude them from conforming to fashionable notions of beauty, but in middle-age when the unusual looks can be seen as ‘distinguished’ or even ‘handsome’. Picking up the glasses I saw that the lenses were clear. The glasses had been part of the camouflage she had worn to protect herself, part of the degrading of the personality perhaps not so different from the degrading I myself had employed when to protect the privacy of my inner self I had referred to my vision as a parlour-trick.

At last I said abruptly: ‘Do you believe me?’ and she answered surprised: ‘Of course.’

Greatly relieved I confessed: ‘I was afraid you might think I was a confidence trickster.’

‘That thought had, of course, occurred to me,’ said Miss Barton-Woods, ‘but the Warden knew you when you were at Grantchester so obviously you are who you say you are. I suppose it’s just possible that you might now be sinking into iniquity, but I think if that were the case you’d have taken care to get the details of the chapel right.’

I forgot my fear of her distrust. ‘What did I get wrong?’

‘There’s no wide space between the doors and the last pew; the pews do go all the way back. There’s no plain altar-table
with a wooden cross; the chapel’s not deconsecrated but it hasn’t been used since my grandmother died, and my father, who wasn’t a believer, gave the altar-table to a local church before selling the altar-furnishings at Sotheby’s. As for the memorial tablet …’ She hesitated before saying: ‘That’s really most odd. It does exist; it commemorates my uncle who was killed in the Boer War, but no one’s placed lilies there since my grandmother died in 1919.’

‘So the past was mixed up with the present and future. That happens sometimes.’ I was so absorbed by these new facts that I barely noticed the astonished lift of her eyebrows.

At last she ventured awkwardly: ‘This is all very –’ But she could not find the word which would have expressed the quality of her amazement and fascination. ‘I suppose I should feel frightened,’ she said, ‘but I don’t feel in any way endangered.’ She groped for words again before concluding: ‘It’s because you’re benign. There’s no wickedness here for me to fear.’

‘Father Darcy would have said that’s because the vision came from God and not from the Devil.’

‘In that case is it vulgar to say I feel exhilarated?’

‘Certainly not! No one thought a spiritual exhilaration in the least vulgar until the religious philosophers of the Enlightenment made “enthusiasm” a dirty word.’

We smiled at each other before Miss Barton-Woods closed the picnic-basket and stood up. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Give me twenty-four hours so that I can talk to my housekeeper and have one of the spare rooms made habitable.’

I stared at her. ‘But you can’t possibly cut short your holiday!’

‘Why not? I’m fed up with Allington and after last night I’ve got the perfect excuse to leave.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘If you take the noon train on Tuesday from Ashburton to Starbridge you can get the three-thirty train from Starbridge to Starrington Magna. I’ll send my chauffeur to the station to meet you. You don’t want to walk a mile with your baggage, and the village taxi’s always breaking down.’

I almost baulked at the prospect of a chauffeur but managed
to pull myself together. ‘How very kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much. But are you sure that my arrival won’t cause awkwardness for you?’

‘What kind of awkwardness?’

‘Well …’ I found myself floundering in the face of what I suspected was an aristocratic indifference to certain conventions. ‘I was thinking of your neighbours,’ I said. ‘Might they not judge it a little unseemly if you were to grant hospitality to a man whom you’ve only just met?’

‘Oh, good heavens!’ exclaimed Miss Barton-Woods, confirming my suspicions. ‘Surely it’s only the lower classes who spend their lives worrying about what the neighbours might think!’

Old wounds broke open in my psyche. ‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but my background is very different from yours, Miss Barton-Woods, and I’m afraid you must make allowances for my tediously bourgeois anxiety.’

She looked stricken. Furious with myself both for upsetting her and for revealing my ineradicable sensitivity on the subject of class I said rapidly: ‘I’m sorry. You were being refreshingly honest and I was being tiresomely inhibited.’

‘No, I was being snobbish and you were quite right to reprove me for it. But don’t worry about the neighbours,’ said Miss Barton-Woods, resuming the casual confidence which can only be acquired from an upbringing in privileged surroundings. They wouldn’t cut me unless I did something quite beyond the pale.’

‘I think offering hospitality to a clairvoyant cleric might be construed as pressing the pale to its utmost limits.’

‘We’ll keep quiet about the clairvoyance and play up the clerical collar,’ said Miss Barton-Woods smiling at me, but added in panic: ‘Or are you trying to create an excuse for refusing my invitation?’

‘Absolutely not!’ I said with a robustness worthy of Francis. ‘The very last thing I want to do is refuse! Thank you for displaying your hospitable inclinations so generously, Miss Barton-Woods. I can only confess I find your offer irresistible.’

Later on the motor-bus which took us back across the moor to Ashburton some confused impulse prompted me to say: ‘I’m sorry I embarrassed you earlier by displaying the chip on my shoulder,’ but she answered tranquilly: ‘You weren’t embarrassed by my chip – why should I be embarrassed by yours?’

‘But to be over-sensitive about class is so tedious and commonplace –’

‘A chip is never tedious or commonplace to its owner. It’s always quite unique and utterly beastly. Fortunately I’ve never suffered from class prejudice, but I’m sure that if I had I wouldn’t think a chip about class was tedious or commonplace at all.’

The motor-bus began to growl up a steep hill. When we reached the summit there was a brief pause as if the engine were gasping for breath, and at that moment my voice said: ‘My mother was an orphanage girl who became a parlourmaid. When I was growing up I found that what the neighbours thought so often made the difference between happiness and misery.’

‘Beastly old neighbours! I suppose they couldn’t bear to think that your parents had not only married in defiance of the conventions but had actually had the nerve to live happily ever after.’

I smiled before saying: ‘My parents were certainly devoted to each other.’

‘I remember you saying your father was a schoolmaster. Did he teach at a public school?’

‘Yes – but that was before he was married, of course. When he became engaged the headmaster suggested to him that my mother might find it difficult to fit in with the wives of the other masters in such a closed community, and so naturally my father resigned. After that he taught at the local grammar school for some years, but although that was a step down the educational ladder he never complained.’

‘Beastly headmaster! Beastly public school! If you ask me, both your parents were well out of it. Did your mother manage to make many friends in her new life?’

‘Good heavens, no! None of the neighbours would call. But she didn’t mind. She’d got what she wanted.’

‘And your father?’

‘Oh, he never complained.’

‘All the same –’

‘They were happy enough. She had her household and her cats, he had his study and his books, and both of them were content in their isolation.
I
was the one who minded when the neighbours’ children weren’t allowed to play with me and the big boys tried to bully me at the local dames’ school where I began my education.’