The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (7 page)

A little later in the evening I was aware of him threading his way across the room towards me. Again I saw how the others drew away from him as he passed and wondered if it was because they knew what his offence had been.

‘ ’Evening, Vicar,’ he said. ‘Enjoying your cocoa?’ There was a touch of mockery in his voice which took me aback. The other men treated me with a respect that bordered on reverence. I tried not to bridle; there was no reason why he should be deferential, so I smiled and nodded.

Mason paused. He appeared to be searching for something to say to me, then a thought came to him. He put his head on one side and said: ‘That story we read from the gospels about the man in the cemetery and the pigs.’ His voice was clear and well produced, in the tenor range, with a slight South London twang.

For a moment I did not know what he meant. It was such an odd way of talking about the story of Legion and the Gadarene Swine.

‘What about it?’

‘Well, let me make it clear, I am personally an atheist, so I have a rather different perspective on these things.’ He paused again, perhaps to study my reaction to his words. ‘But if you want my opinion,’ he went on, ‘I would say that whoever wrote down that story—’

‘St Mark.’

‘—whoever—had got it all wrong.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, for a start, everybody seems to have assumed that this man Legion needed to be healed somehow,
wanted
to be healed. But that was their assumption, wasn’t it? I mean, suppose he just liked living that way. Among the tombs and that.’

‘Cutting himself with stones?’

‘Yes. All right. Similar to what some holy men do in your church. Don’t they call it mortification? That was his choice.’

‘It’s an interesting point of view,’ I said, turning away from him. I had had enough of this conversation, but Mason hadn’t. He moved uncomfortably close to me.

‘You know why everyone wanted him dealt with?’ he said.

‘No. Why?’

‘It says why in the story. It says they had chained him up several times, and he always broke the chains. So he had strength. He had power. And he wouldn’t fit in. That’s why they wanted to get him. They wanted to destroy his power.’ By this time, though his voice was not raised, there was something nakedly aggressive about his tone. One of the men close by must have become aware of this because he turned round and said:

‘Is this man bothering you, Reverend?’

‘No. No,’ I said. ‘But I really must be going.’

Meriel escorted me to the door. When we were out of earshot of the others, she said: ‘You’ve been talking to Harry.’

‘Yes.’

‘You mustn’t let him bother you.’

To anyone else I might have said ‘he doesn’t’, but you didn’t lie to Meriel. I was silent.

‘He’s a rather more difficult customer than my average, but we’ll soon have him “clothed and in his right mind”, as they say.’ It was an odd choice of phrase, though it would have seemed even odder if it had not occurred in the gospel reading for that night. I wondered if Meriel was trying to tell me something about Mason which she had guessed at but was not quite prepared to admit openly.

My walk back to the Rectory that night was dominated by thoughts of Harry Mason and Meriel. She had exuded confidence in her work, complacency even. I wondered for the first time whether her confidence was well placed.

The following morning I was on my way to the church when I was waylaid by Mason. It was a disconcerting experience because he suddenly emerged from behind a tombstone in the graveyard. I make no claim to psychic gifts, but I have a strong sense of the presence of other people. Like most of us, for example, I usually know when I am being watched. What shocked me about Mason’s appearance was that I had no intimation of his presence until he was there. One moment the churchyard was empty—I was sure of it—the next he was about ten feet away from me standing quite still behind a tombstone and looking at me.

‘I apologise if I startled you,’ he said.

I said: ‘Not at all,’ or something equally foolish.

He then embarked on a long and rather rambling apology for what he had said the night before. I am not quite sure what he thought he was apologising for; except that he seemed to feel that I had been shocked by his unorthodox views. As a matter of fact, I had not. One phrase he used I can remember. He said: ‘I had no intention of offending the sensibilities of a man of the cloth.’ It struck me as oddly ponderous, pompous even, and besides, I don’t know about you, but I have a peculiar aversion to that phrase ‘a man of the cloth’. Whenever it is used I always feel that there is some sort of sneer behind it.

He talked at great length and I found it extremely difficult to disengage myself from him politely. At one point I thought he was going to follow me into the church, but when I opened the church door he backed away. The next minute he was gone.

It seems rather shaming to have to admit it, but when I came out of the church again after about an hour, I felt deeply apprehensive—afraid even—that Mason might be waiting for me among the gravestones. Fortunately he wasn’t.

From that day onwards I was plagued by Mason’s attentions. He never called on me in the Rectory or the Church, but I am sure that he often contrived apparently accidental meetings: in the village, sometimes when I was walking in the fields, but most often among the tombs in the churchyard. Then he would engage me in conversation. I can’t really remember what he said; perhaps I have deliberately blocked it from my mind. Details escape me but I do have a clear impression of always coming away from those meetings the worse for the encounter: distracted, uneasy, drained. But it was not that his talk was wild or evil in any obvious way. Do you know that expressive word ‘witter’? Well, that describes exactly what he did. He wittered at me. He launched on me a barrage of inconsequential chat about nothing in particular, and, what was worse, he constantly invited my reaction to what he said, so I could never switch off.

I once asked him directly why he needed to talk to me so much. I remember his reply distinctly because it was odd, and, for once, concise.

He said: ‘I talk to you, Vicar, because I’d rather not talk to myself.’

When I saw him walking in the village or in the fields I am ashamed to say I would often hide myself so he wouldn’t see me. As a result I was occasionally caught out by my parishioners in undignified positions because I felt a curious compulsion to observe his movements unseen. There was something peculiar about him which struck not only me but others as well.

‘There goes that Mr Mason,’ the villagers would remark, usually with a slight frown, and their eyes would follow him until he disappeared from view. It was as if, one of them observed to me, it was necessary to ‘keep an eye’ on him.

His walk was odd. He moved quickly, taking long strides with his stick legs, his body bent forward, shoulders slightly hunched. It was as if he were hurrying somewhere with a heavy but invisible weight on his back. Occasionally he would take a quick glance to his left or right, but he never seemed to notice his surroundings much, let alone enjoy them.

I felt I needed to speak to Meriel about him, but what was I to say? That he talked too much? That he had a strange walk? Fortunately, I was relieved of this responsibility by Meriel herself who came to see me at the Rectory. We discussed various churchy affairs. She even canvassed my opinion about a religious controversy which was then raging, but I could tell that something else was on her mind. Her usual stillness—a unique blend of rigidity and serenity—was absent. At last she blurted it out.

‘I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to have to ask him to leave.’ I asked who she meant, but my question was redundant because I knew she would say it was Mason. ‘He’s upsetting the other men,’ she said.

‘In what way?’

‘Nothing violent or insulting. He walks into a room and the atmosphere becomes unsettled. You know me, Rector. I don’t judge. It’s a necessary principle with me: I have to take people as they are. But there is something wicked about poor Harry.’

‘You think he’s wicked?’

‘No. No. I didn’t say that. I said there was something wicked
about
him.’

She then started talking about Tibbles, the ginger Tom who kept down the mouse population at the Old Tannery. Apparently Tibbles would rush headlong out of a room whenever Mason entered it, very unaccustomed behaviour for this dignified old bruiser. I thought this was fanciful nonsense, but, all the same, I was very relieved to hear that Mason was going. I felt ashamed at my relief, so I tried to enjoy our conversations when he waylaid me. But he didn’t go. And so the summer passed.

One other thing happened that summer which may be of no relevance at all. We had a Summer Fête and Flower show. It was in its way rather well run—not by me, you understand—and used to attract people from miles around. They were very welcome, but it was an invasion, and some of the visitors could be less than considerate, particularly where parking was concerned. There were, of course, fields set aside as car parks, but some found it easier to park in the village with little regard for the convenience of the locals. On this occasion some particularly inconsiderate persons had put their car directly across the little drive which went up one side of the Old Tannery, and it so happened that Meriel had chosen that day to visit a sick friend thirty miles away. For this she needed to use her battered old Morris Oxford which was in the drive.

The first I knew of it was a furious Meriel bearing down on me as I was judging vegetable marrows in the main marquee. I had never seen Meriel in a temper before. Every aspect of her seemed out of joint. Words poured from her in an incoherent stream; her movements were jerky and uncoordinated. Under other circumstances it might have been comical. She demanded that I make an immediate and stern request over the public address system that the offenders should immediately remove their car. This I did. I escorted Meriel back to the Old Tannery where we discovered that the car had been moved, but evidently not by its owners.

It was a medium-sized saloon car—I cannot remember the make, a Rover perhaps—quite a bulky and heavy thing, but it had been tipped over on its side into a ditch. Two strong men could not have done it, three possibly.

There was a terrible to-do about it. The owners of the car transformed themselves in an instant from offenders into irate injured parties and became particularly indignant when they discovered who the inhabitants of the Old Tannery were. The police were called in and the men interviewed, but the mystery was never resolved. Most of the men had excellent alibis for the time when the deed could have been done. Meriel happened to remark to me much later that the only one who didn’t was Mason, and he was the only one she knew had witnessed her rage about the car. But, of course, everyone agreed it would have been quite impossible for one man singlehandedly to have overturned a medium sized saloon car. What made it all the more mysterious was that there had apparently been no witnesses to the incident.

At the end of the Summer, I began to wonder why Meriel had not let Mason go, if not altogether, at least to another of her Philippian houses. He had committed no offence, of course, but the atmosphere at the Old Tannery had noticeably deteriorated. There was none of the relaxed warmth that there had been before. My weekly Compline Services were held in a stiff reverential silence. Mason was always present, but always apart and aloof. Usually he sat in the window which faced West so that his shadow blocked out the rays of the declining sun.

Eventually I tackled Meriel about it. We were taking a walk together after an early weekday communion at which she had been the only person present. When I pressed her she smiled, as I thought, in an irritatingly superior way.

She said: ‘You have heard, Rector, of the Doctrine of Substitution?’

I knew about it theoretically. Certain advanced Anglicans of a mystical persuasion were very keen on it at one time, I remember. The idea is that, like Christ, albeit in a very minor way, you can take on the sins and afflictions of others. In other words, you can not only be the beneficiary of the Passion of Christ, you can also, in a small way, participate in it.

Meriel told me that Mason was suffering from some kind of deep-seated spiritual trauma and that she had been having sessions with him, and also engaging in severe personal mortifications in order to take on some of his burden. When I pressed her for details she became vague and evasive.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I have always been somewhat wary of this Doctrine of Substitution. I think you have to be a very saintly person indeed—or a very arrogant one—to undertake such a task. So which was Meriel? You may think I have prejudged her, but I haven’t. I have no way of telling whether she was acting out of vanity and spiritual pride, or a kind of divine and humble recklessness. Or was it a strange mixture of the two?

All I was sure of then—as I am now—was that she was attempting something very dangerous and of dubious practical benefit. I told her so and she disregarded me, as she had every right to do, of course. I was not her spiritual director; that office was filled by the Abbot of a local Friary of Anglican Franciscans.

For several days after my meeting with Meriel, I did not see Mason. It was the end of summer and the earth was warm. Leaves gave off their last dusty glitter before turning yellow. I wondered whether my unaccustomed feelings of goodwill had anything to do with Mason’s absence. As each day passed I began to lose my dread of his sudden appearance in the churchyard. I wondered if he had left altogether as he did not put in an appearance at Compline for two weeks running, but Meriel assured me that he was ‘still with us’.

Then one morning he was there again. This time I knew it the moment I had stepped out of the Rectory at six forty-five. It was a pleasant morning as I remember, sunny, but moist with a slight chill in the air.

Though the Rectory is adjacent to the church you cannot see it from there. It is hidden by a belt of magnificent and ancient oaks. You walk down the Rectory drive past these trees and then, as one comes out of the drive, the church is there, embedded in its green graveyard, with its tower of knapped flint tall against the sky. That first sight of St Winifred’s used always to take me by surprise, and often filled me with joy.