The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (29 page)

One evening I was hurrying back to my flat after a long day in the Bodleian. The need to get home before dark had become an obsession with me so that I was running. When the exertion became too much for me I stopped to lean against a low wall. I remember my right hand reaching out for some support and touching a smooth surface, spongy, and slightly slimy, like the cap of a mushroom that has been kept too long in the fridge. I drew my hand back and saw that I had touched the death mask. There it was, peering at me vacantly over the wall, its mouth working, making vague chewing movements. If it was trying to say something, no sound came. I screamed and ran.

My other visions were less alarming but no less haunting. More than once in that strange borderland between waking and sleeping I saw, or thought I saw something. At first it was no more than a white mist, but I had the impression that, though I knew myself to be in my small flat in the Banbury Road, I was also, on some other level, surrounded by the mist. The sensation filled me with despair, not of a violent, grief-stricken kind, but settled and, in some horrible way, peaceful, like a narcotic sleep.

Slowly, out of the mist, two shapes would emerge. They came towards me out of a great distance. As they came closer, it was not simply their physical presence which encroached on me, but their emotions and agonies. Even before I could see them clearly, I knew them to be Gordon and Freda. They seemed to be asking for my help, but I had no idea what help I could give them, or if there was anything there to help. Each time I confronted their pleadings with my helplessness I could feel their distress and I saw their faces fall into the gaping death masks that I had seen on that almost but never quite forgotten day. As I struggled out of my hideous waking dream, a phrase would keep repeating itself over and over in my head: ‘We thought we were going to end it all.’

My mental condition deteriorated. I became more fearful, more withdrawn, more visionary each day. Eventually a kind friend found me a psychiatrist. His name was Bernard and some swore by him, while others said he was a crank. I only discovered later that, in addition to being a qualified shrink, he also belonged to an Anglican religious order. He listened patiently while I described my terrors to him and their probable origin. When I came to my visions of Gordon and Freda Barrymore in the white mist, he nodded as if he recognised the phenomenon.

‘A white mist? Yes, that often happens with suicides,’ said Bernard.

I was baffled. He seemed to be talking about real events rather than my subconscious. He saw my confusion and explained: ‘When people are somehow in touch with suicides they often have this impression that the suicides are walking through a white mist, a sort of “spaceless” space, infinite, but claustrophobic because everything is the same. It’s an image, of course, but it’s almost certainly a reflection of reality. It means that the suicides have lost their way. They are quite literally lost souls. They don’t know where to go, or what to do.’

‘Even if that’s true, what can I do about it?’

‘Oddly enough, you can do quite a lot. You can pray. The prayers of the living are often a great help to suicides, because they’re still earthbound, you see.’

This struck me as pure nonsense, but my reaction to Bernard’s words was at odds with my impression of him as a person. He was quiet, intelligent, unhysterical. Though I thought what he said was folly, I felt that he was a man whose views should be respected.

‘How do I pray?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t tell you. I’m not an expert. To be honest, no-one is. You just have to try it and find out for yourself.’

I cannot draw any conclusions. I can only say what happened. I attempted to do what Bernard suggested. I spent some time of every day thinking about Gordon and Freda and asked some power in which I did not wholly believe to lead them out of their limbo. As I did so my anxieties began to diminish. One night I had a vision of the white mist again, but the figures of Gordon and Freda were walking away from me, and they were not alone. A third figure was with them, and he wore a uniform.

Now in my waking and dreaming thoughts the death mask has gone; and so have Freda and Gordon Barrymore. All that is left behind is my gratitude to them; and that I cherish.

THE SEVENTEENTH SISTER

I have no way of verifying this story. Father Berrigan died a few weeks after telling it to me, and I can only say that I have no reason to doubt it. Father Berrigan was a small, emaciated, wiry man who gave off an aura unique to himself: a combination of extreme, almost febrile spirituality and great toughness. He could look severe, but you discovered that whatever severity there was in his nature was inflicted on himself. He had a narrow, intense face and a thin mouth which, when it smiled, showed a beguiling, mischievous side to his complex personality.

He ran the Catholic chaplaincy at the University of Dorset for which I was the Anglican equivalent. Our relations had always been cordial, but it was only after my wife had died that we became close. If there was a chink in Berrigan’s armour, it was the slight unease—I would not exactly call it nervousness—that he exhibited in the presence of women. There was a certain wary respect between my wife and him, but I sensed there could never be anything like a friendship.

Once I was a widower he would come to my house almost every Thursday evening after dinner. He would pour himself and me a large glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey which would then be diluted with an equal measure of water, and we would talk. That the bottle was supplied alternately by one of us was an unspoken part of the ritual, as was the rule that one glass only per evening was allowed. The conversation, while never trivial, was not heavy. University personalities and politics were usually discussed and, as Berrigan’s view of life was ironic rather than censorious, we laughed a good deal. I enjoyed our conversations but, about six months before Berrigan died, I began to sense that there was something he wished to tell me. There were moments when he would swallow a large gulp of Jameson’s, lean forward and take a deep breath, as if about to embark on some serious topic. Then he would check himself, sit back in his chair and make a general, anodyne comment to fill the gap he had created. I wondered if I should urge him to come out with whatever he wanted to talk about. In fact I found that I was nerving myself to prompt him in the same way that he was nerving himself to tell me.

The moment came one evening when we had been discussing the dismissal of one of the lecturers for sexual harassment. The case was particularly heinous because the lecturer in question—Berrigan noted in passing the homophonic appropriateness of the title—had used academic bribery and blackmail to ensure silence and get his way. I speculated aloud whether that difficult adjective ‘evil’ was appropriate in this context.

‘Oh, no,’ said Berrigan with unexpected firmness. ‘He was weak and vain and dishonest—as much with himself, as with anyone else. But evil? Oh, no, that’s a different kettle of fish.’

‘But surely the effect of what he did . . . ?’

‘Effects are not relevant. We don’t call a drunken coach driver wickeder than a mass murderer because he kills more people in a traffic accident. Effects anyway are ultimately incalculable. Evil, like beauty, is a thing of itself, without cause or justification. It is an entity, independent of those it acts on and through. When you see it, you know it.’ Berrigan was leaning forward and I saw that there was a tremor in the hand that held his whiskey. ‘Hannah Arendt was wrong when she talked about the banality of evil. Sin is banal. Human weakness is banal. But evil lies beyond human weakness. It preys on human weakness, and it is not banal.’

‘There’s something you’ve been wanting to tell me,’ I said.

Berrigan leaned back with a sigh. He was grateful for the opportunity, but I detected a residue of reluctance in him. At the time I thought that as a Catholic priest, he may have felt it beneath his dignity to open up to a mere Anglican. I now believe I was mistaken: Berrigan was beyond such trivial sectarian concerns. When a man has stared into the pit as he had, he very properly hesitates to communicate the horror he has experienced.

He made several false starts to his story, and often, during the course of his narration, went into long digressions, fascinating in themselves, but not relevant to the events he described. I will therefore give a précis of what he told me and only set down his exact words when I can remember them and they are of importance.

I must also, for the sake of completeness, make one other observation. The time of year was October, and it had been raining. My house is a modern one, its rooms are small and centrally heated. The radiators were on and the room when he began to tell his story was pleasantly warm, but as he got into his narrative I began to experience something like cold. That is the only way to describe it, because I am sure that, had I looked at a thermometer it would have shown that the temperature had not dropped. It was similar to having a fever when you know that you are perfectly warm but you still shiver, and cold sweat courses over your skin. But the symptoms were not shivering or cold sweat, but the kind of stiffness and paralysis, both mental and physical that you experience if you have to spend a long time in a cold, damp room.

**

Soon after his ordination Father Berrigan was sent to a parish in the North of England. The work was hard; the poverty he witnessed was distressing, but the sense of fulfilment was great. The period we are talking about was shortly after the Second World War when there was at least almost full employment, and communities had not yet begun to disintegrate. He had been working in this parish for about a year when he was summoned by his bishop to a meeting. I gathered from hints dropped by Berrigan that relations with the bishop were strained for reasons he did not make clear.

At the meeting he was asked, in addition to his parochial duties, to take over as confessor and spiritual director to a convent. An elderly priest who lived in semi-retirement nearby was able to say Mass for them, but he was not considered to be fit enough for more exacting spiritual duties. Berrigan was deliberately vague to me about the location of this convent, but I gathered that it was in a fairly remote part of rural Lancashire and some distance from his own parish. Berrigan wondered why he had been chosen for the task, but the Bishop merely said that it was because Father Berrigan had a car, a rare commodity among Catholic priests in the 1950s.

His predecessor in the role had been a Father Coughlin who had withdrawn, apparently because of ill health. (Coughlin incidentally was not the man’s real name; Father Berrigan told me he could not reveal it.) Berrigan asked the bishop if he might speak or write to Father Coughlin, but the bishop forbade any communication and refused to reveal Coughlin’s whereabouts. There was something about the bishop’s more than usually abrupt manner which made Berrigan feel that information was being withheld from him.

The following day Berrigan drove over to the convent which was called The House of the Sacred Heart. It stood in its own grounds on the edge of a large village which Berrigan called Crampton. It had high walls and was approached by a long gravel drive via a spiked wrought-iron gate which needed to be unlocked by one of the sisters. The house itself had been purpose built at the turn of the century of red brick in a plain, soulless style. The order of nuns which it served was contemplative though not utterly silent or enclosed. They conducted retreats, and they had attached to them what was known as a Magdalene House where unmarried girls who had become pregnant could be brought to have their children delivered and then taken away to be adopted. There, under the supervision of the nuns, the girls worked a laundry—the convent’s chief source of income—until they were deemed fit to be released again into the community.

‘We are talking about the 1950s,’ said Berrigan, ‘when attitudes were not as enlightened as they are now.’ I nodded, acknowledging my friend’s almost obsessive desire to give as accurate and fair an account as he possibly could.

His first impressions of The House of the Sacred Heart were contradictory. ‘I felt I ought to have been more uplifted than I was. It was a fine day, bright with high clouds and a bit of a breeze, a good walking day. The place was spotlessly clean and neat; and the nuns I met showed cheerful faces. I was given what I could have described as a warm welcome; except that it left me cold. Perhaps the fault was mine. There was something too about the light in the convent which I did not care for. It is hard to describe except to say that the place was very cool and white, somehow unnaturally so. It reminded me of the light you get in a room when it has been snowing and the sun reflected off the snow throws a while glare on the walls and ceiling. I was shown into Mother Superior’s office. I remember the one picture, a crudely coloured photograph of Pius XII, staring intensely at me out of that bespectacled skull of a face. Behind a desk Mother Superior smiled at me. She had regular features, and the typical nun’s look of scrubbed agelessness, shorn of everyday human charm or ugliness.’

Berrigan found Mother Superior an admirable woman but not especially sympathetic. ‘She was utterly devoted, efficient, unimaginative, a born organiser. Perfectly nice, but. . . . You find them in all denominations. In your church they’ll be supervising bring and buy sales and flower rosters. . . .’

Berrigan hesitated a moment and I knew his thoughts. He was wondering if I felt that he was implying that my wife was like that.

‘Margery was hopeless at flower rosters,’ I said. ‘Bring and buy sales left her cold.’

Berrigan smiled sheepishly, then went on: ‘If that type has a fault it is a certain reluctance to face reality if a problem turns up which is beyond their capacity to deal with. Pretend it isn’t there and it will go away was her philosophy. An inadequate one, as I discovered. But she was very friendly, and she knew how to treat me, without that creepy, servile respect that nuns often show towards a priest.’

After the interview with Mother Superior Father Berrigan took tea with the other sisters in their parlour. There were sixteen of them and Berrigan was introduced to every one individually. ‘One small thing nagged at me. I can’t say I was disturbed by it, but it did seem faintly mysterious. I had the odd impression that there was one nun in that parlour to whom I had not been introduced, and yet, when I counted them off, and memorised their names, I found that I had met them all. I put it down to nerves and unfamiliarity.

‘When the tea party was over I asked if I might visit the girls in the Magdalene House. Mother Superior seemed a little surprised and disturbed by my perfectly reasonable request. I had been deputised to see to their spiritual needs as well as those of the sisters. Mother Superior took me through into their quarters.’

‘The girls’, as they were called, though some of them were in their late twenties, were housed in an annex, built slightly later than the main convent building. The ceilings were not so high, but the place had the same atmosphere of high polish and cleanliness, and Berrigan observed the identical quality of light that was in the convent. There were about a dozen girls who slept two to a room. The conditions under which they lived were not exactly harsh. They were clean, of course, and a degree of modest comfort was allowed them. They had a common-room which contained some easy chairs, a shelf full of improving books and a piano, but no radio or gramophone. Mother Superior explained that most of their time was taken up with work in the laundry or in cleaning and polishing the Convent. Berrigan gathered that the average stay in Magdalene House was six months.

‘We find that they come to their senses very rapidly,’ said Mother Superior. Berrigan had looked at her face to see if he could detect any signs of compassion, or even irony in her expression, but there was nothing. The girls seemed calm and well behaved, but there was something in their look that worried him. ‘It was an expression common to nearly all of them,’ said Berrigan, ‘a sort of miserable resignation. All the fight had gone out of their faces. But underneath that there was something else; something I couldn’t put my finger on immediately. Afterwards I realised that it was fear.’

Berrigan drove home in a heavy mood. The following Saturday, he was due there in the afternoon to hear the confessions of the community, and on the day in question, he felt a reluctance to set out on his journey which went well beyond the reasonable misgivings he felt about his new appointment. ‘It was almost a physical force,’ he said, ‘as if someone were pressing down on my shoulders jamming me into the ground so that I couldn’t move. I felt a terrible lassitude, of the kind I rarely felt in those days. Still, I went.’

Unlike the previous Saturday, when he had first seen The House of the Sacred Heart, the weather was overcast. Long lines of grey cloud, in Berrigan’s phrase ‘like dirty bolsters’, lay over the landscape. It struck Berrigan as odd, uncanny even, that, though there were few electric lights on in the building the quality of the light, that blank and leprous white, was precisely the same as it had been the previous Saturday, even though the weather was quite different. He went to the convent chapel and made ready to hear the confession of the sisters.

At this point in the narration Father Berrigan allowed himself one of his charming, transforming smiles. ‘Monsignor Knox once said that hearing the confession of nuns is like being nibbled to death by geese,’ he said. ‘Well, without claiming to be the expert on geese that poor Knox was, I would say that was about right. All the petty failings of humanity are there, but writ smaller. All the little nastinesses of the caged convent world came out.