JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. It’s nothing near as bad as that.
THOMAS BECKET: Am I then to suppose that this is purgatory, this grey place where phantoms wander lost and make their aimless discourse, caught here for all time?
HUSBAND: [Bleakly, still staring into space.] I threw them out, and I got new ones.
WIFE: [The WIFE looks up at her HUSBAND uncomprehendingly.] What?
HUSBAND: The sheets. I threw them out, and I got new ones. And I turned the mattress over.
BECKETT: [To THOMAS BECKET.] What you’ve just said, I think that you might be very near the mark.
WIFE: [She looks at her HUSBAND, shaking her head in incredulous disgust.] That’s you. That’s you forever, in your vest and sweating, trying to turn the mattress over, trying to cover all your stains. And was she watching while you did that? Was she sitting there and watching?
HUSBAND: She were crying.
WIFE: There. What did I say?
HUSBAND: [Hopelessly.] I thought, you know. I thought that it were all of the emotions she was having that had made her weepy.
WIFE: Oh, I dare say. I dare say it was. All the emotions. While she watched her father try to hide her blood because he was so proud of what he’d done.
HUSBAND: [As if understanding what he’s done for the first time.] Oh, God. [After a pause, there is the SOUND from OFF of the CHURCH CLOCK, STRIKING ONCE.] Is that … is that one o’clock, and it was half past twelve before, or is that half past one, and …
WIFE: [Explosively, at her wits end.] Oh, shut up! Shut up! Shut up with everything! It’s always the same time! We can’t move on from this! We’re stuck here on these steps, this night, over and over! [The WIFE starts to weep again. Her HUSBAND also sinks his head in his hands.]
THOMAS BECKET: [Downcast and resigned.] Purgatory, then. But you say they are yet alive?
BECKETT: Again, I think a lot of that depends on your perspective. They’re alive here, in their time, as we are in our own. One way of looking at things, everybody’s dead and always has been. Like your woman here was saying, we’re all stuck. Perhaps we have it all, the good and bad, over and over. Wouldn’t that be all the Heaven and the Hell of it, how everyone was threatened by their pastors?
THOMAS BECKET: I find that a fearful ideology. I had dared hope for better.
JOHN CLARE: I’d feared worse! If it meant I should have my first wife Mary by my side again, then the travails of life should be as nothing and that by itself should be my Heaven.
BECKETT: I’m not saying I believe it. It’s just something I’ve had put to me. The father of the girl I talked about, James Joyce, I can recall him telling me about his fondness for Ouspensky’s notion of what I suppose you’d call a grand recurrence. It had had some bearing upon the eternal day in Dublin that was circumnavigated variously in his greatest novels.
THOMAS BECKET: More and more I hope this to be an outlandish dream and, wishing you no disrespect, the pair of you but figments. It may be this is a night-start after all, born of my apprehensions that I have given the King offence, one that our erstwhile friendship shall not mitigate.
BECKETT: Well, I’ll confess to the same thought myself initially. A dream of some kind would be the most reasonable explanation, although since I don’t subscribe to the interpretations of Professor Freud, I can’t see why I should be dreaming about all this wretched and incestuous back-and-forth. And that’s before I try to fathom how a load of saints and writers that I haven’t thought about in years fit into the arrangement. It’s a mighty puzzle, and I can’t say I’m enjoying it.
THOMAS BECKET: [Looking at couple on steps.] That is the sin that binds them in their disagreement, then? The man has lain down with his daughter?
JOHN CLARE: In the countryside there’s more of it than you’d imagine.
BECKETT: Even in the towns, I wouldn’t say they did so bad. The woman I was talking of, Lucia, there were those who reckoned it was much the same thing that commenced her acting up, all of the incest and the rest of it.
JOHN CLARE: [Shocked.] Her father, that you said was called James Joyce as was my Mary’s, he’d been guilty of the same offence?
BECKETT: Oh, no, not him. He worshipped her. She was the one he wrote for, and about. He might have thought about her in that fashion, I suppose, but if he did he only tried to touch her with his writing, fingering her with a sentence here or there, a feel of tit concealed within a subtext. No, the culprit in a physical regard, if that was anyone, my guess is that it might have been her brother.
THOMAS BECKET: In my day that would be thought as much a sin … at least in open conversation. Privately, I am convinced that there is nowhere it does not go on.
JOHN CLARE: Though I will own it is a grievous matter, I’ve known many that have sported with a brother or a sister and there’s been no great harm come of it.
BECKETT: Well, Lucia was very young when this occurred, now, if occur it did.
JOHN CLARE: But we have said before that your own views upon what is a proper age may not be those appropriate to earlier times.
BECKETT: If I’m right, Lucia would have been ten.
THOMAS BECKET: Unless we speak of Royalty that is an age that even in my times would be thought young.
JOHN CLARE: [Somewhat sheepishly.] Is that a fact? Well, yes, I can see that it would compound the incest.
THOMAS BECKET: Of the sins I would remark it is not, evidently, thought a deadly one, and in my readings of the Holy Bible I have found it something of an ambiguity.
BECKETT: I’d eat my hat if it were not adversely mentioned somewhere in Leviticus.
THOMAS BECKET: That is undoubtedly the truth, but what of the unusual dispensation granted unto Lot after he and his daughters have escaped the Cities of the Plain?
BECKETT: I had assumed that, as a man, God had felt bad about turning the poor chap’s wife to salt. He’d very possibly felt he owed your man Lot a favour and had thought it was the least that he could do, to look the other way for once.
THOMAS BECKET: It’s an unusual interpretation, but …
JOHN CLARE: You know, I’ve always found Eden a puzzle that would suit your argument.
BECKETT: What are you going on about?
JOHN CLARE: Well, Cain and Abel. I’d have thought it would be obvious that even if the Lord had granted Eve and Adam one of each sort rather than two boys, improper love within the family must surely have been unavoidable. More so in Eden than in, say, Green’s Norton, unless there is something I have not considered. It might be that what undid your woman friend and the poor child that is the issue of this sorry pair alike is something that is part of our condition since our origins there in God’s garden.
BECKETT: Eden. Well, you see, there has been some dispute about that place.
THOMAS BECKET: Dispute? What manner of dispute? I have not heard of one.
BECKETT: Ah, well, I don’t want to get into it. There’s those who say that Genesis was written a lot later than some of the other books and only got put at the start through a misunderstanding in the order of the compilation. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how there could be a populated Land of Nod for Cain to serve his exile in, incest or not.
THOMAS BECKET: And I had thought your news of my impending martyrdom this dream’s most hitherto disquieting aspect. I am hopeful that I will forget all this upon my wakening, and am distressed to think I have such blasphemies in even my unbidden thoughts.
BECKETT: It’s not my wish to be upsetting you. You’re someone that I have admired, and I would not have all my conversation with a saint be taken up by what befell Miss Joyce when she was ten.
JOHN CLARE: [Suddenly, in a strangled, anguished voice.] It was an act of matrimony!
BECKETT: [Puzzled.] What? The business with her brother? How do you make that out?
JOHN CLARE: [Momentarily disoriented, then regaining his composure.] How do I … oh! It’s your Miss Joyce you’re speaking of. Pay no attention to my lunatic outpourings. They are less than chaff. I
do not know what I am saying half the time. [A pause, while he attempts to find a safe direction for the conversation.] You must have a great fondness for her, for your friend, to visit her in her adversity.
BECKETT: She was a lovely, well-intentioned girl and filled with energy and light much as her name suggests. The things she said were funny and were clever if she took the trouble not to get too convoluted. She was what you’d call a dancer in a million, and the way that she impersonated Charlie Chaplin was a treat, although I don’t expect you’ll be familiar with his work.
THOMAS BECKET: I do not think it is a name I know.
JOHN CLARE: I have known various Charlies, but no Chaplins I can think of. What was he like in his manner, that your woman friend made an impersonation of?
BECKETT: He had a walk to him and a moustache, a way he moved his eyebrows and the like. Lucia could do all of that. His art was in the pathos he inspired for the unfortunate or common man, the footsore wayfarer much like yourself but in a time of longer railway lines and higher buildings. He’d make you feel for the great injustices there are in life then make you laugh for all the triumphs of the individual. I do not suppose that he was necessarily a happy man. I can remember reading something by the filmmaker Jean Cocteau … no, don’t ask, it’s far too complicated … where he mentioned Chaplin saying words to the effect that his life’s greatest sadness was the fact he’d gotten rich off playing someone who was poor.
JOHN CLARE: It is the guilt that we were speaking of again, though if my greatest sadness were that I was rich I do not think I should be sad at all.
THOMAS BECKET: It may be that the sorrows of the wealthy life are naught save more expensive ones. It sometimes is as if my king and the companion of my boyhood is made heavy by the weight of gold that’s in his heart.
BECKETT: Well, if it’s guilt you’re after then your royal pal would take some beating. In fact, now I come to think of it that is exactly what he took. The mess he made of things with you, Rome set him to be flogged for penitence and this despite him being king. From what I hear he kneeled there and he took it, too. He must have known he was deserving of his punishment.
THOMAS BECKET: The king was flogged, and he submitted to it?
BECKETT: That he did. It’s a well known occurrence. It was after exhumation when you were discovered to be incorruptible, that was what settled it. In my opinion he was lucky to get off with just the flogging.
JOHN CLARE: I’d have made him get down on his knees and stay there till he’d scrubbed up the cathedral floor. He’d still be there now.
THOMAS BECKET: [Horrified.] He was flogged. The king was flogged. Because of what he’d done to me.
BECKETT: That is the substance of it. No one thought he was judged harshly, put it that way.
THOMAS BECKET: But if he were treated so, then what must he have – ?
BECKETT: You don’t want the details.
JOHN CLARE: All the ins and outs. No, I agree.
BECKETT: You’re better off without them. There’s no benefit in fretting needlessly.
THOMAS BECKET: [Grumpy and resentful.] No. No, there isn’t. For that matter, I don’t see that you were under a compulsion to be mentioning this business in the first place.
BECKETT: I would hate to think I’d tried your patience to the point where it became proverbial.
THOMAS BECKET: To try my patience is the least of it, when you have sought to undercut my faith itself with your sophistications.
BECKETT: I’ve sought no such thing.
THOMAS BECKET: Yet you speak dismissively of Eden and of our first parents, you insinuate a love between Eve and her sons that is unspeakable, and you insist that here about us is the twentieth century of Our Lord and still God has not come?
JOHN CLARE: Yes, Mr. Bunyan who we spoke to a short while since raised a similar complaint regarding the ongoing absence of Jerusalem.
BECKETT: [To THOMAS BECKET.] He never comes. That’s my own understanding of the matter. Or at least, He’s not about when you’ve a need of Him, much in the style of a policeman.
JOHN CLARE: There’s a phrase that I have heard in these parts. Now, what is it? It has something of the meaning of “policeman”, but there is a connotation of the tithing man or rent-man there into the bargain. I cannot recall it at this moment but it’s possible that it will come to me.
THOMAS BECKET: [To SAMUEL BECKETT.] If as you say He never comes, can you be certain He is truly there?
BECKETT: I would imagine that is where the faith comes into it. For my own purposes I like to think His non-arrival is not necessarily an indication of His non-existence.
THOMAS BECKET: But He does not speak to you?
BECKETT: It isn’t a great matter of importance if He does or not. There’s lots of people who don’t speak to me, or who I never see, but I don’t have a problem about if they’re there or not. It’s not like I feel snubbed or anything.
THOMAS BECKET: But if you never hear His voice …
BECKETT: Sometimes it seems that there’s a certain quality to the long periods of silence.
THOMAS BECKET: Is there?
BECKETT: I believe so. [CLARE, BECKETT and THOMAS BECKET lapse into a thoughtful silence. There is a long pause.]
HUSBAND: I did all of it. I did the lot of what you said. I’m all of what you called me. [Pause.] But you knew.
WIFE: [Turning to regard him contemptuously.] What are you going on about?
HUSBAND: I’m saying that you knew.
WIFE: Knew what?
HUSBAND: About the goings on.
JOHN CLARE: The ins and outs. That’s what he means.
WIFE: The goings on? You’re saying that I knew about them?
HUSBAND: All along. That’s what I’m saying.
WIFE: Oh, how dare you? How dare you sit there and say I knew about the goings on? If I’d have known about the goings on then I’d have stopped them there and then. They wouldn’t have been going on at all.
HUSBAND: You knew. You looked the other way.
WIFE: The other way?
HUSBAND: Deliberately. You know you did. It was convenient.
WIFE: [Guardedly.] Convenient? I don’t know what you mean by that.
HUSBAND: Celia, yes you do. You know the whole of what I mean by it. We’ve hardly touched each other in this last twelve years of marriage. Or had you not noticed?
WIFE: That’s just normal. That’s how everybody is. The thing with you is you’re sex mad, trying it on every five minutes and not bothered if the other party feels like it or not.
HUSBAND: You never felt like it, not every five months, let alone five minutes. And when I stopped bothering you, when I stopped trying it on, did you really believe that I’d lost interest too? That I’d stopped having feelings of that nature just because that’s how it were with you?
WIFE: I … I suppose that I assumed you’d made other arrangements. That you had resorted to a dirty book or something.
HUSBAND: Oh, and what would something be? Would it be an affair outside of marriage, knocking off the barmaid round at the Black Lion, something of that nature?
WIFE: [Appalled.] Oh God, Johnny, tell me that you didn’t. Not with that Joan Tanner. Everyone would know! What would they think? What would they think of me?
HUSBAND: Don’t be so daft. Of course I didn’t. I knew that you wouldn’t want that, everybody knowing.
WIFE: [Relieved.] Oh, thank God. Of course I’d not want anybody knowing. If you’re going to do a bloody stupid thing like that, then you should …
HUSBAND: Keep it to meself?
WIFE: [Uncertainly.] Well … yes.
HUSBAND: Keep it indoors?
WIFE: Yes, I suppose so.
HUSBAND: Keep it in the family? [The WIFE stares at her HUSBAND in silence for a few moments, realising her own unacknowledged complicity, then turns from him to stare into space with a haunted expression. The HUSBAND looks away, down and to one side.]
BECKETT: Well, it’s a fair point. In my own
experience, I think it very rare a woman doesn’t know what’s going on in her own home, even if she’d prefer she didn’t. In the case of Miss Joyce that I mentioned earlier, the trouble that she may have had when she was ten, if that was what occurred I can’t imagine Nora – that was Lucia’s mother – I cannot imagine that she would not know of it. I think that very often women are more adept at the managing of a whole spider’s nest of secrets than most men would have within their capability.
JOHN CLARE: I’m still not utterly convinced in my own heart that ten’s too young.
THOMAS BECKET: The victim’s age, I think, has no material bearing on the sin, nor on its gravity. They are condemned, these wretched creatures, to unending misery, sat here on these hard and unyielding steps awaiting absolution that shall not arrive.
BECKETT: They’re damned then, and beyond the reach of mercy or forgiveness. You appear to be quite certain of the fact.
THOMAS BECKET: The husband has made rut with his own child, one of these little ones that God has said we should not harm. It seems the wife has tacitly consented to the ruinous liaison, with a blameless innocent thus doubly betrayed. I cannot think a just Creator might extend his mercy to those who have never thought to exercise that quality themselves.
BECKETT: Well, you being a saint it follows that you would be an authority on such concerns.
JOHN CLARE: Look, now, when God was speaking of these little ones, did he specifically say they were ten? That’s all I’m getting at.
BECKETT: [Ignoring CLARE.] It seems to me that though the sex of it is very likely woeful and unpleasant, it would still be the betrayal that’s the main thing. With Lucia, when the brother that she thought had loved her more than physically announced that he’d be getting married to an older woman very like his mam, that’s when she started acting up and throwing chairs about. I think it was her brother first suggested she be given psychiatric treatment somewhere, and you might suppose it was because he didn’t want her saying anything that could not be conveniently dismissed as ravings. That, at least, was how it looked to me, and Nora, pretty quickly she fell in with it. Lucia hadn’t been what you might call her favourite child, even before the hurling furniture commenced. They said Lucia was what they called a schizophrenic, although if you ask me it was more that she was young and spoiled and couldn’t cope with disappointment easily. She thought that she was justified in her behaviour. She felt immune because of who she was and never dreamed she could end up stuck in an institution, as in fact turned out to be the case.