How old was I then? Fourteen? I couldn’t bear it even then. I’ve been fleeing my mother’s unhappiness all my life.
Different images collide, one triggering the next. Guy’s face when she told him she was pregnant, the way he said, “What are you going to do?” Not we, just you. Not a muscle in his face moved, but he was smiling beneath the skin, unable to conceal how well this suited him, because now he could make the break he had been too idle to achieve before. Then there came the memory of her mother’s face when she told her she was having a baby, but she and Guy wouldn’t be together any more. There was the same buried smile, masked by various layers of conventional shock and conventional concern, her mother comforted to know that Liz would now lead the life she had led, of loneliness and struggle. And here’s Bridget, putting on the double face, finding validation for her own place in the world as she discovers Mrs. Dickinson in a filthy nightdress and her hair in disarray. So we feed on each other’s unhappiness, our faces assuming the same expression, a compound of pity, relief, and triumph.
Liz returns to the house to sit with her mother. She needs to confirm that some version of normality has been re-established, that Bridget will be allowed to go on doing her job.
“I hear you’ve had some problems, Mum.”
Mrs. Dickinson gazes at her as if she doesn’t hear her.
“Never mind. Bridget’s got everything cleaned up now.”
Still no response. This is not like her mother. But perhaps the two days she spent coping on her own have exhausted her.
“I buried the guinea pig,” Liz says. “I said a little prayer.”
“I killed her,” says Mrs. Dickinson. She says it as a statement of fact, unburdened by any emotion.
“I’m sure you didn’t, Mum,” says Liz. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I kill everything.”
“Oh, honestly. Don’t be so silly.”
She understands her mother’s crushed manner now. This is self-punishment. Liz feels the anger rise within her. Why must her mother turn everything into a tragedy? There’s as much egotism in casting herself as the murderer as there is in playing her more usual role, the victim.
“I do,” says Mrs. Dickinson. “I kill everything that comes near me. So you’d better not come near me.”
“That’s just nonsense, Mum, and you know it.”
Her mother gently raises her shoulders and let them fall. Her head droops.
“I’m sure you know best, Elizabeth.”
Liz is overwhelmed by the desire to be spiteful. She knows of no honorable way to escape the chill embrace of her mother’s neediness. But if she speaks unkind words before she leaves she will leave a part of herself in her mother’s kitchen, as a bee leaves behind its sting.
“So are things a bit easier now with Bridget, Mum? She’s turned out to be quite useful, hasn’t she?”
Her mother answers this, but in such a low mumble that Liz doesn’t catch her words.
“So you’re happy for Bridget to go on coming?”
“She’s won,” says Mrs. Dickinson.
“What do you mean, she’s won? It’s not a competition. It’s not a fight. She’s here to help you.”
Once again her mother lifts her shoulders and lets them fall.
“Tell me what more you want, Mum. If there’s anything I can do, you just tell me.”
Her mother looks up at that, and meets Liz’s eyes with a gaze of such profound and inconsolable misery that Liz flinches. For once, shorn of pride and anger, her mother allows her to see how helpless she is, how lonely, how afraid. It’s more than Liz can take, far more. She looks away toward the bathroom, where Bridget can be heard washing the floor round the toilet.
“Would you rather I tried to find someone else other than Bridget?”
Mrs. Dickinson does not answer.
“It’s just not easy getting good carers. The thing about Bridget is she’s so reliable. I mean, look how she came back, even though you’d told her to go away.”
All this without looking at her mother. But it’s true: reliable carers are hard to find. Bridget is a treasure. It would be madness to replace her.
“Mum, I’m going to have to go. I have to write a piece about donkeys by eight o’clock.”
She bends down to kiss her mother’s crumpled cheek.
“I called you,” says Mrs. Dickinson. “Your phone is broken.”
“No, it isn’t. You know we’ve got a new number. I gave you the new number when we moved.”
She takes up her mother’s address book and finds there the old address and the old number, unchanged. She writes in the new details.
“There. You’ll find that number works. I wondered why you hadn’t called. And if we’re out, just leave a message. Or you can get Bridget to give me a call. She’ll be in every day.”
No response to that.
“I know it’s not perfect, Mum. But it works, doesn’t it?”
“If you say so, Elizabeth.”
“So let’s be thankful for that.”
“Yes,” says her mother bitterly. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Bridget is wonderful. Everything is wonderful.”
38
Tomorrow! One more day!
Worth Abbey turns out to be undergoing a restoration. Roddy refuses to be dismayed. Is he too not about to be restored? The taxi from Balcombe station delivers him to what appears to be a building site. An immense scaffolding tower rises up from a small village of Portakabins clustering round the skirts of the abbey church. This structure, built in the seventies out of beige-coloured brick, is circular rather than the traditional cruciform, and has a roof shaped like a flattened cone. Theater in the round, once a modern approach to drama, now itself a period piece.
He makes his way to the entrance to the church, and finds himself in a long passage-like space called the Narthex. Here for the duration of the restoration works the larger religious services are held. Roddy has come for one of the humblest services, the sung office called Compline, with which the monks’ day ends.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.
This, the famous “Nunc Dimittis,” the Canticle of Simeon, is the heart of Compline. As the day ends and we release ourselves into the night that is also our death, we pray to be allowed to go in peace. Roddy is not a believer, or at least not an orthodox believer, but these words cast a spell over him. Simeon speaks them as he beholds the infant Jesus, and is reconciled to death. But departure takes many forms, as does salvation. Roddy too is on the eve of a journey.
A man in a red polo shirt and faded jeans appears, and busies himself with some electrical cables that run from the altar microphone. Roddy asks him what time Compline will be sung.
“Compline?” He seems puzzled.
“The monks have a little service at the end of the day?” suggests Roddy.
“Oh,” says the man, “you mean Night Prayer. That’ll be in the Unity Room. Round on the east side.”
Roddy leaves the Narthex and walks round the church, past the builders yard, as far as a gate on which is painted: Monastery, Private. Beyond the gate lies a wide, peaceful, uninhabited valley. He can see no sign of the Unity Room. The name irritates him. Unity of who, with what? This passion for all to be one, this urge to merge, strikes him as adolescent, the rhetoric of football teams and army regiments. “We’re all in this together, lads!” We are not all in this together, he thinks fiercely to himself. I am not like you. As for Christian unity, you either have convictions or you don’t. The Catholic Church he admires is the self-confident monolith that calls itself universal. This late twentieth-century nervous relativism is undignified. All faiths are not one. Religion makes demands. What you believe should change how you live. Salvation can only be reached through sacrifice.
So muses Roddy, as yet unaffiliated to any church, while nosing around the scaffolding and the stacks of cement blocks and the skips for the way to
the Unity Room. He finds it at last, its glass door locked, a sign on the inside saying: Night Prayer 9 p.m. He has half an hour or so to wait.
He wanders the grounds, which seem to consist largely of car parks, and so comes upon a sign that reads: Quiet Garden. He passes through a wooden picket gate into a long narrow strip of grass bounded by a clipped yew hedge. A gap in the hedge, over which droops a long-leafed acacia tree, leads into a series of hedge-walled lawns, each with an island tree. To the south lies the immense pastoral landscape, which because it was barred by a gate saying: Monastery, Private, he likes to imagine as the paradise of the monks.
Roddy has made this trip in part to create a pretext. His true motive is to install himself in the Broads’ comfortable Sussex house the night before Diana joins him there. But now that he’s here in the monastery grounds with time to meditate, he’s glad of the opportunity. He strolls through the beech-walled rooms of the Quiet Garden gazing at the golden evening sky, and sees there the coming apocalypse. Because his own life journey is carrying him toward an explosive rebirth—tomorrow! One more day!—he responds to all that is revolutionary in the Christian message.
Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, nay: but rather division.
The search for God is not a nostalgic reversion to a past age. It’s a shattering of the vanities. Come face to face with the blazing heart of truth and nothing can ever be the same again.
This Laura knows.
“You’re really going on adventures, aren’t you, Roddy?”
He heard it in her voice when she said that: she wants to share the journey. She feels it as he feels it, the tingling in the air, the shining in the sky. This is the dawn of a new age.
“Laura.”
Alone in the Quiet Garden he speaks her name out loud, wanting to make her real. He feels an overwhelming compulsion to talk about her, to tell his story to some third party; but there is no one.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Surprising how much of his half-hearted public-school Christian education has stuck. Or perhaps it’s the culture, a grab-bag of resonant phrases that float to the surface of the mind in the manner of a T.S. Eliot poem. What was Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land”? Something jokey but not funny. “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Ezra Pound put a stop to that nonsense. But Eliot understood that the big moments in life require big words. Lacking grandeur in our impoverished modern age we raid prestige from the past. Doesn’t have to be religious, of course. Anything planted deep enough will do.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
So interweaving the love of God with the love of Laura, Roddy strolls the monastery lawns, and the summer sun descends over the woods and meadows. He will stay for Night Prayer, as they choose to call it, then phone for a taxi to carry him to Edenfield.
A distant bell rings, signaling the approach of the hour. At almost the same moment his phone buzzes. It’s Henry, at Haywards Heath station, offering him a lift.
“Laura told me you’re at Worth, and coming to us for the night.”
“Isn’t it horribly out of your way? I was going to get a taxi.”
“No problem,” says Henry. “I can be with you in twenty minutes.”
This is just the time it will take to attend Compline. They arrange to meet in the car park. Roddy hurries to the Unity Room. The glass door is now open and inside the monks have already gathered, a dozen or so of them, taking the chairs that line three walls of the large space. On the fourth side stand three rows of maroon upright chairs for visitors. Roddy sits quietly at the back.
The room is bleak: brown brick walls support a high tray roof of steel girders and timber cladding. Lights in the shape of flying saucers hang down. In the center of the space a patterned carpet forms an island bearing a lectern and six immense candles. The monks sing the psalms briskly, as if this is business to be done. Roddy settles his mind for prayer, but finds instead that all he can think about is Laura.
He’s decided the words he’s going to say and how he’s going to say them. He’ll choose a moment when they’re alone. He’ll touch her hand—touch is important, this is the contact that once made will never be broken—and she’ll look at him. The look is even more important. The look will be their mutual admission. So after the touch, after the look, the first words he speaks will not be the first communication. They will enter mid-conversation. He will say, “What are we going to do?” This claims nothing but declares everything. Her answer is not important. She may say, “There’s nothing we can do.” He’s ready for that. Tomorrow is the beginning of his new life, but for a while the new life will have to remain hidden within the shell of the old. There’s no hurry.
She’ll be afraid. She’ll be less ready than he is to cause pain to others. There’ll be long hours of talk. But in the end she’ll come to see what he has seen. It’s no kindness to live a lie. Our partners are trapped, as we are, in false lives. Our act of love will set them free.
He hears the scraping of chairs and realizes with a start that the short service of prayer has ended and the monks are leaving. Somehow he managed to miss the “Nunc Dimittis” entirely. Roddy follows, and finds that outside night has fallen.
He walks slowly up the slope toward the car park, wondering what it must be like to be a monk. The black robe they wear, that falls to mid-ankle, is both comical and magnificent. Such a dress must change a man. Roddy imagines putting on a monk’s habit, and appearing in it before his family. They would laugh, but they would also be afraid. A man who dresses like that is beyond the reach of scorn or shame.
A dazzle of headlights approaches. Henry’s voice calls out.
“Here you are! Hop in.”
The odd thing is Roddy really likes Henry. Though maybe it’s not so odd, since presumably Laura likes him too. Henry is one of the few people with whom he’s ever been able to have a proper conversation.
“So what’s this all about?” says Henry as he swings the car round the one-way system past the school buildings. “Laura says you’ve been in search of silence.”
“Yes,” says Roddy. “Change of pace, and so forth.”
“So did you find it?”
He heads out of the grounds onto the long straight road.
“Silence turns out to be quite hard to get,” says Roddy. “I suppose I need more practice. My brain won’t shut up.”
“I go on walks,” says Henry. “High up on the Downs. Best of all where you see the Downs with the sea beyond. I find that shuts me up.”
It strikes Roddy that this is a late hour to be returning home.
“Are you usually so late getting back?”
“I’ve been having meetings about a possible new job. Nothing very conclusive. I’m not even sure I want it. But something is better than nothing, I suppose.”
This is all the prompting Roddy needs.
“That’s not necessarily true,” he says. “If you’re trapped in the wrong something, it may be better to go for nothing.”
“But I’m not ready to pack it in yet, any more than you are. I’m only fifty-four.”
“I’m not talking about packing it in,” says Roddy. “I’m talking about changing your life. One life ends, another life begins.”
He’s discovering as he speaks that he has a powerful compulsion to tell his brother-in-law everything. Of course he mustn’t, he won’t, do anything of the sort. But there’s a thrilling frisson of danger as he skirts the edges of revelation.
“Oh, yes, I remember now,” Henry says. “Apparently you’re looking for God.”
“That’s Diana. She only understands words of one syllable.” Henry gives a gratifying snort of laughter at that. “I don’t have a name for what I’m looking for. All I know is there’s more to life than I’ve been getting.”
Henry says, “There could be less, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m becoming a bit of a fan of hu
mility. Did Diana tell you we went to a Buckingham Palace garden party yesterday?”
“No. I had no idea.”
They’re driving down a treelined road. Henry’s gaze is on the beam of his headlights, dipping and undipping as cars approach and pass.
“It was quite a revelation for me. Not so much the royal side of things, though that was actually rather impressive in its way. It was the other guests. It’s a very odd experience being at a party where no one knows anyone else. You realize then that your life consists of meeting people in cliques, and that all the time you’re busy calculating, Am I in this group or not? Do they respect me or despise me? What do I have to do to win their approval? When you all meet as individuals, something quite different happens. You engage with strangers on their own terms. I suppose it’s a bit like being in some faraway unpopulated land. Anyone you meet is automatically your friend, because there’s no one else. Plus, of course, everyone who’s been invited to the garden party is tremendously proud to be there, which creates a bond. So we got talking to various people, and somehow it made me feel how much goodwill there is in the world, and how we so arrange things that most of the time we never see it. I don’t suppose I’m making much sense. Actually it felt like a revelation. It was like seeing a different possible version of the world. One in which people actually want to make each other happy.”
Roddy is not interested in the dynamics of a royal garden party, but he seizes on this last suggestion.
“There is a different version of the world in which we can be happy,” he says. “I’m sure of it. But to find it we must allow ourselves to seek happiness. Most people are too afraid to seek their own happiness.”
“Do you think so?” says Henry. “Isn’t that rather perverse? I mean, why would anyone not go for what makes them happy?”
He isn’t disagreeing, Roddy can hear it in his voice. He’s exploring.
“Because we’re afraid of hurting others,” Roddy says.