Paper Cuts

by Stephen Bernard

  Where was my mother? I did not know, do not know. He came to the door. The first day at a new school, in a new house, and I was eager. Priests were part of life. Canon Fogarty had come to bless the house, our new home. He came to the door while I was getting changed and boy! how this would change me. He explained that he was the parish priest and that he had come to bless the house. Those were welcome words, and kind and loving to a boy who had grown up in the love of the Church, in another country. They meant no harm. Maybe, I think now, he meant no harm. I was in my gym kit and answered the door. Here was a vision of black, in black, simple and kind and loving. He brought blessings to the house, my home, our home.

  *

  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Latin, the language of the ancients, the language of Catullus, the language of love. The language of Martial – love, frustrated and bitter and wrong. Also, the language of the law. Fogarty taught me Latin and brought love and the law into my life. He meant to bring only love, but life is not that simple. Love is regulated. The language of love is regulated. Nominative, accusative. The name, Fogarty, the accusation? We shall see.

  The law is a massive and unrelenting force to be brought into the life of a child. It is not the law that protects the child, but the man who protects the child. Where was my mother? I do not know. Where was my father? That is an easier answer.

  Gerard Bernard was a naval man. He had been present at the conception of his children, but not much else, it seemed to me as a child. He had a country to defend, another country. Where was he when all this happened? Abroad. Perhaps that is why as a child I used to think that I hated abroad, and like Charles Wilcox thought I saw through foreigners so. Foreigners are those with whom we deal diplomatically, or militarily, when we have to. In short, my father was abroad.

  Our last parish priest we had called father, but Fogarty was a canon. I called him ‘Father’ at first, but that was wrong he explained to me. He was ‘Canon’, a canon of the diocese and a doctor of canon law.

  The canon law is not the law. Canon law is the body of law which regulates life for a Catholic. It exists in perfect international unity with the Church, within the Church. To know Latin, to speak Latin, is to speak a dead language, perfect in itself. The language of canon law is Latin; the language of canon law is a dead language, perfect in itself.

  Canon law is not the law, but it is the law of the Church. Fogarty was a doctor of canon law, a law parallel to the law of the land. This was a new country to me and to my family. The law of this country was not the law of the land. The law of this country was canon law, perfect in itself.

  Naval children, when they are in a new country, do not know the law. They do not know their country or the country in which they live. Naval children know the law of the navy, naval law. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? There is an impact, but nothing moves or changes. English, my language, the language of my country, my law, was about to meet Latin, the language of the law by which we were meant to live. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The language of Catullus and Martial, but also Newman. But it was not the language of love to me. Not uncomplicated, unsophisticated love. My love was a love for something bigger than that, which rightly thought it was bigger than that. My language was not English or Latin, but the language of cancer, a language which is both the irresistible force and the immovable object. Entire in itself. Perfect from the moment of conception.

  *

  I am a doctor of philosophy, but that does not mean that I understand philosophy. There are a lot of doctors in this story. Fogarty was a doctor of canon law. I am a professor of English; I profess English for my job. This story will set doctor against doctor, professor against professor. Fogarty was my confessor, he confessed for his job. This story will set confessor against confessor.

  In English there are two ways of pronouncing the word confessor. One means the man who hears the confession: one means the man who confesses. Fogarty was not that man. He did not confess.

  English has become my life. Another language, my own native language. English is the language of life to me, of my life. I spake only as a child is the expression of the perfect thought, expressed perfectly, in my language. The Bible is, to me, an English Bible. This story is the story of the conquest of the Latin world, the language of the two largest constituencies the world has ever known: the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church; and the largest constituency the world will ever know: the British Empire, the Empire of English.

  *

  That thought again. That thought, that somewhere someone is plotting, against me. In darkness and concealment. O. O. Against me. I do not know why, cannot know why. It is a fact, that will tincture my thoughts, my thinking, my day, as it has so often. myster. ium.

  *

  Of all the statements I could make, it would be wrong to say none are true. No, none is true. None is singular. It was a moment of revelation when I realized that ‘none is’ was correct. None of these statements is true. That is the correct thing to say.

  I have made statements, to the police, to the authorities. None is true, is true. That is a statement, but it is not true. This is true.

  There is the feeling of a strong and heavy hand on my neck. I cannot move my head because of this. I can’t breathe.

  This is true.

  I can see the Canon in the mirror. His trousers are round his ankles. He is above and behind me. I feel the boniness and weight of him in me. In me.

  This is true.

  I wake up. I’m at home. I feel the stickiness of the semen, which reminds me of Fogarty’s semen on my back. I’m very scared. I can’t breathe.

  This is true.

  I gently remove the hand – Fogarty’s – from my thigh it comes back it moves towards my groin I do not want this to happen again I can’t breathe I’m only little this is wrong I’m scared I can’t breathe I’m all by myself with this man he tells me to go upstairs I have no choice I am electric

  This is true.

  My back is awkward I move and this causes a sudden penetrating force the weight is inside me and intense and above me behind my back green and beige a mirror with an open door in it

  I am electric

  *

  I should perhaps tell you how embedded I would become in the Church – almost to the point of being in a cult. Each morning on weekdays at seven I would serve mass with the Canon in the convent chapel. Then I would go to the grammar school; then I would attend the Canon in the presbytery and all that that entailed. On Saturdays, I would serve mass with him in the chapel at the King Edward VII Hospital on the Downs. On Sundays, I would serve mass with the Canon at eight and ten thirty in the morning and then at benediction or vespers, depending on the point in the liturgical calendar, at six. My mother was on the parish council; my sister attended the convent school; my father was abroad. Each day, after my prayers for release, I would sleep and then be rereleased into a world without forgiveness, with forgiveness. There was no fixed point outside the Church from which I could move the world, so I stayed within it, fixated by it.

  *

  This is not getting it done (I think). I idle the minutes away before my books. They want the copy at the TLS today. I must start again.

  It is not surprising that Tonson has received the most critical attention of any bookseller of the period, but …

  *

  It is 8 September 1987. I am at home, in my new home. It is 14 January 2016. I am at home, in my new home. I am in Oxford and I am living in the eighteenth century. That is my time, my place.

  Nothing happened in the eighteenth century, and nothing was perfectly expressed. Everything was perfectly expressed in the eighteenth century, in England, in English. And the Universal Enemy was the Catholic Church.

  I study manuscripts, letters. My job is not to express things, but to copy things. To copy them out, and in doing so to transcend the time in which they were written and to make them something outside of time.

  I don’t have a voice
, only a subject. The subject is the creation of literature, and the conditions which brought it about, the creation of the English literary canon.

  I am electric

  *

  I have read a few books. I have read many books, but I only remember a few. Clarissa. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Disgrace. Finnegans Wake. Some Hope. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. I like Richardson, Haddon, Coetzee, Joyce, St Aubyn. Nothing else. I don’t really rate literature or art. It doesn’t speak to me. It isn’t my job to explain it. I can’t understand or explain the art of these men. How did it come about, though? That I can explain, that I can understand.

  I have met the author of Disgrace. I know the author of the Curious Incident, although he does not know about these paper cuts. Joyce, obviously, I haven’t met, although I think I know him best. I know the author of my experiences, my self: Fogarty.

  Something happened to me when I was a child that was to be my experience. Do I know authors? Yes. Do I like authors? Yes. Do I trust authors? No. There is something about the artificiality of what they create which I cannot trust. I cannot trust their artifice. I cannot trust their art. I trust what is true, and what is true is that authors are not to be trusted.

  There are three consummate artists whom one has to have something to say about in the eighteenth century: Dryden, Swift, Pope. The Augustans. Dryden expressed things perfectly, transforming the language of the ancients into a language we can understand today. Pope expressed things perfectly too, transforming the language we can understand today into a language for eternity. Swift expressed what he saw, and what he saw was not right. Swift’s is an imperfect language, expressing imperfection. Who survives, who will survive of these three? Swift. These three at the beginning of the eighteenth century speak for themselves, but Swift speaks to today.

  I have measured myself against these three men. I think I owe them that, and that I owe that to myself. Dryden speaks to today in what he did not write. He lived in a country in fear of the Universal Enemy. Terrorists! They were everywhere. Titus Oates was a priest, a man of the cloth, but was he to be trusted? He told the country what it wanted to hear, that the Roman Catholic Church was plotting the overthrow of the Kingdom, of the order of creation. The Church was plotting the overthrow of the natural, the right order of things.

  Dryden was a Catholic in a time and a country when to be Catholic was to be suspect. He did not talk in his letters about his religion, only about those of ‘our perwasion’. What persuasion was that? It was a persuasion which dare not speak its name. Dryden speaks to us today in what he did not say, in his silences. His sons were true sons of the Church. He did not discuss them. They had gone to Rome to study, they had gone to Raqqa.

  Pope, too, was Catholic. The greatest of the Augustans, he spoke for himself and not in silences. He mocked authority, but he was authority. The author of his own creation, he created the shade of those laurels which descended to him. His closest friend, Swift, was told that he would not be a poet by his cousin Dryden. These three men were poets, but only one was something else, an author: Swift. To Swift we will return, as he returns to us, speaking our language, not that of the ancients or of eternity.

  *

  Sussex at the end of the twentieth century was a fine place, well placed. It was the place of my adolescence. I came to Sussex as a child from another country and left a man. There is something about the Sussex Downs in autumn that speaks to the soul. The lanes of Sussex, the fields, the rapture. God was in Sussex and saw that it was good.

  I was a Catholic, in Catholic country. Sussex is the country of the Fitzalan-Howards, the dukes of Norfolk. The Church has found sanctuary in Sussex, under the protection of the family of the Earl Marshall, under the protection of its saints and martyrs. Midhurst, the town of my adolescence, the town at the heart of the Downs, has its own presiding martyr: Blessed Margaret Pole. She has a simple side chapel in the church there. She was ransomed in the castle there, now in ruins. Someone truly good held captive in the sixteenth century, held in Sussex against her wishes, bequeathing her faith to her captors. Her successors in that country bear witness to her faith, to truth.

  There are very few voices in my story, which may seem strange, but it is not so strange as what those few voices say.

  ‘My son, would you like to make your confession to me?’

  ‘Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It is some time since I made my last confession.’

  *

  St Mary’s Presbytery sits in the heart of Midhurst, in the heart of the South Downs, of Sussex. A modern building, it replaced a mansion in the middle of the twentieth century. Yellowstone red brick, it was built by faith, and the money of the Irish. The old house, which I never saw, had tennis courts, and a wall that surrounded it. It had gardens and large grounds, now built over by the prospectors of the baby boom. The tennis courts are gone, but the wall remains, in parts, surrounding the new church which Nicolas Pevsner so admired. A statement of faith in the future of the Church and of the Church in Sussex, a statement of the faith of the Church today. The Norfolks were the presiding influence over the new church in Midhurst. There is a convent attached to it too, which had a private school for the local gentry to send their children to, and the local Catholics. My sister went there.

  ‘Do you know that you have upset the Canon?’ the nun asked in her lilting Irish voice. ‘You know that your sister only goes to the convent because you serve on the altar? If you don’t serve on the altar we would have to think about what to do about your sister. You wouldn’t want her to leave the convent, would you now? Why not go to the Canon and say you are sorry? You’ll go to the Canon and say you’re sorry now, won’t you? And that’ll be an end of it.’

  So, I went to the Canon and said I was sorry. That is when it happened, again.

  *

  I stumble into the bedroom. I knock my leg against the bed. The door does not close. I hear a zip. I get pushed onto the bed, onto the clean white linen sheets. Its surface repels my face. My head is held down, fingers splayed across my ears my nose as I turn. I smell musk. The hand is removed, my trousers tugged down, awkward, with my pants. An oath. I am scared. I bury my head in the white folds of the linen. My hands lie useless at my sides. Then I struggle, but only to catch my breath. I feel it. I feel him. Inside me. Two bodies wrench in a Sussex chamber. Tenets of a new theology of violation are created. I see only white. I feel only blackness. I feel only my own hot breath, asphyxiating. Then it stops. But it doesn’t stop for me. Not then, not now. Not ever.

  *

  There is a limit to evil, though it may not feel like there is. There is a limit to how we can comprehend evil, which comprehends evil, although it may not seem so. In She, Rider Haggard creates a subterranean world in which ‘She, who must be obeyed’ has complete control. It is an empire of evil, of the mind, seemingly all-comprehending. But outside that dark world, not a hundred miles away, the British Empire is conducting itself, with all its compromises, bringing civilization to the uncomprehending world, the glory of the West to the heart of Africa.

  As a statement, that is not so simple or lacking in complicity than it might seem. There is no dark heart of Africa, and the glory of the West is not as innocent as we might hope. Everything is compromised in the end. All are complicit. Sussex is not the dark heart of Africa, but it is not a million miles away from it, either. In Sussex there are subterranean worlds, hidden from the glory of the West, where there is a limit to evil. I lived at its limits.

  *

  What happened to me is not unusual. I am not unusual. It has taken me many years to learn this. There is in what happened to me a kind of architectural beauty, a musical perfection. It has in it the germ of a narrative completeness. Fogarty was ‘in’ me in a physical sense, but he was also ‘in’ me in a psychological sense. There was something full and all invasive to his violation of me which it is almost impossible not to admire.

  *

  I
am now going to make a statement.

  The first time Canon Fogarty saw me naked was when I was eleven years old at the beginning of September 1987. My family had just moved to Midhurst in Sussex from Dorset and the Canon came to bless the house while I was getting changed. He came up to my bedroom and encouraged me to continue to get changed from my school sports kit into my home clothes. He sat on my bed and watched as I changed. I had never met him before, but he had told me that he was our parish priest and that he had come to bless the house, and that there was nothing that I could show him that he had not seen before.

  Soon after we moved to Midhurst I became an altar boy and Canon Fogarty offered to help me with French and Latin after school. I would have to sit next to him and he would place his left hand on my leg and sometimes further up than I was comfortable with. I would try to remove his hand but he would then reach for my genitals and laugh as he fondled them, sometimes undoing the zip on my trousers and actually touching them. I did not report this as he was a figure held in great esteem in the parish and I was embarrassed by his activity. Later he took to fondling my genitals on a regular basis, a price I thought I had to pay for my tuition, which diminished in its extent as he became more interested in me as a sex object. There are two windows in the study/sitting room of St Mary’s Presbytery and the Canon would make sure that those at the back, which had no net curtains, would be closed. Those at the front he would pull almost to but not close entirely.

  Some time after I reached puberty at about the age of twelve, Canon Fogarty started to question me about my sex life and sexuality. He would explain how to masturbate and occasionally to my great embarrassment and disgust, he would get me to masturbate in front of him to show him that I was doing it right. He would then help me to clean up and once took me to his bathroom upstairs to clean me up properly, as a boy should after each emission, that is, pulling back the foreskin and squeezing all of the semen out of the penis. It was then that he showed me his extensive collection of pornography, which had titles such as Hommes International and which were extremely explicit, in fact, hard core. After each of these occasions, Canon Fogarty would take me downstairs and make me make my confession of what had just occurred. This took place on the hard-backed sofa in the presbytery, on which we two would sit side by side. Sometimes when I arrived for my tuition I would try to sit on one of the armchairs but there would be a discussion – quite good-natured – until I had moved to the sofa next to the Canon. It became ritualistic and I had no one in whom I could confide, my father being often away at sea and my mother a very religious person. I could not tell any of my friends, but expected that the same sort of thing happened to them too. Canon Fogarty made it plain that my sister’s place at the local convent school, St Margaret’s, very much depended upon my complying with his wishes.