by A. N. Wilson
Was this true? Or was it really a poetic way of describing humanism? Did he not believe, really, that what had made Christianity such a powerful force in the world, from its earliest days, was not its theories about God but its ethics? Here was a religion which actually thought it was important how you behaved! The Jews had always thought that, but for the Gentile world in Rome it was a novelty. Within weeks of Constantine making Christianity the official religion of the empire, there were orphanages established in Rome. Before that, unwanted children were piled up on street corners, the way the ecologically tidy in the West today pile up used bottles, rags or newspapers.
The myth of God made Man was really an example of the extraordinary human capacity to project our dreams into the universe. It really meant Man made God. All that we cherished, all that we deemed to be Good, we now recognized was something we could do for ourselves; and this applied not simply to good deeds, but to the spiritual life. The story of the Ascension, of Jesus actually taking his human body back to Heaven, and re-entering the Godhead with his flesh and bones, was not a fantastical piece of science fiction: it was not a story about the first man in space. It was a myth about what had happened to human religion after the coming of Christ.
But now the myth was discarded. Even the Church did not really want to understand its own myths, and for the ignorant majority, the Christian story was simply a set of unattainable ideals (‘sell all and give to the poor’) or unbelievable tales (water into wine). How was it possible to go on being a Christian in such a world, unless one seized the initiative, recognized what was happening, and did the works of God for him? Fed the hungry? Put down the mighty from their seat?
It was with such thoughts as these that Father Vivyan Chell wrestled in the silence while he stayed with his fellow Anglican monks in Westminster. He thought, too, of his disgrace, and the pain which had been caused to the parish, and to his brother. Because he had heard the boy’s confession – and knew just what a muddle of evil and madness was churning about in that child’s skull – he could not tell anyone about it. He accepted this as his punishment for his years and years of leading a double life as a monk, while actually being the lover of dozens of women.
The disgrace weighed on him, as heavy as a cross on his shoulders. He knew now how impure had been those decades of his enjoying a heroic public image. Father Vivyan, the voice of Oppressed Africa! Father Vivyan, the modern saint! This was what The Daily Legion had taken from him. The untruth of the stories could never be proved. He had become one of the ridiculous people – presenters of TV shows, drug-crazed minor aristocrats, exhibitionist politicians – who got into the newspapers. The loss of dignity involved was awful. He felt himself changed by it. He was slower, older. His digestion and sleep were disturbed.
At the same time, just as he could not be passive in his belief in God – or ‘God’ – nor could he be acquiescent in the injustice brought to pass by the lies and tittle-tattle of The Daily Legion. It was only right that the truth should be made to prevail – and for people to know what this poisonous newspaper, and ones like it, were up to, in defending lies and supporting evil.
Sometimes, when he thought about The Daily Legion, the anger became so intense that he thought he might suffer a seizure. Then he needed physical activity. There was a small garden behind the monastery, where the Superior allowed him to dig and sweep, but there was only a limited amount which could be done in the continuing wet weather. When darkness fell, he walked – sometimes for hours at a time – down to the river, along the Embankment, pacing beside the wide, angry brown flood with rainwater soaking his head.
Somehow, instinct suggested that he should avoid walking out in the light, though there was little enough light in London these days. Dawns rose in a half-hearted wet pall of grey, and it had been weeks since there had been any brightness in the sky. Everyone walked rapidly through the rain, with their heads buried beneath upturned collars, hats, newspapers, umbrellas. When the truth of this fact slowly dawned on him, Father Chell began to venture forth by daylight.
It was on one such day, mid-morning, that he found himself walking with long strides, seemingly purposeful, but in fact quite at random, across Victoria Street, down Storey’s Gardens towards St James’s Park. Deluge had softened to a light drizzle, and the park was beautiful in its autumnal way, the leaves now on the turn; ducks, moorhens, flamingos all enjoying the wetness. He strode down Birdcage Walk, in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Military music could be heard. It was something which always had a powerful effect upon him, recalling not only his early days as a soldier, but also his childhood and schooldays. It was only as he came near to the Palace and the Queen Victoria Memorial that he recognized the flags on the innumerable poles which lined the Mall. They were, alternately, the Union Flag of Britain, and the copper-orange, green and red tricolour of Zinariya, with the cluster of cocoa-leaves in the middle.
There had been obvious reasons why, recently, Father Chell had not felt inclined to look at the newspapers. The monks with whom he was staying did not appear to possess a radio and none of them watched television. He had been out of touch with the world for a seemingly indefinite period.
The band was playing ‘The British Grenadiers’, and in spite of himself, the Christian monk (who was wearing not monastic rig, but black jeans, jumper and dark blue duffel coat with hood up) felt his throat gulp with emotion. Patriotic emotions could not easily or perhaps usefully be defined, any more than religious emotions. Yet, when he heard music like this, Vivyan Chell would have been able fairly simply to define why he found it so moving. It was because he believed, with a very deep part of himself, in the fundamental decency of his own country.
He knew that terrible things had been done by the British Army, and by the British Empire, with its Amritsar massacres and its battles of Omdurman and its atrocities during the Boer War. He nonetheless believed that these aberrations, terrible as they were, were not to be compared with the horrors perpetrated by the Russians or the Germans on their own people, and on others. When the great test came (will you resist Hitler or will you let him take over the world?) there was one nation, and only one nation, in the whole world who answered unequivocally that they would go on fighting. The hammy old rhetoric of Churchill was so moving because it was literally true. The British had been prepared to fight on the beaches and never to surrender. In Vivyan Chell’s lifetime, the British armed forces, in an overwhelming proportion of instances, had been used to defend the defenceless, to resist tyranny, to stand up for that which was good against evil.
This was what he found so moving when he heard a British military band playing in the drizzle outside Buckingham Palace, and there was something else which was moving about it too. Whereas his religious beliefs were shared by only a tiny number of his fellow-countrymen, he believed that his pride in his country and its love of liberty and fair play was shared by countless millions of Britons.
He quickened his pace, therefore, and went to join the crowds watching the band.
They were tourists, nearly all of them – Americans, Japanese, Germans. Father Vivyan suspected that they had come to see a spectacle without having any marked sense of what this spectacle might be. Three open landaus were being pulled down the Mall by prancing black horses, and accompanied by the full helmeted escort of the Household Cavalry.
Once, as a young soldier, Vivyan had met the Queen. She was about five years older than he was. He had a recollection, therefore, of a beautiful young woman, small, with a radiant smile and very clear skin, like that of a country girl who had been out riding. She had come to Knightsbridge Barracks when he was posted there, and he did not spend more than five minutes in her company. She had asked him a question about horses. It was, in its way, a very predictable encounter. What he had felt in her presence, however, was awestruck. He had tried to explain this to people at various junctures in his life, and he found that when he was talking to older Britons or to Africans, they did not need any further explanat
ions. It was only younger people who did not understand. His niece, Kitty, for example, who was in many ways an intuitive and sensitive girl, had said, ‘Honestly, Viv! I thought you were meant to be a socialist, and underneath it you are simply an old snob!’
This was not what he felt at all. He was not proud of himself for having met the Queen, and he did not revere her in the way that snobs might be excited to meet a duchess. He felt awe, partly simply because she was the Queen; but also because he had an almost mystic sense of her great personal goodness. She possessed an aura. Whether he had imposed this upon her in his imagination, he did not know, though he had subsequently heard of others who felt the same about her.
He had often seen photographs of her since, of course, and he had seen her on television or newsreels. As it happened he had never actually set eyes upon her from that day until this morning, when he saw her passing down the Mall in an open landau in the drizzle. At her side was the figure of President Bindiga.
The State Visit was under way. In spite of all the protests from friends of the opposition Alkawari! party, all the anger of the other African Commonwealth countries, all the reservations of the European Union, Britain was welcoming to London a man who had been responsible for genocide, torture and slavery. Little Joshua! Joshua Bindiga! Vivyan Chell’s protégé from the parish school in Louisetown! Little Joshua, on whom Vivyan had pinned such hopes, and who had gone so horribly to the bad. There he sat beside the Queen. Opposite him was some flunkey or equerry. In the following landau was the Duke of Edinburgh and one of President Bindiga’s wives, a six-foot blonde Danish girl who was waving shamelessly to the tourists. Behind, the Duke of Kent, for some reason, and a trio of Africans, one of whom was Stephen Obiko, the Zinariyan ambassador.
There now occurred to Vivyan Chell a moment of revelation which was comparable in intensity and importance to his Divine Call in Africa. The horses trotted past, their bridles and furniture jangling. As always, they and the soldiers were beautifully groomed and trained. The band played the old stirring tunes. The Queen, no longer a radiant young woman, now looked like an old frump made out of pastry, grumpy and about to crack into floury powder.
The generalized feeling of unhappiness about England, which Vivyan Chell had been experiencing since his return from Africa, now crystallized into a moment of truth. That decent, brave, good place of his childhood – that place which fought for the underdog, and stuck up for liberty and justice in Europe – now seemed a mean, ugly, filthy little fraud of a place. Even its corruptions, putrescent as they now appeared in his eyes, were pointless. England had not been taken over by some alien ideology of Stalinism or Nazism. It had simply died and gone rotten. It was pointless. The figures who had gone past in their landaus were all equally pointless. There was no difference between the wrinkled old Queen and the Danish tart.
‘Murderers! Boo! Boo! Killers!’
He was yelling at them and waving his fist. Did little Joshua, his pupil, hear him or see him? Or had the royal entourage already trotted by, towards the Palace?
Vivyan Chell turned away. When he had accepted the job at Crickleden, he had done so – he realized this now – because he thought there was something left in England worth salvaging. He thought that it was possible to set up some small corner where the old values, the values which his parents and grandparents took for granted – kindliness and goodness and Christianity – could be practised, where the poor could be nourished and rescued from the system.
He felt, as he paced along, an intensely personal anger with the Queen herself. He was in a sort of dream-state, for he now saw in his head a replay of the ceremonial trot-past. Instead of wearing an unbecoming tweed coat and hat in too-bright colours, she was dressed like the most dissipated and desperate old madam in a cheap brothel. She wore only a basque and crotchless fishnet tights. You could see tufts of grey pubic hair at her puckered armpits and round her pussy. Her fat old wrinkled arms wobbled as she waved and called out, in her parody of an upper-class voice, ‘Looking for business, ducky?’
‘No,’ he said earnestly to her, ‘but you are. Copper business, cocoa business, funny business. If you had half a conscience, woman, you wouldn’t have sat in a landau with that murderous little Joshua! Admit it, woman – you only want to preserve yourself! You haven’t thought what is good for this country – you haven’t even begun to think through what was worth preserving and what needed changing! You call yourself a head of state – a Christian head of state – Supreme Governor of my church!’
He stopped for breath. He felt himself gasping for breath.
If I had a gun on me, he thought, I would have done Jesus’s work and shot your selfish old head off.
Everything, in the previous five to ten minutes, had gone; everything which he had previously stood for in life now seemed farcical to him: his belief in English decency, and in the Church. Everything stank. Bindiga was the national treasure, just because the City did not want to lose money investing in copper futures or cocoa futures. The truth was non-existent. The Daily Legion was the Bible. God was dead and Lennie Mark was his prophet.
These crazy thoughts, born of grief-stricken disillusionment, only lasted a few minutes as he walked and walked. He found that he had paced beyond Victoria and was somewhere in the Vauxhall Bridge Road before he had formed a plan of action. He no longer worried about the Bishop or the newspapers or the regulations, which had hitherto restricted his movements. He knew the complete falsehood of the allegations against him. Empowered by rage, he decided to return to his parish. That was where he belonged.
He begged at Charing Cross until he had collected money for the tube, and tea at the other end. The placards for the evening paper spoke of minor demonstrations against the State Visit, and rumours, in Bindiga’s absence, of a coup d’état in Zinariya.
THIRTY-FOUR
Rachel set off for the cemetery. It was good to get out of the vicarage. The effect of Sinclo’s declaration had shocked her. He had been showing her a safe, warm, cosy place which would have been a trap, a servitude. Already, even as she heard his stammered declarations of love, whose signs she had been reading in his face for a couple of years, she could see the future. It would not be a bad marriage. Unless (this sometimes happened, she knew) a perfectly nice-seeming man turned out to be some variety of domestic monster, she would be linking her destiny with a kind person. As she had, in the vicarage kitchen, been powerfully aware, it would be perfectly agreeable to go to bed with Sinclo. It was possible that the cliché would come true that ‘love would grow’.
She knew, however, that to make such a choice at this stage of her life would be the reverse of life-enhancing. And in this knowledge, she felt that she knew a little of what it was which attracted her to Father Vivyan, and also what it had been that she had loved in Kitty. They lived dangerously. By this, Rachel did not mean that they lived suicidally: rather, that they lived as if there was more to life than creature comforts, stability, common sense. Kitty was a failure, Vivyan a partial success, in the quest for a life which was both interesting and useful to others. Rachel’s key moments, her guiding inspirational perceptions about how she wished to conduct her life, came from Kitty’s funeral, and next from the ending of her affair with L.P. They were both negative inspirations: they showed her what she did not want. She did not want, if she died tomorrow, to have been only a journalist on a cheap paper; she did not want to define her life in terms of whom she slept with.
Her honest, clever parents had hoped that she would choose a career for herself after university. This had not happened: she had not become, like Mum and Dad, a doctor – or a civil servant, or a lawyer or a banker. This was the modern disease in England. None of her generation wanted to enter professions or to be part of the old society. They all wanted to live inside their dreams, and they supposed that this would be easier if they were in nebulous, boring jobs connected with the ‘arts’ or newspapers or publishing. In fact, as she realized now a bit late, she could have led a more in
dependent life of dreams, and pursued the inner life with more dignity, had she possessed the independence which a professional career would have given her.
She had already begun, inside her head, to consider programmes of retraining. A crash course of science A levels would only take a few months, and enable her to get into medical school by the following year, if she wished to pursue the long road of being a doctor. Or she could go in for charity work overseas. Or she could go back to university and become a scholar, possibly do a PhD in philosophy. As yet, the thoughts had not focused, but they had begun. A new life was beginning, and to step back from this and opt merely for the security of being loved by Sinclo would not be the right choice. She knew it would make her happy only for a matter of months. Sooner or later, she would become resentful of him, and begin to notice that she was cleverer than he was. These things mattered.
One of her thoughts was simply to take the civil service exam. There were many things wrong with England – she agreed with Vivyan about what some of these things were; in other areas, in particular his distrust of finance, wealth, the big institutions, she disagreed profoundly. No one had ever been born on this planet whose mindset less resembled Plato’s; she thought that the great philosopher’s mingling of mythology with actuality was one of the most corrupting factors in the history of Western thought. But she agreed with Plato in one of his ‘myths’, namely that of the good life only being liveable in the well-ordered society (preferably, literally, a Republic). This well-ordering depended on a sound economy, a fact which Vivyan with his crazy Christian fear of money resolutely refused to see, and it also depended on efficiency.
