On Loving Josiah

by Olivia Fane

  ‘Our bodies hold us altogether. Do you know the wonderful definition of “life” in Samuel Johnson’s original dictionary? “The temporary, mutual co-operation between body and soul.” That’s rather wonderful, don’t you think? And also true.’

  ‘Dualists like you are rare, nowadays.’

  ‘Don’t think that dualists devalue the body. The body is a miracle. Even Augustine, whose body was always getting the better of him – “make me good, Lord, but not yet” – concedes the body is a miracle, as indeed are all created things. They are created by God, hence their beauty…’

  ‘You know, Justin, I think you can help me.’ Thomas suddenly looked up so eagerly that Justin was quite ready for the confession he’d been hoping for.

  ‘Anything! I’ll do anything I can!’

  ‘You would, of course, be acquainted with Augustinian and medieval Latin?’ Thomas’ excitement was in perfect synchronicity with Justin’s disappointment.

  ‘“Acquainted” is the right word, I’m afraid, I’m no Latinist.’

  ‘But you know the works of Augustine in English? You know them well?’

  ‘Fire me a question,’ said Justin, anxiously.

  ‘I need to know if there’s any virtue in loving beauty.’

  Justin laughed in relief, and suddenly understood all. The man was in love. ‘Then you must borrow my Confessions’, he said. ‘Come to my rooms after dinner.’

  As they walked towards Old Court in the dark, Justin was smiling to himself, hoping and expecting to put his entire range of pastoral skills to good use. He felt mellow, generous and thoroughly good-natured. On reaching his rooms, he offered Thomas a fine malt whisky. Thomas declined, but Justin helped himself, and began to prod the coals in his grate and bring them back to life.

  ‘Sit down, Thomas,’ he said. ‘Make yourself warm.’

  But Thomas said, ‘No, thank you’, and continued to stand awkwardly by the door.

  For a moment Justin forgot why he was there, but then he said, ‘Ah yes, of course, The Confessions!’ He went over to his bookshelves and murmured something about a good recent translation.

  ‘Translation? Oh no, I need the Latin,’ insisted Thomas.

  ‘How stupid of me, how very stupid of me…’ Justin’s voice petered out into a sliver of non-comprehension.

  He found a text from 1927 and surreptitiously wiped away a layer of dust with his handkerchief. ‘Here,’ he said, simply. ‘Keep it as long as you like.’

  ‘Thanks, Justin,’ said Thomas, ‘This is just what I need at the moment,’ and he took the large burgundy volume and held it in both hands like a prize.

  ‘Good luck with it,’ laughed Justin, uneasily, as he held the door open for him.

  What Thomas was wanting was permission, and that night Augustine gave it to him. He read the Latin hungrily:

  Hoc est quod amo, cum deum meum amo.

  Et quid est hoc? Interrogavi terram, et dicit, ‘non sum’ ; et quaecumque in eadem sunt, idem confessa sunt. Interrogavi mare et abyssos et reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt: ‘non sumus deus tuus; quaere super nos.’ Interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis suis: ‘fallitur Anaximenes: non sum deus.’ Interrogavi caelum, solem, lunam, stellas: necque non sumus deus, quem quaeris,’ inquiunt. Et dixi omnibus, quae circumstant fores carnis meae: ‘dicite mihi de deo meo, quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid.’ et exclamaverurnt voce magna: ‘ipse fecit nos.’ Interrogatio mea intentio mea et responsio eorum species eorum.

  Which, for those less literate amongst us means:

  This is what I love, when I love my God.

  And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered: ‘It is not I.’ Whatever things are in it uttered the same confession, I asked the sea, the depths, the creeping things among living animals, and they replied: ‘We are not thy God; look above us.’ I asked the airy breezes, and the whole atmosphere with its inhabitants said, ‘Anaximenes is mistaken; I am not God.’ I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: ‘Nor are we the God whom you seek,’ they said. And I said to all these things which surround the entryways to my flesh: ‘Tell me about my God, since you are not He; tell me something about him.’ With a loud voice, they cried out: ‘He made us.’ My interrogation was my looking upon them, and their reply was their beauty.

  ‘In every looking, there is a seeking. And Josiah, you answer me, your beauty answers me. Who made you? For the world didn’t. The pure are made by God and left naked. That is why I love you.’

  Thomas went back to the Symposium that night: ‘Love, more than anything (more than family, or position, or wealth) implants in men the thing which must be their guide if they are to live a good life. And what is that? It is a horror of what is degrading, and a passionate desire of what is good.’

  That’s the answer, thought Thomas, the Greeks believed that to love beauty is to love goodness. Nowadays, we love neither; we love sex. There are no ideals anymore; nothing to transcend our appetites. But I’ll prove to Josiah that I can love well, I know I can do that.

  That night he dreamt of Hans. They were on a bobsleigh together, shooting down icy channels; his arms were hugging Hans’ waist, finding their natural home under his jumper: the pleasure of warm skin in a cold place.

  Chapter Nine

  JOSIAH ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES EARLY. Five minutes before that, Thomas was wondering whether the honourable thing to do was to renege on his promise to teach the boy Latin at all; but luckily that was after he’d laid out a few text books and made a fire, which he was stoking when the doorbell went. He jumped up and looked in the mirror; his face did not belie his mood – skin wan, but clear; eyes bright, but not manically so – and that fact alone gave him the strength to go downstairs and answer the door.

  ‘Josiah, you’re keen!’ exclaimed Thomas, making a show of looking at his watch.

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Josiah, unapologetically. ‘Iterum nos videmus’ – is that right?’

  ‘Ita vero, puer. Sed ubi didicisti illud?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Where did you learn that? I’m impressed.’

  ‘Ex bibliotheca librum cepi – is that right?’ Josiah was still standing on the doorstep, grinning happily, wearing a striped jumper two sizes two big for him.

  ‘Here is an angel dropping by,’ thought Thomas, ‘here is fresh water from a clear spring!’ But he said, rather more sensibly, ‘Come on upstairs, Josiah. It’s warmer there.’

  So the two of them sat on armchairs by the fire, every bit as comfortably as Thomas had imagined they might, and perused each others’ textbooks like old hands.

  ‘The library was quite good,’ explained Josiah, ‘despite not letting me take the dictionary away. They had about four different courses and I chose the Oxford one for the pictures, and you see, I want to be able to speak Latin.’

  ‘That’s a rare ambition, Josiah, and can I ask you why?’

  ‘My mother used to say to me, “When you grow up, people will try and persuade you that Latin is dead. But Latin is the most living language there is.”’

  ‘She’s a wise woman, she’s right.’

  ‘So can you tell me why she’s right?’ asked Josiah, looking up at Thomas expectantly.

  ‘You really want to learn Latin, don’t you?’ There was something about Josiah’s manner which made Thomas feel he was shielding himself against sunlight.

  ‘Apart from… apart from seeing my parents again I’ve never wanted anything more.’ Josiah looked hard at Thomas, in a manner which forbade him to look away.

  ‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ muttered Thomas. He didn’t want the boy to have a dead mother. He needed him to have brothers and sisters and play football on Saturdays.

  ‘But begin, Mr Marius, begin, begin, begin!’ Josiah was sitting on the edge of his chair, more childlike than ever.

  ‘And you must begin by calling me “Thomas”.’

  ‘Why aren’t you called “Tom”?’

  ‘Becaus
e no one’s ever called me “Tom”.’

  ‘Then I shall be the first, Tom. And you can call me “Jo”. Just my Dad calls me “Jo”. I don’t let anyone else.’

  ‘I’m flattered, Jo – without an “e”?’

  ‘Yes.’ Just J O,’ Josiah said slowly. He looked very solemn indeed.

  Thomas shifted in his chair, and anxiously shuffled the textbooks around on the table between them. ‘I don’t see why we can’t follow the Oxford course,’ he said.

  ‘You never answered my question,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Why is Latin the most living language there is?’

  ‘I think I can answer you that,’ said Thomas, his own enthusiasm suddenly rising up to meet Josiah’s. ‘Because Latin is made in such a way that each word is pregnant with meaning. In other languages a word takes you from A to B with barely a detour – but in Latin, how shall I explain this? Take the gerund, or even better, the gerundive. The gerundive is a verbal adjective which contains within it a sense of ‘ought’, a sense of moral duty. Now in philosophy no one knows how to get from is to ought; it’s hard to find the bridge which leads us to universal principles. But in Latin the sense of ought is built into the word. The girl’s name Amanda, for example, means woman to be loved, there’s no two ways about it, there’s no dilemma, the ought is an is. You are a puer docendus, a boy who ought to be taught, there are things which ought to be done, agenda, that ought to be said, loquenda.’

  ‘Why is there no Amandus then? Do you think than men need to be loved less than women do?’

  ‘I think we men need to be loved, don’t we?’

  O, but the question was far too serious! Whether it was true or not was irrelevant.

  ‘Well, if I ever have a son I shall call him Amandus, the boy who ought to be loved! Have you got a son? Or a daughter?’

  ‘No!’ said Thomas, and he tried to add to that ‘no’, to soften it, but couldn’t think how he might.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to have children?’ continued Josiah, full steam ahead.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.’ Thomas wanted to say that he’d never been married, but that, of course, wasn’t true.

  ‘If you were to think about it now, what would you say?’

  ‘I think I would say I wasn’t ready to have children. What about your father? Is he a good father to you? Was he ready to have children, do you think?’ An old tactic, turning the question on the questioner. Was that fair on a boy so young?

  But Josiah seemed unperturbed. ‘Yes, he was. He was a very good father.’ Josiah suddenly became very serious and thought hard. ‘He is a very good father. Of course, since my mother’s death, it’s been quite difficult.’

  ‘That was how many years ago?’

  ‘Seven and a half,’ said Josiah.

  ‘Does he work?’

  ‘He retired early. He used to be a gardener at one of the Cambridge colleges. I can’t remember which one.’

  ‘And is he pleased you’re learning Latin? He knows you’re here now?’

  ‘Yes, of course he does,’ said Josiah, meeting Thomas’ eye and looking deadly earnest.

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you like football?’

  Josiah shook his head.

  ‘I see,’ said Thomas, and sank back into his chair.

  ‘So are we going to begin the lesson?’ asked Josiah.

  ‘Of course we are, Jo.’

  The hour and a half of industry which followed – armchairs locked together now to share the textbook – were all that either could have hoped for; Josiah hungrily sped through the chapters, his inexhaustible eagerness to learn matched only by Thomas’ eagerness to teach him. Jo’s farewell; their determination to continue same time next week, perhaps for longer, perhaps they should make a day of it if Jo’s father had no objections: their arrangements were made with such ease and straightforwardness that the moment the door was closed behind his young pupil, Thomas’ anxieties fell away and he knew that everything that had happened and would happen between them was an unconditional good. And such was his confidence, that he went straight back to his study and found a book that he had last read when writing his PhD on Marcus Aurelius: namely the correspondence between him and his teacher Fronto, written while he ‘burned with love’ for his teacher and his teacher ‘burned with love for him.’ Then he blew away the dust and dared open it; only to remember that Fronto was even willing to give up his consulship in order to put his arms around the young Marcus once more. He put the book back, and sighed deeply.

  Meanwhile, such was Josiah’s exuberance that day that he found his way to Corpus. He went into the Porter’s Lodge and told the amiable, elderly porter that he was meeting his uncle for lunch that day, and where were Thomas Marius’ rooms, please?

  ‘He never told us he had a nephew,’ said the porter.

  ‘Oh, lots of people have nephews,’ said Josiah enthusiastically, and he noticed that the porter had a toupee and wondered why someone so old and so kind could be bothered with covering his baldness. Perhaps it was the cold. Do bald people complain about the cold ever?

  ‘And your name is?’ asked the porter.

  ‘My name is Josiah Nelson. My father is married to his sister.’

  ‘I didn’t know Dr Marius had a sister,’ muttered the porter.

  ‘Well, why should you know it? Lots of people have sisters.’

  ‘So they do, sir.’

  ‘So could you direct me to his rooms, please?’

  ‘He never comes in on a Saturday,’ said the porter.

  ‘But he’s expecting me,’ said Josiah.

  ‘I’ll ring him to make sure he’s in,’ insisted the dutiful porter

  ‘Don’t worry yourself! Don’t worry yourself!’ said the lad, shrugging, hands under his jumper and walking backwards.

  Josiah ran through the courts and skipped over the gardens, he put his head through the chapel doors and read the names painted at the bottom of every staircase. At last he found the name of his teacher, and slowly he licked the tip of his finger and wiped the dust off DR T E MARIUS. Upstairs he went to the first floor and tried the door which was, of course, locked. Unperturbed, he peered through the keyhole, and saw shelves of books and a mantelpiece with three or four chairs in front of it (just like his study at home, he thought, proudly) and the edge of a desk in front of an enormous window with leaded glass which was probably hundreds of years old. Josiah was so ludicrously happy that when he noticed the porter on the warpath he could barely be bothered to hide from him. But hide he did, in a bathroom, in a broom cupboard, and finally, just as he was making a dash for the outside world, he found himself in the college library.

  Josiah stopped running after that. He stopped noticing the way people were looking at him, or even feeling out of place. Slowly he ran his fingers along the spines of the books, the leather and the cloth, the soft paperbacks in their cellophane covers; he didn’t register their titles or their authors, only the fact that men had thought so hard about things that mattered so much to them, and that in this place they were allowed to exist, all hugger-mugger, together. And if such private lives, hidden from all the world, were allowed a mere inch in such a place as this, didn’t it make that life immediately worth living?

  In the end Josiah chose a book about Egyptian mummies. He chose it because he liked the white leather binding and the embossed gold lettering. He like the fact it was old and mysterious, and when he opened it on an old oak table by the window, he was smiled at by the lovely girl who was sitting opposite him. The pages were thick and creamy, the typescript clear and dark; and from time to time there were black and white photographs of pyramids, mummies, camels, goblets, jewellery and archaeologists wearing moustaches and hard white hats. The lovely girl had long silky brown hair, and Josiah quite thought he loved her, too; in fact, the love within him was so strong he knew that anything falling in its beam would be swept up
in it. And then it occurred to him that when he had first learnt about the Egyptians, at the age of eight or so, the teacher took it for granted that the Egyptians had been wrong to embalm their dead, and that their rituals were an elaborate waste of time: fun to learn about, but fundamentally wrong. But what if, at the very moment of death, when you feel the body slip away, you have a craving to return to it? Perhaps it’s the first time you really understand the importance of what you are about to lose. What if the Egyptians were right? Perhaps right now in heaven Pharaohs are sitting in state, bodies, robes and all, with buckets of gems at their side, mocking those simple spirits who flit about weightlessly because they had no faith in life after death.

  But then Josiah’s friend – yes, surely she counted as a friend by now, for had they not been in Egypt together? Had she not been there at his side in the heat of the desert? – got up to leave, and a man in a leather jacket had swooped in on her with a proprietorial arm around her waist, and the two of them had walked out of the library together. Not even a wave! Dejected, Josiah put the book back and slowly wended his way back to The Hollies, the place he called home.

  Josiah had a new key-worker called Angela Day who was waiting for him. In fact, he’d had seven ‘key-workers’ since Kerry had left to live with her boyfriend in Wales, all of whom had had cosy chats with him about their ‘special relationship’ with him, but none of these special relationships had ever come to much. At thirty, Angela was rather old for a residential social worker, and rather more sensible. She was short, stocky and committed, a real rock, and quite as unimaginative as a rock. So when Josiah was absent at lunchtime and hadn’t signed himself out, and what with a stressful morning trying to organize several of the older children into ‘painting teams’ in the hope that they might ‘pull together’ to decorate their home, she was understandably angry with him and stood in his way at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Not so fast, young man,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Josiah.