by James Wood
And sure enough, Norrington, the fool—though perhaps he knew nothing about Karl’s origins—now wanted to discuss the godlessness of Nazism, the evil of the camps, and Peter seemed perfectly happy to join him. I was horridly embarrassed.
“Yes,” Peter was saying confidently, “the two great engines of evil in this century, fascism and communism, were essentially godless, indeed set themselves against organized religion.”
“Because without God, everything is permitted,” said Mr. Norrington, with particular pompous pleasure.
“That’s very stupid,” I said, breathing fast, and looking at the tablecloth. “It’s stupid because even with God, everything already and always has been permitted—oh, let’s see, Crusades, executions, bloody wars, uprisings, monarchical totalitarianism, regicides, papal decadence, burnings at the stake, Inquisitions, revolutions, immoralities of every kind. All of this happened with God, so what was there left to be ‘permitted without God’?”
“What was left to be permitted was precisely the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges,” said Peter quickly, looking at me glancingly. “Which was Mr. Norrington’s point.”
“I’m telling you,” I said, into the stiffly silent company, “Mr. Norrington’s point was stupid, and I’m very surprised that you, Dad, don’t see that. As long ago as the Enlightenment, philosophers and historians were able to see as they surveyed world history that there was no necessary link between godliness and goodness. Some of them actually thought the link might go the other way, between godliness and cruelty. Gibbon thought this. And if you insist on using the Holocaust as your great example of godlessness, I have several points: first, Nazism wasn’t resisted strongly enough, or at all in most cases, by the German churches—not to mention, of course, the Christian roots of anti-Semitism itself. And, second, if the Holocaust was godlessness run rampant, where the hell was God? Where had He suddenly gone? God did not ‘die at Auschwitz,’ as people like to say, because by this logic He must have already been dead, He must have died centuries before, during some other previous terrible atrocity. In this sense, the Holocaust isn’t unique, and proves nothing, theologically. I really can’t stand Mr. Norrington’s pseudo-Dostoevskian line of argument, it’s so fucking unempirical.”
I couldn’t look up into the frozen air. I was shaking, my head was pointed down at my plate. I heard my father screw the twist of his cigarette into the ashtray; it squeaked against the glass.
“I’m generally on Tom’s side, as you know,” said Karl, always the pacifier, “but I think in this case that we might say that the case remains unproven on both sides. If godliness does not entail good conduct, which may well be true, then godlessness can hardly be said to entail good conduct either. On the evidence of this century, the antireligious forces, which certainly made up the bulk of fascism and communism, don’t come out of it very well.”
“Actually, the divorce rate is higher among religious believers than it is among professed atheists,” I said, but without bitterness, for Uncle Karl was trying to repair the atmosphere. “By the way, I apologize for any brusqueness towards you, Mr. Norrington. That was unforgivable. I get caught in the passion of ideas.”
“You are a bit tired at the moment,” said Jane.
“Tired?” said Peter coldly. “What on earth do you have to be tired about? What’s detaining you at night? Your Ph.D.? The Epicureans?”
This was the point at which I left the table and went upstairs to our bedroom. Now, I feel only ashamed of the absurd speed with which I took offence. My dad had never heard me swear like that; it was deeply provoking, no doubt, and he felt inclined to defend Mr. Norrington, I understand that now. But then I was in a righteous fury. So, I thought, the news was out: my parents had no real faith in my abilities, and never had done. My father classed me as a juvenile because he, along with my mother, could not think of me as an adult. And they thought this way because I hadn’t finished my stupid thesis, about which they were relentlessly obsessed. If only they knew, I thought, of the existence of my parallel work, my Book Against God. Then they would be sorry, then they would be surprised, they might be shocked, menaced, threatened, challenged, all this would be good for them, it would shake them up a bit, they would see it as a work of genius, of moral indignation but intellectual composure, with the most delicate and refined transits of language. But their interest is in each other, I thought—which means, in fact, that their interest is in Peter Bunting, the sun-priest, at whose court we all have to pay our respects.
Upstairs in the bedroom, I started writing in my BAG. I think now that it was at this moment, without quite knowing it, that I formally abandoned my Ph.D. and tipped myself headfirst into the more serious business of planning a great work of theologico-philosophical argument and commentary. But of course my parents would not be told about it until it was an accomplished great work, something worthy of intellectual scrutiny. Until then it would be my secret.
And now, of course, Father will never see my Book.
I was alone for a long time. I heard the front door open and close several times, and the old bell was rung. Eventually, Jane came upstairs with Uncle Karl and Max and Fiona Raymond. In that curious reversal that sometimes happens in such situations, Jane and Karl looked sheepish, as if they had taken on my guilty embarrassment and were about to apologize for my misdemeanours. Max spoke. He was laughing, and despite my ill humour I found his mirth infectious. He took his glasses off, rubbed them, and said:
“Uh-oh. Right, Tom, it’s no Christmas lunch for you. No … plum pudding. But this is the problem with Christmas. How long have you already been at home? It’s far … safer to ration yourself to two or three days, like me.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid that you two were unwilling participants in an extramural class about the thoroughly intramural relations of the Bunting family.”
“Oh love, what nonsense are you talking now?” said Jane.
“I mean that I’m sorry you had to watch me and my father circling around a very square hole.”
Karl burst into laughter and said, “How do your students understand a word you say? Do they feel they are sitting at some shrine of The Great Riddler?”
“I don’t have any students. Karl, I was angry for you,” I said. “It was completely wrong and insensitive of my father, let alone Mr. Norrington, to be discussing the Holocaust, the camps, Nazism, and all that, in your presence. He showed you no respect.”
“Tom, Tommy. Dear boy, Peter and I are old, old friends! He has known me from before you were born. Do you think we have never discussed my German childhood? Many times we have talked about Nazism. Peter has the greatest tact, the finest instincts, he is the only man alive who can tease me about being German, and even make a kind of joke or two about Hitler in my company. With honesty, I do not think of a thing that is wrong with Peter … well, except perhaps he has a weakness for going again and again to the doctor to get his ears syringed. But, you know, it is quite sweet of you to defend my honour.”
“I wasn’t defending your honour, as such, I was defending a principle.”
“Don’t be pompous, Tommy,” said Jane.
“How did everything end?” I asked.
“We were all very nice to Mr. Norrington,” said Jane. “Your father said that Christmas Day—what did he say, Karl?—has an almost magical power over warring parties, and that he fully expects reconciliation. Then Max and Fiona arrived and everyone cheered up.”
“So you’ve been downstairs sucking up to the Buntings while I’ve been imprisoned in my turret up here?” I asked Max, mock-mournfully.
“Yep, that’s about the measure of it,” said Max.
“Maybe we should change places. You could come and spend Christmas Day here, and I could spend it at The Oratory.”
“Oh no,” said Max cheerfully, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
We heard my father’s voice downstairs, and then the front door was opened and shut.
“That’s Pe
ter and Sarah going to the midnight mass,” said Max. “So you can come downstairs, the coast is clear.”
We got ourselves drinks, and Karl asked Jane if she might play him his favourite piece, the Bach aria “Sheep May Safely Graze.” She needed to put up her hair, and searched for her elastic hair-ring. Then she reached behind her head, her elbows pointing towards us as if she were surrendering them, and I saw the ring slide on and suddenly she had harvested that hair into a single feathered sheaf, twisting her face as she did so, a gesture I loved, since it added a suggested strenuousness to a silky and weightless activity.
I liked the way, when she played this arrangement, that she picked the vocal melody out of the surrounding notes, as if the fingers responsible for playing that melody were indeed singing it. With enormous gentleness her fingers rescued from the surrounding mobility the walking lento of the tune.
We had happy, easy conversation. Max and I told stories about the village. We mentioned a man who had gone to prison for clumsily trying to blackmail a firm in Durham; and the time we drove our bikes over Susan Perez-Temple’s kitchen garden; and the evening we tormented poor Sam Spedding by phoning him and hanging up. We got on to Max’s parents.
“Do you remember,” said Max excitedly, “when you lied to my dad about having got a poem into a literary … magazine? I couldn’t … believe it. I was standing next to you, and almost bursting with laughter. You … invented the whole magazine, and … he believed you.”
“Well, your father always made me uncomfortable, and so I had to secure some kind of internal victory over him,” I said. “He always had a special way of looking at me, in fact he still does, which terrified me. You remember his first words to me, ever?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘You’re a plausible rogue, aren’t you?’ Those were his first words. I was thirteen!”
“Colin is a psychological genius,” murmured Karl.
“And at … the second or third meeting,” said Max, still excited, “he asked you to list the seven wonders of the ancient world.”
“Right, utterly humiliating, so I had to plan my revenge.” But it was several years before I could put it into action. I could see that Colin despised weakness and ignorance; clearly, I would have to be strong and knowledgeable. And since, as a teenager, I wasn’t naturally these things, I would have to lie about them. Even Professor Thurlow couldn’t be more knowledgeable than me about a complete fiction. I was sixteen, and at that time I was writing poems, and sending them off to poetry magazines, often with letters denouncing the poems that were running in these magazines—I had read somewhere that the way to catch an editor’s attention was to attack his choices.
“I forget now how your dad and I got onto poetry, but anyway, he said to me that he had heard from you that I was writing verse. And he sounded so dismissive that I decided to invent a poetry magazine and ask him if he had heard of it. I knew that he would hate to confess ignorance. Sure enough, he said that he had heard of it! Well, I said, I just got a letter from them yesterday telling me that I have had a poem accepted. His face fell.”
“Tommy is always so proud of his lies,” said Jane to Fiona.
“Tom’s moral sense has been … on sabbatical since puberty,” explained Max to the group.
“Actually, I’m much more embarrassed by the memory of the poems I wrote than by my lie,” I said. I wrote passionate philosophical poems, rhymed, often hazily antitheological, and full of landscape. I tended to describe walking up the hill and looking down at the village from Pilgrim’s Path:
And there, beneath me, lies “God’s city,”
As the sun shines its electricity—
Bright wafer, which has turned but not harkened,
To the blood of our hearts, the pain of life sharpened!
Eventually, Max and Fiona went across the road to The Oratory, and Karl went off to his hotel in Durham (Karl always needed a double bedroom, and we had taken it), and Jane and I found ourselves in the strange position of being alone in the vicarage. I kissed her, and we continued upstairs. We made love fast, against the anticipated return of my parents. Sex had become a fairly infrequent activity in that last year of our marriage. By deciding to try to have a child, we had made sex veer from pleasure to function. Jane seemed always to be looking in her diary and announcing that “the next four days are the most fertile, the optimal window of the month,” and informing me that we should have sex as often as possible in this brief opening. Frankly, it felt a bit forced. In the last months, whenever we had sex something always went wrong, and I drifted far away into my own thoughts, and we seemed, to me, like two separate entities masquerading at union—not unlike the old joke in which one man approaches another and says, “I like to walk alone,” to which the other man replies, “So do I, so we can walk together.” In this sense, Jane and I were walking together quite well.
As it happens, on Christmas Eve, as the rain continued to come down outside, we were very warm and intimate, tender on the bed, provoked by the thought of imminent interruption. I felt sentimental and kissed Jane so passionately that she whispered, “Less, darling, less,” which only increased my desire. As she rose and fell on top of me, I remembered for a second my first lover, Rachel Worth. She was a friend of Max’s, a fellow student of his at Oxford, and I took the bus there most weekends from London. Rachel and I were virgins, first-timers, both awkward. I remembered how we sat on the floor naked, like children at the beach, trying to get it right, repeating the game until, suddenly, she was sitting on top of me, there was no gap between us, and I was inside her. “God!” Rachel said, and her brown eyes were large. I felt unable to look at her, fearful of the enormity and simplicity of the experience, and I think we both thought: “Is this the beginning of adulthood? Is this it?” Then we cried a little in each other’s arms, and put on music and danced around her freezing room in Magdalen College overlooking the deer park. The deer moved around on the grass in great separation, as if concentrating on trying to ignore each other.
20
THE TERRIBLE THING I did on Christmas Eve did not really concern my behaviour with my father, but with Jane.
I had been telling one large lie for at least a year, and it had begun to master me. It is that I did not want to have a child, and was lying to Jane about it. I tried as often as possible to postpone sex during the announced “optimal window of the month” until the days after that time, when Jane was at her least fertile. More recently, my unwillingness to make a child with Jane had resulted in a kind of impotence. I would get some of the way with her, and then collapse before climax. Ever since our decision to “try for a baby,” things had deteriorated. As soon as I became aware of having to concentrate on procreation, the “engorged phallus” steadily lost its rigidity.
On Christmas Eve, I did an especially bad thing. Remarkably, I had no difficulty in maintaining an erection. Excited by Jane’s passion, I grew passionate myself, and maintained a rigidity that would have made old Mr. Conners very happy. Yet hearing Jane come before me, I decided to withhold my sperm and to fake a simultaneous orgasm. So afterwards, as Jane turned aside to sleep, doubtless feeling between her legs merely an illusory glue, and saying anxiously to me, “You did come, didn’t you?” to which I whispered, “God, yes,”—I was rather ashamed.
I was ashamed to be so deceitfully denying Jane what she wanted. But I was, and am, sure that I did not and do not want a child. At first, my motives were practical: I didn’t want a child now—why not delay the inevitable disruption for as long as possible? I worried that I would be unable to finish the Ph.D. once an infant was installed in my life. I dreaded the constraints of paternity.
But these weren’t the real reasons. My real objections were metaphysical. What right do I have to bring life into the world? To create a person who might, at some point in his life, wish that he were dead? Who might complain—to me, his father—that he had never asked to be born? True, we cannot ask to be created; that would be like Baron Münchhau
sen tugging himself out of a bog by his own pigtail. So we cannot complain that we were never consulted in the matter. But knowing this does not alter the truth that life, however enjoyable or pleasant, being imposed rather than requested, is a sentence on us. That which seems uniquely ours—our life—is not ours at all, since we were voteless at conception.
Atheists and antireligious philosophers have often argued that though life is meaningless, we should not commit suicide, since to do so is to surrender the necessary struggle with the sentence of life. But I think this presumes too much of life; suicide is no surrender of possession if we do not possess our life anyway. If life is meaningless, then suicide is meaningless too, and the reason not to do it is that to add one meaninglessness to another meaninglessness is not a solution but merely akin to a double negative in speech, a blocked statement. Since we did not ask to be created, we can never have been free enough for suicide to grow any prestige of freedom. We cannot commit suicide—because we are not alive; we cannot freely end—because we did not freely begin.
Do I have the right to impose this sentence on someone else? Clearly not. Do I have the right to pass on my unhappiness? No.
And now, here I was, on Christmas Eve, in the middle of one of Jane’s “optimal windows,” and I did not come, but deliberately held back my sperm, and lied.
I told myself afterwards that I couldn’t lie any longer. This lie could not continue, because I was not its master. This lie had mastered me, and would have to be confessed.
21
I GOT MYSELF through the Christmas Day festivities by quietly suffering my father. He greeted me cheerfully, as if nothing had happened the night before. It was an old trick of his, this Promethean regeneration of emotional tissue overnight. It was more complicated than denial, I think; he actually killed disagreement, simply made it disappear. So I let him drive away the memory of the previous night, and I partook of the usual Christmas events: the service with the church full (Max and Fiona came, with Belinda but not Colin), lunch, and at three the television, briefly put on for the Queen’s Christmas Address to the Nation. Yes, she was the same as usual, sitting in a bosomy room in Buckingham Palace. She was really no beauty, the queen; that broad lion-mouth, which she got from her father, with wide littoral of upper lip, was now giving her a royal-animal look, as if through sheer longevity she were becoming one of the heraldic beasts on her own crest. To read, she wore enormous square spectacles, each lens like a little television screen. Her baked hair had an unnatural streetlamp tinge. She spoke in a high voice about the Commonwealth, about a visit to India, about goodwill to all men, and wished “people of all faiths” a very happy Christmas—which struck me as illogical. The national anthem played, while an overhead shot tempted the masses with a vision of the mottled rooftops of the palace.
