by David Lodge
“I couldn’t do that, it would be murder,” said Violet. “I’ll just go away somewhere to a Home for Unmarried Mothers and have it adopted and never trouble you again.”
“Don’t be absurd, Violet,” he said irritably. “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you, it’s just that I don’t want to rush into it. And I certainly didn’t intend starting a family straight away.”
But in the end he did marry Violet, and in a Catholic church. His doubts about the wisdom of this step were mitigated by her being awarded an Upper Second class degree – a rare achievement by girls doing Classics. The Professor sent them a handsome present, and they went to Sicily for their honeymoon and looked at antiquities. In the fourth month of her pregnancy, late in 1956, Violet had a miscarriage, and fell subsequently into a deep depression.
England was less boring in 1956 than it had seemed to Polly in the coffee bar with Michael the year before. At Easter there was the first CND march. The Outsider and Look Back in Anger made a great stir and the newspapers were full of articles about Britain’s Angry Young Men. In the autumn there was the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising.
Only the last of these events touched off an unequivocal response in our young Catholics. They were not, on the whole, a politically conscious group. Their childhood had been dominated by the Second World War, which their religious education had imbued with a mythic simplicity, the forces of good contending with the power of evil, Hitler being identified with Satan, and Churchill, more tentatively, with the Archangel Michael. After that apocalyptic struggle, mere party politics seemed an anticlimax, no doubt – anyway, few of them took an informed interest in such things, or bothered to think how they would cast their votes when they were twenty-one. Their politics in adolescence were international Cold War politics. The betrayal of the glorious Allied cause by Soviet Russia, the enslavement of Eastern Europe with its millions of Catholics, the inexorable advance of atheistic communism in the Far East – all showed that Satan was as active in the world as ever. Their hero was Cardinal Mindszenty, who had been imprisoned by the Communists in Hungary, and was released by the new provisional government in October 1956. When the Russian Army moved in to crush the rising with its tanks, the widespread feelings of outrage and impotence in Britain were felt especially keenly by Catholics.
One Sunday, while the Hungarian patriots were fighting for their lives in Budapest, a huge march and rally in Hyde Park was organized by students of London University, at which Dennis and Angela were present with Michael and Miriam. Dennis had recently been released from the Army, and was camping in Michael’s bedsitter while he looked for a job. Angela was teaching in a school in South London. Miriam was just starting her final year in Music. Michael had finished his MA thesis on the novels of Graham Greene, and was just beginning a Postgraduate Certificate of Education course: though he would have preferred to try for a university post, schoolteaching was the only way of avoiding National Service.
They stood on the trampled grass in the middle of a large, excited crowd, the two girls hanging on to the arms of their fiancés, and listened to the speeches. The announcement that a group of students were forming a volunteer force to join the freedom fighters of Hungary was received with great enthusiasm. “We want volunteers,” declared the speaker, a very young man, pale with sleeplessness and the strain of historic decision, “but only if you know how to use a gun.”
Of the four of them, only Dennis knew how to use a gun. For a moment or two he contemplated a heroic gesture, for he was genuinely moved by the plight of the Hungarians and the atmosphere of the meeting was heady. He had a brief glimpse of himself, as though through a rift in cloud, manning a barricade, gripping a rifle, hurling a grenade – converting at one stroke all the tedium and futility of his military training into something positive and transcendent. But then he saw himself falling dead across the bodies of Hungarian partisans, or flattened by a Russian tank like a hedgehog on a bypass, and the rift closed. He did not want to die. Especially he did not want to die without having possessed Angela.
Angela, at that moment, was thinking that if Dennis stepped forward to volunteer, she would ask him to make love to her that night without the slightest hesitation or guilt. She saw herself standing before him in the posture of a statue of Our Lady, her arms slightly lifted, her clothes slipping from her like melting snow.
None of them said anything. When somebody came round with a collecting box, Dennis put in more than he could really afford. Later he read in the paper that the volunteers – there were only about twenty of them – had been turned back at the Austrian border.
If Adrian had been present in Hyde Park, he would certainly have volunteered, but at that time he was still doing his military service, as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps. He had signed on for three years as a Regular in the hope of getting a commission in the prestigious cavalry regiment into which he had been conscripted as a National Serviceman, but he ended up in the despised RASC, in which he could probably have been commissioned anyway. At the time of the Hungarian uprising, which was also the time of the Suez crisis, he was a transport officer in Cyprus, and his frustration and disgust at the turn of events was extreme. His country, instead of flying to the assistance of the gallant Hungarians and Cardinal Mindszenty, was committing itself to a dubious adventure in wog-bashing – that was how Adrian saw it. The actual invasion was so badly organized, however, that he doubted whether the British Army would have been much help to the Hungarians anyway. On the quayside at Limassol, prior to embarkation, one French truck was grouped with every three British trucks, and as the British vehicles had been sprayed with yellow desert camouflage and the French ones had not, this pattern gave away the presence of the trucks to aerial reconnaisance as clearly as could be. When Adrian pointed this out to his CO, he was brusquely told that there was a political reason for it. In Suez, the convoys lost their way, ran out of water, and their wireless equipment broke down. It was a shambles, and an immoral shambles. When Anthony Eden was forced to resign soon afterwards, broken by ill-health, Adrian felt that some kind of justice had been done in Old Testament style. He determined to vote Socialist at the next election. (He had to wait till October 1959 and the Tories won by a hundred seats.)
After his release from the Army, Adrian took a job in Local Government in his home town, Derby. He lived with his parents because they would have been hurt if he had done otherwise, but it was cramped and inconvenient, for they were a large family with several children still at school. It was time, he decided, that he got married. He took dancing lessons and went to parish socials, but the girls he met were afraid of his severe, intense manner. He joined a tennis club, but the girls there found him stiff and priggish. He was not very good, either, at dancing or tennis. In the end he met Dorothy at a weekend conference on Catechetic. Adrian no longer did public speaking for the Catholic Evidence Guild, but he helped with a Sunday School in his parish for children attending non-Catholic schools. Dorothy was doing teacher-training in Religious Education, but she was quite willing to give up her course to marry Adrian, who had a good job and was suddenly very impatient to have sexual intercourse after so many years of continence in the interests of holiness and self-advancement.
Though he knew much more about sex, in a second-hand way, than when he was a student, from barrack and mess-room conversation, from reading the manual of military law, and from censoring the mail of other ranks in the Suez crisis, Adrian was shy of talking about it to Dorothy during their short engagement. She was a virgin, of course – so much so that when, prior to retiring to bed on their wedding night, he kissed her attired only in a dressing-gown, she inquired what hard object he was concealing in his pocket. Under the bedclothes she snuggled up to him happily enough, but when he tried to enter her she went rigid with fear and then grew hysterical. It transpired that she knew almost nothing about how a marriage was consummated. Adrian turned on the bedside lamp, sat up in bed, and lectured her on the facts of life
. He was a good lecturer, having benefited by his training in the Army and the Catholic Evidence Guild, though he spoke rather more loudly than was necessary and after a while somebody banged on the wall of the adjoining room (they were spending their honeymoon in a small hotel in the Lake District). Adrian continued his lecture in a lower tone, making three-dimensional diagrams in the air with his fingers. Dorothy watched him wonderingly, with the bedclothes drawn up to her chin.
“Didn’t your mother tell you anything?” he said.
“Sex was never mentioned at home, Adie.”
“Well, but you must have picked up something from somewhere. How did you suppose babies were conceived?”
Dorothy blushed and shifted uneasily beneath the sheets. “I thought it was enough if the man just touched the woman with his … I didn’t think he actually had to … to ….”
Adrian sighed. “Would you like to have another try, now I’ve explained?”
“If you like, dear.”
Adrian lay on top of his bride and butted at her dry crotch while she winced and gasped faintly beneath him. When at last he succeeded in penetrating her, he ejaculated immediately. “That wasn’t right,” he said. “With practice I’ll be able to last longer than that.”
“It was long enough for me, dear,” said Dorothy, and fell fast asleep.
Adrian lay awake for quite a long while. Undoubtedly it had been a disappointment, the sexual act. But then, so had most things in his life – his degree class, his army career – always falling a little short of his ambition, his ideal. And now marriage. Dorothy was a good, kind-hearted girl, utterly devoted to him, but she didn’t scintillate, there was no doubt about that, and though she had nice eyes and pretty hair, she was no beauty, her nose was decidedly half-an-inch too long, and her body rather awkward and angular. Adrian had a sudden recall of Angela, whom he not seen for years. Angela in her pink angora jumper – still, it seemed to him, the prettiest girl he had ever met in his life, and he wondered what she was doing now. Married to that chap, no doubt, what was his name, Dennis. Adrian grew gloomier and gloomier. He went through a dark wedding night of the soul. It seemed to him that God had always mocked his efforts. He had always tried to do his best, to do what was right, but always there was this bitter rebuff to his hopes and ambitions. Meanwhile other people, less good, less dutiful, indeed positively mischievous – fornicators, adulterers, unbelievers – prospered and enjoyed themselves. Of course all would get their just deserts in the next world, but he couldn’t help feeling some resentment about the lack of justice in this one. He knew for a fact that men who hadn’t worked half as hard as himself had got Upper Seconds in Finals, whereas he himself had only got a Lower Second, and sacrificed the chance of winning Angela to boot.
The disloyalty of this train of thought to the young woman sleeping peacefully beside him shocked Adrian out of his melancholy mood. Lying on his back, he made the Sign of the Cross, and said his usual night prayers, which he had omitted in the excitement of going to bed – an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, an Act of Contrition; then he turned over and settled himself to sleep. Tomorrow he would take Dorothy to Great Gable and teach her a few basic rock-climbing skills.
Because he was doing medicine, Edward was still a student of a kind long after his contemporaries had left the University. His main leisure activities were playing rugby and taking part in the College Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s productions until, the season before he qualified, someone trampled on him in a loose scrum and damaged a couple of vertebrae, putting an end to his athletic career and bequeathing to him a lifetime of intermittent backache. For recreation that left him with just Gilbert and Sullivan – and girls, for whom he had not previously had much time. The teaching hospital was of course teeming with pretty nurses looking for doctors to marry, and Edward met one of them, Tessa, at the beginning of his houseman’s year, when they were on night duty together. Tessa wasn’t a Catholic – her family were vaguely C of E – but she was quite happy about getting married in a Catholic church, and bringing their children up as Catholics. This was established long before Edward formally proposed, for after he had taken her out a few times he said, putting on the expression of exaggerated gravity that used to disconcert Father Brierley, that he thought it was only fair to make clear, before they got seriously attached to each other, what the implications were.
“You’d have to take instructions from a priest,” he said. “Of course, it makes everything much simpler if the non-Catholic partner converts, but it’s not essential.”
“Well, I might, you never can tell,” Tessa said brightly, her smooth brown cheeks dimpling, and her dark eyes glancing in all directions. They were in the Brasserie of a Lyons Cornerhouse at the time; Tessa had never been to one before and thought that the gay check tablecloths and the gipsy music and the tangy smells of Continental cooking were heaven. At that moment she would cheerfully have agreed to marry a Hindoo if his name had been Edward.
“And there’s another thing,” said Edward, looking more solemn than ever. “You know about the Catholic teaching on birth control, don’t you?” His big ears glowed red with embarrassment, for in spite of his training in anatomy and gynaecology, and the obscene songs that he sang as lustily as anyone else after rugger matches, Edward was remarkably pure-minded and assumed that girls were even more so.
“Well, I believe in large families, anyway,” said Tessa, with a giggle, glancing to right and left.
“It doesn’t mean,” he hastened to assure her, “that the Church is against family planning as such. It’s just a question of the method. It’s quite all right to use the Rhythm method.”
“Much nicer than the other methods, anyway, I should think,” Tessa said, and then wondered if perhaps she had revealed a little too much knowledge. She was still technically a virgin, but had had a fairly passionate heavy petting affair the previous year with a postgraduate dentistry student who had hopefully explained to her on several occasions the various means of contraception.
Tessa decided to become a Catholic as soon as she discovered that, if she didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to have a nuptial mass. She liked the idea of being the focus of attention for a full hour in her bridal dress, kneeling up on the altar (it was the only time in her life, Edward explained, that a woman was allowed into the sanctuary, except of course for cleaning and polishing and arranging the flowers) with organ music, choir-singing, Latin prayers and glowing vestments swirling around her. Most weddings she had been to seemed to her to be over far to quickly, and the Catholic service for a mixed marriage was almost as short and bleak as a Registry Office ceremony – no candles, flowers or even music being permitted.
“You do understand what you’re doing, darling?” Edward said anxiously the day before she was received. “You’re quite happy about it?”
“Oh yes, darling, quite happy.” In truth Tessa found a lot of the doctrine inherently implausible, but she could see that it all fitted together, and if Edward believed it, who was she to quibble?
Shortly afterwards, Edward took her to a weekend conference for Catholic engaged couples. There would be talks by priests, doctors and counsellors on such subjects as The Sacrament of Marriage, Getting On Together, and The Rhythm Method, plus Mass and Benediction each day and times for private recollection. Edward had the idea that this experience would help Tessa to feel fully assimilated into her new faith. It was held at a retreat house and conference centre run by nuns, on the northern outskirts of London.
They arrived on a Friday night, late because Edward had been delayed by an emergency at the hospital. An aged and irritable nun admitted them and said that they were not expected until the following morning. “There’ll be extra to pay,” she grumbled. “What’s your name?”
“O’Brien,” said Edward.
The nun peered myopically at a list of names pinned to a noticeboard. “Come with me,” she said, plucking at Tessa’s sleeve like a crone in a fairy-tale.
“Shall I wait
here?” Edward said.
“You can if you like,” said the nun. “But you’ll get nothing to eat. The kitchen’s all shut up.”
“Goodnight then, darling,” said Edward, smiling encouragingly at Tessa, and gave her a peck on the cheek. He could see that she was a bit downcast by this chilly reception. The hall was cold and ill-lit, and smelled faintly of boiled cabbage and carbolic soap. Dark oil paintings depicting martyrdoms and miracles loomed from the walls.
“Goodnight,” Tessa replied in a small voice.
Afterwards they both recalled that the nun had looked puzzled by this exchange.
Edward waited while Tessa was shown to her room. It was deathly quiet. After a couple of minutes the nun slowly descended the stairs and shuffled across the lobby as if he weren’t there. Just as she was about to disappear through a green baize door, Edward called out: “Excuse me, sister, but where is my room, please?”
The old nun looked balefully at him across the black and white flags of the hall. “Number twenty-nine, up the stairs and turn right,” she said.
Edward located the room and walked in to find Tessa in her slip, brushing her hair. She dropped the brush in fright, and clasped her arms across her bosom.
“Oh, heavens, Teddy, you did scare me, this place is so spooky, what do you want? Have you come to kiss me goodnight? What will the nuns think?”
Edward explained about the nun’s mistake, but gave her a goodnight kiss anyway, a proper one which went on for some time. There were two beds in the room and they made some jokes about that, which aroused them both. They had a common feeling of being back at school, riskily breaking the rules. Eventually Edward went back downstairs to try and find out about his room. He checked the noticeboard in the lobby. On a list he found: “Mr and Mrs O’Brien – room 29.” All the names on the list were married couples. The sheet was indeed headed, Conference for Married Couples, and the programme included talks on The Holy Family, Beating The Seven-Year Itch, and Problems with Teenage Children.
