How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  Austin Brierley almost rubbed his eyes in disbelief sometimes. He read the professional theological journals with much the same mixed feelings of shock and liberation as Michael read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the sexually explicit fiction that was published in its wake. Of course the theologians and exegetes were generally more discreet than the novelists. They expressed themselves with elaborate caution in learned journals of tiny circulation, or exchanged ideas with like-minded scholars in private. It was understood that one did not flaunt the new ideas before the laity, or for that matter before the ordinary clergy, most of whom were deplorably ill-educated and still virtually fundamentalists when it came to the interpretation of the New Testament. The main thing was to get on quietly with the work of updating Catholic biblical scholarship while Rome was too preoccupied with pastoral and liturgical experiment to bother checking up on them. Austin Brierley, however was unable to take this view of the matter. It seemed to him that a dangerous gap was opening up between the sophisticated, progressive theologians and exegetes on the one hand, and ordinary parochial Catholics on the other. The latter still went on believing in the nativity story and the miracles of Our Lord and all the rest of it as literally, historically true. If they woke up one day to discover that their own “experts” hadn’t believed these things for years, they would feel cheated, and might understandably give up the practice of their religion in disgust. It was therefore, he concluded, the clear duty of priests like himself to try and educate the laity in the new, modern way of reading Scripture.

  When his course was over, Father Brierley returned to his parish at the end of the Northern Line fired with this sense of mission. His first sermon was given on Ascension Day. He expounded the Gospel reading as a dramatic way of expressing the idea that Jesus was united with the Father in eternal life after his death on the cross, and thus promised all men of faith the same union and the same eternal life. To the disciples, to the first Christians, to the authors of the New Testament (especially the authors of Luke and the Acts, in which the Ascension was most elaborately described) it was natural to express this idea as a physical movement upwards in space, for they inhabited a flat world in which “Heaven” was identified with the sky above. Today, of course, we knew that the world was round, that space was curved, that there was neither up nor down in the cosmos, that Heaven was not a place that would ever be discovered by a space probe. To understand the Gospel story, we had to interpret it metaphorically.

  After a few more sermons like this, the parishioners complained to Father McGahern, and Father McGahern to Archbishop’s House, and Austin Brierley was seconded to another diocese in the Midlands that was allegedly short of priests. Before he left, the Monsignor gave him a sympathetic interview, shook his hand and advised him to go easy on the new biblical scholarship in his new job.

  It was a small satisfaction to Austin Brierley that one year later Father McGahern had to be hurriedly retired from his parish, when it came out that he had put the entire proceeds of a special collection for the African missions on a horse in the St Leger. Had the horse lost, the matter could have been hushed up, but as it won at 11-2, the priest was unable to resist boasting from the pulpit about his coup, and the popular press got hold of the story.

  Sister Mary Joseph of the Precious Blood took her final vows in 1960. The evening before this solemn ritual, there was a ceremony (borrowed from the Benedictines) that in some ways remained even more vivid to her memory. In front of the assembled community, she had to signify her determination to embrace the life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Two tables were set out before her. On one, neatly folded, were the clothes she had worn on the day she entered the convent as a postulant; on the other, the habit of the order and, in a little dish, the silver ring which would be placed on her finger the next morning to confirm her as a Bride of Christ. She had to bow to the Mother Superior, and place her hand irrevocably on one table or another. If she chose the secular clothes, she was free to leave the convent without reproach. It made it easier to turn to the other table that those clothes looked so dowdy and insubstantial.

  Soon afterwards she was sent to a girls’ grammar school run by the Order in the North of England, to teach biology and botany. Her qualifications were particularly valued by the convent, which was usually obliged to hand over these subjects, so sensitive and potentially dangerous to faith and morals, to lay teachers. Shortly before Sister Mary Joseph’s arrival, there had been an unfortunate episode involving a young married teacher who had taken it upon herself to give her fourth-formers a lesson on human reproduction in the General Science course. The policy of the school, as Mother Superior told Sister Mary Joseph at her first interview, was that there should be no class discussion of such matters before the Sixth Form, and then only within carefully defined limits. “What about menstruation?” Sister Mary Joseph enquired. “We assume that the girls’ mothers will attend to that,” was the reply. “But of course, we are always available to see the girls on an individual basis. You will find that they come to you when they need help.”

  Sister Mary Joseph found, however, that they very rarely came to her for that kind of help. Help with preparation for exams, or advice on applying to universities, yes. But everything to do with their sexual development they kept discreetly hidden from the nuns, though even from her own cloistered perspective it was obvious that society at large was becoming increasingly permissive and thus creating acute problems for adolescent girls. Every now and then there would be a sexual scandal of some kind, major or minor, in the school – a girl obliged to leave hurriedly because she was pregnant, a fourth-former caught with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her satchel: glimpses, as through chinks in a fence, of appalling temptations in the world outside. With some of her pupils, especially the brighter and more ambitious ones, Sister Mary Joseph enjoyed close friendship – for a time. But always there came a point of withdrawal on the part of the girl – silent, unexplained, unacknowledged, yet as sensible as the sudden disappearance of the sun behind a cloud, signifying (she was morally certain) that the girl in question had discovered Boys, or possibly, a boy. It was not, at first, a physical withdrawal – the girl might come to her just as often for extra coaching, for walks in the lunch hour – but it would not be the same, a deepening reserve separated them, a no-man’s-land of unmentionable experience. It pained Sister Mary Joseph that this should be so, that the girls feat they could not share the crucial problems and anxieties of adolescence with her (nor, she was fairly certain, with any of the other nuns) and she came to the conclusion that the habit and rule of life which the Order had adopted as a sign of its dedication had become an impediment.

  When, therefore, in 1965, the call went out from the Vatican Council to all religious orders of women to reappraise their statutes, rules and regulations, to consider what changes might be appropriate to make their vocations more effective in the circumstances of modern life, and Mother Superior convened a series of meetings of all the sisters in the community to discuss these momentous questions, Sister Mary Joseph came out strongly for reform. By the power of her intellect and the force of her eloquence, she carried the day. A television set was introduced into the recreation room. The Times was subscribed to. Sugar in tea and coffee was no longer restricted to Sundays and feast days. Permission was no longer required from Mother Superior to take a bath, make a telephone call, or go into town on errands, and sisters were allowed to go out alone, not always in pairs. The 6 p.m. curfew was extended to 10 p.m. For sisters with a full teaching load, meditation and recitation of the Office of Our Lady in Chapel at 5 a.m. was made optional, and the day began normally with mass at six.

  The mood in the convent in those days was comparable to that of the French National Assembly in ’89. The older generation was fearful and sometimes appalled at the rate of change; the younger and more progressive nuns were drunk on liberty, equality and sorority. They had been schooled in the novitiate to believe that the rules and restrictions of the
Order were essential to the pursuit of holiness, necessary ways of subduing pride and crucifying the flesh. When word came from Rome that these rules might in many cases be the fossilized remains of obsolete manners and customs, the accumulated frustration of years exploded like a sudden release of compressed air. Mother Superior escaped, by a narrow margin of votes, having her office abolished and replaced by a committee re-elected monthly. A proposal to allow smoking was defeated only on health grounds, and another to allow attendance at theatres and cinemas was approved. But, without doubt, the subject of the greatest contention, and of the most drawn-out debate, was the question of dress.

  Even Ruth (as she now thought of herself again, for the Jacobin nuns in the community began to call each other by their baptismal names rather than their names in religion, which they had not chosen for themselves and had never much liked) – even Ruth, progressive as she was, acknowledged the problems and pitfalls in modernizing dress. The disadvantages of the habit were obvious: it was expensive to make and to maintain (two lay sisters were almost constantly employed sewing, laundering, starching and ironing), it was impractical (particularly in the labs), it was excessively warm in summer, and (though this was disputed) it prevented the wearer from having a normal, relaxed relationship with ordinary people. How to modernize this dress was, however, a difficult and delicate question. When the Order had been founded, its habit differed only in detail from what most women wore at the time in provincial France; but that could hardly be a guideline for them now in the mid-nineteen-sixties, the era of the mini-skirt. As one middle-aged sister, otherwise inclined to liberal opinions, remarked: “After all, a nun does take a vow of chastity and I really don’t think you should be able to see the tops of her stockings when she sits down.”

  “Most women wear tights, nowadays, I understand,” said Ruth. But she took the point.

  In the end it was agreed that a certain number of the sisters should experiment with various kinds of modernized dress, and that after a trial period the matter should be discussed again. As leader of the progressive party, Ruth felt morally obliged to volunteer, though she did so with misgivings. After the meeting, she went to her cell, took off her headdress and habit, and stood in her shift before the mirror on the inside of her cupboard door. It was something she had not done for many years – ever since being taught “custody of the eyes” as a novice (the mirror was supposed to be used only for checking one’s appearance when fully dressed). Now it was almost physically painful to scrutinize herself. Her hair was thin and lifeless from years of confinement under the headdress, and a deep red weal ran across her forehead where the headband habitually pressed against the brow. Her bosom had grown fuller with the years, but her brassieres had been silently removed from her laundry shortly after she became a novice, to be replaced by a stiff bodice that flattened and spread the breasts into a kind of unitary mound. Her hips were as broad and clumsy as ever and (she stood on a chair and hitched up the skirt of her shift) her legs of almost uniform thickness from thigh to ankle. Walk through the gates with that lot dressed up in a tee-shirt and mini-skirt, she reflected wryly, and the populace would flee screaming in terror.

  Eventually she settled for a navy tailored costume consisting of jacket and mid-calf skirt, worn with a high-necked blouse and a little cap and short veil, like a nursing sister’s headdress. She had her hair cut and permed, and every night put it in curlers, obedient to the injunction of the hairdresser’s assistant (“You must do it religiously,” the girl had said, without apparent irony). When she and the other guinea-pigs first appeared in school in their new get-up, the effect on the girls was, of course, sensational. There were gasps and titters in Assembly, and a crescendo of whispered comment like bees swarming, before Mother Superior was able to restore order and silence. The volunteers were prepared for that, prepared to be the target for curious stares until the novelty wore off. Still, it was rather discouraging to overhear two girls in the cloakroom saying didn’t Sister Mary Joseph look a fright in her new clothes, like a cross between a Meter Maid and a Home Help; and it took all Ruth’s self-control not to rush back to her cell and put on the habit again. Nor did the new costume have any perceptible effect of breaking down the emotional reserve between Ruth and her pupils. That, she now began to feel, was caused by something much more fundamental than clothing. One of the married teachers, a woman with whom she got on well, put it to her bluntly when they were discussing the catastrophic fall in new vocations to the order: “Frankly, Sister, girls these days aren’t very keen on the idea of perpetual virginity.”

  Sister Mary Joseph sighed, and supposed she was right.

  “It’s hardly surprising,” the teacher went on, “when you see what they’re being fed all the time by the mass media. Just look at this.”

  She took from her bag a popular women’s magazine. “I confiscated it from a girl in 5C this morning – she was reading it in a Library session, cheeky devil. Just look at these letters, and the answers.”

  Ruth glanced at the page folded back for her perusal. It was an agony column of a familiar type, entitled, Ask Ann Field. “Dear Ann Field,” the first letter began, “I am seventeen and have been going out with a boy who I love very much for about six months …” And underneath, in bold type, was Ann Field’s answer:

  Many people today believe that if the couple concerned have a loving and stable relationship, sex before marriage is not necessarily wrong and may be a way of putting a future marriage on a firm foundation. Only you and your boy friend can decide whether this, for you, would be an expression of genuine love or merely selfish exploitation. But if you do decide to commit yourself to such a relationship, for heaven’s sake get advice about contraception first. There is, incidentally, no reason why you should not have a white wedding when the time comes.

  “If that isn’t encouraging young people to jump into bed with each other, what is?” said the teacher. “How are a couple of teenagers supposed to know the difference between selfish pleasure and true love, I’d like to know?”

  Ruth sighed again. “It must be a great responsibility to receive such letters,” she said. “I suppose this, whatshername, Ann Field, I suppose she tries to help according to her lights.”

  The teacher looked surprised at this mild response, and reclaimed the magazine with a slightly aggrieved air, as though confiscating it for a second time. “Well, ten years ago, even five, you’d never have found a magazine like this approving sex before marriage,” she said. “I don’t know what things are coming to.”

  Polly would have been gratified by Ruth’s remark, had she overheard it, for as it happened she was Ann Field at this particular time. She was also married, to a successful television producer, to whom she had borne, precisely two years apart, a handsome son and pretty daughter; and she lived in a converted oast-house near Canterbury, with an au pair to help with the children and a milk-white Mini of her own to run about in. She led a busy, enjoyable life, only slightly marred by occasional twinges of anxiety about Jeremy’s fidelity and perpetual worry about putting on weight, the two being connected.

  They had met in 1960, when she was assigned to work on a programme with him. Jeremy’s first marriage, to a well-known actress, was breaking up, and when the unit went on location in Scotland (it was a documentary about the depopulation of the Highlands, a somewhat lugubrious subject rendered all the more so by Jeremy’s mood of the moment) they inevitably had an affair. The affair required more mothering than eroticism on Polly’s part – long, introspective monologues from Jeremy in the huge, high-ceilinged bedrooms of Scottish three-star hotels, his head pillowed on her lap while she gently massaged his scalp – but the erotic moments were satisfactory too; and before his divorce proceedings were completed, Jeremy had asked Polly to marry him and had been accepted with alacrity.

  It was necessarily a Registry Office wedding, a circumstance that caused Polly’s parents some pain. Though well aware that she had not practiced her religion for years, they pretend
ed to be ignorant of her way of life. Now her marriage to Jeremy (whom her mother insisted on referring to as divorcé, with a French accent, as if the English word were somehow indelicate) made it all public and irrevocable.

  “I don’t know where we went wrong, I’m sure,” her mother said, snuffling into a dainty handkerchief, while Polly nibbled the end of a Biro and tried to draw up a list of the wedding presents she wanted.

  “It’s nothing to do with you, Mummy,” said Polly. “It’s the way things are. Most of the girls I was at school with are divorced and remarried or living with people. D’you remember the name of that stainless-steel tableware we saw in Harrods?”

  “Well, I think it’s shocking. The money your father paid that convent in fees….”

  “Why don’t you sue them?” said Polly, trying to tease her mother out of her mood. But she was not amused.

  “He’s left one wife, how can you be sure he won’t leave you?”

  “He didn’t leave her, she left him,” Polly snapped back. But the barbed remark stung and was not easily forgotten.

  They started a family immediately (Jeremy had had no children by his first wife) and to this end Polly gave up her job at the BBC, without much regret. However, they agreed that it would be socially irresponsible to have more than two children, and once Abigail was out of nappies and Jason had started playschool, Polly began to feel a certain return of surplus energy, the need for a more than merely domestic interest in life. “Something to keep me occupied while you’re away filming,” she explained to Jeremy, and added, taking care to smile as she did so: “To stop me worrying about what you might be getting up to with those pretty research assistants.”