How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  From these experiences Ruth emerged proud and self-reliant. Her life before America, dull and orderly, seemed like an album of monochrome photographs in her memory. But still she hadn’t found what she was looking for. The euphoria, the inspiring sense of solidarity with one’s brothers and sisters, that was generated by marches and demonstrations, soon evaporated. Eventually the columns dispersed, the marchers went their separate ways. “This is the darnedest time,” said Josephine, a Paulist sister from Iowa, on one such occasion, just after a big peace rally in San Francisco. The two of them were drinking coffee out of paper cups in a bus-station automat in the middle of the night, waiting for their connections. Blue strip lighting bleakly illuminated the Formica tables and the littered floor. “While the rally’s going on, you feel just great, right?” Josephine went on. “Like, people are really digging each other, the barriers are down, and when everybody’s singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, or ‘They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love’, you feel it’s really true. You think to yourself, gee, this is really great, this is the New Jerusalem, this is what it’s all about. But it doesn’t last. Soon you’re in some lousy automat, zonked out, and the party’s over.”

  “I suppose it couldn’t last, in the nature of things,” said Ruth philosophically. “You couldn’t keep up that intense emotional pitch for long.”

  “It’s not just that. The others on the demo, ordinary people, have got homes, real homes to go back to. Husbands, wives, families. Folks waiting to welcome them back, wanting to hear all about it. That must be real nice.” Ruth nodded sympathetically, knowing that Josephine’s community did not approve of her radical activities and would not want to know anything at all about that weekend’s demonstration. “Whereas, for us, it’s just an anticlimax, going back. Anticlimax and loneliness. Gee, I get so depressed after one of these rallies…. D’you know what I do, Ruth?” Josephine looked around, and although the automat was empty apart from themselves and a black soldier asleep in the far corner, lowered her voice. “I buy myself a little miniature bottle of Southern Comfort and then I fill me a big deep tub, very hot, and I have a long, long soak. I lie there for hours, taking a sip of Southern Comfort every now and then, and topping up the hot water in the tub. I usually wind up giving myself another kind of Southern Comfort, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” said Ruth, truthfully. Josephine looked at her with a strange expression – quizzical, sceptical, slightly wicked – and suddenly Ruth guessed what she was talking about, and blushed vividly. “Oh,” she said.

  “D’you think I’m going crazy, Ruth?” said Josephine. “D’you think I should get out before I’m totally screwed up by this life?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Don’t ask me. I don’t even know about myself.”

  As well as the Sunday masses in the College chapel, Michael and Miriam and their friends held occasional gatherings in their homes on weekday evenings which they called “agapes”, after the common meal or love-feast which accompanied the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the primitive Church. These occasions did indeed make Michael and Miriam and their circle feel a little bit like the early Christians, gathered together in fellowship behind the curtained windows of suburban houses, while all around them people went about their secular pursuits, sat slumped in front of televisions, or drank beer in pubs, or walked their dogs under the streetlamps, quite indifferent to and ignorant of the little cell of religious spirit pulsing in their midst. About a dozen people would be invited and, when everyone had arrived, sat round a table spread with homely and slightly archaic fare – home-baked bread, butter, cheese, dates, nuts and raisins, and wine. The host and hostess would choose some readings, usually from the new Jerusalem Bible, which had “Yaweh” instead of “God” in the Old Testament, and then, with some made-up prayer referring to the Last Supper, they would break the bread and pour the wine into a large goblet. These would be passed round the table from person to person, each taking a piece of bread and a swig from the goblet. Then everyone’s glass would be filled and the meal would continue with ordinary conversation, serious at first, but getting more lighthearted as the wine flowed.

  When Father Brierley came to the city, they naturally invited him to join them at these occasions, and then they would have a Eucharist, but without any vestments or candles, just all sitting round the table as before, with home-made bread and vin ordinaire, broken and blessed and handed round, just like at the Last Supper. A certain theological ambiguity hung over these occasions. Was it a real Eucharist, or wasn’t it? Outwardly, only the presiding presence of an ordained priest significantly distinguished the event from their improvised agapes. To some, this was a crucial difference, to others it was a relic of the old “magical” view of the sacraments which they had renounced. In the earliest days of the Church, the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper was not restricted to a priesthood, and Austin (as they now called Father Brierley) himself declared that the idea of a special caste exclusively empowered to administer the sacraments was rapidly becoming obsolete. He prophesied a time when the whole elaborate structure of bishops and priests and dioceses and parishes would melt away, house-eucharists would replace the huge anonymous crush of the parochial Sunday mass, and mutual counselling and consciousness-raising groups would replace Confession and Confirmation.

  So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stimulating and slightly unnerving. For we all like to believe, do we not, if only in stories? People who find religious belief absurd are often upset if a novelist breaks the illusion of reality he has created. Our friends had started life with too many beliefs – the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. To work their way back to the fundamental ones – what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? – they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief (as of literary convention) it is a nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.

  To the agapes came, on occasion, Edward and Tessa and Angela and Dennis. Tessa found the religious part somewhat embarrassing, especially when the bread was passed round in silence and you could hear the sounds of people munching and swallowing; but that was soon over and then it was quite jolly, with plenty of cheap wine, and perhaps after the food was cleared away some music, even dancing if the spirit moved the group that way – free-form spontaneous dancing to recorded music in the folk-rock idiom, with anyone able to join in and no nonsense about partners. It was almost as good as going out to a real party, which Edward was usually reluctant to do, pleading tiredness and backache. So Tessa always jumped at an invitation to an agape. People dressed informally for these occasions, but since Miriam and her friends favoured long skirts and kaftans to wear about the house anyway, Tessa did not feel overdressed in her long Laura Ashley cotton dresses, which she bought from the original little shop in Shrewsbury. As far as Tessa was concerned, that you didn’t have to go to a ball nowadays to wear a long dress, or adjust your dancing style to the limitations of a partner, were the two great social achievements of the nineteen-sixties. (It was by now the nineteen-seventies, but this group of people were having their sixties a little late.)

  Though he pretended that Tessa dragged him along to the agapes, Edward went willingly enough. Since joining Catholics for an Open Church he had been cold-shouldered by his Catholic colleagues in the medical profession – an intensely conservative group in whose collective consciousness the pre-war confrontation between Marie Stopes and Dr Halliday Sutherland still exerted the power of myth. Even if they disagreed privately with Humanae Vitae, they saw the pro-contraception lobby as indistinguishable from the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia lobbies and did not wish to join such un
desirable allies in attacking their own religious leaders. Thus Edward found himself pushed, almost involuntarily, into identification with the radical Catholic Underground, though by natural inclination he was far from radical, and at the liturgical gatherings of the Miriam – Michael circle was apt to worry, with a spasm of atavistic superstition, about what happened to the crumbs left over from the bread that Austin had consecrated (or had he?).

  And Angela came, as she had come in years gone by to the Thursday masses at Our Lady and St Jude’s, because she was invited, because it was obviously a good thing to join with Catholic friends in prayer and fellowship. She had never had much historical sense or any great interest in metaphysical questions; and since the birth of Nicole and the death of Anne she lived more than ever in the present, attending to the tasks immediately to hand. Looking back into the past was too painful, it filled her with a kind of mental nausea. So Angela rarely reflected on the changes that had taken place in the Catholic Church in her lifetime, and was unperturbed by the variety of liturgical practice and doctrinal interpretation that now flourished in it. Whether one prayed in church or in one’s living-room seemed unimportant to her, as long as one prayed. It worried her that Dennis no longer seemed to believe in the efficacy of prayer – indeed he seemed to have little faith left at all. She did not discuss the matter with him, partly because they had got out of the habit of discussing serious, abstract questions, and partly because she was afraid of what state of unbelief might be revealed if she pressed him. They had both changed a lot since the birth of Nicole.

  When she was told about Nicole’s condition, Angela had two quite distinct yet simultaneous reactions, happening, as it were, at different levels of her self. On one level she was shocked and horrified, fought against the truth as long as she could, and, when it could no longer be denied, abandoned herself to grief and self-pity; but on another, deeper level she felt as though she had been waiting all her married life for this, or something like it, to happen. Till now, Dennis had taken all the worries and responsibilities on his shoulders – money, houses, holidays, even the temperature charts – while she had lapsed into a bovine placidity, slowly completing her domestic tasks by day, with a milky-breathed infant invariably in her arms or under her feet, then falling asleep in front of the television in the evenings. It had been a more comfortable and cushioned existence than she had predicted when they were courting, but now Nicole had arrived to confirm her misgivings, and it was almost a relief to know what her cross was to be. When she had cried herself dry, she pulled herself together and resolved to make Nicole the ablest mongol in the land. She read every book on the subject of mental handicap she could lay her hands on, travelled miles to consult specialists, filled the house with educational toys and equipment, joined all the relevant societies, organized playgroups, toy libraries, and fund-raising events.

  When, two years after Nicole’s birth, four-year old Anne ran into the road in pursuit of a runaway doll’s pram and was knocked down by a dry-cleaner’s van, Angela was sufficiently hardened and tempered psychologically to cope with the crisis. It was Angela who prevented Anne from being moved from the gutter where she had been thrown, who sent for a blanket to keep her warm, and went with her to the hospital in the ambulance, while all Dennis could do was to crouch over his little daughter’s crumpled form, swearing frightfully and literally tearing his hair, great tufts of it which blew away from his fingers like thistledown. When Anne died that night in hospital, without regaining consciousness, it was Angela who was at her bedside, for Dennis was in shock, under sedation at home. It was Angela who made the necessary arrangements for the funeral and held the family steady through that dreadful time. A great shift of gravity had taken place in the marriage, a transfer of power and will from Dennis to Angela. Anne’s death showed it, but Nicole’s birth had started it.

  To Dennis the diagnosis of Nicole’s condition had been a stunning and totally surprising blow. He tried to work out why the possibility of such a thing ever happening had never crossed his mind, and came up with several reasons: Angela’s pregnancies had always been quite free from complications, and the first three babies had arrived safe, sound and on time; he had never known anyone who had produced abnormal offspring nor had he had personal contact with any mentally handicapped person in his life. But the more fundamental reason was that he had always subconsciously assumed that he was favoured by Providence, or in secular terms, lucky. There had been setbacks and disappointments in his life, but invariably he had found that if he was patient and industrious the obstacle gave way eventually; and after eight years of marriage he was well pleased with himself and his beautiful wife and bonny children, his new four-bedroomed detached house and company car, his well-paid job as deputy production manager of a prospering electronics firm. As far as he knew, he was earning more than any other man among their college contemporaries, except perhaps Edward, and was fairly confident that before long he would have overtaken him, too. The only significant flaw in his general contentment was the business of birth control, with its attendant frustration and worry, but he was prepared to put up with that – it seemed to be a small price to pay for his other blessings. Because of his upbringing, you see, Dennis could not help crediting his good fortune to God, who was rewarding him for working hard and obeying the rules of the Catholic Church.

  The birth of Nicole had rudely upset this simple confidence. Instead of being rewarded, it seemed that he had been punished – but for what? Why me? What have I done to deserve this? was his first thought (it is probably everyone’s first thought in misfortune, but those with a religious world-view are especially prone) that wet Sunday afternoon in the garage, as Edward, fiddling with the Black and Decker sander, hesitantly described his misgivings about the child (and for ever after the smell of sawdust was associated in Dennis’s mind with bad news, so that when two years later his eldest, Jonathan, rushed into the back garden where he was mowing the lawn and screamed at him to come quickly because Anne had been knocked down in the road, he smelled not grass but sawdust, and felt sick). To Dennis, Nicole’s condition was not like the other setbacks in his life, something that might pass away or be overcome; it was fixed and irrevocable, as unalterable as chemistry. People they spoke to about mongolism – Downs’ Syndrome, as Angela insisted on referring to it – tried to be encouraging: these children were happy, loveable people, they were often good at music, some had even learned to read. But none of this was any comfort to Dennis. His daughter had been defective from the moment of conception, nothing could undo the effect of that extra chromosome at the primal collision of sperm and egg. Nothing except death. In the early days, Dennis wished very much that the child would die, which naturally increased his sense of guilt – indeed, explained to him why he was being punished, since anyone capable of such murderous feelings obviously deserved to be punished.

  Outwardly Dennis seemed to share Angela’s determination to make the best of things. He cooperated in the training programme for Nicole – played with her, exercised her, talked to the other children about her, read the literature that Angela brought home and attended some of the public meetings, committees and fund-raising events for the mentally handicapped that she was involved in. But it all seemed to him a vain and futile effort to pretend that the tragedy had not happened, that life could resume its former promise. When he came home from work on her first birthday to find her propped up in her high chair, a lopsided paper hat on her head bearing the legend, “Downs Babies Rule OK”, obviously the work of her older brothers, it seemed to Dennis like a sick joke, an unconscious expression of resentment, not, as Angela obviously felt, a sign of their acceptance of the child, and he had to struggle to raise a smile.

  Nicole’s birthdays were always bad days, but after that first one things became a little easier. The little girl began to show that she had a distinctive personality of her own, and she was infatuated with her father, exhibiting signs of excitement and delight as soon as Dennis came in sight. It was i
mpossible to resist such utterly innocent affection. Then Dennis began to realize how many handicapped people there were, most of them much more pathetic cases than Nicole. Through personal contact, anecdote, visits to schools and clinics, watching television programmes he would formerly have avoided, Dennis became aware of a whole world of suffering at the extent of which he had never guessed: children horribly afflicted physically and mentally, by brain damage, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, rubella, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, autism and God knew what else; children suffering from multiple handicap, children doubly incontinent, children so hopelessly paralysed that they would live their whole lives on stretchers, children with cleft palates and deformed bodies and scarcely human faces. Dennis began to feel that perhaps he was lucky after all. He no longer automatically compared Nicole with normal children, but with children more crippled and retarded. His child became for him a lens with which to see more clearly the real vulnerability of human life, and also a talisman against further hurt. He began to feel that he did not need the pity and sympathy of his friends with normal children – it was they that deserved pity, for they had not yet felt the blow of fate that opened a man’s eyes to the true nature of things. He had nothing more to fear. He had, as the Americans put it, paid his dues.

  Then Anne was run over and killed and Dennis gave up. He could see no sense at all in the pattern of his life. The idea of a personal God with an interest in his, Dennis’s, personal fortune, became impossible to maintain, unless he was a God who took a personal interest in torturing people. For while Dennis was able to see that there was some meaning, some positive moral gain, in the experience of having Nicole, he could see no point whatsoever in losing Anne, nothing except sterile anguish and futile self-reproach. Perhaps the bitterest, most heart-rending aspect of the whole ghastly business was the impossibility of explaining to Nicole what had happened to Anne. (“Where Anne?” Nicole would say for years afterwards, turning up at their bedside in the middle of the night, tugging gently at Dennis’s pyjama sleeve, “Where Anne?”) If one thing was certain it was that Nicole had done nothing to deserve having Anne taken away from her, and would gain nothing from the experience.