How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  It seemed to Angela that they weren’t getting anywhere. She glanced interrogatively at Tom, whose calling seemed to establish him as the natural decision-maker in the circumstances; though you wouldn’t have guessed he was a priest, she thought, sitting there in his corduroy slacks and a sweater. Like most priests these days, he seldom wore the dog-collar and black suit, and it was surprising what a difference it made. He could have been an ordinary man, home from work, tired, discouraged, uncertain what to do in the crisis. “What do you think, Tom?” she said.

  Tom lit a cigarette and blew smoke from his nostrils. A grey haze from previous cigarettes hung in the air. All the men in the family were heavy smokers, perhaps because cigarettes had always been readily available from the shop. No reference was made by anyone to this as the likely cause of their father’s disease.

  “I see no reason to tell Dad yet,” Tom said at length. “We should try to keep him as cheerful as possible.”

  Their mother looked at Tom gratefully, but fearfully. “But he must have time to … receive the last … sacraments and everything,” she faltered.

  “Of course, Mam, but there’s no need to rush these things. Let’s make him as happy as we can for the rest of his days.”

  It was their father’s habit to walk the dog around the block last thing at night. Tom offered to perform this task, and Angela said she would keep him company. Together they trod the worn, familiar pavements, while ahead of them Spot darted eagerly from lamp-post to lamp-post, adding his mite to the city’s pollution. Every time Angela came home, the district seemed uglier, grimier, more dejected.

  “Mam was pleased with your advice, Tom,” she said. “But I was a bit surprised. I thought you’d say Dad had a right to know.”

  “Of course he has – eventually,” said Tom. “But there’s no hurry.”

  “As long as we don’t leave it too late,” said Angela, “so that he’s too weak and drugged to take it in …”

  Tom looked at her sharply. “I do believe you positively want to tell him.”

  “Of course I don’t, I mean I wish there was nothing to tell, I think it’s awful, just when he was thinking of retiring, too … but, well, we’re supposed to be Christians, aren’t we?”

  “Certainly,” he said drily.

  “Well, doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t be afraid of, well, death?”

  “That’s easily said.”

  “I know it’s not easy at all, but, well, some friends of Miriam’s – you remember Miriam and Michael, at our wedding? Some friends of theirs, Catholics, we met them at Miriam’s, well, his mother died recently, some kind of cancer, she knew she had it, so did the family, including the grandchildren, they discussed it quite openly, adults and children together. The old lady didn’t want to die in hospital so they kept her at home till the end. On the day she died, she said goodbye to them all, she knew she was going. ‘I’ll be glad to go,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a good life, but I’m old and I’m tired. Don’t you go getting upset, now.’ And after she died, the family went downstairs and got out some bottles of wine and had a sort of party. Don’t you think that’s absolutely fantastic?” Angela found that tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Tom. “I think it’s rather affected, if you really want to know.” Then, seeing that she was hurt, he added, “I’m sorry, Angela. The news about Dad has upset me.”

  Angela blew her nose and acknowledged the apology with a sniff. A little further on, Tom stopped under a wall covered with aerosol graffiti to light a cigarette. Without looking at her, he said: “I think I’d better tell you something. I’ve applied to be laicized.”

  “What? Why?” Angela was stunned.

  “I want to get married.”

  “Married? Who to?”

  “A girl called Rosemary. I was giving her instructions, and we fell in love.”

  “In love?” she repeated stupidly.

  “Yes, it does happen, you know. Happened to you, didn’t it?”

  “A long time ago,” said Angela. “When I was very young.”

  “Yes, well, in those days I was locked up in a seminary, and hadn’t the opportunity.” His voice had an edge to it.

  “Have you told our Mam? Or Dad?”

  “No. And now, I can’t, do you see? I’ll just have to hang on and keep up appearances until.…”

  Spot padded back towards them and stopped, legs splayed, ears cocked enquiringly. How nice, Angela thought, to be a dumb unthinking animal. “Tell me,” she said, “are you leaving the Church as well as the priesthood?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You still believe, then?”

  “Oh yes, I believe. Not as much as I used to, admittedly. And not as fervently as they do –” With a smile he indicated the graffiti. Angela read half-comprehendingly: “Jesus saves – and Keegan Scores on the Rebound” – “Steve Heighway Walks On Water.” Tom said: “You know they call football ‘the religion’ up here. It’s more popular than Christianity, that’s for sure.”

  “What about your vows, then?” Angela said.

  Tom looked annoyed. “I don’t regard them as binding. I was too young and too naive to know what I was doing.”

  Angela grunted and resumed walking, her hands thrust into the pockets of her raincoat.

  “I assure you, Angela, that if I could continue to be a priest and a married man, I would.”

  “Have you slept with this Rosemary?”

  He turned upon her fiercely. “What do you take me for?”

  “I take you for a great big booby, since you ask. What makes you think sex is so marvellous?”

  He gripped her arm, hard enough to hurt. “I’m not marrying for sex, Angela, difficult as you and everyone else no doubt may find it to believe. I’m marrying for love, for total commitment to another human being. Have you any idea of the intolerable loneliness of a priest’s life?”

  “Have you any idea of the intolerable things that can happen in married life?”

  He relaxed his grip. “I know you’ve had a lot to bear.”

  They walked on in silence, past the pub, the fish-and-chip shop. Their home came in sight.

  “It will break Mam’s heart,” said Angela.

  “Thanks,” said Tom. “You’re a great help.”

  When Angela returned to pick up her children from Michael and Miriam she told them, in confidence, about Tom’s plans. “Mam will take it hard,” she said. “She’ll think it’s a disgrace.” No, they assured her, it was so common these days, people scarcely raised an eyebrow. “You remember Father Conway, who instructed me?” Miriam said. “He’s the latest.” “There won’t be any priests left, soon,” said Angela. She drove off, the frown on her forehead deeper than ever.

  “It always seems to happen between the ages of about thirty-five and forty-five,” said Michael, as he and Miriam retired to bed that night. “It’s as if they suddenly realize that they’re approaching the point of no return as far as sex is concerned.” He closed the bedroom door and locked it – a coded gesture between them.

  Miriam drew off the nightdress she had just put on and got into bed naked. “How old is Austin, I wonder?” she mused.

  “Must be getting on for forty-five, wouldn’t you say? D’you think he’ll go the same way as all the others?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. If the right woman turned up. He must feel terribly isolated.”

  Michael got between the sheets. He no longer wore pyjamas. Miriam slid into his arms. “Ah!” he sighed. “Nice. You can’t blame them, can you, priests wanting to get married? In the old days, at least they believed they’d get to heaven quicker than other people, have less time in purgatory. Give up pleasures in this world and be rewarded in the next. God pinning a medal on your chest. That was the way they used to promote vocations at school. Now that it’s all regarded as mythology, priests must wonder what they’ve given up sex for.”

  So Austin Brierley’s friends watched his vocation like a g
uttering candle, wondering when it would go out. The bishop had discovered that he was still consorting with Catholics for an Open Church and had suspended his allowance and forbidden him to say mass or perform other priestly duties. He looked less and less like the priest they remembered. To save money (he had qualified for a student grant, but was still hard-up) he wore clothes bought from Army surplus stores, thick, hard khaki trousers and parkas with camouflage markings, and a forage cap vaguely suggestive of German prisoners of war in World War II. He grew a beard, wispy and a surprising ginger in colour, and his hair, balding at the crown, fell down lankly on each side of his face, giving him a faint resemblance to Shakespeare. He carried round with him at all times a rucksack stuffed with books, papers, cuttings, and the materials for rolling his own cigarettes.

  The cuttings were mainly about Humanae Vitae and its repercussions. Sometimes Austin thought vaguely of writing a book on the subject. “Humanae Vitae, By a Repercussion.” Meanwhile he collaborated with Adrian on the text of a pamphlet urging Catholics to make their own conscientious decision about birth control, feeling that in this way he was making some amends for all the times he had given contrary advice in the confessional as a young priest. The books in the rucksack were paperbacks on sociology, psychology, philosophy, sexuality, comparative religion. Austin felt that he had a lot of reading to catch up on – too much. His head was a buzzing hive of awakened but directionless ideas. There was Freud who said that we must acknowledge our own repressed desires, and Jung who said that we must recognize our archetypal patterning, and Marx who said we must join the class struggle and Marshall McLuhan who said we must watch more television. There was Sartre who said that man was absurd though free and Skinner who said he was a bundle of conditioned reflexes and Chomsky who said he was a sentence-generating organism and Wilhelm Reich who said he was an orgasm-having organism. Each book that Austin read seemed to him totally persuasive at the time, but they couldn’t all be right. And which were most easily reconcilable with faith in God? For that matter, what was God? Kant said he was the essential presupposition of moral action, Bishop Robinson said he was the ground of our being, and Teilhard de Chardin said he was the Omega Point. Wittgenstein said, whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent – an aphorism in which Austin Brierley found great comfort.

  Going to and from Michael and Miriam’s house for their liturgical parties, he often saw their eldest son, Martin, a keen amateur astronomer, crouched over his telescope in the dark garden, sometimes actually kneeling on the frosty lawn, immobile, habited like a medieval hermit in balaclava and a long, baggy, cast-off overcoat of his father’s. Austin usually stopped to chat with the boy and through these conversations became seriously interested in the Universe. To the rucksack’s contents he added popular books on astronomy, from which he learned with astonishment and some dismay that there were about fifty million stars like the Sun in our galaxy, and a least two hundred thousand galaxies in the Universe, each containing a roughly equivalent number of stars, or suns. The whole affair had been going for a very long time, and had spread over a very wide area. Galaxies now being observed for the very first time had started sending, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, the light that was now being picked up by our telescopes, many thousands of millions of years before the Earth was even formed. If the history of the Universe was conceived of as a single calendar year, the initial Big Bang occurring on 1 January, then the Earth had been formed towards the end of September, and Homo sapiens made his appearance at about 10.30 p.m. on 31 December. Christ was born four seconds before midnight.

  Austin stored these facts away in his head alongside the theories of Freud, Marx, McLuhan and the rest, and with the opinions of various theologians about God, not finding it any easier to reconcile them all with each other. Indeed, astronomical quantities tended to make all human thought seem both trivial and futile.

  “The silence of infinite space terrifies me,” he murmured, squinting one night through Martin’s telescope at a faint smear of light that the boy assured him was a galaxy several times bigger than the Milky Way.

  “Why?”

  Austin straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “I was quoting Pascal, a famous French philosopher of the seventeenth century.”

  “Interesting he knew that space was silent,” Martin remarked, “that long ago.”

  “You mean, there’s no noise at all up there? All those stars exploding and collapsing without making a sound?”

  “You can’t have sound without resistance, without an atmosphere.”

  “So the Big Bang wasn’t really a bang at all?”

  “’Sright.”

  “Doesn’t it frighten you, though, Martin, the sheer size of the Universe?”

  “Nope.”

  Austin stared up at the sky. It was a clear, cold night, ideal for observing. The longer he looked, the more stars he could see, and beyond them were billions more that one could never see with the naked eye. It was statistically certain, according to the books, that some of them must have planetary systems capable of supporting life. It certainly seemed unlikely, when you thought about it, that the only life in the entire universe should be situated on this tiny satellite of an insignificant star in a suburb of the Milky Way. But if there was life out there, there must also be death. Had those creatures, like us, myths of creation, fall and redemption? Had other Christs died on other Calvaries in other galaxies at different times in the last twenty billion years? Under the night sky, the questions that preoccupied philosophers and theologians seemed to reduce down to two very simple ones: how did it all start, and where is it all going? The idea that God, sitting on his throne in a timeless heaven, decided one day to create the Universe, and started the human race going on one little bit of it, and watched with interest to see how each human being behaved himself; that when the last day came and God closed down the Universe, gathering in the stars and galaxies like a croupier raking in chips, He would reward the righteous by letting them live with Him for ever in Heaven – that obviously wouldn’t do, as modern theologians admitted, and indeed took some satisfaction in demonstrating. On the other hand, it was much easier to dispose of the old mythology than to come up with anything more convincing. When pushed to say what happened after death, the most ruthless demythologizers tended to become suddenly tentative and to waffle on about Mystery and Spirit and Ultimately Personal Love. There was now something called Process Theology which identified God with the history of the Universe itself, but as far as Austin could understand it, the only immortality it offered was that of being stored in a kind of cosmic memory bank.

  “I’m going in,” he said to Martin. “I’m getting cold.”

  The same evening, Michael took him aside. “Austin,” he said, “I want your advice. Martin’s becoming a bit stroppy about coming to mass on Sundays. What do you think we should do about it?”

  “I should leave him alone, if I were you,” said Austin.

  “You wouldn’t like to have a word with him yourself some time? I mean, about religion in general. Even Catholic schools seem to have given up on theology these days. His RE lessons seem to be all about being nice to immigrants and collecting tights for Mother Teresa.”

  “Tights for Mother Teresa? I wouldn’t have thought she wore them.”

  “It seems her nuns use old nylons to make mattresses for the dying. They’re having a big campaign at Martin’s school to collect them. Well, a jolly good cause, I’m sure, but the syllabus does seem to be avoiding the larger questions of belief.”

  Austin did not reply. The reference to tights and nylons had triggered off a faint memory – light years away, it now seemed – of a shapely leg lofted in the air, stockinged to mid-thigh, rising vertically from a lacy foam of petticoats, and he had not attended to the rest of what Michael was saying.

  “I thought,” said Michael, patiently, “That you might find an opportunity to have a chat with Martin.”

  “I have already,” said Austi
n, blinking. “I’m learning quite a lot.”

  Miles decided that he had to get away from Cambridge for a while to think through his problems. In the Easter vacation of 1973 he made a private retreat at a monastery in Nottinghamshire. He slept in an austere cell, rose with the monks at two and six for the singing of Lauds and Prime, ate with them in the refectory while a novice read from Newman’s Apologia. At other times he read the Bible in the Douai version and, for recreation, Trollope, and took walks in the grounds of the abbey. The setting was less idyllic than he had anticipated. It was mining country and every turn in the paths brought in sight some pithead or sombre slag-heap. The grass and trees were covered with fine black dust, and the morning dew on the grass and shrubs was faintly inky. But this mournful landscape suited his mood. He seriously considered presenting himself as a postulant for admission to the Order. The regularity of the day’s routine – office – sleep – wake – office – sleep – wake – office – eat – work – office – work – eat, and so on, around the clock, seemed to take from one’s shoulders the terrible responsibility of being happy and successful: it was like some kind of mechanism for keeping in regular motion a body that left to itself would become inert or spastic. He confided this thought to Bernard, a plump, cheerful young monk whom he found a congenial walking companion in the evenings (though the Order observed the Rule of silence, there was a two-hour recreation period after dinner).

  “No, sorry, not true at all,” said Bernard. “You wouldn’t be able to stand the life if you weren’t at peace with yourself.”

  “Then there’s no hope for me anywhere,” said Miles.

  “Cheer up!” Bernard put his arm round Miles’s shoulder. “Never say die. You’re gay, aren’t you Miles?”

  Miles looked at him, startled both by the statement and the manner of its expression. “In a miserable, frustrated sort of way, which is why I never use the word, yes, I am.”