How Far Can You Go?
Page 30
After due consideration, Adrian and Dorothy did not invite Dennis and Angela to a Marriage Encounter weekend, fearing that it might reopen old wounds. In fact, that marriage is in reasonably good shape. Shortly after the affair with Lynn, Dennis decided that it was time to make a move, to a new job, a new place, and Angela did not resist the idea. He is now managing director of a small firm manufacturing electronic ignition systems, on the south coast. He has bought a small boat, and spends most of his spare time pottering about on it. Angela is much involved in raising funds for a sheltered community in which they hope Nicole will eventually find a home. The two boys are both at college. Angela’s brother Tom is married and has two young babies. To see him with them makes Angela want to laugh or cry at the way their lives have got so absurdly out of synchronization. Tom and Rosemary run a residential home for kids in care.
Austin left the priesthood shortly after the Paschal Festival and, much to everybody’s astonishment, married Lynn. Their friends were scarcely less astonished when, nine months later to the day, Lynn bore him a son. Austin was lucky enough to get a research fellowship at the Poly to do a PhD in the sociology of religion. The Department is Marxist in orientation, but divided ideologically between empiricists of the old New Left and younger Althusserians intoxicated by Continental theory. There are factions, arguments, confrontations, pamphleteering and political manoeuvring. It is all very exciting and exhausting, and, to Austin, reminiscent of goings-on in the Catholic Church since Vatican II. He still regards himself as a kind of Catholic, but, partly in the interests of his research, goes to a different church or chapel each Sunday – Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Free Church, Quaker meeting house, in rotation.
Violet is not a Jehovah’s Witness any more, but a Sufist. While she was in the long-stay psychiatric hospital she read a book about Sufism, and when she was discharged she went to stay with a Sufist community to learn more about it. Sufism seems to suit her better than Christianity because she has not had a nervous breakdown for two years, nor does she take tranquillizers any more. She lost faith in the Jehovah’s Witnesses when none of the things that were supposed to happen in 1975 happened, but her imagination is still markedly apocalyptic. She is convinced that a nuclear catastrophe is imminent, and that Sufists will be the only ones able to cope because they know how to tap the full potential of the human being. She and Robin, whom Caroline eventually deserted for a younger and more virile lecturer at the University, now enjoy a surprisingly tranquil companionate marriage. Violet finds that doing without sex completely is a great relief to the spirit, and Robin, who is himself heavily into yoga and macrobiotic diet, is content with this arrangement, appeasing his lower instincts with occasional clandestine visits to a massage parlour in a neighbouring industrial town. When Polly discovered that Jeremy had been unfaithful to her with Gertrude (and, it emerged, with every other au pair girl they had ever had, plus scores of research assistants) she divorced him. The oast-house was sold at a vast profit and Polly invested her share in a feminist publishing house of which she is a director. She lives in a flat in London with her daughter and is deeply involved in the women’s movement. Jeremy emigrated to California, where he makes highly profitable pornographic films. Miles is still at Cambridge, but has gone back to the Church of England because, he says, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between Anglican and Roman beliefs any more and he prefers the liturgy of the former. An unpleasant scene at the Catholic church where he used to worship, following his appearance on Jeremy’s programme, also contributed to this decision. Ruth is headmistress of her school in the North of England, a job which has curtailed her charismatic activities, though she still derives great strength and consolation from a weekly prayer-group attended by interested staff and sixth-formers. I teach English literature at a redbrick university and write novels in my spare time, slowly, and hustled by history.
While I was writing this last chapter, Pope Paul VI died and Pope John Paul I was elected. Before I could type it up, Pope John Paul I had died and been succeeded by John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular – but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now? All bets are void, the future is uncertain, but it will be interesting to watch. Reader, farewell!
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Copyright © David Lodge, 1980
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First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd in 1980
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