Paradise News

by David Lodge

  I went to see the auxiliary bishop under whom I served in the diocese, told him of my loss of faith, and asked to be laicized. He predictably urged caution, delay, reflection. He asked me to make a private retreat to consider the matter in a peaceful and spiritual atmosphere. To show willing, I went to a Carmelite monastery for a two-week retreat, but left after three days, half-mad from the silence and solitude, and returned to the bishop to repeat my request for laicization. He asked me if it had anything to do with difficulties over celibacy, and I replied, somewhat casuistically, that my doubts about the Catholic faith were entirely intellectual and philosophical, though it was obviously quite likely that, once laicized, I would, like most laymen, marry. He said he would take further counsel with himself, hoping that we could find some mutually acceptable way of delaying an irrevocable step. He said he would pray for me.

  There followed a hiatus of a week or two, during which my mind was in a turmoil of indecision and contradictory impulses. The bishop had dispensed me from the obligation to say mass: officially I was unwell, suffering from stress, resting under doctor’s orders. I had a room in a convent just up the road from St Peter’s and Paul’s. Daphne and I continued to meet surreptitiously. I think she rather enjoyed the illicit and conspiratorial character of our relationship – it gave it a spice of the romantic. Our talk was all of my doubts, my decision, the bishop’s procrastination, but our physical closeness grew. Her kisses when we parted were long and lingering, and once she startled me by pushing her wet, warm tongue between my lips and teeth. Inevitably, a parishioner spotted us one evening, holding hands in a little country pub miles from Saddle, and the cat was out of the bag.

  Next day the parish vibrated with gossip. Aggie goggled at me when I called at the presbytery to pick up my mail as if I had horns growing from my forehead and hoofs protruding from my trouser cuffs. I was reported to the bishop, who summoned me to an interview and accused me of deceiving him. We exchanged angry words, as a result of which I resigned from the priesthood there and then, and effectively excommunicated myself. I travelled to South London and had a painful meeting with Mummy and Daddy to report what I had done and planned to do. It was a terrible shock to them. Mummy wept. Daddy was haggard and speechless. It was a hellish experience. I didn’t attempt to explain the reasons behind my decision – it would only have aggravated the pain. Their simple faith was as vital to them as the circulation of their blood; it had kept them going through the trials and disappointments of life, and would do even through this one. Mummy said, as I left, that she would say the rosary every day of her life for the return of my faith, and I am sure she did. All that wasted breath … it makes me unspeakably sad, still, to think of her kneeling night after night in that vain endeavour, in her chilly bedroom, beneath the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes on the mantelpiece, her eyes screwed tight shut, and the rosary beads twisted round her knuckles like bonds, at a time when she was far from well herself. The break-up of my brief relationship with Daphne gave her hope, however. It still left the way back to the priesthood theoretically open.

  I hastily moved out of the presbytery at Saddle, and rented a bedsitter in Henfield Cross, a drabber, less affluent place about eight miles away on the outskirts of Greater London (the irony of the vestigial Christian allusion in the name did not escape me). Daphne had invited me to move into her flat, which had a tiny guest-bedroom, but it was too close to the parish for my comfort. The local press had got hold of the story, and once a young reporter ambushed me in the lobby of Daphne’s block, requesting an interview. In any case, I shrank from so sudden a plunge into total intimacy, total commitment. Somehow, in the space of a few weeks, an embrace had turned into a relationship, a vague possibility of marrying had turned into a discussion of practicalities: where, when, and under what auspices. I felt I needed some quiet interval in which to collect my thoughts, adjust to the lay life, and get to know Daphne better. Then there was the unresolved question of how I was to earn my bread. I was living off my small savings, which wouldn’t last for long. I signed on at the Social Security Office for unemployment benefit, and put my name down on the Professional register at the local Job Centre. The clerk looked somewhat nonplussed when I gave my occupation as “theologian”. “We don’t get many requests for them,” he said. I believed him. I began to haunt the local public library, reading the small ads in the newspapers, especially for educational posts, where I thought my best chance of employment lay.

  Meanwhile I saw Daphne regularly. Often we ate a meal out at a pub or an Asian restaurant, or she came over to Henfield Cross and cooked us a meal on my gas-ring. I was reluctant to visit her at her flat for the reasons just given. Also she had a car, and I didn’t. The Ford Escort I drove as parish priest had been bought with a loan from the diocese, and I had to surrender it on leaving St Peter’s and Paul’s. That car is the only thing I genuinely

  I was interrupted in mid-sentence by the telephone ringing. It was Tess. I had completely forgotten my intention of phoning England this evening. That Tess had had to call me again naturally put me still deeper in the wrong, and at a still greater moral disadvantage when it came to admitting that she couldn’t speak to Daddy because he was in hospital. She hit the roof, of course. I almost conformed to the cartoon stereotype of holding the receiver at arm’s length from my ear, as she berated me for my carelessness and incompetence in looking after Daddy, and folly in dragging him to Hawaii in the first place. Fuelling her anger, I knew, was a guilty consciousness that she herself had encouraged him to go, for mercenary motives that had proved to be ill-founded. I gave as encouraging an account as I could manage of Daddy’s injury and his progress towards recovery, and craftily emphasized that the hospital was not only highly efficient but Catholic. I also claimed a little credit (which properly belonged to the young man in the travel agency) for having taken out insurance to cover the medical expenses. (The Walshes were never very prudent in such matters: I recall that our house was burgled twice in the nineteen-fifties before Daddy got round to insuring the contents.) I promised to arrange for Daddy to phone her from his hospital bed, so that she could satisfy herself that I was telling the truth, and that he wasn’t (“for all I know,” as she darkly hinted) concussed, unconscious or in intensive care.

  I tried to steer her off the subject of Daddy by describing the difficulties of finding a suitable nursing home for Ursula. Tess asked me how much Ursula was worth, and grunted in a dissatisfied sort of way when I told her. When I mentioned that I had persuaded Ursula to pay for a private nursing home out of her capital, Tess said, “Don’t you think, Bernard, that you’re acting a little high-handedly in all this? After all, it’s Ursula’s money, even if you have got this power of whatever-it-is. If she would prefer to go into a state home, and have the comfort of knowing she’s got a bit of money behind her –”

  “For God’s sake, Tess,” I interrupted, “she’s only got a matter of months to live. And in any case, it doesn’t make any difference. If she went into a state home now, they’d claw back the cost from her private means, until it got down to a threshold of a few thousand dollars.” (I had discovered this in the course of my research).

  “Oh well, I give up,” said Tess crossly. “It’s all a mess and a muddle. And,” she concluded irrationally, “it’s all your fault,” and slammed down the phone.

  Back to Daphne: I want to finish with this sad story and go to bed. Essentially the situation was that I wanted to delay marrying, to give us both time to get to know each other better. Daphne was in more of a hurry: she was thirty-five, and she wanted a family. I needed her companionship and support, but deep down I was terrified of the sexual side of marriage. We had never got beyond kissing and cuddling, in a cosy, decorous sort of way that I found comforting rather than arousing. Only when Daphne’s tongue squirmed against mine did I experience some sexual excitement, and then, by a kind of conditioned reflex, I immediately backed off, and sought some mental distraction from the “occasion of sin”. I trusted this
indicated that I was at least capable of performing the sexual act, but how I would set about it when the time came I could hardly imagine. One evening when we were sitting together in my bedsitter, I hinted at my anxieties and doubts, so vaguely and obliquely that it took Daphne some time to grasp what was worrying me. When she did, she said, with characteristic briskness, “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” and proposed that we went to bed together there and then.

  Well, it was a disaster, a fiasco, that night and the other occasions on which we tried – whether it was in my room, or in her flat, or (once, a desperate last resort) in a hotel. Daphne wasn’t a virgin, but her sexual experience had been limited to a couple of brief, unsatisfactory affairs in her student years. From what she told me of these episodes, they sounded like sad stories of a plain fat girl who, desperate for affection, gave herself too easily to unscrupulous young men, who took their pleasure, gave her little, and quickly moved on. After qualifying, she had fallen in love with a surgeon at the first hospital where she worked, but it was a purely platonic relationship because he was a happily married man. She told me this as if to solicit my admiration for her self-control and self-denial, but I wonder whether the surgeon wasn’t quite content with a platonic relationship with Daphne, and whether he didn’t in due course accept a teaching appointment in New Zealand partly to get away from her oppressive devotion. So she was sexually inexperienced, or at least unpractised, but also curiously shameless – the worst possible combination to set at ease an ageing novice like me. Fifteen years of nursing men and women of all ages and shapes had made her totally indifferent to the naked human body, its functions and its imperfections, while I was acutely selfconscious about exposing my own body, and ultra-sensitive to the spectacle of hers. Daphne disrobed was a very different creature from Daphne in the crisply starched carapace of her nurse’s uniform, or sheathed in her ladylike frocks and invisible foundation garments. My image of the naked female form, inasmuch as I had one at all, was something chaste, classical and ideal, derived I suppose from icons like the Venus de Milo and Botticelli’s Venus. Daphne in the nude was more like a life-sized version of one of those female fertility figurines you find in museum collections of ethnic exotica, with huge breasts, swelling bellies and jutting buttocks, crudely carved or shaped out of wood and terracotta. A more virile and confident lover might have revelled in this abundance of flesh, but I was intimidated.

  Some people imagine, I think, that a man released from twenty-five years of compulsory celibacy must be quivering with priapic appetite, ready and eager to couple with the first willing woman he encounters. Not so. There had been a time, in my student days, when, like any normal young man, I could be surprised into almost unbearable feelings of lust by inadvertently glancing at a lewd picture in a magazine, or finding myself staring down the gaping neckline of a pretty girl seated beneath me as I hung from a strap in a crowded Underground train. And for (I suspect) rather longer than most young men, I was troubled by nocturnal emissions, as the accumulated juice of generation, denied the normal means of relief, spilled over in sleep and dream. (It was a common problem: I once overheard a couple of women who did the laundry at Ethel’s making coarse jokes about “maps of Ireland on the sheets” and “no wonder they call it a seminary”.) But that was a long time ago. Gradually involuntary sexual arousal become rarer, and easier to control. Celibacy became less of a sacrifice, and more of a habit. The sap slowly sank.

  Even with men who have led a normal sexual life, I believe, there comes a time when sexual intercourse is an act of will rather than a reflex response. I read somewhere recently a witticism attributed to a Frenchman, a typical piece of worldly Gallic wisdom, to the effect that “Fifty is a good age, because when a woman says, ‘Yes’, you are flattered, and when she says, ‘No’, you are relieved.” Well, I wasn’t fifty, I was only forty-one when Daphne said Yes to a question I had hardly formulated, but, like muscles that are not exercised, instincts that are not indulged tend to atrophy. Neither Daphne nor I possessed the skill or the tact to revive my long-suppressed libido. I could not, as I believe the vulgar phrase goes, “get it up”. Or, if I did get it up, I couldn’t keep it up long enough to get it inside Daphne; and her well-intentioned attempts to assist me only increased my shame and embarrassment. Every failure foredoomed the next attempt, by making me more nervous and apprehensive. One day Daphne gave me a sex manual to read, full of erotic drawings and descriptions of perverse practices, but it was like giving a gourmet menu to a man who had been living on bread and water all his life (the book was in fact divided into sections facetiously entitled Appetizers, Starters, Main Courses, etc.). It was like giving a Do-It-Yourself handyman, who aspired only to mend a fuse, a textbook on nuclear physics. All it did was to intensify my sense of inadequacy and anticipatory panic as the next test approached.

  Although Daphne was tolerant and good-humoured at first, her patience became strained, and it was more and more difficult to disguise the fact that we were unlikely ever to make happy sexual partners. She naturally felt rejected, while I felt humiliated. The difficulties of this side of our relationship began to infect the rest of it, which Heaven knew was already vulnerable and stressful enough. We bickered about trivia, and quarrelled about something important – whether I should accept the part-time job at St John’s College which had been offered to me. She didn’t want to move to Rummidge – a nasty, dirty, industrial slum as she called the city, though she had never done more than drive through it on the motorway, hardly the most flattering viewpoint. She wanted me to spend more time looking for a job in the south-east, perhaps in the religious-education department of a secondary school. But I knew in my heart that I could never control a class of no doubt bored and resentful teenagers in a state comprehensive, while the post at St John’s, meagre as the salary was, sounded congenial. Besides, I was anxious to move away from the South, away from London and environs, to somewhere where there would be less chance of bumping into former students and colleagues, and less occasion to meet members of my family. So, sadly, miserably, wretchedly, a couple of months after I left the priesthood, I left Daphne – or she left me. We parted, anyway, by mutual agreement. The failure of the relationship weighed on my mind for many months. Had I used her, or had she used me? I don’t know, perhaps neither of us really understood our true motives. I was enormously relieved to learn last year that she is married. I hope it is not too late for her to have children.

  Tuesday 15th

  An extraordinary and wonderful thing happened today. In another phase of my life I might have called it providential, or even, as Ursula did today, “miraculous”. Now I suppose I must call it fortunate or lucky, though “fortunate” sounds too restrained, and “lucky” too flippant an epithet for an event that has a satisfying poetic justice about it. And the key! The lost and found key! A more superstitious person might well have interpreted that little episode as a favourable omen. For without the key I couldn’t have gone to the bank this morning to open Ursula’s safe-deposit box, and without opening the safe-deposit box I couldn’t have collected her share certificates, and without the share certificates I wouldn’t have gone to the stockbroker’s office in downtown Honolulu and discovered that Ursula is very much better off than she ever dreamed. Indeed, rich!

  Because there was a joker in the pack, an extra share certificate that Ursula had completely forgotten about, in a plain, unmarked, rather cheap envelope, slipped between the folds of her marriage certificate (which she had never felt inclined to inspect since her divorce) at the bottom of the box, under a copy of her will, and under the little bundle of the share certificates she did know about, each in its transparent plastic wallet, acquired since she settled in Honolulu, through the firm of Simcock Yamaguchi, with whose Mr Weinburger I had an an appointment this morning. It appears that she had purchased the share (for that was all it was, a single share) at the time of the break-up of her marriage, on the recommendation of a friend, or her attorney, or possibly even her
ex-husband (she can’t be sure, it is all so long ago), a very small investment of two hundred and thirty-five dollars, for just one share in a then little-known company. She had stowed away the certificate of ownership, forgotten it, failed to inform the company of her numerous changes of address at that period of her life, so that she never received dividends, and eventually the company would have given up trying to contact her, according to Mr Weinburger.

  He frowned as he drew the certificate from its flimsy envelope. “What’s this?” he said. “There’s no record of this in Mrs Riddell’s portfolio.”

  Ursula’s shareholdings were listed on one of his computer screens, amber letters and numbers on a brown background. He had been going through the items one by one, summoning up other lists and tables on another screen, white letters on green, to demonstrate, with a display of professional expertise that was quite wasted on me, for I could understand nothing of it, the market value of each share at that moment, before punching in an instruction to sell.

  It is a strange, troglodytic life that Mr Weinburger leads. The New York Stock Exchange closes at ten a.m. Hawaiian time, so he rises in the dark, and comes to work at five o’clock every morning, to spend eight hours in a large, windowless open-plan room crammed with rows of desks at which men in dark suits and striped shirts frown at computer screens and mutter into telephones trapped under their chins like violins. The dealing room of Simcock Yamaguchi is a more convincing simulation of Wall Street than Mr Bellucci’s suite, and even more effective in making one forget that outside the building the sun is flashing in the surf, and the palm trees bending in the trades. The wealth of Hawaii presumably depends on such people as Mr Weinburger, working away under electric light, indifferent to the blandishments of the tropical climate. By one o’clock, I gathered, he would have finished his day’s work, but he didn’t look as if he spent his afternoons on the beach. His complexion was pale, like a miner’s, under his premature five-o-clock shadow. I imagined him eating lunch with his cronies in some ice-cold, dimly lit basement restaurant in a nearby shopping mall, then driving home in his air-conditioned, tinted-glass automobile, to watch TV in his shuttered house.