by A. N. Wilson
When she came out with this, the sea-bass and what had been described as seasonal vegetables (the snap-peas and miniature corn on the cob imported from Kenya and Peru, so presumably seasonal somewhere) had all been consumed. The dining room was very quiet at that point, and her bell-like St Trinian’s voice had carried audibly as far as the cheese board.
—You see, Uncle Lesley, I don’t believe in God. I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Holy Spirit.
He was still beaming, but her admission had provoked one of the famous silences de Lesley Mannock.
At first, she thought he was going to respond in the most maddeningly annoying way possible. She thought that he was going to ignore her confession, or, even worse, to laugh it away as that of the grief-stricken female.
The cheese board came. He dithered between Stilton and Roquefort. Asked her if she wanted port. Her head was swimming and she said no. She chose some Brie.
Then he said with great emphasis and a huge smile,
—It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t MATTER. Nellie. In your priesthood, in your SELF, all you have to do is to be true. Your father and I used to laugh at the motto at Cuddesdon.
—Ten kalen paratheken phulaxon dia Pneumatos Hagiou tou enoikountos en hemin, she repeated, with her mouth still full of cream cracker and Brie.
—Guard the deposit! Guard the deposit, he repeated, beaming with laughter. We thought it was so funny.
When she had swallowed, Nellie said,
—Dad used to say it had made you all laugh, but that after five years as a priest it was what kept him going. That good thing which was committed unto thee, keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.
—It’s the only thing we can do, Nellie. The only thing. We guard what has been deposited with us, and we try to pass it on. And, my golly gumdrops, Ronald was a good priest! And we’ll so miss him.
—I know.
She said it quite simply, and, whether because of the alcohol, or because she was talking to Lesley so intimately and intently, on so much deeper a level than she had ever imagined she would, she felt no choking emotion. She simply acknowledged the fact that her father had been a wonderfully good man, whom she would continue to miss, achingly, forever. The gulping moment of shock, of bereavement ‘kicking in’, never happened with her, and years later, she concluded that there was a reason for this. Her love for him had been uncomplicated by any unfinished business. It was true that she feared upsetting him, and that some of the actions she took, after he died, were ones about which she would have hesitated had he been alive. But there was nothing to grieve about – forty-two years of uncomplicated and uninterrupted love.
—When we guard the deposit, said Lesley, very carefully slicing a wedge of his Stilton and balancing it on a piece of celery, we are all different. It is the same deposit – perhaps, perhaps. Though Bultmann . . .
He laughed, for reasons which could only have been known to himself, and was silent for about two minutes.
—Well, never mind Bultmann! But we are all different. Our minds, in 2018, can’t be the same minds as those in 1618 or 1918. And the sacred deposit which we pass on will mean different things to different people at different times and at different stages of your life. And for the present, in your life, it has all gone. It is blanked out. Nellie, you’ve just lived through an earthquake! You cannot expect that not to affect you. It would be far, far better not to believe in God than to believe He had sent the Earthquake, still worse, sent it to punish you all on the Island. Far better to get rid of that God altogether. Tell Him . . .
He smiled quietly, and then whispered,
—Tell Him to bugger off. You can tell God to bugger off sometimes, you know.
She responded with an astonished stare.
—Live without Him for a while. But in so far as you can – guard the deposit. Who knows? Maybe we live in the end of days, as those late pastoral epistles said. Maybe Christianity itself – or certainly the sort of Christianity you and I were brought up to believe – is on its way out. Who knows what will happen? Go on worshipping Christ, Nellie. Go on worshipping Jesus in the Holy Sacrament. Go on reciting the liturgy – if you can, if you CAN.
She looked down at her Brie.
They took their coffee on a wooden bench in the garden. The gentle summer sunshine was wonderful. He wondered again, although she had already said no, whether she would not like a glass of port, but she was not to be tempted. They stirred their coffee-cans meditatively, and stared across the lawn to the slight mess the hotel people had made of the old garden – the climbing frame for nippers, the plastic tables with umbrellas. Nevertheless, it was a good scene, with an old brick wall against which a rambling rose rampaged . . .
She had no intention of becoming an old maid living in a small flat in a cathedral town. But Dad’s flat was as good a place as any to spend a few weeks before the next stage was decided, and the lawyers had established, via the letting agency, that she could stay on for a few weeks. The rent was still being paid by the canon’s estate.
She was quite sure, had been, really ever since being carried out of the tower as a wounded bird, that her life in Aberdeen was over. A number of factors contributed to this realization. Pace Lesley Mannock’s words, she was not sure, any longer, that she wanted to be a priest. If this feeling persisted, to be the Dean would quite quickly start to feel anomalous. She was sure she could revive The Masks of God, and if this certainty turned out to be an illusion, she still had a big enough body of published work to find an academic post. She did not want to go back to Oxford. Not really. Some other university would be just as good, better, for the present purpose which was . . . what? The old book still provided the right words, even if she had lost, perhaps forever, the knack of belief: Grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life . . . That was what was needed. Newness.
That had been, of course, what had led her to go in the first place to the Island. The offer of the Deanery, held jointly with the research fellowship at Banks, had been newness of life in abundance. It had forced the two sides of her nature into hiding from one another. Clever Ingrid, she thought – while trying not even to think the word ‘Ingrid’ – to have spotted that about her. She had always been at least two people. No doubt most souls are divided, but in Nellie’s case, the divisions were extreme. She really was a different person when she sat in the seminar room or stood at the podium in the Davin Lecture Theatre from the stately priest in her surplice, cassock, scarf and hood, seated in her decanal stall while the choir sang Wood in the Fridge. It had taken an earthquake to make her see it.
It had also taken an earthquake to confirm which she had previously only allowed herself to grasp in little grabbing gestures, which were subsequently suppressed or denied, that she had come to the Island in pursuit of Love. Here the sense of failure was more bitter than the consciousness that her life as a priest had unravelled. It had all seemed more or less clear when she had emigrated: she must get away from Doug. Her husband was, objectively speaking, awful. She could not function, while trapped in the marriage. She could not, quite, tell Dad that the marriage was over, and the new post in Aberdeen solved the problem admirably.
Only now did she admit to herself, only now, that Doug was only half the problem. Although a priest, Nellie had very little pastoral experience. As an ordained teaching fellow of her college, she had occasionally, quite literally, been a shoulder on which depressed graduates wept, but although these tears were usually occasioned by ‘relationships’, it was as often as not their lack as their complexity which made the young people unhappy. During her training, she had attended a few courses of a pastoral character, and been told about marital breakdown. She had very little practical experience of it.
This was one of the reasons she had been so troubled, shocked, by Charles Nicolson’s outbursts about Pamela. Of all the mistakes she had made during her time at Aberdeen, the foolish flirtation, or whatever it was, with Charles weighed heaviest upon her. If she
had never allowed it to happen, she just might have been of some small use to them when the blow fell and Josh was killed. As it was, she, the senior priest in the Cathedral where their son sang, merely added to their pain. It was apparent in the cold hatred with which Pamela regarded her. It was obvious from the studied way in which they asked Bob to take the funeral, and in the fact that, when they had packed and left for Carmichael, they did not even say goodbye to her.
Apart from cringing as she thought of the sheer silly vanity which had delighted in accompanying a handsome, distinguished lawyer on visits to concerts, and on afternoon walks, the sheer professional muddle was making her wince. Her certainty that Dionne and Ricky Wong were up to no good, that the very fabric of the Cathedral was probably threatened, would in normal circumstances have led her to consult the firm of Nicolson and Blake. It was precisely the sort of case in which Charles was an expert.
O, irony upon irony, reader! Allow a narrator to interrupt here and say that Nellie’s fears about the Dionne/Wong axis did not paint the situation in nearly lurid enough colours! Even while she was away in England, Dionne, who had rather Rex-Tone-type feelings about Gothic architecture, was speaking about the damage done to the Cathedral’s fabric as ‘in a very real sense, a godsend’. She addressed the Chapter, in Nellie’s absence, about the possibility of erecting a temporary structure. In Christchurch, New Zealand, after their quake, a Japanese architect had built them a cathedral out of cardboard. Dionne did not like the word ‘Church’. She preferred to think of them all as a ‘Community of Outreach’. What sort of signal did it give to the world if a Community of Outreach were to spend the money on offer from the insurance company – and we were talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here – shoring up some old-time building which quite frankly did not speak to today’s younger people, let alone those on the margins of society? How much better to level the Cathedral to the ground, rebuild a light, airy contemporary structure which would reflect the values of a Community of Outreach. And there was a bonus. God was really and truly speaking to and through Dionne here, of that she was convinced. Ricky Wong, one of the most respected members of our Chinese community, could use the site of the Cathedral as an extension of his magnificent hotel, and the construction of a new multi-storey Convention Centre, which would bring to Aberdeen all the things we so desperately needed – business, foreign investment, especially from South-East Asia. A lot of people made remarks about the Chinese community which Dionne considered to be frankly racist. Wasn’t Zacchaeus, the publican, the man who was the supposed wideboy and swindler of his day, wasn’t he a friend of Jesus? Did not Jesus tell his followers to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness?
Yes, all this was going on while Nellie sat in her father’s little flat. And in the times to come, when Bishop Dionne’s plans for the Cathedral were challenged by an alliance of conservationists, the Victorian Society in London, Deirdre Hadley and others, the case would eventually go all the way up to the High Court in Carmichael where it was heard by His Honour Mr Justice Nicolson.
That all lay in the future. Nellie knew none of it as she sat alone, meditating on the wreckage of her friendship with the Nicolsons. She thought, too, of the clumsiness, the ineptitude of the way she had handled the advances of Barnaby Farrell. She liked Barnaby, and the seminars had been the high point of her professional life after her arrival in the Island. She also fancied him, and it did not matter to her in the least that she was not in love with him.
Some readers might think – well, of course, she could not go to bed with him: she was a priest of the Church of England and they are supposed to be chaste!
Nellie had a different way of thinking about this, particularly when she had hurried home after their last evening together, wishing that she had, in fact, spent the night with him. She thought – one of the reasons I became a priest was because I am afraid of my own sexual nature. It was fear, not a love of chastity, which made me reject Barnaby. And yet she longed for sex, while fearing it, longed for gentle, sensual touching, and longed to be possessed, body and soul, by someone else’s consuming passion.
Reading her dad’s diaries made her contemplate, as she had so often done in the past, the mystery of her parents’ life in that regard. She knew now the real loneliness of the only child. She had often observed, in families visited by death, that siblings squabbled about funeral arrangements, or about possessions – often quite trivial possessions – presumably because that set of not very valuable egg-cups, that chair, were symbolic of some all-but-lost part of childhood, a life-belt to be grasped as one bobbed about in the water. She did not envy her friends these squabbles, which could often turn nasty. What she did envy now, however, was the shared memory which even quarrelsome siblings could bring to the experience of loss. There was no one to talk to about Dad. She could hardly ask Cousin Kath whether she believed that Ronald and Gwen had any fun in the sack, and even if she had done so, there was no reason to suppose that she would have been in a position to know. The diaries, as she might have expected, shed no light upon Ronald’s life with Gwen whatsoever.
Her dad had been an obsessive diary-reader, especially of clerical diaries. Parson Woodforde, Parson Kilvert and Bishop Hensley Henson were all great favourites. He also enjoyed political diaries, from Harold Nicolson to Barbara Castle, literary ones, especially Virginia Woolf, and of course the bizarre snobberies and unstoppable anecdotalism of Augustus Hare took first prize among all diaries. When it came to penning his own journals, however, Ronald was flat. The long years in the fogbound towns of the West Midlands contained almost no Kilvert-style evocations of the characters of his parishioners. He listed the names of old ladies visited, sick communions dispensed. Sometimes there would be a paragraph or two about some current piece of ecclesiastical politics. The crisis caused, during the 1970s, by the then Archbishop, Michael Ramsey, trying to force through reunion with the Methodists was the closest that particular volume rose to the heat of passion. ‘Long conversation with L. about the Methodists. He says that there is no real provision for the ordination of their ministers, and that their superintendents are being talked up as Bishops, but with no apostolic succession. South India all over again. Or the Jerusalem Bishopric.’ It went on for pages, Lesley and Ronald’s agony over the question. She was astonished to discover that they had both gone so far as to visit a Roman Catholic monastery in Lesley’s parish and made arrangements that they would ‘go over’ if the Ramsey measure was passed. The short entry – ‘Methodist Reunion defeated in Synod. DG’ – was eloquent in its way.
Apart from these Lilliputian concerns, whose pettiness and remoteness from anything that might be considered important were troubling, the diaries said little. When Gwen died, he simply wrote, ‘G. died this morning. Woke and found her dead beside me. Kissed her forehead before getting up and ringing Haycraft.’ The account of her mum’s funeral merely listed the hymns – ‘The Day Thou Gavest’ and ‘Soul of My Saviour’.
What made tears start to Nellie’s eyes was the amount of space in the diaries devoted to her. From her girlhood onwards, he chronicled her sayings, her academic achievements, her school prizes, her Oxford prizes (the Gaisford, the Chancellor’s Latin Prose Prize, the Ellerton Theological Essay Prize).
About Whatsisname her dad was characteristically reticent. ‘Nellie married’ was all that he wrote on her wedding day. And, during the first holiday with Doug at ‘Quam Dilecta’ – ‘HC early at Cathedral. Nice cliff walk afterwards with N. Her husband does not join us at church. Nice to have some time with her, just the two of us.’
One thing which shocked her was that he must have been talking about the state of her marriage, both with Lesley Mannock and, more embarrassingly, with the chaplain of her college, Tony Gilmore, for, when she took the job in Aberdeen, her father wrote, ‘L. was right – and T.G. – and my Nellie wanted to leave the man. Suppose this was the neat way of doing it.’
Oh, Dad! Why didn’t you ask me? Why could we not talk about it?
Because we were the Chosen Frozen and that was the way we wanted to keep it. That was the sensible answer.
Only a few weeks before he died, Ronald had written, ‘So now, it is this girl Ingrid. Hope it won’t make N. unhappy. Bless her and keep her.’ And about a week later – ‘Glimpsed the famous Ingrid on N.’s Skype-machine. Rather fleshy face, which surprised me, but nice smile. Fringe cut very straight. Long hair, schoolgirlish. Betjeman girl?’
Nellie put down the notebook on her father’s writing table.
This was the reason she had decided to leave the Island. The other things – the sense of disillusion with the Church, the sense she had made a mess of things with Barnaby and Charles – these could be lived with. What was happening between her and Ingrid could not. They had once – laughing, jokily, as though it could have nothing whatsoever to do with them – agreed that they disliked the use of a word beginning with an L.
She had meant, of course, reference to a Greek island and burning Sappho. (The closest Lesley and Ronald ever came to the ribald, in their shared quotations and jokes, was the notice placed in a newspaper – in the days when the upper classes announced their summer travels – Lord Berners has left Lesbos and is making his way to the Isle of Man.)
