“I always wondered why you never chose that name before,” said Emily, sniffing the milk to make sure it was fresh. “Four sons and not one called after Father.”
“I’ve been in a muddle about Father for a long time.”
“You? In a muddle? Never!”
“You’d be surprised. Em—”
“One lump of sugar or two?”
“One. Em, I must talk to you. It’s urgent.”
“It must be, if you’ve turned up on my doorstep. Nowadays Balham’s not grand enough for you, it seems.”
“Oh, good heavens … Emily, please don’t feel slighted that I haven’t visited you lately—it’s just that I’ve been having a terrible time for some months now, and—”
“You? Having a terrible time? Never! You’re always gliding through life on the crest of a wave!”
“Some wave,” I said, aping Mr. Churchill. “Some life. Look, Em, I’m trying to sort myself out and there are things I need to know about Mother, Father and Uncle Willoughby. First of all I’d like you to tell me—”
“But you hate talking about Mother, Father and Uncle Willoughby! I remember so well after Grace’s funeral—”
“Can we please just stick to one upsetting subject at a time? And can you make that blank-blank tea before your fidgeting drives me completely round the bend?”
She made the tea in silence, her lips pressed into a thin tight line of disapproval. When we were finally facing our steaming cups I made a supreme effort and managed to say: “Sorry. Not quite myself at the moment. Going through a bit of a crisis.”
Emily made no comment but merely said crisply: “What do you want to know about Mother, Father and Uncle Will?”
“I want to know how you see them as you look back on the past. For instance, if they were characters in a play, how would you describe them?”
“What an extraordinary question! Let me think.” As she allowed my challenge to interest her, she forgot to sulk. “Well,” she said after a moment, “Uncle Will was the hero, of course, saving us all and taking me and Mother into his home for that year before we went to St. Leonards. I know what you and Willy thought of him but in my eyes he was always rather a pet.”
“Rather a pet?”
“Yes, he was always giving me the odd penny to buy liquorice. I never told you and Willy that, of course, because I knew you’d be jealous.”
“Well, I’ll be …” Words temporarily failed me. Then I pulled myself together and demanded: “But if you see Uncle Will as the lovable hero, how do you see Father?”
“Oh, as the villain, naturally. Silly, insensitive brute.”
“Insensitive brute? Father?”
“Well, he nearly killed Mother, didn’t he? All those pregnancies! I think it was cruel, especially as she didn’t even like that side of marriage.”
“What side?”
“Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t. Are you referring to childbirth or sex—or both?”
“Honestly, Nev! Must you be quite so crude?”
“I suppose that means you’re referring to sex. But how do you know she didn’t like it?”
“She told me.”
“Mother talked to you about sex?”
“Only when I wanted to get married!” said Emily hastily, as if she feared she had cast an aspersion on our mother’s character. “She tried to put me off the idea by saying how awful it all was. I think she believed I had no idea what went on, although how she thought I’d reached the age of thirty-five in such a state of Victorian ignorance I can’t imagine. As a matter of fact Willy told me on the beach at St. Leonards when I was sixteen. You were off somewhere, holding hands with Grace as usual, and that had put Willy in a bad mood. He didn’t like sharing you with anyone, least of all with a girl—”
“But Em, this is quite extraordinary—are you saying Mother and Father were unhappily married?”
“Well, what else can one think? How would you feel if you didn’t like s-e-x and your husband forced himself on you to such an extent that you had a baby every year?”
“But they were so happy—I can remember them laughing and joking together! And if Mother didn’t want to be annually pregnant why didn’t Father practise contraception?”
“Honestly, Nev! And you a clergyman! I’m shocked!”
“Oh, stop being so idiotic! Now look here, none of this makes sense—”
“Of course it does! Father didn’t practise you-know-what because no one did in those days, but why he couldn’t at least have exercised a decent self-control from time to time I just can’t imagine.”
“Emily, I don’t know what you get up to down here in Balham, but I don’t think you know anything about anything! There are two methods of birth control which have been practised from time immemorial, and although one would expect Father to refrain from sodomy, one would certainly hope he didn’t fight shy of—”
“I’m sorry, Nev, but I think this is appalling talk for a clergyman, and if you continue to speak of such disgusting matters I shall leave the room. You’re as bad as Willy on the beach at St. Leonards. Men are revolting sometimes, utterly revolting—as of course Mother knew all too well—”
“But if you see Father as a revolting villain, how on earth do you see Mother?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Mother was the tragic victim of male cruelty and domination.”
“Emily, I—” Words again failed me. All I could say in the end was a lame: “I had no idea you were such a feminist!”
“A feminist! I’m no such thing—no woman in her right mind would be a feminist: feminism just encourages men to kick you in the teeth and trample on you. No man likes a feminist, just as no man likes a woman who’s too clever. Think of Mother—kicked in the teeth by three men and left to die in misery!”
After I had finished gasping I exclaimed: “I’m beginning to feel as a conventional historian feels when he reads history rewritten by a Marxist! Of course Mother didn’t die in misery! She died loved and cared for in this very house by her devoted daughter!”
“I wasn’t devoted. I just felt sorry for her. I only married to get away from her after being stuck as her unpaid slave for all those years. It’s funny you should accuse me of not knowing anything about anything! I’m beginning to think you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about what goes on!”
“Of course I have a clue but I deal with facts, not feminist fables. Who were these three men who kicked Mother in the teeth?”
“Father, Uncle Willoughby and you. Who else?”
“I absolutely, utterly and entirely deny—”
“All right, we’ll leave you out of it. I don’t want to quarrel. More tea?”
“Mother was behaving unspeakably to Grace. I had to put my wife first. I know it was all very awkward and difficult, but—”
“If that’s the way you choose to remember the past, Nev, I’m not going to stop you, but if you think Mother didn’t tell me exactly what happened—”
“She probably invented some fantasy to preserve her pride. But Em, I never knew Uncle Willoughby kicked Mother in the teeth! When on earth did that happen?”
“It was just before we left Maltby and went to live in St. Leonards. I don’t know exactly what happened, but they had some sort of row—anyway, whatever it was, Mother never forgave him. She pretended to; they had their reconciliation, but it was forever being spoilt by quarrels. Their worst quarrel was when you rejected him—that was when you decided to go into the Church, wasn’t it?—and Mother elbowed her way past him to kidnap you. Uncle Will hated that. They didn’t speak for months. Sometimes I think Mother kidnapped you just to pay Uncle Will back for whatever happened between them in Maltby.”
I stared at her. “But are you saying Mother didn’t really care for me at all? Are you saying she just started to take a keen interest in me because—”
“No, no, of course she adored you. All I’m saying is that I think she was pleased when her adoration gave her the chance to pay Unc
le Will back. It often seemed to me that she secretly hated him.”
“But she couldn’t have done! She adored him, just as she adored me—and just as she adored Father! Good heavens, just remember what she was like after Father died—she wore black for years and put his picture everywhere and couldn’t even mention his name without a sob—”
“Oh yes, I got so tired of it all! For some peculiar reason it suited her to live like a character in a Victorian melodrama. When I read the love-letters she wrote to Father during their engagement I was very struck by their unreality—and his letters to her were just as bad. God knows how they coped with the reality of marriage—if indeed they ever did … Nev, you never said whether you wanted more tea.”
I pushed my cup across the table for a refill. “Do you still have those letters? I remember you offering them to me after Mother died, but I was too upset to read them.”
“Well, that turned out to be your last chance. They all went during the war when there were those appeals for scrap paper. Like a lot of other people I patriotically turned out my attic and lived to regret it.” She poured the tea before adding reflectively: “In many ways the letters told a lovely story, so romantic. The short plain dumpy heroine, much too clever for her own good, declared ‘on the shelf’ by everyone in Maltby and despised by man after man, chances to make a witty remark while organising tea down at the cricket club and immediately makes the tall dark handsome hero of the first eleven look at her with new eyes … What a wonderful catch Father was! It must have seemed to her like a dream come true. Never mind if things went wrong later. At least she had that perfect courtship—which is more than I ever had. Still, I can’t complain. As a plain clever woman I was lucky to get off the shelf at all, and of course a woman’s nothing unless she’s married. I found that out during the years I spent playing the role of ‘spinster daughter.’ I suppose if I’d had an education my life would have been very different, but—”
“You wouldn’t have liked being a blue-stocking, Em.”
“How do you know? How do I know? I never had the chance to go to Oxford, did I? My sex alone classified me as inferior to you and Willy! Of course you think, in your bigoted narrow-minded masculine way, that all women should be wives and mothers, but all I can say is that I hope you won’t deprive poor little Primrose of a decent education. I know you detest unusual women who don’t fit into the conventional feminine mould, but—”
“Nonsense, I’m crazy about them!”
“I don’t think you are, Nev; not really. In fact once or twice in the past I’ve wondered if you really like women at all. Oh, I know you like them in one sense, the obvious sense, and can’t do without them, but I think that secretly makes you cross and then you hate yourself for needing them so much.”
“Em, has it ever occurred to you that all this tea you drink might be softening your brain?”
“You wanted me to talk—how dare you complain now that I’m taking you at your word! It’s such a novelty to have a man choosing to ask my opinion on anything that it’s hardly surprising if I get carried away and start tossing out a few home truths! No man’s ever wanted to talk to me intelligently—certainly you and Willy have always treated me as if I couldn’t possibly have anything of interest to say, but then I suppose you took your cue from Father who always left me at home with Tabitha when he took his beloved boys out for walks—”
“The only reason he didn’t take you was because you couldn’t have kept up with us! You were too little!”
“Oh, was that the excuse he gave?”
“Good heavens, Em, what a chip you have on your shoulder!”
“Well, why should I gloss over Father’s faults, as you and Willy always do? He ruined Mother’s health, he ruined his business and he ruined his family!”
I stood up and headed for the door.
“Are you off? You haven’t stayed long. I’ll stop being clever now, if you like, and start talking about the bread queues and how I’m saving up for an Electrolux.”
I reached the door but went no farther. I had somehow managed to control my emotion, and at last I moved awkwardly back to the table. “Em …” We were not a demonstrative family, but I forced myself to take her hands in mine. “I’m very sorry. I really am. I know you’ve had a raw deal.”
“It could be worse. I could be living in genteel poverty as a spinster in St. Leonards-on-Sea.”
“Please don’t think I don’t care that you’re unhappy—”
“Unhappy? Who said I was unhappy? I’ve got a home of my own and some privacy and a little dignity and self-respect at last. When one’s had nothing for years and years, it doesn’t take much to make one happy—and in fact I’m beginning to suspect I’m a great deal happier than you are: you with your wife you won’t mention and your crisis you won’t discuss! So don’t pity me, Neville, and don’t patronise me. Look to your own life and leave me to look after mine.”
After that speech little remained to be said. At the front door I thanked her for the tea, muttered the clergyman’s conventional “God bless you” and set off, deeply confused, on the next stage of my journey through the wasteland.
3
I might have postponed my visit to Willy, but after the interview with Emily I now had an overwhelming desire to discover if he too secretly harboured extraordinary opinions about the past. I reminded myself that the past had remained undiscussed by us in depth because I had never wanted to speak of it. Moreover, by an agreement which was all the more powerful for being unspoken, Willy and I had never, even in our closest years as children, discussed the circumstances surrounding our father’s death. At first we had been numbed by our bereavement. Then later, when we found we could not mention him without crying, the other boys at our brutal Yorkshire boarding school had thought us soft and bullied us. This experience had made us realise dry eyes were essential for survival and in consequence our father had become a forbidden topic of conversation.
At the tube station I found another telephone kiosk and phoned Willy at his school, forty miles south of London, but the telephone rang unanswered in his rooms. Obviously he was busy teaching, and for a moment I pictured him planting his diminutive frame in front of the blackboard as he glowered at his pupils. Willy always boasted that despite his size he never had trouble keeping order in the classroom.
Backtracking on the tube to Clapham I caught an ordinary train heading south to Leatherhead, where I switched to the Horsham line, and as the train sped through the Mole Valley between Leatherhead and Dorking I looked up at the Starmouths’ mansion, remote on its wooded hillside, symbol of another life in another world in another age, long ago. I thought of Aidan talking of the unbalanced Neville Three, and the memory reminded me of my duty to reflect on every event carefully to discern a possible hidden meaning. I soon gave up trying to make sense of the conversation with Emily; at present I felt incapable of regarding it as anything except a bizarre conundrum which defied interpretation. But I began to think again about my meeting with Charles Ashworth.
It seemed I was being prompted not only to recall the incident with Lyle but to re-examine it; although I had shied away from a re-examination earlier that morning in the chapel, I knew the disaster was still gnawing at the edge of my memory. On the other hand, surely it would be unconstructive to wallow masochistically in guilty memories? I regretted the incident profoundly. I had vowed it would never happen again. What was the point of a re-examination? What new truth was I supposed to extract if I now “faced the pain” and remembered that a year ago I had almost committed adultery? I could think of nothing which demanded to be re-examined … but it was strange how that insipid little word “almost” now had such an unmistakably sinister ring. A year ago I had almost committed adultery … I could imagine myself saying that to Aidan, and all too easily I could imagine Aidan replying: “Almost? No, that’s not quite right, Neville, is it …”
I shuddered. Then I told myself that now was hardly the moment to remember that the legal
and spiritual definitions of adultery didn’t entirely coincide. I had to survive, not drive myself round the bend with unbearable thoughts. Surely it was enough that events themselves were crucifying me—why should I want to crucify myself all over again by telling myself I deserved to be defrocked? I had to think of something else. In panic my mind raced raggedly back to Ashworth again, Ashworth the POW, and as I tried to imagine the quality of the experiences which had so visibly changed him, I found myself remembering those other POWs, my Germans. They were reasonably treated; they did not suffer as I was sure Ashworth had suffered, yet I knew very well there was much suffering present at the camp.
“To be locked up indefinitely,” said Hoffenberg, my favourite prisoner, when I had met him on my first harrowing visit to the camp in 1944, “to be cut off from one’s loved ones, to be hated and despised by one’s jailers—how does one go on believing in God in a world where God is absent?” I had been so embarrassed, so ashamed of my limited pastoral gifts, because I had not known how to reply. My Liberal optimism had nothing to say in the face of such dereliction; any facile message of hope would have fallen on ground too stony to receive it. Groping in despair for a reply I could only say hesitantly: “This is your Good Friday.” I had to struggle to find each word. I, the Balliol scholar and the accomplished Archdeacon, had never felt more intellectually stupid or more spiritually inept than I felt at that moment. “But at the foot of your cross,” I managed to add, still speaking with great difficulty, “stands an Englishman who shares the pain of all the innocent Germans caught up in the war.” And I told him about Bishop Bell.
“He sounds a good man,” Hoffenberg said drearily, “but he won’t come here so he has no meaning for me.”
It was then that the miracle happened. I no longer had to struggle for words. The right reply arrived fully formed on my tongue. “Bell himself may never come here,” I said, “but I’ve come to tell you about him.”
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