by Iris Murdoch
Just as Cato was beginning to feel less awkward in his duties a new idea was mooted. The order had acquired the lease of a house in Paddington, and a priest whom Cato knew slightly, an enthusiast called Gerald Dealman, wanted to set up a little community of priests to live there with the people and share their lives, perhaps even work with them. Cato was delighted when Gerald asked him if he would like to join in. That had been a year ago; and the ‘Mission’, as the local people called it, had come into being. In the original plan there were to have been three resident priests and a visiting Sacred Heart nun. The third priest, an eccentric called Reggie Poole, was present during the initial period of house-renovation and settling in, but afterwards mysteriously disappeared and was later said to have been sent to Japan. The Sacred Heart changed their mind about sending a nun, perhaps as a result of something which they had heard about Reggie. Gerald and Cato ran the Mission very haphazardly, each with his own kind of zeal. Cato in fact found it rather hard to get on at such close quarters with his brother in Christ, who was far from efficient and never stopped talking. However, after the Mission had existed for some time and was certainly a going concern, Gerald too disappeared from the strength after a punch-up with a penitent, an incident obscure in origin which landed Gerald in hospital with a broken jaw. After this it became clear that the enterprise must be either rescued or abandoned. The local authority conveniently decided about this time that it wanted to pull down the whole street, so the project was able to end without any awful stigma of failure.
The Mission had indeed, for all that it existed in a state of unparalleled muddle, not been entirely unsuccessful. ‘They’ll love us!’ Gerald had shouted. Cato had thought it more likely that they would be ignored or mocked. But, whether because Gerald and Reggie were so picturesque or because Cato was more experienced, the priests found themselves quite popular. There was a great difference between visiting a poor area and going home to a clean book-lined room, and living in a poor area night and day. It was now impossible to escape from people. The Mission became a centre not only for Catholics but for all sorts of people who were in trouble, wanting spiritual or temporal advice, or a chance to sponge on somebody or steal something. The simple worldly possessions of the Mission, saucepans, crockery, cutlery, linen, blankets, transistor sets, even books, began to disappear during the first two months. In the early days, on principle, they never locked the door; later on they took to locking up simply in order to preserve a kit for survival. Cato, forced to be a one man citizens’ advice bureau, became expert on all sorts of practical matters concerning supplementary benefits, rent rebates, tenancy agreements, hire purchase, legal costs, insurance and how to fill in tax forms. He had felt disappointed at first that so little time seemed to be spent talking seriously to people and getting to know them. He would have liked to bring the reality of Christ to those whom he saw sunk in misery or upon the slippery edges of crime. Later he was too busy and too tired to worry about such matters or to seek to make opportunities for such ‘serious talk’. He went on hearing confessions but now did not experience the worries he had confided to Brendan. He celebrated mass every day, sometimes almost alone, at a side altar in the big local church. His time came to be spent, especially after Gerald’s departure, more with atheistic social workers and less with fellow catholics or ‘devotional’ people.
During this year Cato had felt himself changing. He felt like a plant growing yet not able to be conscious of what the changes were which were daily taking place in its form and texture. He began to feel more independent, more individualistic, less, in his relation to the Church, like a child. He took to wearing a cassock all the time, unusual for a Roman priest, arguing to Brendan that if Reggie Poole could go about looking like a hippy, he could at least sport a black robe if he pleased. He felt independent, but, amid his many clients, solitary. ‘You’ll miss us’, Brendan had said. He did. It was the first time since he had joined the family of his order that he had been on his own. Of course there was, for a time, Gerald, but his mild alienation from his companion made him feel more alone. He thought a lot about his father and wished that that wound could be healed, he thought about his sister and wished that he could see her more often. The local parish priest, Father Thomas, provided no company, since he had from the start regarded the Mission as a wrong-headed adventure and an intrusion on his territory. The secular priest and the monkish priest are always likely to be at loggerheads, since the former regards the latter as decorative rather than useful, while the latter can hardly help feeling superior and ‘more dedicated’. The general practitioner and the specialist are natural enemies. Father Thomas thought that Cato, Gerald, Reggie and the other members of their order were spoilt idle over-educated prigs, always off on holidays to monasteries abroad, always blowing in and out of places where the real work was done, drinking sherry and showing off their knowledge of Latin and Greek and of the finer points of theology. While Cato tended to find Father Thomas’s conversation rather dull, and resented his assumption that Cato was a frivolous amateur. Of course Cato and Father Thomas, being decent sincere men of God, recognized their prejudices as prejudices. But this did not stop them from quietly feuding.
The majority of the people who came to the Mission were uneducated, some of them illiterate. This did not surprise Cato who had already learnt how in a rich and civilized society large numbers of citizens can be not only miserably poor, but unable to read a newspaper. Of course he had not come to Paddington to keep cultivated company or enjoy luxuries of private contemplation. It was now difficult for Cato to follow any strict regular devotional routine, since in the house he could never rely on being alone even at night. But he knew that a priest must maintain his life of prayer against the unceasing clamour of the world, making his cell of solitude even in crowded streets or underground trains. Thus prayer is strengthened and deepened; and he had seen in Father Milsom the results of a life-time which indissolubly combined trivial nagging practical activity with an absolute quietness in the presence of God. Cato hoped soberly and confidently for grace, the power when tested to live more deeply in and through the ground of his being.
When this hope seemed to be disappointed Cato was not at first alarmed. He ascribed the spiritual dullness which he felt to all sorts of natural causes, tiredness, lack of solitude, the irritations of his exposed existence or simply to the mysterious rhythms which, as he already knew, govern the spiritual life. The dullness, the blankness was a phase which would pass. It was just proving harder than he had expected to enjoy loving Christ without more frequent tête-à-tête. However the phase did not pass, and Cato woke up one morning with the absolute conviction that he had been mistaken and that there was no God. The conviction faded; but from that moment Cato began to treat himself carefully, almost tenderly, like someone who has discovered in himself the symptoms of a serious disease, and for whom the world in consequence is totally altered. Brendan came on a flying visit. Cato said to him, ‘Oh by the way, I’ve lost my faith.’ ‘Rubbish.’ ‘God is gone. There is no God, no Christ, nothing.’ ‘I expected this.’ ‘You expect everything.’ ‘That darkness comes to us all.’ ‘I knew you’d say that. But suppose the darkness is real, true?’ ‘Hold on.’ Brendan went away, then wrote him a wonderful letter, but the darkness persisted.
It was all very well for Brendan, born into a Catholic family, educated at Downside, inhaling the faith with his first breath. Those born Catholics were a different breed. Faith had never been a problem for Cato. It had been absent. Then it had been present. He had not questioned it any more than he questioned the daylight. Now when it suddenly seemed to have been withdrawn he wondered if he had ever really had it at all. Had it all been utterly private, a subjective experience, something like a drug-induced hallucination? Or perhaps the real experience of faith was, for him, just beginning? His sense of living in and with Christ had been so positive that there had almost been no room for the concept of faith. Was he now, after so many years, just reaching the start
? Or had he simply woken up from a happy dream? Brendan, to whom he talked at more length on a second occasion, did not brush his doubts aside, but said things which Cato had already said to himself about ‘the dark night of the soul.’ Cato would have liked to talk now to Father Milsom or to Father Bell, but Father Milsom was ill and Father Bell had gone to Canada.
Of course during this sudden and unexpected period of change Cato contrived to do his work at the Mission, so much of which made no explicit reference to Godly matters. He watched the atheistic social workers, now his colleagues. Several of them impressed him very much indeed. They had no faith. They probably had no exalted feelings of love or care, no sense of companionship with a higher world; they just functioned as efficient machines, tireless tending rescuing endlessly looking-after machines. Cato in spirit bowed down to the ground before them. They were professionals. He took on no fresh penitents and only when unavoidable heard the confessions of those who had by now come to rely on him. He went on celebrating mass each day, but the mass was dead to him, seemed literally dead, as if each morning he were handling some dead creature. He stood at the altar excluded, blind, unable to give any devotional expression to the anguish which he felt.
The decision, not taken by Cato, to close the Mission, was both welcome and unwelcome to him. He was beginning to feel all the pain of being in a false position, of being almost an untruthful lying teacher, a charlatan. He wanted to get away from all these people who took him for granted as a priest, and in their naïve way for a good man. On the other hand, what would happen to him now when at last he had time to think? Practical hard work, preoccupation, constant demands and lack of privacy had so far prevented him from fully facing and investigating his doubts. Suppose now when he was able to give the matter his whole consideration he were to decide, irrevocably and without appeal, that there was no God? So far muddle and procrastination had made the horror of it bearable. Easter, just over, had been a bad dream, but he had managed to get through it in a state of double-thinking. To Brendan, who was still his confessor, he had communicated a rather subdued version of his doubts, but so far he had told nobody else, and Brendan, who now took the line of ‘jollying him along’ and calling him a ‘poor old protestant,’ had not yet revealed his plight. Cato was now to be officially on holiday, visiting his father. After that there would be no more interim, after that he would have to decide, or indeed, whatever happened would have decided. Would he stagger on, consenting, concealing, doubting, half-believing, feverishly reshaping the dogma so as to save his honesty? Many priests did this. Or would he, as it now seemed, destroy himself by leaving the house of Christ? Or would there be a miracle which would renew his faith?
By the end of this period however, by the time of the closing of the Mission, the question of what Cato would or would not have otherwise done about this spiritual crisis was already becoming academic, since something else, also quite unexpected and extraordinary, had happened to him. Cato had met Beautiful Joe quite early on in his Paddington days, when even Reggie Poole had still been around. Beautiful Joe was one of a number of teenagers, all from Catholic families, all cheerfully ‘lapsed’, who had adopted the Mission at the start, making a nuisance of themselves, ragging the priests, playing practical jokes, stealing things and sometimes professing to have religious problems. The other boys had gradually got tired of the Mission after the first novelty had faded. Some of them in any case were ‘Reggie’s boys’ or ‘Gerald’s boys’. In the end they went away, and ‘Cato’s boys’ went away too: except for Beautiful Joe.
Cato had never for a second thought of himself as a homosexual. He had felt no strong emotions about other boys at school. At college he had been in love with girls, though without managing to do a great deal about it. The vow of chastity when it came had not dismayed him. Of course he felt attracted by the young maidens who came to him so confidently for advice and to confess their trifling sins, but of course he had no difficulty at all in keeping his hands off them. He had often reflected on how merciful it was that at least that was not one of his problems.
Beautiful Joe caught Cato’s attention early on as a picturesque and interesting phenomenon. Joe had left school at sixteen, after doing rather well and being pressed by his teachers to continue his education. He was obviously intelligent. He came of a not very poor Catholic family in Holland Park. His father, who had died when Joe was ten, had been a hairdresser. His mother worked as a clerk at a primary school. There were books in the house. Cato had called there once, but Joe’s mother had shown so much embarrassment, almost hostility, that he had not repeated his visit. Joe was the youngest of six boys. The others had all by now left home, left London, or simply vanished. Joe had in fact, as Cato later learnt, left home too. Cato did not know where Joe lived. Joe was mysterious. How Joe acquired money, which he undoubtedly did, was also a mystery since he appeared to have no employment. ‘He’s a baby crook,’ Reggie had said at first sight of Joe. It took Cato some time and some reluctance to come to agree.
Cato had felt rather gratified at being Joe’s favourite, since Joe was certainly the cleverest as well as the handsomest of the little gang of boys who frequented the Mission. What was more important, Joe was the only one who really seemed to want and to attend to spiritual advice. ‘He’s having you on,’ Gerald said. ‘He is and he isn’t,’ said Cato, feeling wiser. What was extraordinary from the start was how easy he found it to talk to Joe. Cato could talk to people of course, but he could not, the way for instance Gerald could, simply chatter to them about serious matters. He and Beautiful Joe chattered about the resurrection, about the Trinity, about the immaculate conception, about transubstantiation, about papal infallibility, about Hitler, about Buddhism, about communism, about existentialism—in fact it later occurred to Cato that they had talked about pretty well everything except sex. Joe did not seem to be particularly interested in sex as a topic of discussion. ‘Sex is a bore,’ he once said, ‘I mean having sex is a bore.’ Joe had had plenty of girls, as he casually explained. ‘Would you like to get married?’ Cato once asked him. ‘Married? Girls are muck, they aren’t real people, they’re a slave race.’
Cato, who felt the utmost curiosity about Joe, soon began delicately to question him about other aspects of his life. Joe was remarkably, almost disarmingly frank. ‘Get a job, me? Talk about a bank job, I might be interested.’ ‘But how do you live?’ ‘I nick things. O.K. You don’t believe in property, neither do I.’ ‘Surely you could do something better than that.’ ‘You bet I could, I’m going into protection, going to employ little kids, scare the shopkeepers silly.’ ‘You ought to go to college and learn things.’ ‘I learnt something yesterday.’ ‘What?’ ‘How to slash a pig with a razor and be sure of leaving a scar.’ ‘Violence won’t get you anything that you really want.’ ‘Won’t it? Show a man a knife and he’ll do anything. Isn’t that pleasure?’ Another time he said, ‘I want to get in with the Mafia. I know someone who knows a big man.’ Such talk was clearly designed to shock and to provoke arguments and reproofs, and Cato did not take it too seriously, though he believed that Joe probably did, in a small way, ‘nick things’. On other days Joe was a revolutionary, talking about joining the IRA, destroying capitalism, bombing the prots, bombing the Jews. ‘I’m an anarchist, see. The straight world is just a racket, business, capitalism, TV, money, sex, all a racket. Look what happened to the Beatles. They just got bloody rich!’
When Cato realized how much he was enjoying these conversations and observed that, however busy he was, he always somehow had time for Joe, he became nervous. All his old fears about collusion came back to him. He made feeble efforts to get rid of Joe, to pass him on to Father Thomas. ‘Talk to that square? You’re the only one who understands me, Father, you’re the only one who can get through to me.’ Cato was touched. He had no evidence, unless the continued conversations were themselves evidence, that he was having any sort of influence on the boy. But surely it was better to go on talking to him and holding onto
him, rather than to abandon him to the world about which he talked so glibly and whose reality round about him Cato had already come to discern. Of course Joe was not ‘vicious’, he could be saved. He was just a young person with different principles, a young person in revolt against a society with which Cato was in his own way at odds. ‘You’re the only one who has ever cared for me, Father, you’re the only one who can really see me at all.’ This was irresistible. If this is even half true, Cato thought, I must stick to this boy through thick and thin. But of course he had already decided that it was his duty to go on talking to Joe. They argued about property, about capitalism, about freedom, often having the same argument over and over again. Cato tried eloquence, persuasion, logic, everything except anger. He knew that anger, which was what Joe wanted, would be the worst collusion of all. Surely that grain of truth could be deposited somewhere. Beautiful Joe was respectful, flatteringly devoted, yet also stubborn, curiously aloof and full of pretences of iniquity. Would he come to confession, would he come to mass? Maybe, one day. When? Maybe, maybe. Is he just amusing himself, Cato wondered.
