I had been as proud as my mother, and in some ways as vain. Some of that pride and vanity was exorcised by now: for I had lived much longer than she did, and age, though it didn’t kill vanity, took the edge of it away. Like her, I sometimes couldn’t deceive myself about the truth. Charles was behaving as I had done. Was it also true that, against my will and anything that I desired, without knowing it I was affecting him as she had me? Had the remorse come back, through all those years, and made me learn what it had been like for her, and what it was now like for me?
Charles’ tone changed, as he said: ‘There is something I wanted to tell you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Maurice and Godfrey (Maurice’s parson friend) will be coming in later today.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Yes, but you mustn’t put your foot in it, you know.’ His eyes had taken on a piercing glint: there was a joke at my expense. Suddenly he had switched – and I with him, seeing that expression – to our most companionable.
‘What are you accusing me of now?’
‘You might forget that old Godfrey has a professional interest in you, don’t you think?’
‘Aren’t I usually fairly polite?’
‘Fairly.’
‘Well then. I don’t propose to stop being polite, just because the man is an Anglo-Catholic priest.’
‘So long’, Charles’ smile was matey and taunting, ‘as you don’t forget that he is an Anglo-Catholic priest.’
I taunted him back: ‘My memory is in excellent order, you’ll be glad to know.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Come on, what do you want me to say to the man?’
‘It’s what I don’t want you to say that counts.’
‘And that is?’
‘Look here, it isn’t everyone who’s done a Lazarus, is it?’
‘Granted,’ I said.
‘It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that a priest will have a special interest in you, don’t you realise? After all, we expect him to have some concern about life after death, don’t we?’
‘Granted again.’
‘Well then, you’d better not say much about first-hand knowledge, had you? I should have thought this wasn’t precisely the occasion.’
We had each known what this duologue meant, all along. About his friends’ susceptibilities, or his acquaintances’ as well, Charles could be sensitive and far-sighted. But also he had constructed a legend about me as a blunt unrestrained Johnsonian figure, in contrast to his own subtlety. It was the kind of legend that grows up in various kinds of intimacy. In almost exactly the same way, Roy Calvert used to pretend to be on tenterhooks waiting for some gigantesque piece of tactlessness from me: on the basis that, just as William the Silent got his nickname through being silent on one occasion, so I had been shatteringly tactless once. With both of them – often Charles acted towards me as Roy Calvert used to – they liked rubbing the legend in. And Charles in particular used this device to make amends. It took the heat out of either affection or constraint or the complex of the two, and gave us the comfort we both liked.
22: The Four Things
AS Charles had prepared me, Maurice and Father Ailwyn duly arrived later that day, round half past four, when I had finished drinking tea. The quixotic pair came through the door, Maurice so thin that he looked taller than he was, Father Ailwyn the reverse. Since all my family called Ailwyn by his Christian name, I had to do the same, although I knew him only slightly. He gave a shy, fat-cheeked smile, small eyes sharp and uncertain behind his glasses, cassock billowing round thick-soled boots. While they were settling down in their chairs, he was abnormally diffident, not able to make any kind of chat, nor even to reply to ours. Maurice had told me that he was quite as inept when he visited the old and lonely: a stuttering awkward hulk of a fat man, grateful when Maurice, who might be self-effacing but was never shy, acted as a lubricant. Yet, they said, Godfrey Ailwyn was the most devoted of parish priests, and the desolate liked him, even if he couldn’t talk much, just because he never missed a visit and patiently sat with them.
With the excessive heartiness that the diffident induced, I asked if he would have some tea.
‘No, thank you. I’m not much good at tea.’
His tone was hesitating, but upper-class – not professional, not high bourgeois. Even my old acquaintance, Lord Boscastle, arbiter of origins, might have performed the extraordinary feat of ‘knowing who he was’ – which meant that his family could be found in reference books.
‘I’m pretty sure’, said Maurice, ‘that Godfrey would like a drink. Wouldn’t you now, Godfrey?’
The doleful plump countenance lightened.
‘If it isn’t any trouble–’
‘Of course it isn’t.’ Maurice, used to looking after the other man, was already standing by the bottles, pouring out a formidable whisky. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
Maurice, taking the glass round, explained to me, as though he were an interpreter, that Godfrey had had a busy day, mass in the morning, parish calls, a couple of young delinquents at the vicarage –
‘It must be a tough life,’ I said.
Godfrey smiled tentatively, took a swig at his drink and then, all of a sudden, asked me, with such abruptness that it sounded rough: ‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’
For an instant I was taken by surprise, as though I hadn’t heard the question right, or didn’t understand it. I hadn’t expected him to take the initiative.
‘Maurice says you didn’t remember anything about it. When you came to.’
‘I wasn’t exactly at my most lucid, of course.’
‘But you didn’t remember anything?’
‘I was more concerned with what was happening there and then.’
‘You still don’t remember anything?’
I was ready to persevere with evasion, but he was not giving me much room to manoeuvre.
‘Would you expect me to?’ I asked.
‘It was like waking from a very deep sleep, was it?’
‘I think one might say that.’
Father Ailwyn gave a sharp-eyed glance in Maurice’s direction, as though they were sharing a joke, and then turned to me with an open, slumbrous smile, the kind of smile which transformed depressive faces such as his.
‘Please don’t be afraid of worrying me,’ he said, and added: ‘Lewis, I am interested, you know.’
‘Godfrey said on the way here that he wished he wasn’t a clergyman.’ Maurice was also smiling. ‘He didn’t want to put you off.’
I should have something to report to young Charles when next I saw him, I was thinking.
‘I’m not going to be prissy with you,’ said Godfrey. ‘All I’m asking you is to return the compliment.’
I had come off worst and gave an apologetic smile.
‘Eschatology is rather a concern of ours, you see. But most believers wouldn’t think that you were interfering with their eschatology. They’d be pretty certain to say, and here I don’t mind admitting that they sometimes take an easy way out, that you hadn’t really been dead.’
Instead of being inarticulate, or so shy as to be embarrassing to others, he had begun to talk as though he were in practice.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that, have I?’ I said.
‘I should have thought that, by inference, you had. And most believers would tell you that it’s very difficult to define the threshold of death, and that you hadn’t crossed it.’