‘I can accept that–’
‘They would tell you that the brain has to die as well as the heart stopping before the body is truly dead. And until the body is truly dead, then the soul can’t leave it.’
I still didn’t want to argue, but I respected him now and had to be straightforward.
‘That I can’t accept. Those are just words–’
‘They don’t mean much more to me than they do to you.’
Again Godfrey’s face was one moonlike smile. ‘It’s a very primitive model, of course it is. At the time of the early church, a man’s spirit was supposed to hover over the body for three days, and didn’t depart until the decomposition set in.’
Yes, I said, I’d read that once, in a commentary on the Gospel according to Saint John. It was the priest’s turn to look surprised. He had expected me to be entirely ignorant about the Christian faith, just as I had expected him to be unsophisticated about everything else. In fact, he was at least as far from unsophisticated as Laurence Knight, my first wife’s father, another clergyman, in one of his more convoluted phases.
Godfrey Ailwyn had also one of those minds which were naturally rococo and which moved from flourish to invention and back again, with spiralling whirls and envelopes of thought – quite different from the clear straight cutting-edge mentalities of, say, Francis Getliffe or Austin Davidson in his prime. Quite different, but neither better nor worse, just different: one of the most creative minds I ever met was similar in kind to Father Ailwyn’s, and belonged to a scientist called Constantine.
What did Ailwyn believe about death, the spirit or eternal life? I pressed him, for he had brushed away the surface civilities, and I was genuinely curious to know. Though he was willing to spin beautiful metaphysical structures, I wasn’t sure that I understood him. Certainly he believed, so far as he believed at all, in something very different from what he called the ‘metaphors’ in which he spoke to his parishioners. The body, the memory, this our mortal life – if I didn’t misinterpret him – existed in space and time, and all came to an end with death. The spirit existed outside space and time, and so to talk of a beginning, or an end, or an after-life – they were only ‘metaphors’, which we had to use because our minds were primitive.
It was about memory alone that I could engage with him. He would have liked to believe (for once, he wasn’t intellectually cool) that some part of memory – ‘some subliminal part, if you like’ – was attached to the spirit and so didn’t have to perish. That was why, with more hope than expectation, he had wanted to cross-question me.
On the terms we had now reached (they weren’t those of affection and, though I was interested in him, he wasn’t in me, except as an imparter of information: but still, we had come to terms of trust) it would have been false of me to give him any agreement. No, I said, I was sure that memory was a function of the body: damage the brain, and there was no memory left. When the brain came to its end, so did memory. It was inconceivable that any part of it could outlive the body. If the spirit existed outside space and time (though I couldn’t fix any meaning to his phrase), memory couldn’t. And what possible kind of spiritual existence could that be?
‘By definition,’ said Godfrey Ailwyn, ‘we can’t imagine it. Because we’re limited by our own categories. Sometimes we seem to have intuitions. Perhaps that does suggest that some kind of remembrance isn’t as limited as we are.’
No, whatever it suggested, it couldn’t be that, I said. He was a very honest man, but he wouldn’t give up that toehold of hope. Did I deny the mystical experience, he asked me. No, of course I didn’t deny the experience, I said. But that was different from accepting the interpretation that he might put upon it.
As we went on talking, Maurice, unassuming, bright-faced, poured Godfrey another drink. In time, I came to wonder whether, though Godfrey’s mind was elaborate, his temperament wasn’t quite simple. So that in a sense, detached from his intellect, he wasn’t so far after all from the people he preached to or tried to console, stumbling with his tongue at a sickbed, in a fashion that seemed preposterous when one heard him talk his own language as he had done that afternoon.
Soon they would have to leave, he said, his expression once more owlish and sad. He had to take an evening service. Would be get many people, I asked. Five or six, old ladies, old friends of his.
‘Old ladies’, Maurice put in, ‘who, if they hadn’t got Godfrey, wouldn’t have anything to live for.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Godfrey, awkward as an adolescent.
I couldn’t resist one final question. We had spoken only of one of the eschatological last things, I said. Death. How did he get on with the other three? Judgment, heaven, hell.
Again he looked as though I weren’t playing according to the rules, or hadn’t any justification to recognise a theological term.
Did he place heaven and hell, like the spirit, outside of space and time? And judgment too? Wasn’t that utterly unlike anything that believers had ever conceived up to his day?
His sharp eyes gazed at me with melancholy. Then suddenly the pastiness, the heaviness, the depression did their disappearing trick again, and he smiled.
‘Lewis. I expect you’d prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that that would be an improvement, you know. But if you like I’ll say that you’ve made your own heaven and hell in your own life. And as for judgment, well, you’re capable of delivering that upon yourself. I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.’
When they had departed, I thought that last remark didn’t really fit under his metaphysical arch, but that nevertheless, if he allowed himself an instant’s pride in the midst of his chronic modesty, he had a good sound right to do so.
23: Lying Awake
WHEN Charles March called in for ten minutes later that same evening, I asked him to do a little staff work. Would he, either on his own account or by invoking Mansel, make an arrangement with the nurses? Up to now, they had forced sleeping pills upon me each night. I wanted that stopped. Partly because I had an aversion, curiously puritanical, from any routine drug-taking: I would much rather have a broken night or two than get into the habit of dosing myself to sleep. But also I wasn’t in the least tired, I was serene and content, I didn’t mind lying awake: which in fact I did, luxuriously, looking out one-eyed into the dark bedroom.
Not that it was quite dark, or continuously so. There was a kind of background twilight, contributed perhaps by the street lamps or those in the houses opposite, which defined the shape of the window and chest of drawers close by. Occasionally, a beam from a car’s headlights down below swept across the far wall, and I watched with pleasure, as though I were being reminded of lying in an unfamiliar bedroom long ago, at my Uncle Will’s in Market Harborough, when as a boy I didn’t wish to go to sleep, so long as I could see the walls rosy, then darker, rosy again, as the coal fire flickered and fell.
I was being reminded of something else, what was it, another room, another pattern of light, almost another life. At last I had it. A hotel room in Menton, regular as a metronome the lighthouse beam, moving from wall to walclass="underline" in the dark intervals, the sea slithering and slapping on the rocks beneath. Yes, I had been ill and wretched, wondering if I should recover, maddened that I might die quite unfulfilled, longing for the woman whom I later married and did harm to. Yet the recollection, in the hospital bedroom, was happy, pain long since drained out, as though all that persisted was the smell of the flowers and the sharp-edged lighthouse beam.