‘Tell me,’ he said and because he forgot the beauty of his own hands and turned towards me his ugly cheek, forgetting himself in the desire to help, I found myself talking - about that night and the bomb falling and the stupid vow.
‘And you really believe,’ he said, ‘that perhaps.. ‘Yes.’
‘Think of the thousands of people all over the world praying now, and their prayers aren’t answered.’
‘There were thousands of people dying in Palestine when Lazarus…’
‘We don’t believe that story, do we, you and I?’ he said with a kind of complicity.
‘Of course not, but millions of people have. They must have thought it reasonable… ‘
‘People don’t demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren’t reasonable, are they?’
‘Can you explain away love too?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won’t be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.’
I thought, it’s all true, but isn’t there something over? I’ve dug up all that in myself, in Maurice too, but still the spade hasn’t touched rock. ‘And the love of God?’ I asked him.
‘It’s all the same. Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.’
When he spoke of distorting and beautifying mirrors, I couldn’t remember what we were talking about for the thought of all those times since adolescence when he had looked in mirrors and tried to make them beautifying and not distorting simply by the way he held his head, I wondered why he hadn’t grown a beard long enough to hide the spots; wouldn’t the hair grow there or was it because he hated deception? I had an idea that he was a man who really loved the truth, but there was that word love again, and it was only too obvious into how many desires his love of truth could be split. A compensation for the injury of his birth, the desire for power, the wish to be admired all the more because the poor haunted face would never cause physical desire. I had an enormous wish to touch it with my hand, to comfort it with words of love as permanent as the wound. It was like when I saw Maurice under the door. I wanted to pray: to offer up some inordinate sacrifice if only he could be healed, but now there was no sacrifice left for me to offer.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘leave the idea of God out of this. It’s just a question of your lover and your husband. Don’t confuse the thing with phantoms.’
‘But how do I decide - if there’s no such thing as love?’
‘You have to decide what will be the happiest in the long run.’
‘Do you believe in happiness?’
‘I don’t believe in any absolute.’
I thought the only happiness he ever gets is this: the idea that he can comfort, advise, help, the idea that he can, be of use. It drives him every week on to the Common, to talk to people who move away, never asking questions, dropping his cards on the turf. How often does anybody really come as I have come today? I asked him. ‘Do you have many callers?’
‘No,’ he said. His love of truth was greater than his pride. He said, ‘You are the first - for a very long time.’
‘It’s been good to talk to you,’ I said. ‘You’ve cleared my mind quite a lot.’ It was the only comfort one could give him - to feed his illusion.
He said shyly, ‘If you could spare the time, we could really start at the beginning and go to the root of things. I mean, the philosophical arguments and the historical evidence.’
I suppose I must have made some evasive reply for he went on, ‘It’s really important. We mustn’t despise our enemies. They have a case.’
‘They have?’
‘It’s not a sound one, except superficially. It’s specious.’ He watched me with anxiety. I think he was wondering whether I was one of those who walked away. It seemed a little thing to ask when he said nervously, ‘An hour a week. It would help you a great deal,’ and I thought, haven’t I all of time now? I can read a book or go to a cinema, and I don’t read the words or remember the pictures. Myself and my own misery drum in my ear and fill my eyes. For a minute this afternoon I forgot them. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll come. It’s good of you to spare the time,’ I said, shovelling all the hope I could into his lap, praying to the God he was promising to cure me of, ‘Let me be of use to him.’
2 October 1945.
It was very hot today and it dripped with rain. So I went into the dark church at the corner of Park Road to sit down for a while. Henry was at home and I didn’t want to see him. I try to remember to be kind at breakfast, kind at lunch when he’s home, kind at dinner, and sometimes I forget and he’s kind back. Two people being kind to each other for a lifetime. When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return - stretching out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour - I would escape myself for ever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars - the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces, and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed for ever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard’s - about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year’s vermin. It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
Richard’s right, I thought, we have invented the resurrection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy-tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness. I walked up the church, looking at them one after the other: in front of the worst of all - I don’t know who she was-a middle-aged man was praying. He had put his bowler hat beside him and in the bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery.