The Celibate-Eleven

Eleven

Thank you all for being such good sports; I’m sure that my credibility with the rector was much enhanced by my milky moustache. Fortunately he has sufficient sympathy with the subject to overlook such an unprepossessing guide. In any case we needn’t trespass on his good nature, or indeed his property, any further, as we can see the rectory perfectly well from the bottom of this drive.

Such spots have a special significance for me; and I consider that by now I know you well enough to be able to acknowledge it. On my previous walk, I had only the vaguest idea of my audience. I could hazard a few guesses, but I’m not sure they were all that inspired. And yet the very fact of our coming together for this retreat creates a common bond of sympathy, so I can feel confident that you won’t accuse me either of overstating the analogies or of overstepping the mark. And during a contemporary crisis in which many clergymen would rather sit on the fence than stand up and be counted, at most muffling their sympathies and murmuring their regrets, it’s imperative to remind ourselves that there is an alternative – and it works.

That alternative may be summed up in two words: William Mompesson… In 1665 he was a relatively recent recruit to Eyam. It was his first parish and hardly his idea of a prestigious preferment since, in addition to its obscurity, it was still suffering the bitter aftermath of two decades of doctrinal strife. Then came the plague, and with it the growing conviction that he’d at last discovered his divinely appointed mission. And yet it was also to bring him much misery; for although he was one of the fortunate few – and they were indeed very few – who survived, Catherine, his devoted wife, was not.

Nevertheless he buried his private sorrow in the wider struggle as he galvanised the village to glory. Remarkably, there are only two recorded instances of attempted flight, both of which quickly came to grief. And, as if to prove that ignorance and ingratitude aren’t simply twentieth-century phenomena, when three years after the plague he left Eyam to take up a living in Nottinghamshire, his new parishioners at first forbade him entry to the town, restricting him to a hut in the park until he managed to convince them he was free of the contagion. Nor would they even allow him access to the church. And he who, as we shall shortly see, was no stranger to open-air worship, having once preached so valiantly at ‘Pulpit Rock’, was forced to preach ignominiously beneath ‘Pulpit Ash’.

But that’s another village and another story. Let’s now try to escape the worst of this heat in the traditional cool of the country churchyard where our first stop will be Catherine Mompesson’s tomb.

The sunglasses aren’t an affectation, nor am I trying to conceal a black eye… merely red ones. Although I expect to you they’d simply look a little inflamed. Nevertheless I need all the confidence I can muster. I’m reeling under the strain of my recollections; I’m punch-drunk with the past.

I’m not sure… when we last met, had I introduced Mark to Jonathan? No? Well, they took to one another right from the start; so much so, I was taken aback. I’ve always considered ‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine’ the most indiscriminate of compliments. Of course I was relieved; I longed for them to be friends – just not necessarily at first sight. Jonathan encouraged Mark to join his Plus IV support group; and I was again surprised by his enthusiasm. So I welcomed the chance to attend an open evening for lovers, friends and carers… They ought to have added family to the list.

We met in the billiard-room of the clergy house where a giant jigsaw, a Dutch seascape, was laid out on the felt. Mark explained that it was a long-term project: more of a pretext than a puzzle, designed for new members to break the ice… He moved off to greet some friends, leaving me to contemplate the jigsaw; and I felt disappointed by both its sentimentality and its size. They hadn’t completed much, but they’d assembled all the edges; and I can remember thinking that if those were ten thousand pieces some of them must be awfully small. I stepped aside; I was suddenly convinced I was going to knock it over… I fulfilled my worst fears.

Would you like a glass of wine? Or was it a cup of coffee? That I don’t recall. I was less struck by the offer than the voice. I turned round. I knew him at once: even though I hadn’t set eyes on him for fourteen years. No, that’s not true. I’d glimpsed him in the hall of the Lambeth Mission, queuing up for a charitable chocolate. My instincts had been quicker than my brain.

His body was much thinner; his hair was much thinner. His skin was weather-worn and he had liver marks on his leathery hands. At least I assumed they were liver marks. But I could never have mistaken the shock of recognition in his eyes nor the slobber of emotion on his lips. I backed away; I was terrified he was about to embrace me. I backed away and knocked over half the jigsaw. Three months work, three months of hard-won confidence and conversation: and I swept it away in one swoop.

There was a dull thud and a muffled clatter followed by a murmur of consternation; and a moment later Mark was at my side. He began to berate me as though he considered himself responsible. I was impossible: no better than a clumsy child who didn’t know his own strength… But I was a child who hadn’t known his own attraction. And as I gazed at my uncle for the first time in so many years, it all came flooding back.

I knelt down and started to pick up the jigsaw: its thin cardboard pieces had become jagged and sharp. I refused to face him. I tried to blot him out of my sight… to black him out of my memory. Then I felt arms encircling me – his arms; I froze. My heart was in my mouth; I was choking; I couldn’t breathe. And his hands were on my wrists restraining me, and around my neck strangling me; and I couldn’t understand why no one could see. And I tried to call for help; but his fingers were down my throat trying to tear out my larynx. And… and is the dividing line between madness and sanity as thin as that between present and past? For they were Mark’s hands, and Jonathan’s, forcing me to vomit up the pieces of the puzzle that I was desperately stuffing into my mouth.

They succeeded. The sentimental seascape was spat out in a splutter of bile. And whilst Mark attended to my uncle, Jonathan led me upstairs. He sat me down on his bed, ignoring my assurance that I’d be perfectly fine if he’d only ring for a taxi, and insisted that I told him everything. Although it wasn’t until I started speaking that I realised how much there was to tell. So please don’t think I’ve been holding out on you. As I forced it out, the story became its own discovery. And yet you clearly played a crucial part. For when I spotted him standing in line, all I’d been able to see was my long-lost uncle. It took two years of dredging through my memories to alert me to everything else that I’d lost.

So I withdraw any reservations about the effectiveness of the process. You’ve proved your credentials beyond any doubt. And yet I’d hate you to assume that that was the key to my entire character: a childhood assault by my uncle: no wonder I’m so confused/repressed/ neurotic: strike out where inapplicable, or add on as the case might be. I’ve warned you before that I’m not an open book; well, still less am I an open-and-shut case history. I don’t… I can’t deny what happened; what I do deny is that it determined my development; or how would I ever have been able to forgive him as freely as I did?

And you can’t expect me to believe that a few local difficulties – my refusal to contemplate certain sexual acts… my reluctance even now to name them – is of any relevance. That isn’t inhibition, simply distaste.

I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to raise my voice. But this is very hard. I seem to be reliving my revelations, not merely relating them. I don’t know which is worse: your silence or Jonathan’s questions. He treated me with text-book tact and sympathy; and yet I could tell that it was my uncle who was his chief concern. It was as clear as when Mark recently made love and I sensed him stroking the contours of another man’s body: working from memory rather than touch. And I felt indignant; I was sure that if it’d happened to one of the boys in his parish he’d have been up in arms.

And I was in Hell; which I can authoritatively assert is not the simple state of mind so beloved of liberal theologians, but an underground oven worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. And its hub is a spit: a smouldering, scalding spit with a sharp, snagged spike on which I was twisted and turned and tortured, basted in hate and roasted in passion, whilst his hot sweat seeped on to my stomach like burning fat, and my skin cracked and crackled, and my soul…

Why are you putting me through this? Is it not enough to forgive and forget; must I remember and resent? You even prompt me to suspect my own resolution. There may be some things which are buried so deep, we do better to leave them undisturbed. If they’re that far down, it must be for a reason, like a consignment of nuclear waste. My uncle is my personal Hiroshima. And the memory leaves me scalded and scarred: a flash of blinding light and then the darkness of unending pain.

I loved him; and he abused my trust as much as he abused my body. He was my strong, safe uncle with the moustache as soft and bushy as his shaving brush – the cavalry moustache which I always found so incongruous in view of his reverence for the RAF. In the holidays I used to run down to the lodge before breakfast to watch him trim it. He’d stand at the sink bare-chested, with his braces hanging round his knees. And I was fascinated by the concentration of his shoulder-blades; his whole back appeared to frown… He was the only man I knew who wore braces; but then he was the only man I ever saw without a shirt. And at Edensor, apart from the servants with their subserviently scornful faces, he was the only man I ever saw at all.

I was ten years old. And my whole education had been designed to keep me in ignorance. Biology was simply nature study: squirrels and badgers rather than birds and bees. Whilst for once even the Bible afforded no help, as its imagery of seed and fruit and loins seemed to have more to do with the larder than with love. And since my abiding image of Sodom was of Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt, I presumed that the unspeakable sin must be curiosity – not what was shortly to be thrust on me.

It hurt. I was ten years old… I was six years old and I asked Uncle Sinclair why he’d never married. For me marriages were made in Heaven and honeymooned on Noah’s Ark. And he laughed and said that the only girl for him had married my father; which was the perfect reply. I wanted every man in the world to be in love with my mother; in those days when love was no hands and all heart. He used to put me between his – stand me between his legs and tell me that I reminded him so much of her… Oh no, you won’t lure me down that path. Believe me, it’s a blind alley. I’ve enough on my mind without that.

He claimed he was teaching me to wrestle. He’d previously taught me to arm-wrestle: always leading me to believe I was about to beat him, but then levering my elbow down to the table and holding it there for just a moment too long… So the prospect appeared unexceptionable, although the timing was something of a surprise. And I remember asking whether it wasn’t a little late at night. But he said no, late was best. And he told me that we had to take off our shirts, which we duly did. And he made a comment I don’t – I can’t – remember, to do with my being so skinny, before explaining that he’d start by showing me some holds.

But then he changed right before my eyes, like a piece of trick photography. My safe, solid, slightly stuffy uncle became a monster who was all fingernails and fangs. He turned both me and my world upside down. I choked… I bled. What made it still harder was that the part of me he seemed to be making the most of was that part of which I’d always been taught to be most ashamed: my ugly, fleshy, lavatorial part… And I pulled up my pants like a bloody bandage. And my bowels didn’t open for a week.

And at one stroke my vision became murkily incestuous. Instinctively I think I sensed some of the same incongruities in the sustaining myths of my childhood that Jonathan later exposed so publicly: the tree of life not just fertilised by a rotten apple, but fed by forbidden fruit. And yet my hold on life was far too fragile to admit dissension; and so I buried the confusions deep inside me, where there was neither explanation nor resolution – only dull, festering pain.

In fact he ought to count himself damn lucky that I’d decided not to turn him in. Although no doubt he’d have been let off with a derisory suspended sentence… Well, who would suspend mine? I’d been living it for fourteen years without remission. I’d been locked in my solitary shell as though I were the abuser; which, by the law of averages, or at least that of psychiatrists, I might have expected to be. But the only person I’d harmed was myself.

Not the only one, he said softly, and then looked away. But I told him that he should also lay his grievance at the same door. In which case, he asked, just as there were wheels within wheels, mightn’t there also be doors behind doors? He knew my uncle’s story; he’d heard his confession; I’d added nothing but the names. And yet he couldn’t regret them; for he was convinced that God had brought us together for a purpose… At which point, and despite considerable reservations, I agreed to his request.

Even so I stressed that it would have to be later in the week, as I was in no fit state. But then he dropped the second bombshell of the evening which, if not as violent nor as searing as the first, was utterly devastating nonetheless. When I’d picked up all the pieces of my life I’d failed to put two of the most elementary together. Those weren’t liver marks on the backs of his hands…

I’ll take these off. They’re beginning to steam up; and besides you’ve seen me in tears often enough before… I couldn’t take in what he’d said. I’d assumed as he’d offered me the drink that he was there as some sort of volunteer; I’d never admitted any other possibility. Then when I did, I felt infused with a great gust of fellow – or was it family? – feeling; as I pictured him forced to measure his days by the cracks in pavements, frail and friendless, ravaged at once from within and without. And I vowed there and then to turn my personal Hiroshima into my personal Eyam.

Jonathan hugged me – I thought once more of Krishnan – and then kissed me, a kiss of friendship but still a kiss, before going downstairs to fetch Uncle Sinclair. He was away so long that I wondered if he mightn’t already have left. And by the time I heard the knock on the door I’d had ample time to regain my composure; indeed so much that I was afraid I might be about to break down all over again. Then the door opened and he entered, unexpectedly alone.

He looked so much smaller. I don’t mean from my childhood memories; but he seemed to have shrunk a good six inches from the man I’d encountered earlier that night… like an ancient textile inadvertently exposed to the atmosphere, which had crumpled to dust. His eyes had become opalescent. I’d heard of people’s hair turning white with shock, but never till then their eyes. And they brimmed with tears, for which he stammered an apology. Trembling, I took his hand and we sat down.

I was lost for words and he seemed lost for speech altogether. But the mere fact of our presence was eloquent enough. He kept hold of my hand and gently stroked it as though he were pleating the bedclothes; and I saw just how ill he was. Gamely he tried to smile; and I couldn’t work out why I found it so disturbing. Until I realised that he was wearing a set of standardised false teeth.

My arm soon began to ache and my hand felt clammy; and yet I was desperate not to destroy the mood. I was amazed at how relaxed I felt, as though nothing in my life had ever touched me, let alone him; but I was aware that I had to preserve my composure at all costs. He kept repeating how well I looked; which I found strange, since whatever he may have done, it was fourteen years ago. Then it hit me that his main fear hadn’t been of discovery or even of denunciation, but that my presence at the group would reveal an indirect chain of infection that would reflect directly on him.

But I assured him of my good health. He was visibly relieved. Although he still seemed to hold himself responsible for the entire thrust of my sexuality. I denied it vigorously; if anything it would have been the other way round. While if it were the case, I’d consider he’d done me a favour; for otherwise I’d never have met Mark. And though my words were braver than my feelings, my voice must have carried conviction; since for the first time he laughed… And despite the overstatement, I truly believe what I said: I have to take responsibility for my own actions. I can no longer portray my life as some sort of patchwork made up of everyone else’s odds and ends.

He gained confidence and told me that there’d not been one day when he hadn’t thought of me – and then he checked himself; there’d been some days when he’d thought of nothing but the struggle to survive: the cold and the hunger and the aches and the pains. So he amended it to not one day on which he’d been able to think. And I said that that was over; and he replied quietly that time wasn’t as fixed as gravity. If he’d had the courage he’d have killed himself. Instead he’d just wandered the streets, taking refuge with the refuse. In his more maudlin moments he’d been able to convince himself that that was a juster punishment; but the truth was simply that he was too great a coward.

And yet such arguments had been superseded. He had such a short time left to live… I tried to contradict him, but he calmly held up the lesions on his hands… And whilst it was far too late in the day to imagine that he might ever die happy, he’d nevertheless be happy to die having been reunited with me. For apart from my mother, I’d been the one thing of value in his life.

Then why had he left? I asked. At the time what I’d found hardest to understand, and still, to be honest, to forgive, was his disappearance… that he should compound the crime with confusion: that he should just take off without a word. Other boys had books they failed to make sense of; I had a body. And I was left to piece it together from my ignorance and guilt.

Guilt, he asked incredulously, whatever for? As though he’d taken on all the guilt of the world the way that Christ had the sin. And I was amazed that he could be so blind; after all it’s been evident to you from the moment I sat down. I felt guilty about egging him on – and yet a far more appropriate word might be ‘appling’ – in the way that I constantly engineered moments of contact: scrapping and scrambling and swimming and even shaving. I remember once unbuttoning his shirt on the pretext of hearing his heart beat; if I wanted to hear someone’s heart beat, why didn’t I try my aunt’s? No, I provoked him beyond all endurance, coiling my trap as subtly and as supplely as a snake.

But he stared at me aghast and then rose up and pulled me to my feet, as though his words contained the authority of a gospel reading. I must never again think such a thing, he exclaimed. I’d given him no sign: none at all. Even if I never trusted another syllable anyone said, I must swear to believe that. He’d needed no persuasion, let alone provocation; he’d been drunk with self-disgust. It was pity he’d felt for me, not passion; for he knew perfectly well why I used to spend so much time at the lodge. It wasn’t him I was looking for but my father… And for a moment I took him literally and failed to understand… He was merely the next best thing, he added; although all too quickly he proved the worst.

He couldn’t conceive how I could ever have picked up such a wrongheaded notion. Had he had the least suspicion, he’d have damned the consequences and stayed put for however long it took to set me right… But I felt sure that my father thought the same… Had I discussed it with my father? he asked, in a voice pinched with panic. Of course not, I assured him; but clearly somebody must have seen what’d occurred and informed him, which was why he’d ordered him out of Edensor the very next day. And yet he’d been in no doubt as to who was the true offender. And so he’d never let me close to him again, but simply withdrawn into small talk and scorn.

How long had I believed that? he asked. And I had to admit that as far as I knew it was the first time I’d put any of it into words; nevertheless it’d become the central tenet of my private creed… My father knew nothing, he declared. He’d run away from himself and no one else. He was terrified that what he’d done once he could do again: begging for forgiveness on his knees and then attempting to take advantage of his position; whilst my reproach became a spur to self-loathing which aroused him even more than lust.

I heard his voice, but all I could assimilate was the assurance that my father didn’t know; and that therefore my guilt had been entirely of my own making. Then what else could have prompted his estrangement? If not disgust, was it rather disinterest? Had he simply wanted to walk away and forget? Oh no, he exclaimed with alarming vehemence; a man can never forget his son. He can forget anything else but not his son… And I suddenly had a burning insight into my uncle’s loneliness. He hadn’t been able to love me as a father; and yet the next best thing had proved the worst for him too. For the confusion of identities had in turn led to far more dangerous confusions; when he’d wanted to be touched one way and I another. And it’d been impossible to say where physicality ended, and sexuality began.

And I had no way to account for what he’d done to me: neither to understand him nor to love myself. I had no models, so I had to turn to myths. And I evolved my own myth of my essential corruption which came to parallel that of Adam’s Fall… But there was no Fall, either personal or universal. My uncle wasn’t the snake and I wasn’t Adam; he wasn’t Adam and I wasn’t the snake. Even Adam wasn’t Adam and the snake wasn’t the snake. There was no primeval innocence; and there is no original sin.

His assault had coerced my inexperience, not corrupted my innocence… And I finally appreciate the distinction between the words ‘innocent’ and ‘naive’. Which is not one that can be learned theoretically, but only in practice. Since however paradoxical it may sound, true innocence is the product of experience; it’s a state of mind, not a state of ignorance. And it won’t be found in any childhood garden, whether Edensor or its namesake; but rather in an uncompromising and an uncompromised acceptance of life.

And so at last both my myths can be discarded and with them the whole excess baggage of grief and guilt. Jonathan was right; St Augustine’s heresy has done far more harm than any of those which the Church has exerted all its efforts to extirpate: a heresy, moreover, which was the product of a deeply disturbed mind. For he was a man so revulsed by his youthful sins of the flesh that he deemed flesh itself a sin. And Christians ever since have paid the price of his self-disgust.

But there is no fundamental state of wickedness; and we don’t have a propensity to evil, merely the capacity for it. How can it be otherwise when we’re made in the image of God, with his two supreme faculties of creativity and moral responsibility? So perfection is neither a lost cause nor a lost paradise. The ideal may lie in Christ, but the potential is in ourselves.

I realise now why he was so keen I should confront my uncle, and you that I should my past. The key isn’t to ‘forgive and forget’, but to remember and forgive. And as I forgave him with all my heart I was richly rewarded. For though it may be more blessed to give than to receive, the greatest blessing of all must be to forgive. And in forgiving him I’m even starting to forgive myself… While Jonathan’s analogy held as true as his argument: there were doors behind doors behind doors. And suddenly they all flew open and the room was flooded with light.