Tomorrow! One more day!
Worth Abbey turns out to be undergoing a restoration. Roddy refuses to be dismayed. Is he too not about to be restored? The taxi from Balcombe station delivers him to what appears to be a building site. An immense scaffolding tower rises up from a small village of Portakabins clustering round the skirts of the abbey church. This structure, built in the seventies out of beige-coloured brick, is circular rather than the traditional cruciform, and has a roof shaped like a flattened cone. Theater in the round, once a modern approach to drama, now itself a period piece.
He makes his way to the entrance to the church, and finds himself in a long passage-like space called the Narthex. Here for the duration of the restoration works the larger religious services are held. Roddy has come for one of the humblest services, the sung office called Compline, with which the monks’ day ends.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.
This, the famous “Nunc Dimittis,” the Canticle of Simeon, is the heart of Compline. As the day ends and we release ourselves into the night that is also our death, we pray to be allowed to go in peace. Roddy is not a believer, or at least not an orthodox believer, but these words cast a spell over him. Simeon speaks them as he beholds the infant Jesus, and is reconciled to death. But departure takes many forms, as does salvation. Roddy too is on the eve of a journey.
A man in a red polo shirt and faded jeans appears, and busies himself with some electrical cables that run from the altar microphone. Roddy asks him what time Compline will be sung.
“Compline?” He seems puzzled.
“The monks have a little service at the end of the day?” suggests Roddy.
“Oh,” says the man, “you mean Night Prayer. That’ll be in the Unity Room. Round on the east side.”
Roddy leaves the Narthex and walks round the church, past the builders yard, as far as a gate on which is painted: Monastery, Private. Beyond the gate lies a wide, peaceful, uninhabited valley. He can see no sign of the Unity Room. The name irritates him. Unity of who, with what? This passion for all to be one, this urge to merge, strikes him as adolescent, the rhetoric of football teams and army regiments. “We’re all in this together, lads!” We are not all in this together, he thinks fiercely to himself. I am not like you. As for Christian unity, you either have convictions or you don’t. The Catholic Church he admires is the self-confident monolith that calls itself universal. This late twentieth-century nervous relativism is undignified. All faiths are not one. Religion makes demands. What you believe should change how you live. Salvation can only be reached through sacrifice.
So muses Roddy, as yet unaffiliated to any church, while nosing around the scaffolding and the stacks of cement blocks and the skips for the way to the Unity Room. He finds it at last, its glass door locked, a sign on the inside saying: Night Prayer 9 p.m. He has half an hour or so to wait.
He wanders the grounds, which seem to consist largely of car parks, and so comes upon a sign that reads: Quiet Garden. He passes through a wooden picket gate into a long narrow strip of grass bounded by a clipped yew hedge. A gap in the hedge, over which droops a long-leafed acacia tree, leads into a series of hedge-walled lawns, each with an island tree. To the south lies the immense pastoral landscape, which because it was barred by a gate saying: Monastery, Private, he likes to imagine as the paradise of the monks.
Roddy has made this trip in part to create a pretext. His true motive is to install himself in the Broads’ comfortable Sussex house the night before Diana joins him there. But now that he’s here in the monastery grounds with time to meditate, he’s glad of the opportunity. He strolls through the beech-walled rooms of the Quiet Garden gazing at the golden evening sky, and sees there the coming apocalypse. Because his own life journey is carrying him toward an explosive rebirth—tomorrow! One more day!—he responds to all that is revolutionary in the Christian message.
Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, nay: but rather division.
The search for God is not a nostalgic reversion to a past age. It’s a shattering of the vanities. Come face to face with the blazing heart of truth and nothing can ever be the same again.
This Laura knows.
“You’re really going on adventures, aren’t you, Roddy?”
He heard it in her voice when she said that: she wants to share the journey. She feels it as he feels it, the tingling in the air, the shining in the sky. This is the dawn of a new age.
“Laura.”
Alone in the Quiet Garden he speaks her name out loud, wanting to make her real. He feels an overwhelming compulsion to talk about her, to tell his story to some third party; but there is no one.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Surprising how much of his half-hearted public-school Christian education has stuck. Or perhaps it’s the culture, a grab-bag of resonant phrases that float to the surface of the mind in the manner of a T.S. Eliot poem. What was Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land”? Something jokey but not funny. “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Ezra Pound put a stop to that nonsense. But Eliot understood that the big moments in life require big words. Lacking grandeur in our impoverished modern age we raid prestige from the past. Doesn’t have to be religious, of course. Anything planted deep enough will do.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
So interweaving the love of God with the love of Laura, Roddy strolls the monastery lawns, and the summer sun descends over the woods and meadows. He will stay for Night Prayer, as they choose to call it, then phone for a taxi to carry him to Edenfield.
A distant bell rings, signaling the approach of the hour. At almost the same moment his phone buzzes. It’s Henry, at Haywards Heath station, offering him a lift.
“Laura told me you’re at Worth, and coming to us for the night.”
“Isn’t it horribly out of your way? I was going to get a taxi.”
“No problem,” says Henry. “I can be with you in twenty minutes.”
This is just the time it will take to attend Compline. They arrange to meet in the car park. Roddy hurries to the Unity Room. The glass door is now open and inside the monks have already gathered, a dozen or so of them, taking the chairs that line three walls of the large space. On the fourth side stand three rows of maroon upright chairs for visitors. Roddy sits quietly at the back.
The room is bleak: brown brick walls support a high tray roof of steel girders and timber cladding. Lights in the shape of flying saucers hang down. In the center of the space a patterned carpet forms an island bearing a lectern and six immense candles. The monks sing the psalms briskly, as if this is business to be done. Roddy settles his mind for prayer, but finds instead that all he can think about is Laura.
He’s decided the words he’s going to say and how he’s going to say them. He’ll choose a moment when they’re alone. He’ll touch her hand—touch is important, this is the contact that once made will never be broken—and she’ll look at him. The look is even more important. The look will be their mutual admission. So after the touch, after the look, the first words he speaks will not be the first communication. They will enter mid-conversation. He will say, “What are we going to do?” This claims nothing but declares everything. Her answer is not important. She may say, “There’s nothing we can do.” He’s ready for that. Tomorrow is the beginning of his new life, but for a while the new life will have to remain hidden within the shell of the old. There’s no hurry.
She’ll be afraid. She’ll be less ready than he is to cause pain to others. There’ll be long hours of talk. But in the end she’ll come to see what he has seen. It’s no kindness to live a lie. Our partners are trapped, as we are, in false lives. Our act of love will set them free.
He hears the scraping of chairs and realizes with a start that the short service of prayer has ended and the monks are leaving. Somehow he managed to miss the “Nunc Dimittis” entirely. Roddy follows, and finds that outside night has fallen.
He walks slowly up the slope toward the car park, wondering what it must be like to be a monk. The black robe they wear, that falls to mid-ankle, is both comical and magnificent. Such a dress must change a man. Roddy imagines putting on a monk’s habit, and appearing in it before his family. They would laugh, but they would also be afraid. A man who dresses like that is beyond the reach of scorn or shame.
A dazzle of headlights approaches. Henry’s voice calls out.
“Here you are! Hop in.”
The odd thing is Roddy really likes Henry. Though maybe it’s not so odd, since presumably Laura likes him too. Henry is one of the few people with whom he’s ever been able to have a proper conversation.
“So what’s this all about?” says Henry as he swings the car round the one-way system past the school buildings. “Laura says you’ve been in search of silence.”
“Yes,” says Roddy. “Change of pace, and so forth.”
“So did you find it?”
He heads out of the grounds onto the long straight road.
“Silence turns out to be quite hard to get,” says Roddy. “I suppose I need more practice. My brain won’t shut up.”
“I go on walks,” says Henry. “High up on the Downs. Best of all where you see the Downs with the sea beyond. I find that shuts me up.”
It strikes Roddy that this is a late hour to be returning home.
“Are you usually so late getting back?”
“I’ve been having meetings about a possible new job. Nothing very conclusive. I’m not even sure I want it. But something is better than nothing, I suppose.”
This is all the prompting Roddy needs.
“That’s not necessarily true,” he says. “If you’re trapped in the wrong something, it may be better to go for nothing.”
“But I’m not ready to pack it in yet, any more than you are. I’m only fifty-four.”
“I’m not talking about packing it in,” says Roddy. “I’m talking about changing your life. One life ends, another life begins.”
He’s discovering as he speaks that he has a powerful compulsion to tell his brother-in-law everything. Of course he mustn’t, he won’t, do anything of the sort. But there’s a thrilling frisson of danger as he skirts the edges of revelation.
“Oh, yes, I remember now,” Henry says. “Apparently you’re looking for God.”
“That’s Diana. She only understands words of one syllable.” Henry gives a gratifying snort of laughter at that. “I don’t have a name for what I’m looking for. All I know is there’s more to life than I’ve been getting.”
Henry says, “There could be less, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m becoming a bit of a fan of humility. Did Diana tell you we went to a Buckingham Palace garden party yesterday?”
“No. I had no idea.”
They’re driving down a treelined road. Henry’s gaze is on the beam of his headlights, dipping and undipping as cars approach and pass.
“It was quite a revelation for me. Not so much the royal side of things, though that was actually rather impressive in its way. It was the other guests. It’s a very odd experience being at a party where no one knows anyone else. You realize then that your life consists of meeting people in cliques, and that all the time you’re busy calculating, Am I in this group or not? Do they respect me or despise me? What do I have to do to win their approval? When you all meet as individuals, something quite different happens. You engage with strangers on their own terms. I suppose it’s a bit like being in some faraway unpopulated land. Anyone you meet is automatically your friend, because there’s no one else. Plus, of course, everyone who’s been invited to the garden party is tremendously proud to be there, which creates a bond. So we got talking to various people, and somehow it made me feel how much goodwill there is in the world, and how we so arrange things that most of the time we never see it. I don’t suppose I’m making much sense. Actually it felt like a revelation. It was like seeing a different possible version of the world. One in which people actually want to make each other happy.”
Roddy is not interested in the dynamics of a royal garden party, but he seizes on this last suggestion.
“There is a different version of the world in which we can be happy,” he says. “I’m sure of it. But to find it we must allow ourselves to seek happiness. Most people are too afraid to seek their own happiness.”
“Do you think so?” says Henry. “Isn’t that rather perverse? I mean, why would anyone not go for what makes them happy?”
He isn’t disagreeing, Roddy can hear it in his voice. He’s exploring.
“Because we’re afraid of hurting others,” Roddy says.
“Maybe happiness isn’t after all our primary need.” Henry pursues his own unfolding thoughts. “Maybe our primary need is respect. The need to be validated by others. And to achieve that we’ll do things that may well bring us misery and suffering, even death. Look at the martyrs. Look at the suicide bombers.”
This isn’t quite where Roddy wants to go.
“But why is it,” he says, “that so many people accept a life they know won’t make them happy? Why do they endure what is really only half a life?”
“It’s what you say,” says Henry. “It’s fear. Why haven’t I sat down and written the book I’ve been wanting to write all my life? Fear. I’d rather do a good job I half-like than write a bad book. And I know what you say to that. You say, How do you know it’ll be a bad book if you don’t try? Of course, I don’t know. But I do know I don’t want to be one of those sad types who followed their dream, and the dream died on them, and now they’re full of envy and self-hatred.”
On the main road south he kicks down on the accelerator.
“Won’t be long now.”
“You say you’d rather do a good job you half-like,” says Roddy. “Would you choose to live a life you half-like? Because I think that’s the real question. I’m just a couple of years older than you, Henry, and I totally agree with you, I’m not ready to pack it in. But on the other hand, I have to face the fact that I have a limited time left. I can’t put a number on it, but if you count the years I’m likely to stay physically fit, you’re talking about twenty-five at the most. So the question becomes, do you live those twenty-five years fully, or do you go on half-living?”
“That’s what I mean by humility,” says Henry. “If we can only get past this bloody status competition that makes us all do everything in our power to intimidate each other, then we can start to actually enjoy each other’s company.”
“I’m talking about love,” says Roddy, making a determined bid to control the conversation.
“Well, yes, I suppose I am too,” says Henry. “You could say love is the acceptance of another person as he is, and status competition is the use of another person as an instrument to boost self-esteem.”
“No, I mean love between a man and a woman.”
“Oh,” says Henry, surprised. “Okay.”
“The love between a man and a woman is, I believe, the core energy of the universe. It’s the prime act of creation. Of course, there’s sex. But I go further. I believe we are made to exist in balance with a lover of the opposite sex, and without that we live only half-lives. Tolstoy believed this. Dickens believed this.”
Roddy does not elaborate, but both Tolstoy and Dickens, trapped in loveless marriages, fell in love with their wives’ sisters. It was practically the norm in Victorian times, to find you’d married the wrong sister. They even had a law forbidding subsequent marriage to the wife’s sister if the wife died, they were so afraid of husbands in this predicament committing murder. Henry is a historian, he’d know all about that. However, Roddy does not think it appropriate to speak of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act this evening.
Predictably Henry finds Roddy’s theories comic, because Roddy himself does not conform to the stereotype of the lover.
“I don’t know what to say, Roddy. You turn out to be a closet romantic.”
“There, you see. You want to laugh at me. But I know I’m right.”
“No, no, I’m not laughing at you at all. I’m just caught off-guard. You’re the last person . . . I suppose it’s just not the picture I’ve had up to now of you and Diana.”
“Who said anything about Diana?”
Henry drives in silence for a few moments. Roddy feels his heart beating. The closer he gets to confession, the more excited he becomes.
“So what are you saying, Roddy?”
“Probably I’m jumping the gun a bit,” says Roddy. “It doesn’t do to force things. I just decided some time ago to stop struggling against life. I decided to let it carry me the way it wants to go. But I can tell you that there are big changes on the way.”
“Big changes. Right. I’m not sure I should know any more.”
But Roddy presses on, doggedly pursuing his goal.
“I’ve realized recently it’s not about right and wrong. That’s part of the ego world, in which we imagine that we’re in control. But once you see how it really is, once you let the ego die, then the stream takes you where it wills. That’s when you become free. And of course I need hardly add, only a free man has the capacity to love.”
“Let the ego die,” says Henry. “I think that may be what I mean by humility. But the stream—I’m not sure what this stream is. Is it God?”
Roddy shakes his head irritably. He doesn’t want to talk about God.
“God is only a name. Let’s say there’s a force that governs all things. You might as well call it love. Though love is also intensely personal. Love presents itself in our life in the form of individual human beings.”
“I think you’re losing me again,” says Henry. “This is all getting a little too cosmic for me.”
“But it’s not cosmic at all,” says Roddy, frustrated. “There’s nothing cosmic about a man loving a woman. Well, maybe there is, but you’ve still got a real flesh-and-blood basis for it. This man sitting in one armchair, this woman sitting in another armchair. A fire burning in the grate. A cold winter landscape outside the window.”
“What?”
Roddy realizes he’s overstepped the mark.
“Just an image.”
“Where do armchairs come in?”
“Don’t worry about it. All I mean is, love comes down to Person A and Person B, in a real time, in a real place. And all we can do about that is say yes or no. Maybe not even that.”
“You know what you are, Roddy? You’re a fatalist.”
“Or a man in love.”
Henry hesitates. “Better not tell me anything you don’t want Laura to know. I’m not good at keeping things from her.”
“Laura’ll know soon enough,” says Roddy.
He feels the most delicious shiver all down his body. Then he says her name again.
“I don’t think Laura will be too surprised.”