Did Marco repent? Did he receive absolution? Has he now passed through Purgatory into a rococo paradise filled with Habsburgs, Schwarzenbergs and Frychts? Jomier knows about Heaven and Hell and Purgatory from his Catholic friend, Theodor Tate. Theo is quite unlike Marco Davenport. He goes to Mass every Sunday at the Brompton Oratory wearing twill trousers, a tweed jacket, brown brogue shoes, sometimes a waistcoat, always a tie. He is a Knight of Malta and a member of the Athenaeum: he and Jomier meet there for lunch from time to time. Jomier puts on a suit and travels up to Piccadilly. Jomier enjoys these outings. He likes London clubs such as Brooks’s, White’s, the Travellers, the Athenaeum – the grand rooms with pillars and porticos; the leather armchairs; the atmosphere of male exclusivity; the unctuous staff. Like his father, he had been a member of the Garrick. After the divorce he could no longer afford the subscription.
Theo can afford the subscription: the fogey runs a hedge fund and, by Jomier’s standards, is rich. He has no children. He has no wife. Jomier cannot decide whether Theo is single because he is not attracted to women, or because women are not attracted to him. Or both. Theo is tall, bald, with bulging short-sighted eyes. He talks precisely and thinks precisely: hence his success at managing a hedge fund. Is Theo gay? A repressed homosexual? Or a repressed heterosexual? Or nothing at all? Does he feel no urge to remove the clothes of a beautiful woman, nibble her nipples, plunge his penis into her entrails? Or has that shrewdness which anticipates the rise or fall in the price of copper, nickel and oil also made him realise that a wife, like a car, depreciates sharply and brings a poor return?
Jomier suspects that, were Theo to unleash his libido, he would like to caress the naked bodies of slim young men. But Theo is no more likely to unleash his libido than he is to wear an open-necked shirt. The tourniquet is tight. Like the priests at the Oratory, Theo condemns all forms of ‘disordered’ sex. This includes masturbation and the use of contraceptives. He tells Jomier that, just as there are natural laws that govern inanimate matter, so there are natural laws that govern human behaviour. Newton arrives at the law of gravity from the fact that an apple falls to the ground. Aquinas deduces that a man’s penis was created by God to inseminate the female of his species. The exchange of pleasure that creates a bond between the copulating couple is a secondary end. It is wrong to thwart God’s intentions, particularly his primary intentions. Moreover, were it to be admitted in principle that sex was a good thing in itself, it would open up a Pandora’s box. Why confine it to marriage? Why not have sex before marriage, outside marriage? Men with men? Women with women? Why not cottaging, sheep-shagging, or sex with consenting gorillas?
Jomier and Theo had rooms on the same staircase in their first year at Oxford. They had exchanged visits. Jomier had served cheap wine, Theo sherry out of a decanter. They had argued about religion. They still argue about religion. The position of neither has changed. Theo would like to convert Jomier and Jomier to convert Theo. But convert him to what? Jomier is aware that his agnosticism is a spongy alternative to Theo’s clear-cut Christian beliefs; but he feels he is in tune with the zeitgeist whereas Theo is not. He watches Theo eat liver and bacon in the dining room of the Athenaeum and tries to judge what in his friend is genuine conviction and what pose. Is Theo’s medieval morality adopted to match his fogeyish attire? Is Theo a reincarnation of G. K. Chesterton? Or Hilaire Belloc? Theo admires both writers though he is embarrassed by some of the things Belloc said about the Jews. Jomier tells Theo that his views are anachronistic; Theo retorts, quoting Chesterton, that the great advantage of Catholicism is that it saves a man from being a child of his time. He reminds Jomier of their contemporaries at Oxford who were Existentialists, Logical Positivists, Deconstructionists, Marxists, Maoists, Marcusards, Laingites, Reichians, Deridans and quotes St Paul: ‘The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew.’ Jomier thinks back to the philosophical fashions that have come and gone in his lifetime and finds it hard to disagree.
Jomier has never felt the need of a philosophy – least of all a philosophy of life. He is, after all, a lawyer and there are now no principles behind the law beyond Rabelais’ ‘Fay ce que vouldras’ – ‘Do as you please so long as what you do doesn’t prevent me from doing what I please’. Theo would like our laws to be based upon Christian principles as they were in the Middle Ages. He tells Jomier that the rot started with the Enlightenment – with Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau and co. – and spread slowly but inexorably via Marx and Freud and Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells to a point in the 1960s when finally the whole tree was rotten and came crashing down.
Jomier disagrees. There has always been a consistent principle behind the law – the interests of the legislators which by and large matched those of the rich. Nabobs were ennobled. Poachers were hanged. Adultery does more harm to society than poaching or shoplifting but when it became a favoured pastime of the powerful it ceased to be a crime.
Jomier recalls that enticement was a crime until the 1970s: a man could be prosecuted for suborning another man’s wife. Should it still be a crime? Jomier thinks of Max and says yes. And adultery? Jomier thinks of the weekend with Sandra and thinks no. Theodor remains non-committal. When it comes to enticement and adultery, Theodor knows that Jomier has an axe to grind. He knows about Sandra and Tilly and Max. Theodor could write a doctoral thesis on Jomier’s lovelife since his was the shoulder Jomier cried on at the time. Theodor listens but does not condemn. He is like a priest in the confessional. Jomier often wonders why he is not a priest. He has put the question to Theodor. ‘I’m not up to it.’ What does he mean? That he has some secret vice? That he is too fond of Mammon – of adding zeros to the digits in his hedge-fund account? He presses Theodor. Theodor gives a laugh instead of an answer. Jomier presses him further. ‘Dominus non sum dignus . . .’ ‘Lord, I am not worthy.’ Theodor often drops phrases in liturgical Latin, or illustrates a point with a Latin quip. Mea culpa, mens rea, nota bene: Latin – the language for priests and pedants and lawyers and fogeys just as German is the language for highbrows and French the language for sex.