22

We were having problems we hadn’t had before.

Down-and-outs. Charitable appeals. Flag days.

But mainly down-and-outs.

Although in Birmingham, where we lived now, there weren’t as many destitute and homeless as there would be later, not nearly, there was still a distressingly large number. I felt a need to give, and to give substantially. I knew I would sometimes be duped but this seemed unimportant. “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” I wanted—no, felt driven—to act out the teachings of Jesus as fully as I could. I didn’t wait to have hands held out to me in want, I searched for those who looked as though they needed help. No special virtue here, I simply couldn’t stop myself. In fact, in some ways I felt it was very far from being a virtue. Witness the dissension it provoked at home.

“But this is madness. We are getting into debt.”

She was always accusing me of madness, though this took many forms. Prison-visiting, “when you can’t even find the time to visit your own parents!” Helping out in missions, “until you’re practically sleepwalking and no doubt thoroughly in the way of those whose job it is!” Giving shelter to derelicts, “who might steal everything we have, or be sick on our Persian rug, or even murder us while we sleep—though on these occasions, as you very well know, I never do sleep! Not that you ever care about that, naturally!”

“And not only are we getting into debt,” she added now, “we are getting steeply into debt! Frighteningly so! What a fine example to our children!”

She had been talking, of course, only about financial management, but inadvertently had gone straight to the nub of it. When I was out with my children—and I was out with them as often as I could be, despite her taunts about not visiting my parents (which I didn’t believe justified)—when I was out with my children I neither repressed this urge towards giving, nor exaggerated it. Actually, all four of them put it down to ‘Daddy being in one of his crazy moods’, a phrase they had possibly picked up from Geneviève herself. But whereas Anne and Philip would speak about it with me, and sometimes shyly hold out a coin on their own account, to the ‘poor people who just aren’t as lucky as we are’, Jacqueline and Arthur often appeared uncomfortable, Arthur even more so than his sister. “Don’t, Daddy—don’t! It makes us look so silly. And Mummy says they only drink it.” Later I heard Philip say to him, “If they have to drink money they really are very poor people!” and out of the corner of my eye I saw the six-year-old Arthur—having first decided, erroneously, that my attention was engaged elsewhere—give him a pinch.

Philip was three. He was our youngest and our last. Geneviève had put her foot down about having any more—and indeed I had even had a fight to secure Philip. I wasn’t sure what I’d have done if she had continued adamant; his life had been more crucial to me than Arthur’s—although in a vastly different way. He was precisely the same Philip as before, good-humoured, generous, funny, endlessly endearing. We enjoyed a rapport, he and I, which I knew to be very special but which I didn’t feel in the least guilty about. Clearly, I tried to keep it secret.

We had other problems, Geneviève and I, again related to money, or partly so. Partly related to prestige. Not all that much related to education.

“Darling. How would you feel about our keeping the children at home and educating them ourselves?”

I’d realized this would be contentious but I hadn’t known how to lead up to it in easy stages. It wasn’t as though the three who were already at school were unhappy there—bullied or repressed or friendless. It wasn’t as though they weren’t doing well and getting good reports. They just weren’t doing as well, obviously, as if they’d been getting a lot more individual attention. “Wouldn’t you like the thought,” I said, “of being able to control our children’s progress? Academically?”

“No. I should hate it. I should find it terrifying.”

“One person on his own maybe. But the two of us together. Think how enriching it could be: widening our horizons, drawing us closer, all the time teaching us something new.”

“Why, don’t you feel we’re close now?”

“What I meant was—it could form yet a further bond between us.”

“No, you don’t feel we’re as close as we should be, do you?”

“Geneviève, I love you. Very much. You know I do.”

“Pooh! You love everybody.”

“That’s nonsense. But don’t let’s get sidetracked. We were talking about the children.”

“No. I think you were talking about Arthur.”

“Darling, all our children. I haven’t got a particular preference for Arthur…except in some ways. I have a particular preference for each of our children…in some ways.”

“What about Anne, for instance?”

I hesitated.

“The way she buys us presents for no special reason. The way she’s always wanting to give us small surprises. A dozen things.”

“And Jacqueline?”

“Oh—Jacqueline. The way she looks like you; the way she walks about in your shoes, little coquette, and looks so very pleased with herself…so mignonne and adorable. The way she’s so determined and will stand up to anything, large dogs, angry parents, but then will suddenly get very shy as well…” My grin broadened. “Why do I have this strange idea you might be testing me?”

“Perhaps because you always think that, in the end, everything comes back to you.”

“Ouch!”

“You always rely on your charm to get you your own way. Your own way in everything.”

I wasn’t sure that I could see any connection. “But, darling, won’t you please try to stick to the subject? Which is about teaching our kids at home.”

“Ethan, you’re not being serious about that? No, you can’t be!” She stirred her coffee for the second time. “In any case. A partnership, you said. But you meant you. Right? Basically, you meant you. Yet how could you ever stay at home long enough to give a proper education?”

“Well, that brings us to my next point.” I announced this, wishing I had a little more of my second daughter’s fearlessness.

My next point involved leaving the Church. Leaving the Church involved moving to rented property probably inferior—greatly inferior—to that which we’d grown used to. I had already been asking questions about possible night work in hospices and hostels—hostels, say, catering for ex-offenders—or in refuges or old people’s homes. Geneviève would also need to take a job. None of this would be easy. But I hadn’t envisaged it as impossible.

“No, I refuse to talk about it. I refuse! Now you really have taken leave of your senses.”

“Geneviève, this means a lot to me. Right or wrong, you can’t dismiss it out of hand.”

“We’re nearly at the end of your second curacy. Nearly there. Your being a vicar means a lot to me. All those years of study. (Which, perhaps you need to be reminded, my father mainly paid for!) All those platitudes. All those expressions of…?”

“Piety?”

I offered the word grimly.

“Pretensions of caring.”

“No, I do care. I care very much. But there are other curates, other vicars. Our children have only one father and I genuinely believe I’ve a duty to them which transcends—”

“And what about your duty to me?”

I looked down into my own coffee cup.

“Because,” she said, “please glance around you! We’re surrounded by people with young families. But the fathers are normal loving fathers who want the best for their children—like we all do—yet don’t expect their wives to give up everything, go out to work, have no fun, never see their husbands…” Since we now lived very close to a large housing estate where there was much poverty and drunkenness and wife-beating—in stark contrast to the parish where we’d started out in Nottingham—I felt her picture was not a fully impartial one, any more than was her subsequent comment. “They’d be amazed to hear a smart middle-class person like you thinking for one second of taking on anything so far beneath him. Working as a porter—or a cleaner—or a janitor! So immature, so irresponsible! And what would you suggest for me? To superintend a public toilet?”

This was quite a diatribe and there were occasional disadvantages to Geneviève’s having so quickly acquired such very good English.

So I let the subject drop, and continued to pray about it and try to be thankful. But Geneviève remained immutable. I couldn’t believe that God wanted my marriage ruined for the sake of a unilateral decision which was in any case debatable. And why had he encouraged me to enter the ministry in the first place if I was only going to let down so many who’d been relying on me? Certainly my children hadn’t been relying on me, not for their education.

So that same September, September 1970, I became a fully-fledged vicar, with my new incumbency in Dorset. Geneviève was happy and busy and full of common-sense supportiveness; there was no question but that I’d done the right thing. Friends from Amersham, Nottingham and Birmingham came for the induction, and Geneviève’s parents flew in from Paris, and from London Johnny brought not only Mary, his wife of six months, but Gordon Leonard as well, whom he had bumped into one day in Selfridges. Gordon, on hearing of the event, had thought it would be fun to join in and had phoned me that very night. In fact, to be completely accurate, it was Gordon who’d brought Johnny and Mary, in his latest Porsche. And it would have been fun…well, to an extent it was fun…all of us making do together in our grand new vicarage, rustling up a totally impromptu supper. But my father had just died from lung cancer (his funeral had been eleven days earlier) and though Mum came to Bridport—driven there by Max, with Gwen in the back seat—still, the fact that my dad couldn’t be with us inevitably cast something of a blight, at least as far as she and I were concerned, and probably Gwen and Max as well. “He was so proud of you at Southwell and later at your priesting,” said my mother. “And he was so looking forward to being here with us this afternoon!” I told her I was sure he had been here with us this afternoon but I suppose she saw this only as some typically churchy remark. Anne, too, said that it wasn’t the same without Granddad, Jacqueline agreed, and Philip climbed onto my mother’s lap and put his arms about her neck and looked into her eyes and said, “I loved my granddad!” I said, “Yes, I know, Pip, we all did. Didn’t we, Art?” and Arthur said, “‘My daddy said his daddy’s dead, the moment I got out of bed!’ Granny, I want to be a poet when I’m older, and that’s a poem I’ve made up.” I found I had to restrain myself, the vicar so recently returned from his induction and from the small party thrown afterwards in his honour—the small party at which he’d spoken a few honeyed words to every member of his parish then present in the church hall. Had to restrain himself from giving his older son a fair old clip round the ear.