19

WHAT A STRANGE TIME, that last Christmas before my father died. First the Gathering, then my poor behaviour on Christmas Eve …

Christmas Eve began well. Jane and I went to see Max, who was at home for two days over the holiday. We were both curious to meet his new girlfriend, who had come north with him, his first after a drought of two years. Max had told me about her on the phone. “Her name is … Fiona Raymond. The short version is—she’s ten years older than us. She’s written … comic novels, now she makes documentary films. Met her at a Times party. She’s just back from Romania. You’ll like her.”

Even with their adult son home, the Thurlows seemed to be hard at work in their separate studies. Max opened the front door, and in the familiar way the study doors on either side opened almost simultaneously, as in a West End farce, or perhaps a masque representing dawn, and Colin and Belinda emerged. Max, always high-spirited, generally became buoyant and irresponsible when forced to spend time with his parents. “Christ, let’s … get out of here,” he whispered to me on the front step, and suddenly we were little boys again, and the running truancy of those days came back to me.

I set my face to the customary mask for Belinda and Colin—a slightly gloomy, scholarly sobriety, my eyes halfclosed in an analytical squint, my mouth a little pursed in the Bunting style—and shook hands with them both. Colin was in an agony: his study door was open, and he kept on glancing at it with mournful indulgence. Obviously he was calculating how many minutes he had to sacrifice to the wasteful frivolity of human encounter. Fiona was introduced. Max was right, I did like her; she was blond, with rather dry, lined skin that seemed to have been written on. She had an appealing, open, frank manner, and a deep voice that made everyone think she smoked. “I don’t, actually, but with Max around I don’t need to.”

We escaped Colin and Belinda, and drove down the wintry road to Vaughan House, Mrs. Millington’s old place, now the treasure of Philip Zealy, the crooked businessman from Newcastle. The weather was cold and dead in that way that Christmas seems to reserve for itself. Everything I could see was drained of life; the grey bricks of the small houses were dead to colour, and lucid with cold: the tight sharp windows, the certain front doors, the black pavement, the river renewed by icy apprentice streams from the hills, all dead. We passed a wooden viewing bench, now alienated by the season. After a few minutes, we reached Vaughan House. It is very large, set well back from the road, and unusual for the area because built out of red brick rather than the local stone. A huge, undisciplined lawn stretches from the front of the house to the clear fast little river, the same one that comes sharp and novel from the hills, goes quickly through Sundershall, and then grows wide and mud-delayed as it reaches Durham. We stopped to gaze. I told Fiona and Jane that Max and I had always loved Vaughan House.

“The Pekineses,” said Max.

“The Pekineses indeed, with the extraordinary names.”

“It was always said that Mrs. Millington used to give overnight guests a dog to take to bed, for warmth … Animal hot water bottles,” said Max.

“Well, now it’s Zealy’s to do whatever he wants with it. I’m sure he’ll put efficient heating in.”

On a whim, we drove to Durham for lunch, where we ate at a very bad restaurant—“there being no other kind in Durham,” as Max remarked. Fiona told us about her work. She had written six comic novels, superstitiously finishing each on her birthday, one a year. But she decided to stop writing when the reviewers began to write of each new book after her second that”this is not Fiona Raymond’s best novel.” This sentence had come up again and again.

“I got absolutely bloody sick of reading ‘this is not her best novel, this is not her best novel.’ I felt like shouting to reviewers at parties: ‘Tell me which bloody novel was my best!’ So there were two conclusions, then,” she said, with pleasing crispness. “I once wrote a book that was my best—presumably my first—and I can’t match it. Or I have not yet written that best book yet, and that is why no one ever mentions its title. For a while I believed the latter, and it got me up in the morning. Faint praise can be surprisingly energizing, it turns out! But slowly, oh, I don’t know, over a period of a couple of years, I started to believe the former, and I got depressed about it all. I could see a dismal career stretching out for decades, books and books and books, with each one received in exactly the same way: ‘This is not her best novel.’ The books weren’t the biggest thing for me, anyway.”

“And since then …” said Max fondly, in a leading way.

“Yes, since then I’ve been doing this other thing—mak—ing documentaries, which I sort of slid into while I was doing my last book. That one was set in Monaco, and I did a short film about gambling.”

“Fiona’s come back from Romania with an extraordinary film,” said Max. “About Romanian orphans. Terrible and harrowing. No one in the West knows the full extent of it. We all need to do … something, whatever we can, about this.”

“I’ve seen some of that on the news. Awful. But you can count me out of that,” I said. “I’m sure your film is brilliant, but I’m too weak for that kind of thing. Oh no, I couldn’t bear it. Fortunately we don’t have a video, so I may be spared it anyway.”

After lunch we took Fiona, who had not visited Durham before, to the cathedral. The building rose up before us with black wings of stone. As we crossed the broad apron of grass in front of the cathedral, I reflected that the monks and masons who built it so long ago could not have foreseen a time when many or most of its visitors did not believe in God. Yet perhaps they did foresee that time; for what was the purpose of this sheer enormity except as a kind of insurance against the scepticism of futurity? Here we were, unbelievers at the end of the twentieth century, still bowing our heads before its size, and throughout Europe were these great flying buildings which had lasted longer than God, flying like the flags of countries that had disappeared.

Back at Sundershall, we tried to get Max and Fiona to come to dinner at the vicarage, but Max said that he was at home for such a short time that he should stay at The Oratory and “take the medicine in one … quick shot.” They would come over later, though, after dinner. By the time Jane and I arrived at the vicarage Uncle Karl had arrived. Karl always came to stay for a week over Christmas; his regular visit was one of the indices of my childhood. When I was young, I didn’t understand why he would not attend the Christmas services. I used to slouch in the festive church, on Christmas morning, the place crowded with villagers. What a boyish feeling of anticipation and excitement: I liked the service, but I wanted it to end, I willed the hymns to their close, longed for the organ to cease its metal mimicry, urged on each prayer and waited for the divine moment at the end when Father opened the heavy dungeon-door of the church entrance and let the light, swelling all morning in the porch, fall into the church in spreading fathoms. I could not imagine, in those days, anyone in the world not having Christmas. Surely there was no child who was not getting Christmas presents, who was not going to run home over cold earth “hard as iron” to a lunch of turkey or goose and roast potatoes—and brussels sprouts, those funny tattered turbans of green leaves. Yet Uncle Karl was not beside me in church, Uncle Karl was not celebrating Christmas. What on earth was he doing at home, while everyone else was at church?

Now, of course, as an adult, I side with Uncle Karl, and would rather laze around the house in a secular maunder, helping myself to Christmas nuts and liqueurs, while everyone else crowds into church and imitates the credulous shepherds who, two thousand years ago, saw a great light in the sky and fell to their knees.

Karl used to drive up from London in a red MG with a creaking chassis, but this time he came in his latest car, a big blue Mercedes, whose twin exhausts reduced the massive engine to a siphoned tremble. It was a treat to see him, but he quickly disappeared with Peter, his real quarry. While Mother was cooking in the kitchen, and Jane was chatting with Father and Karl in the sitting room, I went upstairs to our bedroom, on the pretext of “working on the Ph.D.” Instead, I lay on the bed and started reading one of those religious apologists who get me so angry. They’re all the same. They admit that evil and suffering exist, that the existence of evil and suffering may constitute a challenge to God’s goodness and power—and then they just stop! Like Kierkegaard, like Simone Weil, shaking on the very edge of blasphemy, they stop the direction of their argument, in the same incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary way that a spider, wandering across the ceiling, will stop moving at a certain point for an hour or two, or even for good. And watching the insect, we think: Why stop there?

Having correctly described a world of meaningless suffering, these thinkers assert: Well, God is love, God didn’t create anything except for love itself, and the means to love. Therefore, affliction and suffering must also be forms of love. It is a “privilege” to suffer. Ah yes, and here it comes: the very image of affliction, Christ on the Cross, is also the very image of God’s love. God suffers, too, you see. He suffered on the Cross. He suffered, and suffers, with us.

From the bed, I could see that it was already dark, and only four o’clock in the afternoon. Those awful end-ofyear days in Sundershall, jammed down into the very boots of the year, where the light comes in rationed steps only, between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon—I won’t forget those days. Now I looked out of the window, and saw that it was beginning to rain, and felt a sadness come over me. And anger. The Cross, the Cross, how much we hear about the Cross. Christ suffered with us on the Cross. The Cross is at the heart of Christianity. The Cross is the image of pain and of victory, of life and of eternal life. Well, I reject the Cross; I stay clear of the Cross! I make a cross of my fingers, as the hero does in the Dracula movies, at the Cross, to make it wither and die.

But I should tell you about how I disgraced myself. Still thinking about these questions, and the doomed, grotesque effort to make suffering meaningful, I fell asleep, and woke to find Jane changing for supper. We went downstairs. Mother and Karl were in the sitting room. I looked hard at Uncle Karl, deep into his rusty eyes, and tried to imagine what he might have to say about the great God-given “privilege” of suffering.

“Tom, you’re elsewhere,” said Mother. “Might you get a drink for yourself and Jane, while I go and ‘touch up,’ as my mother-in-law used to say, the supper. Karl has a drink—”

“Karl always has a drink,” I said, looking at him. “His task in life is to enact everyone else’s secret aspiration: he drives a fast car, doesn’t have to go to church at Christmastime, and flies to various European capitals at whim.”

“Indeed,” said Karl, “but lucky Karl is also unable to find a wife who will stay with him for more than three years. By the way, Peter is still out doing his rounds.”

“On Christmas Eve?”

“He’s taking some presents to the … Welbys, is that their name? A very poor family.”

“You remember them, my love?” I said to Jane.

“Yes—Mr. Welby fell into a fire, or something.” Jane, haughty, sounded like her mother at that moment, and looked like her, too, her face raised, her long nose dryly divining, and her dark hair, which was down tonight, flashingly acknowledging the electric light, a countless conformity of dark strands sealing her scalp in lustre.

“Welby, in fact, set light to his ear,” I said. “He was drunk and was trying to have a fag in bed, and he burned his ear. Quite badly, because he didn’t do anything about it for days.”

“How many of these delightful facts do you know?” asked Karl.

“Quite a few. You know me, I collect them, like you collect East German and Russian stories. Welby burnt his ear; Tattersall, of course, knocked the pedestrian down; Seddon drowned in the river, that was alcohol again—he drowned on the night of his thirtieth wedding anniversary, which he had spent without his wife in The Stag’s Head, a pretty depressing detail, I always think; and Louise Winters was fined for trying to sell captured squirrels as housepets. I can go on.”

“Still, they are all God’s good people, yes?” said Karl smiling slyly.

“Oh yes. Karl, do you have any new horrors from your Communist contacts?” Karl does a certain amount of business in Germany and Bulgaria, and had just started representing new Russian artists, the children of Mr. Gorbachev’s glasnost, in the West. He likes collecting Communist jokes, anecdotes, scandals, and so on.

“I have something very good, which I heard the other day,” said Karl, but at that moment my father walked into the sitting room, shining, pinkly stung by the cold—and cheerful, so cheerful. He was a vision of confidence and decency; the brilliant white priest’s collar around his neck glowed like a fallen halo. His bald head was pipped with little drops of moisture.

“Everything all right? I got back just in time,” he continued. “Now it’s really coming down outside.”

“I have calculated that of the fourteen Christmases I have spent here, only two have been entirely free of rain or snow,” said Karl.

“Yes, it rains plenty here,” Peter said.”But, you know, into every rain a little life must fall.” His shrewd eyes looked around for approval. He went to stand near the fire, and installed himself like a policeman in Gilbert and Sullivan, his back to the flame, his arms behind him, and his legs planted wide.”Perhaps Jane will serenade us after supper, as you did so beautifully, my dear, in September.”

“Oh, thank you, Peter, that’s awfully sweet,” said Jane. “It may go to my head, I’ve been living on a rather reduced diet of praise.”

“My goodness, your husband does not appreciate you?” asked Karl, looking greedily at her. Well, I thought, when did Jane last praise me for anything at all? A month ago she was complaining that she had no time to practise, despite her endless practising, and now she was complaining that she got no praise.

“I’m not sure one deserves praise for practising,” I said, charmlessly. The bell rang.

“That’ll be Norrington,” said Father. “Hope you chaps don’t mind, I invited him to supper, he’s all on his own at Christmas. Pastoral duty.” This was bad news. Why had my parents spoiled the Christmas Eve dinner in this selfish way? Mr. Norrington—well, I have nothing against him especially. He is old, pompous, lonely, and fond of the phrase “apropos of nothing,” which he uses as often as possible. He wears immensely thick glasses, and as a boy I had been interested in the thickness of those lenses, longing for the moment when he might remove them to reveal the weak failures, the tiny confessions, of his eyes. I was always supposed to feel sorry for Mr. Norrington because of his loneliness: Mother told me that he had seen Brief Encounter, his favourite film, eighteen times. He was in love with the actress Celia Johnson.

Norrington entered, shook hands, and in reply to Peter’s offer of a drink, said, “A small glass of sherry wine, please,” with great precision, and then sat down with his shoes perfectly aligned, as if he had taken them off before going to bed. I went to the kitchen to find a fresh bottle of whisky, and when I returned, Norrington was on his favourite subject, genealogy. “The crucial thing,” he was telling Jane, “is the 1851 census. Lots of very nice material there. You can consult it in London at the PRO. You see, the Norringtons were originally from Shropshire. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that our line of Norringtons is related to the Earl of Cavendish, via an illegitimate birth.”

Over the years, in Sundershall, whenever an area of England was mentioned in Mr. Norrington’s presence, he would say, with a strange coughing eagerness: “Now, I have a large number of relatives in that county … oh yes, Somerset”—or wherever was being discussed—“is absolutely full of Norringtons—yes, farmers”—and here he might correct himself—“farm owners, landowners.” There he would sit, a small man surrounded by centuries of relatives in every corner of England.

Mother came in, waved us to the table, and on the way to the dining room I thought again about what I had been reading upstairs. “The sea is not less beautiful for our knowledge that ships are wrecked on it.” This was one of the sentences I had read in the bedroom. The famous Jewish thinker I had been reading was trying to argue that beauty and suffering are entwined. You can’t have the majesty of the natural world without the threat of danger; nature is not easy; freedom will entail shipwrecks. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a sea that still has all the large power of a sea while also being a place in which every swimmer and every sailor is always safe, a place that guarantees your safety. So beauty is freedom, and freedom is risk? You like swimming, and dipping down to the sand? Then you may also drown, for that is the natural property of wateriness. This was what the thinker was saying.

And suddenly, sitting at my parents’ dinner table, at the old family table, I glimpsed something, and my mind was utterly alive with clarity. This moment lasted only a few seconds, but in those seconds I saw a new world: I saw a safe sea. It resembled a real sea—look, there are the unknown salty slums, many storeys deep, overcrowded with nether-life, the cloudy suspension of a million forms of existence! But it was an imaginary sea, because it was a safe sea. A sea on which I can sail, and on which at the slightest threat of storm, the skies suddenly clear and the boat continues on its happy way. A sea in which I can swim, and on which at the first moment of danger, an unseen hand lifts me up and places me on top of the water, as if on the surface of the Dead Sea. Oh, but my New Dead Sea, which threatens no human, is unimaginable, you will say; nature must follow its own laws of necessity. The kinds of supernatural tamperings I am imagining are impossible. Are they? But the Psalmist tells us: They that go down to the sea in ships, these see the works of the Lord, for he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. And the Gospels tell us that Christ tampered twice with those laws, once when he walked on water, and once when he calmed a storm. Jesus killed the sea, made it Dead—and was the sea, in these divine instances, any less beautiful at the very moment it became safe? So I invert the famous thinker, and I say: Is the sea any less beautiful for our knowledge that ships are safe on it?

At that moment, and only for a moment, I saw a world in which the sea had no powers to drown us; and I saw a kingdom where the skies were safe, and the stormy wind was made mild, and the mountains did not erupt, and murder had been abolished, and violence was defunct, and illness was as rare as the unicorn, and where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, a kingdom where we shall be given beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. The people inhabiting this kindly world would not be human, not as we recognize the human. They would not be free, not as we recognize the word. In particular they would not be free to suffer; there could be no Hitlers, no Stalins—but also no con men, no plausible rogues, no jokers, no entertaining frauds, no brilliant culpable politicians, for all these people cause suffering of one kind or another. I saw a colourless kingdom, no doubt, humans reduced to charitable prisoners, unfree robots. But it is not my task, is it, to decide which world would be more pleasant to live in—the suffering free world, or the painless unfree world; it is not my task to choose between these worlds at all. It is only my task, as a philosopher, as a human, as an adult, as Thomas Bunting, to imagine such a world, and just by imagining it to prove that the world we currently live in did not need to be made the way it was made. If I could imagine such a world, how much greater might God’s imagining of it have been.

And do not tell me that the charitable prisoners in the happy kingdom I am imagining are not happy because they are not free. For the kingdom I have been describing is heaven—where the seas, if they exist, are utterly safe, where the wind is always mild, where there is no suffering and presumably no freedom, and “no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” Who would dare to say that heaven is not a good or “beautiful” place to be? Heaven is all the proof we need that God already loves his charitable prisoners, and all the proof we need that God could have created a different world here on earth. God could have created heaven on earth! Why then did God create earth before heaven? Why the fallible rehearsal for perfection rather than perfection itself?

But my father’s voice broke into my consciousness, and I discovered that he was saying grace, and that my head should be bowed to the plate. “For these and all Thy gifts, O Lord, we give Thee thanks.” I don’t remember much about the first course, except that Karl and my father were talking to each other a lot—rather exclusively, I thought. This didn’t bother me too much; but I was chivalrously offended on behalf of Jane and my mother, who had to make do with the tedious Mr. Norrington.

Whenever my father and Karl met, they fell into easy reminiscence, and Father, conscious of the “nobility” of Karl’s childhood and early suffering, tended slyly to promote his own moral dignity. On Christmas Eve this took the form of several stories about his wartime service. Karl, who is fiercely Anglophile, encouraged him to talk about English soldiers, especially eccentric officers. Peter did not boast; instead, he talked about other men as if they were completely unrelated to him, as if they had fought in a different army, and were a cause of vague wonderment in him. A clever strategy, I thought. It enabled him to praise all the more lavishly certain attributes which were then left to us, out of a spirit of fairness, to pin on him.

That evening Peter mentioned an ace RAF pilot. “His name was Rowland or Rowlands. He was as cool as a lamb throughout the most terrifying dogfights with the Germans, and once apparently brought his Spitfire down perfectly on a country road in Sussex—what the airboys used to call ‘a real daisy-cutter,’ if I remember correctly.”

Of course he remembered correctly.

“Was he really a better pilot than everyone else?” asked Karl. “I mean by this, did he put down more Germans than his colleagues did?”

“No, no,” said Peter, clearly enjoying himself. “It was his extraordinary coolness that made him famous. He didn’t sweat; and the boys knew this because he changed his clothes far less frequently than the rest of them.”

I thought that he sounded like my kind of hero.

“What became of him?” asked Karl. “You will now reveal to me that he went into Parliament after the war and became the most tedious imaginable Conservative backbencher, as cool on committees as he had been in the cockpit,” said Karl, with his sweet, gentle smile.

“Ha, Karl, this is your vision of the English, this is what you secretly admire in them—German conformity! You want the poor fellow to have settled down and followed orders!”

Karl’s smile widened, and his eyes glinted with pleasure.

“What actually happened, was that the chap was shot down, caught by the Germans, and put in a camp, fortunately with other British officers. He escaped once and was caught, and thankfully didn’t try again, since the Krauts had a nasty habit, among several others, of losing their patience with escaped prisoners and shooting them—sometimes on Hitler’s orders. So he stayed put in prison for the rest of the war. His family was in the wine business, quite a famous and venerable merchant, actually. He entertained the other boys in prison by enacting imaginary wine tastings. They sat with their tin cups full of water, and had to perfectly describe a particular wine, and then he would tell them where—in occupied France, of course—their imagined wine came from.”

Mother, Jane, and Mr. Norrington were now silent, and listening to Peter.

“Who liberated him, dearest? The Russians?” asked Sarah.

“No, the Americans, I think. I got all this secondhand years ago from old Bill Stapley, who knew him. You met Bill once, Karl, at the house in Durham. And to answer your question, after the war Rowland looked after the family firm for a while—and became rather a fine Christian, went on speaking tours and the like, and founded a charity.”

I should have responded warmly to Father’s reminiscences, but instead I felt that he should not have mentioned German camps in Karl’s presence, in public; I felt that this revealed a bullying insouciance on his part. He should have shown more respect for Karl’s suffering. Father and the theologians, they were in this together, I decided, judging the world from the citadel of their own strength, rather than joining the world in the shelter of its weakness. All of them deciding the tolerability of others’ pain. The privilege of it! Horrid vanity, the martyr’s vanity, the religionist’s arrogance.

And sure enough, Norrington, the fool—though perhaps he knew nothing about Karl’s origins—now wanted to discuss the godlessness of Nazism, the evil of the camps, and Peter seemed perfectly happy to join him. I was horridly embarrassed.

“Yes,” Peter was saying confidently, “the two great engines of evil in this century, fascism and communism, were essentially godless, indeed set themselves against organized religion.”

“Because without God, everything is permitted,” said Mr. Norrington, with particular pompous pleasure.

“That’s very stupid,” I said, breathing fast, and looking at the tablecloth. “It’s stupid because even with God, everything already and always has been permitted—oh, let’s see, Crusades, executions, bloody wars, uprisings, monarchical totalitarianism, regicides, papal decadence, burnings at the stake, Inquisitions, revolutions, immoralities of every kind. All of this happened with God, so what was there left to be ‘permitted without God’?”

“What was left to be permitted was precisely the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges,” said Peter quickly, looking at me glancingly. “Which was Mr. Norrington’s point.”

“I’m telling you,” I said, into the stiffly silent company, “Mr. Norrington’s point was stupid, and I’m very surprised that you, Dad, don’t see that. As long ago as the Enlightenment, philosophers and historians were able to see as they surveyed world history that there was no necessary link between godliness and goodness. Some of them actually thought the link might go the other way, between godliness and cruelty. Gibbon thought this. And if you insist on using the Holocaust as your great example of godlessness, I have several points: first, Nazism wasn’t resisted strongly enough, or at all in most cases, by the German churches—not to mention, of course, the Christian roots of anti-Semitism itself. And, second, if the Holocaust was godlessness run rampant, where the hell was God? Where had He suddenly gone? God did not ‘die at Auschwitz,’ as people like to say, because by this logic He must have already been dead, He must have died centuries before, during some other previous terrible atrocity. In this sense, the Holocaust isn’t unique, and proves nothing, theologically. I really can’t stand Mr. Norrington’s pseudo-Dostoevskian line of argument, it’s so fucking unempirical.”

I couldn’t look up into the frozen air. I was shaking, my head was pointed down at my plate. I heard my father screw the twist of his cigarette into the ashtray; it squeaked against the glass.

“I’m generally on Tom’s side, as you know,” said Karl, always the pacifier, “but I think in this case that we might say that the case remains unproven on both sides. If godliness does not entail good conduct, which may well be true, then godlessness can hardly be said to entail good conduct either. On the evidence of this century, the antireligious forces, which certainly made up the bulk of fascism and communism, don’t come out of it very well.”

“Actually, the divorce rate is higher among religious believers than it is among professed atheists,” I said, but without bitterness, for Uncle Karl was trying to repair the atmosphere. “By the way, I apologize for any brusqueness towards you, Mr. Norrington. That was unforgivable. I get caught in the passion of ideas.”

“You are a bit tired at the moment,” said Jane.

“Tired?” said Peter coldly. “What on earth do you have to be tired about? What’s detaining you at night? Your Ph.D.? The Epicureans?”

This was the point at which I left the table and went upstairs to our bedroom. Now, I feel only ashamed of the absurd speed with which I took offence. My dad had never heard me swear like that; it was deeply provoking, no doubt, and he felt inclined to defend Mr. Norrington, I understand that now. But then I was in a righteous fury. So, I thought, the news was out: my parents had no real faith in my abilities, and never had done. My father classed me as a juvenile because he, along with my mother, could not think of me as an adult. And they thought this way because I hadn’t finished my stupid thesis, about which they were relentlessly obsessed. If only they knew, I thought, of the existence of my parallel work, my Book Against God. Then they would be sorry, then they would be surprised, they might be shocked, menaced, threatened, challenged, all this would be good for them, it would shake them up a bit, they would see it as a work of genius, of moral indignation but intellectual composure, with the most delicate and refined transits of language. But their interest is in each other, I thought—which means, in fact, that their interest is in Peter Bunting, the sun-priest, at whose court we all have to pay our respects.

Upstairs in the bedroom, I started writing in my BAG. I think now that it was at this moment, without quite knowing it, that I formally abandoned my Ph.D. and tipped myself headfirst into the more serious business of planning a great work of theologico-philosophical argument and commentary. But of course my parents would not be told about it until it was an accomplished great work, something worthy of intellectual scrutiny. Until then it would be my secret.

And now, of course, Father will never see my Book.

I was alone for a long time. I heard the front door open and close several times, and the old bell was rung. Eventually, Jane came upstairs with Uncle Karl and Max and Fiona Raymond. In that curious reversal that sometimes happens in such situations, Jane and Karl looked sheepish, as if they had taken on my guilty embarrassment and were about to apologize for my misdemeanours. Max spoke. He was laughing, and despite my ill humour I found his mirth infectious. He took his glasses off, rubbed them, and said:

“Uh-oh. Right, Tom, it’s no Christmas lunch for you. No … plum pudding. But this is the problem with Christmas. How long have you already been at home? It’s far … safer to ration yourself to two or three days, like me.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid that you two were unwilling participants in an extramural class about the thoroughly intramural relations of the Bunting family.”

“Oh love, what nonsense are you talking now?” said Jane.

“I mean that I’m sorry you had to watch me and my father circling around a very square hole.”

Karl burst into laughter and said, “How do your students understand a word you say? Do they feel they are sitting at some shrine of The Great Riddler?”

“I don’t have any students. Karl, I was angry for you,” I said. “It was completely wrong and insensitive of my father, let alone Mr. Norrington, to be discussing the Holocaust, the camps, Nazism, and all that, in your presence. He showed you no respect.”

“Tom, Tommy. Dear boy, Peter and I are old, old friends! He has known me from before you were born. Do you think we have never discussed my German childhood? Many times we have talked about Nazism. Peter has the greatest tact, the finest instincts, he is the only man alive who can tease me about being German, and even make a kind of joke or two about Hitler in my company. With honesty, I do not think of a thing that is wrong with Peter … well, except perhaps he has a weakness for going again and again to the doctor to get his ears syringed. But, you know, it is quite sweet of you to defend my honour.”

“I wasn’t defending your honour, as such, I was defending a principle.”

“Don’t be pompous, Tommy,” said Jane.

“How did everything end?” I asked.

“We were all very nice to Mr. Norrington,” said Jane. “Your father said that Christmas Day—what did he say, Karl?—has an almost magical power over warring parties, and that he fully expects reconciliation. Then Max and Fiona arrived and everyone cheered up.”

“So you’ve been downstairs sucking up to the Buntings while I’ve been imprisoned in my turret up here?” I asked Max, mock-mournfully.

“Yep, that’s about the measure of it,” said Max.

“Maybe we should change places. You could come and spend Christmas Day here, and I could spend it at The Oratory.”

“Oh no,” said Max cheerfully, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

We heard my father’s voice downstairs, and then the front door was opened and shut.

“That’s Peter and Sarah going to the midnight mass,” said Max. “So you can come downstairs, the coast is clear.”

We got ourselves drinks, and Karl asked Jane if she might play him his favourite piece, the Bach aria “Sheep May Safely Graze.” She needed to put up her hair, and searched for her elastic hair-ring. Then she reached behind her head, her elbows pointing towards us as if she were surrendering them, and I saw the ring slide on and suddenly she had harvested that hair into a single feathered sheaf, twisting her face as she did so, a gesture I loved, since it added a suggested strenuousness to a silky and weightless activity.

I liked the way, when she played this arrangement, that she picked the vocal melody out of the surrounding notes, as if the fingers responsible for playing that melody were indeed singing it. With enormous gentleness her fingers rescued from the surrounding mobility the walking lento of the tune.

We had happy, easy conversation. Max and I told stories about the village. We mentioned a man who had gone to prison for clumsily trying to blackmail a firm in Durham; and the time we drove our bikes over Susan Perez-Temple’s kitchen garden; and the evening we tormented poor Sam Spedding by phoning him and hanging up. We got on to Max’s parents.

“Do you remember,” said Max excitedly, “when you lied to my dad about having got a poem into a literary … magazine? I couldn’t … believe it. I was standing next to you, and almost bursting with laughter. You … invented the whole magazine, and … he believed you.”

“Well, your father always made me uncomfortable, and so I had to secure some kind of internal victory over him,” I said. “He always had a special way of looking at me, in fact he still does, which terrified me. You remember his first words to me, ever?”

“No.”

“He said, ‘You’re a plausible rogue, aren’t you?’ Those were his first words. I was thirteen!”

“Colin is a psychological genius,” murmured Karl.

“And at … the second or third meeting,” said Max, still excited, “he asked you to list the seven wonders of the ancient world.”

“Right, utterly humiliating, so I had to plan my revenge.” But it was several years before I could put it into action. I could see that Colin despised weakness and ignorance; clearly, I would have to be strong and knowledgeable. And since, as a teenager, I wasn’t naturally these things, I would have to lie about them. Even Professor Thurlow couldn’t be more knowledgeable than me about a complete fiction. I was sixteen, and at that time I was writing poems, and sending them off to poetry magazines, often with letters denouncing the poems that were running in these magazines—I had read somewhere that the way to catch an editor’s attention was to attack his choices.

“I forget now how your dad and I got onto poetry, but anyway, he said to me that he had heard from you that I was writing verse. And he sounded so dismissive that I decided to invent a poetry magazine and ask him if he had heard of it. I knew that he would hate to confess ignorance. Sure enough, he said that he had heard of it! Well, I said, I just got a letter from them yesterday telling me that I have had a poem accepted. His face fell.”

“Tommy is always so proud of his lies,” said Jane to Fiona.

“Tom’s moral sense has been … on sabbatical since puberty,” explained Max to the group.

“Actually, I’m much more embarrassed by the memory of the poems I wrote than by my lie,” I said. I wrote passionate philosophical poems, rhymed, often hazily antitheological, and full of landscape. I tended to describe walking up the hill and looking down at the village from Pilgrim’s Path:

And there, beneath me, lies “God’s city,”
As the sun shines its electricity—
Bright wafer, which has turned but not harkened,
To the blood of our hearts, the pain of life sharpened!

Eventually, Max and Fiona went across the road to The Oratory, and Karl went off to his hotel in Durham (Karl always needed a double bedroom, and we had taken it), and Jane and I found ourselves in the strange position of being alone in the vicarage. I kissed her, and we continued upstairs. We made love fast, against the anticipated return of my parents. Sex had become a fairly infrequent activity in that last year of our marriage. By deciding to try to have a child, we had made sex veer from pleasure to function. Jane seemed always to be looking in her diary and announcing that “the next four days are the most fertile, the optimal window of the month,” and informing me that we should have sex as often as possible in this brief opening. Frankly, it felt a bit forced. In the last months, whenever we had sex something always went wrong, and I drifted far away into my own thoughts, and we seemed, to me, like two separate entities masquerading at union—not unlike the old joke in which one man approaches another and says, “I like to walk alone,” to which the other man replies, “So do I, so we can walk together.” In this sense, Jane and I were walking together quite well.

As it happens, on Christmas Eve, as the rain continued to come down outside, we were very warm and intimate, tender on the bed, provoked by the thought of imminent interruption. I felt sentimental and kissed Jane so passionately that she whispered, “Less, darling, less,” which only increased my desire. As she rose and fell on top of me, I remembered for a second my first lover, Rachel Worth. She was a friend of Max’s, a fellow student of his at Oxford, and I took the bus there most weekends from London. Rachel and I were virgins, first-timers, both awkward. I remembered how we sat on the floor naked, like children at the beach, trying to get it right, repeating the game until, suddenly, she was sitting on top of me, there was no gap between us, and I was inside her. “God!” Rachel said, and her brown eyes were large. I felt unable to look at her, fearful of the enormity and simplicity of the experience, and I think we both thought: “Is this the beginning of adulthood? Is this it?” Then we cried a little in each other’s arms, and put on music and danced around her freezing room in Magdalen College overlooking the deer park. The deer moved around on the grass in great separation, as if concentrating on trying to ignore each other.