you’d had mistresses before 1923, surely?’
‘I wouldn’t call them mistresses. There were incidents during the War when I was on my own somewhere a long way from home. But Hilda … That was quite different. She did voluntary work for a charity which aided discharged prisoners. I met her when I was calling at the home of a prisoner who’d just been freed and she was there too, visiting the wife and children … We were both immediately attracted. Chastity soon became quite impossible.’
‘Did you ask her to marry you?’
‘No, I told her from the beginning that I was only marking time until I could be a monk. But of course she never believed I’d go through with it.’
‘How did you eventually extricate yourself?’
‘I … No, I really can’t describe the ghastliness of it all except to say that she threatened suicide and I nearly died of guilt. I hadn’t hated myself so much since that poor girl died up at Cambridge.’
Francis printed: ‘GUILT. HATES HIMSELF’ on his sheet of foolscap and said without expression: ‘Did she in fact commit suicide?’
‘No.’ I wiped the sweat from my forehead. ‘She married someone else eventually.’
‘And during this agonizing time did it not once occur to you, not once, that you might give up all thought of being a monk and marry this woman?’
‘Oh no,’ I said. The affair with Hilda confirmed what I already knew: that I couldn’t stay in the world and remain a good priest. My only hope of fulfilling my vocation lay in entering a monastery.’
‘Obviously your call was very strong but a satisfactory intimate relationship is no mean driving force either. I’d have thought –’
‘Marriage was an impossible dream,’ I said impatiently. ‘I could never have borne the burden.’
Francis’ pen paused in mid-sentence. ‘Burden?’
‘The burden of guilt that I’d married despite my knowledge that I was unsuited to married life.’ Unable to look at him I glanced around the room until my gaze rested once more on the clock. The temptation to reduce my tension by projecting it in a stream of power from the psyche was very strong.
‘But you’ve just admitted that you nearly died of guilt when you jilted her,’ Francis was saying. ‘Are you now implying –’
‘Yes. The guilt would have been even worse if I’d married her. I chose the lesser of two evils.’
‘How far were you able to set down the burden of all this guilt when you entered the Order?’
‘The relief was instantaneous. I was finally at peace after years of torment.’
‘How very odd! I wouldn’t have thought that merely walking through the door of the Grantchester house would have made so much difference – in fact surely your problems were only exacerbated when you wound up in such a mess as a postulant?’
‘I agree I got in a mess and was miserable, but it was a different kind of mess and a different kind of misery. Grantchester was quite the wrong house for me, of course – but not, as I thought at the time in my arrogance, because it was spiritually slack. It wasn’t, not then; James ran the place well enough in his own mild idiosyncratic way until old age made him lose his grip, but I was beyond being helped by a mild idiosyncratic rule. I needed the austerity of Ruydale, and Father Darcy realized that as soon as he met me.’
‘So once you met Father Darcy –’
‘I was happy.’
‘Even when he followed that first meeting by flogging you in the London punishment cell?’
I stopped staring at the clock and swivelled to face him. ‘Nobody enjoys being flogged!’
‘No?’ said Francis. ‘I rather thought that according to modern psychology some people do.’
I finally lost patience with him. ‘Can we forget the modern psychology for a moment and concentrate on the spiritual dimensions of what was going on? The flogging was necessary because I was so deeply sunk in pride that I was unable to learn humility and obedience in any other way – I was being forcibly turned around and redirected along the correct spiritual path. But once that had been done I was set free to realize my full ability to serve God at last – and that’s why I can say with truth that an enduring happiness only began for me when I met Father Darcy.’
‘And your happiness continued when he kicked you north to Ruydale, the toughest house in the Order – are you sure you don’t enjoy suffering, Jonathan?’
‘Is that another of the witty remarks which I’m supposed to find amusing? I can’t tell you how irritated I’m becoming by your psycho-analytical poses – shouldn’t you now pause to remind yourself that you’re a priest and not a Harley Street quack? If you did you’d have no trouble understanding that the suffering I had to endure – endure, not enjoy – was a necessary part of my development into a good monk, and I endured it – endured it – because my call to be a good monk was so strong.’
‘Yet now you have what is apparently an equally strong call to stop being a good monk – and why, Jonathan, why? Has your life at Grantchester become too soft and easy for you? Do you think you’d suffer more if you went out into the world?’
‘You’re being deeply offensive. I absolutely deny –’
‘Save your breath. Come back at four o’clock tomorrow and – hullo, the clock’s stopped! Ah yes, of course – I forgot to wind it this morning.’ Francis rose to his feet, moved to the fireplace and produced a key from a china vase on the mantelshelf. Then he looked back at me over his shoulder. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he demanded. ‘You’re dismissed.’
Retiring to the chapel I futilely tried to pray.
XII
I was now convinced that Francis was determined to reduce my call to a delusion by burying its spiritual dimensions beneath the rubble of a garbled psycho-analysis. I could see all too clearly the theory which he was developing. Deciding that I was a masochist who had finally exhausted the potential for suffering offered by the monastic life, he was toying with the idea that Father Darcy’s death had been the mythical ‘final trigger’ which had sent me over the edge of sanity. Having suffered the delightful humiliation of being rejected by my mentor and the exquisite pain of failing to become the Abbot-General, I had realized that the Order now offered me nothing but an intolerably pain-free life at Grantchester, and unable to face a monastic future without my favourite sadist I was chafing to return to the world where with any luck I might acquire a wife who would beat me every night. How delicious! All I would have to do would be to buy a whip and a chain or two and then I could live happily ever after.
This atheistic vision of a maimed psyche so appalled me that I even wondered – and this was the final horror – if there could be a grain of truth in it. Surely if the theory were quite inapplicable I should be laughing at its absurdity? But my whole future was at stake. How could I laugh when the future I knew I had to have was now threatened with abortion? Indeed all thought of both present and future had suddenly become so agonizing that instinctively I took refuge in the remote past. Closing my eyes I reached up to clasp my mother’s hand as we walked down the garden to find Chelsea, serene elegant Chelsea who washed her paws so fastidiously before the sitting-room fire on the long winter evenings when my father read his books and my mother sewed in silence and I sat listening to her thoughts.
‘You and your cats!’ said my father to my mother. ‘In the old days you’d have been burnt as a witch!’ And the high clear voice which had belonged to me long ago said in panic: ‘They won’t burn her now, will they? I don’t want her dying and going away.’
My memory shifted. I felt Martin’s small sticky hand in mine and heard