Earthly Powers (12 page)

       She put her fingers to her lips; I blinked the water back; Father had come back in again with a letter. "They were tidying his things up," he said. "Apparently there were a lot of letters he'd written but hadn't sent off yet. Here."

       It was the usual involved periphrastic infinitely qualified Henry James, O.M. He had made his major pronouncement about the contemporary British novel (of which, with his naturalisation of 1915, he became the great though retrospective luminary) in a couple of articles in the Times Literary Supplement. I had written a mild protest in a stand-in literary column in The Illustrated London News, the regular man being ill and incapable: I had found as much fault with his imagery as with his judgment. He had spoken of the fine play of oar of Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole and had D. H. Lawrence bringing up "the dusty rear." He had hit on a "persistent simile" of an orange and said it was "remarkably sweet" in the hands of Walpole. The great stylist could not be allowed to get away with that. He had replied to me but had delayed sending the letter off, or perhaps, obsessed with his Napoleonic fantasies, he had just forgotten he had written it. Well, here it was my dear young friend and the rest of it. I bow my head with shame at your naked rebuke (the bowing, alas, comes all too naturally, though from the physiological causes altogether appropriate in one whose advanced age and concomitant bodily decay bid him increasingly look earthwards) but would say in feeble extenuation that the exigencies imposed by frantic copy editors, et cetera, et cetera.

       My mother brought in the cocoa.

CHAPTER 15

It was a mistake to go home for Christmas. For much of the rest of the world the feast was sentimentally pagan, and tears at the birth of the Prince of Peace were altogether compatible with rage at the Hun. For me, for the family, the redeemer was born, and I had the intolerable task of keeping to myself my recent decision not to believe that the redeemer was born. The carolers came round singing "O Come All Ye Faithful," words which to them were a means of earning odd coppers for a winter-woolies.for-our-brave-boys fund or of being invited in for hot eggnog and mince pies. To me they were a reminder of my voluntary but ineluctable exclusion from the world of the faithful.

       When Christmas Eve came, my mother said, "This evening we take the train for St. Leonards and go to confession. Your father will finish his surgery early. And then tomorrow morning we all go to communion together."

       "Can't we stay in St. Leonards and go to the kinema and then go to midnight mass?" asked Hortense. Kinema. Pedantic nuns, I supposed.

       "There will be no trains," said my mother. "No. Very early mass tomorrow. And then we come back to our special Christmas breakfast and then put in the oven the turkey."

       My heart was sinking all through this. And I can see how you, my readers, will sigh with another kind of sinking of the heart. We are into Graham Greene territory, are we not? Or, since the betrayal of a mother is involved, James Joyce territory (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been published that year, to be mainly misunderstood but fulsomely praised as "Swiftian" by H. G. Wells). Some things, may I remind you, are anterior to literature. Literature does not manufacture them. Literature about them is there because they are there. Graham Greene invented a kind of Roman Catholicism, but not a kind easily intelligible to Catholics of 1916.

       I said, "I shan't be going to confession."

       "No sins on your soul?" teased my sister. "Unspotted by sinful London?"

       "When did you last go to confession?" my mother asked.

       "I could say, Mother, that that is a matter between me and my soul," I said gently, smiling. "But in fact I was in Farm Street only a few days ago."

       "Well then, if you think you are still in a state of grace—"

       "I'll stay home and write my review." It was a long one on the oeuvre to date of Eden Phillpotts, a writer then thought important, especially by Arnold Bennett, who called him "a master of the long sentence."

       "But it is fine weather and very mild, and we can walk a little by the sea."

       "I must pay my rent, Mother, and I was promised payment on receipt of the article."

       "Very well, then." And I sat by the fire writing the rough draught in pencil on a pad on my knee, chewing dates, sipping sherry. My father's house was short of very little.

       I lay awake that night, juggling agonizedly with alternative courses of action. If I no longer believed, then the host on my tongue would be no more than a bit of bread, and the family would be happy, all having taken Christmas communion together. But I knew that the host was more than a bit of a bread, and I could not take it cynically. A sacrilegious communion—terrible phrase. In the morning I prayed briefly to the God of my glands: Help thou my unbelief. Unbelief takes time, I know, but please make the time short. I heard the family stirring. It was still dark, and the electric light was on on the landing. My father came in, lather on his face. "The train goes in half an hour, son." The God of my glands was already responding. "You don't look well," said my father. I had switched on my bedside lamp. It showed, I did not doubt, pallor and hollow eyes.

       "I don't," I said, "feel all that well. I don't think, somehow, I can... a slight stomach upset. I'm not used to good food."

       My mother came in, ready dressed and cologned. "You are sick? Perhaps you should not have eaten so much of the"—she pronounced the name of the dish in, as it were, quotation marks: an item in a barbarous cuisine, cooked because my father liked it, admissible just about, Christmas Eve being, despite the wartime dispensation, a day of abstinence for us—"fish pie."

       "I'll go tomorrow. Tomorrow's Saint Stephen's Day."

       "If you are better you can go to the last mass today. And good, yes, Saint Etienne Protomartyr. And the feast of your poor uncle Etienne. We will go together." Hortense came in, full of a young girl's morning energy and Christmas radiance.

       "Merry Christmas. I knew somehow you wouldn't come. It's all London's fault. Gottlose Stadt, Sister Gertrude calls it."

       "And probably Kaiser Bill too," warned my father, studding his stiff white collar.

       "Please, child. No German. Especially this day."

       "Entschuldige. Je demande bien ton pardon. Leave him to rot in his sin, then. Come on, we'll miss the train."

       They went, and I lay rotting a while longer while the house, creaking rebuke, let in the mild dawn and the milder daylight of my Gottlose Christmas. I was ravenous. I dressed (stiff collar and tie, always formal, even when declaring the love that durst not speak its name) and went down to the kitchen, where the stove was banked and hot. I made strong tea and toast, opening the window to discharge the crumbs and the smell of burning, then made the fire in the dining and living rooms. Then I put my presents by the Christmas tree—Mr Britling Sees It Through for my father; a new edition of Three Men in a Boat for my sister; for my mother a homage-to-a-brave-ally anthology called La Belle France, with a parody of Mallarmé by Beerbohm, a tactless polemic on the sins of France by Bernard Shaw, a pastiche of Debussy by Cyril Scott. It was perhaps not a good choice; it would make my mother tearful. I peeled a lot of potatoes. The surgery bell buzzed loudly. There was a middle-aged man at the door, a kind of ostler to judge from his oaty smell. He had a raging toothache; he needed my father.

       "He's gone to St. Leonards. To church."

       "What for? Want me Christmas dinner like everybody else. It ain't fair."

       I took him into the surgery. The soldier on the wall looked in fearful exophthalmia at burning Pompeii. "You should look after your teeth," I said. "You should get your teeth ready for Christmas." I looked for oil of cloves but could see none. There were forceps there, though, neatly laid in lines, shining in the Christmas morning light. "Sit in that chair," I ordered. "Let's have a look at it."

       "Here, it's the dentist I want. You're not the dentist."

       "Like Christian baptism," I said. "Anybody can do it in case of emergency. Open." He opened and let out a hogo of medicinal rum and beer. The bad tooth was a premolar. It wobbled when I fingered it.

       "Hurts, that does, ow."

       "You don't want an anaesthetic, do you? It may upset your stomach."

       "I want something what will kill the pain."

       "Through fire," I said, "to peace and cool and light." I took the largest forceps in my right hand, pushed back the chair, inserted the pincers and caught the tooth, squeezing hard to hold it. He kept his mouth well open in protest and pain, ow for both. I worked the tooth to and fro, felt it loosen and then break from its moorings, and then pulled it out. "Spit," I said. He spat, howling from a pursed mouth. "Rinse," I said. I gave him cold water. "Better," I said. "Better now, eh?" I showed him the decayed horror at the end of the tongs.

       When he could speak he said, "There ought to be a law."

       "Don't grumble. I'm not charging you anything. Call this a Christmas gift."

       He went off bleeding, grousing about bloody butchers. I threw the tooth into the kitchen stove and rinsed the forceps under the kitchen tap. There was blood on my fingers but I did not at first wash it off. A corporal work of mercy and the badge thereof. If I were to be good in this my post-Christian life, it must be totally without hope of reward.

       I said nothing of what I had done when the family came home. Yes, better, a little better, but I could not stomach eggs, bacon and sausages. I missed last Christmas mass. I ate heartily of Christmas dinner, though. Better, much better.

       In the evening there was a little party—Dr. Brown and his wife and three slackmouthed children, Mackenzie the bachelor bank manager, a Belgian evacuee widow whom my mother had befriended. I wore the tie my mother had given me, smoked the Muratti Turkish from my sister, crackled in my trouser pocket the five one-pound notes, God bless him, from my father. Cold turkey and stuffing, ham, trifle, Christmas cake, mince pies, a punch of burgundy and fizzy lemonade for the children, Beaune and Pouilly-Fuissé for the rest of us, a toast to the end of war, absent friends, absent Tom. My mother held back her tears. I went to bed a little fuddled.

       My mother came, not at all fuddled, into my bedroom and switched on the main light. Electric light in those days was surely softer, pinker, more intimate, even when it shone from the ceiling. My mother wore her new dressing gown, a gift from my father, cornflower blue and frilled at wrists and lapels. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me with sober eyes. Throughout our colloquy she spoke not one word of English.

       "No confession, no communion. Indeed, no mass. This is the first time it is so at home at Christmas. I do not believe you were not well, my son."

       "I was not well in my body perhaps because I was not well in my soul." I was grateful for French; it distanced a little, though not enough. Acting the vowels and the intonation, I was also acting the predicament. But French was literally my mother tongue. It had the power to knock down solid-seeming English, language of my education and street games and craft, disclosing the solidities as mere stage-flats. It had this power because it had fluted and hurled through my foetal bones and flavoured my milk and soothed me to sleep. But it was still a language of the brain; its words for faith and duty and home would never make me cry.

       "You lied too. You said you were at confession in London. I want to know what is wrong."

       "I was scrupulous in not lying. I said I was at Farm Street, where the Jesuits are. I talked with a priest."

       "What did you talk about?"

       "I talked about the necessity of giving up my faith."

       "Necessity? Necessity?" The word hissed like gaslight.

       I set up a pasteboard shield. "It is a necessity that many Christians are talking of. We pray to the same God as the Germans. Must God answer only the prayers of the French and the English? Is the sacrifice of the mass offered only that we may be granted grace?"

       "This is a just war."

       "It began as a just war. I and many others believe that it is being prolonged for reasons other than justice."

       "You have not talked of this before, to me or to your father. If you are convinced of what you say it should have come bursting out of you, as so many things you were convinced of came bursting out of you on other of your visits home. There is something else. Are you perhaps living in sin?"

       "We are all living in sin, Mother."

       "Very clever, but you know very precisely what I mean. Are you keeping house with some woman?"

       "No woman, Mother. No woman, no woman." And then it came, as it had to, bursting out. She listened at first with disbelief and then puzzlement. I did not speak French much these days; perhaps I was not expressing myself correctly. But I was expressing myself all too correctly. Then her machine would not play my record. She smashed the shellac on the floor.

       "What you're saying makes no sense. You have been drinking too much wine. You took also three glasses of cognac after supper. You are making a very silly stupid joke. In the morning perhaps you will speak reasonably."

       "You want to know the truth, Mother. I'm telling you the truth. Some men are made this way. Some women too, as I have seen for myself in London."

       "London, yes. I can believe many things of London. But this I will not believe. Not of you."

       "Mother, Mother, I cannot help it. It is some strange freak of the chemistry of the glands. I am far from alone in this, other men have been so, great men, writers, artists, Michelange, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde. Wilde suffered for it, in prison. It is not a thing a man would want to choose. Not in a world like this, which looks with horror on it."