No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (29 page)

Poor Mel. No wonder she’d demanded silence. It wasn’t only him she needed to shut up. It was herself. Enough now. Enough with all the noisy importunings of desire.

You can’t go on listening, that was her point. You can’t afford to go on listening.

But there’s no getting rid of the noise in his brain tonight. Poor Mel twice over. An idol doubly fallen. Fancy her having returned on her knees to Little Cleverley. Fancy her having come all this way to get another lick of Clarice. And never telling him. That’s if she had. But what if Clarice was lying? What if Mel had never come back that second time? What if they’d cooked this up in bed all those years ago, calculated that he’d come back one day, wouldn’t be able not to come back, and when he did, what fun for Clarice to concoct some cock and bull story about Mel having been back before him? He didn’t know what Mel was capable of, that was what it amounted to. D the fat comedian had seasoned his imagination with jealousies of the conventional sort. Another man … men … Mel sprouting hair again. Now Clarice was dropping still deeper deviancies into the boiling pot of his uncertainty. There was pain in it for him whatever the truth was. Mel actually coming back to Clarice, or Mel fainting in Clarice’s arms, plotting the deception. Disgusting, either way.

Just how disgusting are you, Mel? Tell me, tell me.

‘Keep out of my head,’ she had warned him back in London, when he’d tried to get her to whisper to him in the night, tried to incorporate her shame into his. For a fallen idol is a mightily voluptuous concept.

The conventional lovers’ night he’d passed with Clarice
was a wasted opportunity. It hadn’t answered to any of the needs released by the preceding three days. Sure, sure, she was nice to fuck. But what’s one more fuck in a long life of fucking? The needs he hadn’t honoured, and should have honoured, were essentially conjugal in nature. They were to do with Mel. You could say he wanted to
be
Mel now. It worked like this: considering that Mel had submitted to the erotic will of Clarice, willingly made herself her vassal, and considering that Frank had always accepted the primacy of Mel’s will in most things, didn’t it then follow that Frank was a beggar’s beggar, a bottom’s bottom, and considering that, didn’t it also follow that he was doubly in thrall to Clarice? That Clarice herself would not have been able to follow him through all his upside down reasoning only added to the perverse excitement. If a subtle man desires the thrill of throwing himself away, who but a shallow woman should he throw himself away on? That, anyway, was how he ought to have presented himself to Clarice on that last night – as a supplicant’s supplicant, the lowest of the low.

But he knew less then, didn’t he? He wasn’t fifty then. And no one had yet painted his portrait in cappuccino froth.

Tonight, though, he knows everything. Tonight, with only the moon as his witness, he will get Clarice to treat him like the filth he is.

For Mel’s sake.

‘H
APPY THE PERSON
,’ wrote the fifth-century monk Evagrios – Evagrios the Solitary, to his friends, except that he had no friends – ‘Happy the person who thinks himself no better than dirt.’

So Frank must be delirious, must he not? The nonpareil, the shape and form, the very looking-glass of happiness?

He is a monk himself now. In a manner of speaking. By a man’s company ye shall know him, and Frank is keeping company with monks. He sleeps in a bare but comfortable cell in a new wing of the Abbey, sharing facilities with fifteen other retreatants from the howling world of fleshly sin. He eats his meals, in silence, with the monks. Crap still – there is to be no escape from crap, on the box or in the belly: for a man must toil and a man must eat – but at least sanctified crap. A plain sufficiency. Sprouts, sausages, black pudding, blackened potatoes, gravy, rhubarb and redcurrant compote. He gives thanks for it in Latin before, and after folds his napkin and leaves the refectory with his eyes lowered.

On some mornings he rises with the monks for vigils and lauds. An electric buzzer goes off in the corridor beside his room, telling him it is 3.30 a.m., but it’s up to him whether he rises or not. Free choice. He has not taken orders. He has
seriously considered it, but the monks have made it plain they would not seriously consider him. He is too old. Too set in his ways. Pope Gregory, whom we have to thank for what we know of St Benedict, the founder of Frank’s adopted order, set great store by men of Frank’s years. ‘Temptations of the flesh are violent during youth,’ he wrote, ‘whereas after the age of fifty concupiscence dies down.’ Frank can vouch for that. Were it not for habit, inadequate preparation for old age, and an incapacity to think of anything else to do with himself once he reached it, Frank would have willingly kissed goodbye to concupiscence the moment it kissed goodbye to him. Well, the old horse is dead now, right enough. Not all the whippings in selfchastising Christendom can ever bring that beast back to life. So why don’t the monks consider him good monastic material? There’s a flaw in the order. It isn’t enough that a man has a broken back; they want to be the ones that do the breaking. Benedict himself broke his own, won a victory over temptation by rolling naked in sharp thorns and stinging nettles, tore his own poor sinful flesh to shreds. But that was before there was a Benedictine order to do it for him.

Frank finds vigils and lauds harder to get up for the further the year advances. It can get cold in the North-East of Scotland at three-thirty in the morning in November. Yes, he’s seen the last of the summer off up here, and most of autumn, and now means to do the same to winter. And maybe, after that, to spring. And then, who knows? He’s taking it a season at a time.

The monkish life is growing on him. He rises, or doesn’t, to the pre-dawn torture buzzer. He prepares himself a simple breakfast in the retreatants’ kitchen, white toast, Summer County margarine, and orange marmalade made by the monks. Sometimes he greets his fellow fugitives, like Gordon who has been here even longer than he has, and who
acknowledges Frank’s greeting with sad heroic eyes, as though unable to decide whether he’s pleased or not to have made it through one more night. ‘Yes indeed,’ he says, when Frank comments on the beauty of the day. Yes indeed. It’s that or burst into tears. Otherwise it’s brave good mornings, and little else, all round. But that’s fine and dandy by Frank. He doesn’t want conversation. He’s said all he needs to say for one lifetime. And heard all he needs to hear. By the beauty of the day he means the imminent withdrawal of all signs of life. The earth is already half dead up here. The begrudging light is slow to show itself and quick to go. Dawn will soon be ten a.m. and twilight fifteen minutes later. Get into the pine forest that rises up behind the Abbey, protecting its rear, and you can forget you ever knew what light looked like. That too suits Frank. He wants the day over and done with. He may be skipping vigils regularly now, but he never misses compline, the peace before sleep, the calm that ushers in the Greater Silence.

Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis dominus omnipotens.

The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.

Mel should be up here, whoever Mel is.

For Frank, compline is the high point of his day, a pure moment of monastic theatricality that vindicates the nothingness that precedes and follows it. All lights go out. A solitary monk enters the medieval church and puts a taper to the candles. The crepuscular vaults flicker. Are we inside or out? The monks arrive in a blur of white. White is not the usual colour for Benedictines, but these Benedictines have been Cistercianised somewhere along the way. So much the better. Their whiteness etherialises them. They are angels. Sitting in his pew, watching Gordon’s heaving back, Frank has also become angelic. He lowers his elbows on to his
knees, makes a cup of his hands, and drops his chin into it. If he were an item of church furniture he could not be more inanimate. Or more hushed.

The monks take their places in the choir stall. Their voices are not the voices of men. There is nothing of earth in them. They are starry, crystalline, composed of elements entirely foreign to Frank’s understanding. It is quickly over. The Greater Silence descends. The Abbot, who has a small neat unravaged face, is the first to leave. He swings his censer in Frank’s direction, blessing him, preparing him for the night. Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Be sure it is not you, Frank. Resist him. Be firm in your faith.

The monks wait for the Abbot to quit the church, then they leave their stalls and drop to their knees in stray patterns, like sheep on a field. First they bow to the altar, then they prostrate themselves before the Virgin, in front of whose portrait two high white candles burn. Nothing the monks do in Frank’s sight is more demonstrative or more passionate than this. Some stay on their knees, wringing their hands, a long time. Regimented all day, this is their hour of pure individuation. They choose their own moment to rise and depart, regretfully, like lovers, now one, now another, followed at last by Frank Ritz, into the Silence.

According to Pope Gregory:

One day while Saint Benedict was alone, the tempter came in the form of a little blackbird, which began to flutter in front of his face. It kept so close that he could easily have caught it in his hand. Instead, he made the sign of the Cross and the bird flew away. The moment it left, he was seized with an unusually violent temptation. The evil spirit recalled to his mind a woman he had once seen,
and before he realised it his emotions were carrying him away. Almost overcome in the struggle, he was on the point of abandoning the lonely wilderness, when suddenly with the help of God’s grace he came to himself.

It was in order to see to it that the blackbird did not call on him again that Benedict rolled naked in those thorns and nettles.

Frank too, on only his second night in the Abbey, was visited by the fluttering blackbird of lewdness. Only in Frank’s case it visited him in his sleep. And the woman that was recalled to his mind was not one he knew or had ever seen, unless she was the abstract and précis of all the women he had desired.

She was suddenly there, whoever she was, on his arm. Not young. A woman in her late thirties, say, with close cropped dark hair, apparently a famous memoirist. He was walking up a hill with her, into a cul de sac, peopled with labouring masses, chimneys all around, a factory at the end of the cul de sac, wire fencing, and a forbidding gate. They were separate from their surroundings and not going anywhere. Ambling, arm in arm. He could feel her breasts moving against his shoulder, her dress was loose fitting and flapped against her thighs. Her considered her to be beyond him, despite their proximity; out of his league, not on account of her beauty but her worldliness and intelligence. What could such a woman see in him, a mere monk? Everything! – that was what was so wonderful. Everything! She leaned into him and blew into his neck. ‘This could be it for me,’ she said. ‘Curtains.’ She smiled. He was on fire. Every touch burnt him. This was it for him too. He had never been happier. But he was troubled by one thing: he wasn’t free. How was he to tell her, and yet not scare her away, that he was accounted for, that he had taken vows and would only be
able to fit her into the canonical interstices of his life, between prime and terce, between sext and vespers? And then, as her dress flapped, revealing her thighs, another thought occurred.
He could make himself free.
He trembled, in his dream, with the audacity of what he was thinking, but she melted into him, vanished inside him, leaving him no choice …

And then the buzzer went off outside his room, calling him to vigils and lauds.

Even as a boy, when the roaring lion could do what it liked with him, Frank had never dreamed such sleek insinuations. Was it the Abbey, just as it had been the wilderness for Benedict, that gave the dream its treacherous tactility? Does renunciation turn on you, tempting you with visions far more voluptuous than any you have to deal with in the ordinary sublunary world of regulation sin?

Those poor monks, in that case.

Small wonder, compline over, that they are reluctant to get up off their knees to face the Greater Silence. Knowing their adversary, the silky tempter, will soon be slithering in beside them …

They’d be safer from corruption down on the floor of a shtuppenhaus in Wythenshawe.

Poor monks, but not piteous, nor pitiable. Frank watches them going about their business in the fields, dressed in jeans and wellingtons, carrying buckets, tending to the bees, chasing chickens, laughing amongst themselves. Benedict warned against merriment – ‘Only a fool raises his voice in laughter’ – in deference to which, Brother Ritz the Obedient bears himself most gravely in the precincts of the monastery. Humourless little prick, is how the monks must think of him. Sometimes he feels he spoils their mealtimes, so conscientiously does he interpret the rule and spirit of silence. He lowers his head during grace, averts his eyes, eats
sparingly. It’s just food, Frank. But he may as well be at a repast for the dead. Funereal, that’s what he has become. The other retreatants are the same. They are all or nothing men, every one of them. And now that all has failed them, they are making themselves over religiously to nothingness. The monks, meanwhile, are rollicking. They tuck their napkins into the necks of their habits, they scoop out mountains of yellow cream from their individual containers of Summer County, rub breadcrumbs into their soup bowls, laugh to themselves when the Brother who reads to them throughout the meal comes upon something salacious in
The Tablet -
‘The Pontiff was later said to have hit it off particularly well with Mrs Carey’ – and then, when they have finished eating, zip themselves still smiling back into their hoods, like demonic pixies.

Without exchanging a word or a glance with one another they have succeeded in dining communally.