Glamorous Powers. Susan Howatch
needed this special attention in order to make the most of those limited spiritual gifts. It was possible. With Father Darcy any bizarre monastic situation was possible – as I realized all too clearly when he lay on his deathbed and declared that his successor must be a man who could tell vintage claret from Vin ordinaire’.
Francis took care to say to me afterwards: ‘I’d like to think that despite the old man’s appalling final antics we can somehow contrive to be friends.’
‘Of course. Why not?’ I said equably before retreating to my cell to seethe with rage.
‘I fear I shall still worry in the future about you and Francis,’ confessed Aidan to me after the funeral, but I only answered with all my most fatal arrogance: ‘I can’t imagine any difficulty arising which can’t be easily resolved.’
Less than two months later I received my summons to London and I travelled there in the knowledge that I was deep in difficulties which were incapable of an easy resolution. Moreover after years of rivalry Francis now had me where he wanted me: in a position which was utterly subject to his will.
It was a bitter pill to swallow.
XI
Journeying beyond the walls of one’s cloister was always a disturbing experience – I shall never forget my first journey from Ruydale to London when I encountered the amazingly exposed legs of two flappers on the train – and now I found myself more disturbed than ever. But this time I barely noticed the female passengers. I was too busy reading The Times. It seemed the French had collapsed; Pétain had ordered a cessation of the fighting and was in touch with the Nazi command. For weeks the countries of Europe had been falling to the Nazis and now after the collapse of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium it appeared that France too had been conquered. Without the French we would be quite alone. More than fifteen hundred years of Christian culture hung by a thread and the Devil’s breath was hot upon our necks.
I found myself thinking that the chaos in the world mirrored the chaos in my psyche. I saw my career as a monk hanging by a thread, and as I forced myself to acknowledge that my vision could have been a delusion I was aware of the demonic menace which always had the power to annihilate me. A second later I was trying to recover my equilibrium by telling myself I should put my trust in God, but the trouble was, as I well knew, I was quite unable to put my trust in Francis Ingram.
Unless I wanted to be judged an apostate I could not leave the Order without his permission, and that meant my entire future rested on his ability to exercise the charism of the discernment of spirits, the gift from God which enabled a man to perceive whether a situation was divinely or diabolically inspired. Francis, as I had long since decided, was spiritually limited. This did not mean he was incapable of exercising the charism of discernment, for with God’s grace even the most unlikely people can display charismatic powers, but it did mean that I had ample opportunity to worry about how far he was capable of placing himself in God’s hands so that he might act as a channel for the Holy Spirit. Francis was a clever, cunning, efficient, ambitious, jealous, charming and outwardly devout monk. But was he a good one? I found I could derive no reassurance from reflecting that Father Darcy would hardly have willed the Order to a monk who was merely a first-class administrator. Sickness had undermined Father Darcy’s powers at the end of his life, and it was more than possible that in a moment of weakness he had given way to the temptation to leave the Order not to the best monk he ever trained but to the best son he never had.
These lowering thoughts occupied me throughout my journey on the underground railway from Liverpool Street Station to Marble Arch. Then I pulled myself together as best I could, gathered up a few scattered shreds of faith and trudged north through the brilliant June sunshine to the townhouse which had once belonged to the Order’s founder, Mr Horatio Ford.
XII
‘My dear Jonathan, how wan you look!’ said Francis in his most theatrical voice as I entered the room where he conducted his daily business. ‘But then the news in this morning’s Times is enough to make anyone blanche. I confess I’m seriously tempted to buy a wireless in order to hear Mr Churchill’s broadcast tonight – only the thought of Father Darcy turning in his grave deters me.’
‘If Father Darcy were alive he would already have discovered what kind of wireless the Archbishop keeps at Lambeth Palace and he’d be busy ordering a better one from Harrods!’
We laughed. The interview seemed to have begun in a promising spirit of amity, but I was acutely aware that the amity was no more than skin-deep.
When I had first met Francis in his gilded youth I had been reminded of that famous acid description of Julius Caesar: ‘He was every man’s woman and every woman’s man.’ But despite this appearance of ambivalence he had paid carnal attention only to the opposite sex and it was not until years later, when I became enamoured with modern psychological theories, that I suspected he was a homosexual who had indulged in heterosexual affairs to conceal his true inclinations not only from the world but from himself. Later still, when I had become far more cautious in applying modern psychology to complex characters, I became less confident of this facile diagnosis and wondered if the effete airs of Francis’ youth had merely been part of a mask he had assumed in order to draw attention to himself; I even wondered if the mask had been his way of damping down strong heterosexual inclinations which he believed might disrupt his life disastrously. But whatever the truth was about his sexuality the fact remained that in his maturity no one could have called him effete. He was a tall man, though not as tall as I was, and the passing years, stripping aside the air of decadence, had substituted a flamboyant air of distinction. He had fine dark eyes, expressive dark eyebrows and a remarkable head of silver hair which he wore longer than a monk should, no doubt out of vanity. I was surprised Father Darcy had permitted it. The Fordites may have dispensed with the medieval custom of the tonsure, but they are still expected to keep their hair decently short.
As I entered the room and we embarked on our friendly opening remarks he moved gracefully around the corner of his large handsome desk to meet me. The room too was large and handsome, littered with the antiques old Ford had left behind, and, as Father Darcy had once boasted smugly: ‘More than a match for any of the Archbishop’s private chambers at Lambeth.’ Father Darcy had been dangerously bold in his belief that to attract worldly respect the Order should present a worldly façade, and personally I deplored such a policy. The Abbot-General’s office in which I now stood was in the enclosed part of the house which meant that no one outside the Order ever saw it, but nevertheless it was furnished as lavishly as the Abbot-General’s parlour where important visitors were received. There was even, I regret to record, a peculiarly gross chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling.
After we had laughed with studied heartiness at the thought of Father Darcy ordering the latest wireless from Harrods, we moved swiftly through the formula of cenobitic greeting like actors in a well-rehearsed play. As Francis paused by the desk I knelt, touched his abbot’s ring with my lips and then rose to shake his hand. A moment later we were both seated facing each other across his desk.
‘I’m sorry to hear you have a difficulty with your son,’ said Francis, idly picking up my letter in which I had requested his permission to visit Yorkshire. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘As it happens I’ve now decided that Martin isn’t my main worry at present.’ I had to will myself to add: ‘My major difficulty lies elsewhere.’
Francis, who had been rereading the letter, at once glanced up. ‘Oh?’ he said. ‘And what, may I ask, is your major difficulty?’
I said: ‘I want to leave the Order,’ and at that moment the die was cast.
‘When Tertullian, who was not a mystic, says that most men apprehend God by means of visions, we realize how natural it seemed to the ancients to believe that these experiences were a genuine and by no