Chapter 10 – Peterborough
This is nearly the shortest chapter in the book. While Edward’s story covers years of his life, it only took months of mine, certainly the time taken for these last two chapters wasn’t much. The whirl of Edward made the ordinary World seem dull and it always amazed me how the flow of real events opened to make way for him. Yet my life wasn’t quite static.
Decisions were pressing, what should I do with my office? The Peterborough property market, which I’d first come here to serve, was in a severe slump. Other firms were closing or amalgamating and the source of business that had drawn me here had all but dried up. I had a business base of a mere two years of goodwill trading in the city, the Development Corporation, which had been so helpful when I first came here, was being wound up and I judged my capital simply inadequate to carry on. The fact is I could have decided to stay and fight to keep my firm in business in Peterborough, but I’d devoted so much of the last four months to the project, I couldn’t do both.
The main concern at closing the office was my remaining assistant. It was a difficult subject to broach; she’d joined the firm with such enthusiasm. In the end she raised it with me, she had an offer from the book trade; from the employer she left to come to us; it was a relief.
The office building was leased, but it was on a prime site, in the centre of the commercial district, it still had value. At the height of the property boom I’d thought to get rid of it at a truly exorbitant price, the landlord didn’t want to pay. Now I went back to him with a much more reasonable figure; to my surprise he accepted it. I could walk away with at least some sort of cheque in my pocket; not really in my pocket, it would go to supporting the rest of my business.
The files would come back to Stafford, much of the work was done there anyway, and I could set the wheels in motion to bring things to an end.
People are harder. What do you do with a failed romance? If I closed the office it meant a return to Stafford, and to Frances. She even sounded pleased at my coming back to her. To avoid this cloying falseness I even put off closing the office. The truth was I couldn’t any longer face living with her, pretending all was well. I deferred closing, at least till after Christmas.
This time was like the closing of a chapter.
When Frances left Peterborough there was an almighty scene: furniture was broken, I was drenched in bath water, a ring was shied from an upstairs window and there were all the usual tokens of love and affection between the parting couple. We didn’t speak again for some time. It left our relationship an empty shell, and it left an emptiness in me. I tried to fill that space with my project with Sarah, but this, too, was proving fraught with difficulties.
I half think Angharad introduced me to Sarah because of the troubles I faced. She came to the office, not many days after that scene, for no particular reason. She has a telepathy for people in trouble, and it was about a month later she introduced me to Sarah. You may remember; Sarah was having problems with a romance of her own. It made me suck my teeth slightly, had she introduced Sarah to me as a hypnotist or a potential girlfriend? I very much assumed she would have known better than to confuse the two, but had she? In asking Sarah to join me in the project I’d relied more than I cared to admit on Angharad, had she been disingenuous? The question was one more cause for depression.
The project had become a real possibility from just an academic discussion, yet everything had been encouraging. It had kept my mind off emotions and business. Then came the lack of progress with Sarah and this business with Edward, you can’t ignore Edward, it was like trying to ignore a storm, a storm when I was all at sea.
Now the desolate prospect of return to the Midlands threatened to drop my spirits further. The delays from Sarah’s absence brought our project to a halt and the confusion between Eadie and Sarah turned difficulty into an incalculable web. The mystery and magic of Edward, and the strangeness of it, left me lost, out of sight of dry land. Yet I couldn’t let go of any of it.
The chapter closed on my certainty in my own skills. You don’t admit these things to anyone, only to you, dear reader, yet I would have run away from all these problems, would have let go, if I could.
There was this time to think, I should have talked more to Angharad, of course; eventually I did, she’s very hard to resist. If she had been match making between Sarah and I this romance with Eadie would certainly come as no surprise. I disliked the thought. It would be bound to call into question the genuineness of my passion for the project and my honesty over the visions of Edward. All for a supposed attraction to a woman I judged unreliable. I wanted to think it out myself but when you’re in such a complexity it’s so difficult. You’ve no idea how much emotion can cloud our thoughts.
Sometime before all this, one of our insurance company contacts invited Frances and I to a lavish entertainment. It was held at Peterborough cathedral. The music was by a symphony orchestra, it was exquisite, and the dinner afterwards, in the mayor’s parlour, the whole evening was quite a civic occasion.
The date was in December of the year before this story began, and the Christmas lights of the town and the cathedral combined with the music and gently falling snow to make an evening of pure enchantment. Ever since I’ve paid occasional visits to the cathedral.
It was here that I brought my confusion. Who knows what I expected to find, for certainly religion played no part in my life, gave me no confident faith to fall back on; I only wish it did.
The church buildings of England are remarkable, so many are so very old. We take them for granted. Most of the present cathedral of St. Peter at Peterborough is eight hundred years old; it dates from the reign of Richard the Lion Heart; as every Law student knows, the beginning of Legal Memory. Yet it still stands, solid and impressive. The glass and concrete offices that fill the rest of the city can never drown it; you feel they may come and go, but the cathedral will go on forever.
To touch the massive stone work is to draw your mind back over the centuries, to picture the thoughts of those who built it, when the World was so different. There’s a trembling progression of humanity, a tide of emotions of the countless thousands who’ve lived their day and passed on. A cathedral is an excellent place for human devotion.
I came to pray in one of the little side chapels. It was almost like taking thought about Edward, but this time I was taking thought about my own life, as if I was asking God for help. I wouldn’t even know how, yet I prayed in earnest.
Did I expect a message from God? Did I receive one? Sitting in that chapel, words came to me with such clarity and force, it took me aback.
“DO MY WILL, DO YOUR OWN.”
The power of those words burned into my memory.
For some time I was afraid to repeat them.
They were the words of the maniac, believing he’s heard the voice of God, giving unlimited licence. How many times has some serial killer, or some schizophrenic, claimed to hear something like them? Surely they must be blasphemy, leading only to disappointment, failure and madness.
What did they mean?
Of course they may be merely a message from my own subconscious. But from my own mind or from Christ himself, what did they mean?
The problem was I didn’t know my own will.
I thought about it.
When I was still in my twenties I’d been offered a partnership in the richest practice, per capita, in the county. I accepted a job as an assistant and did everything possible to avoid the partnership. The prospect of spending the next forty years doing the same job, in a small market town, filled me with horror. I was quite right, while I was there I saw the senior partner kill himself through over work. When he died the Law Society’s obituary got every detail of his life wrong, forty years of devoted service to the community and the Law Society’s reporter couldn’t even be bothered to record his name correctly.
Yes I could shelve the project and forget Edward, defend my business and stay in Peterborough. I would finis
h up reasonably well off and respected and have done nothing with my life, or I could stick to the project and Edward. Even if it meant a return to Stafford, even if the choice of Sarah was hopelessly in error, there was really no choice.
If I did anything else I would always wonder; and why had such rich and feeling visions been given me? I would go on with Edward.
Taking the words in the cathedral as, “have faith”, I would act on them. It was only later I came across something to cast light on “Do My Will, Do Your Own”.
To understand Edward better I took to reading books from his time, including Malory’s ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’, the medieval theology of Thomas à Kempis, and Julian of Norwich. In the year 1373 Mother Julian, the great anchoress of Norwich, experienced some remarkable revelations, so remarkable she spent the next twenty years writing about them.
Of her fourteenth revelation Mother Julian wrote that God revealed these words to her,
“I am the ground of your praying.
First, it is my will you have something,
and then I make you want it too;
then I make you beseech me for it –
and you do beseech me.
How could you not have what you ask for?”
This rocked me back; it said at length what had been summed up for me in just six words. I’d asked for the situation I found myself in, it was up to me to work it out. Whatever happened would be my choice and God’s Will.
My state of mind was not an easy one, I was more used to believing in the power of my own reason than having faith in God; and false certainty in ‘God’s Will’ has always been the excuse for such terrible actions. All I could do was hope.
I phoned Angharad; I told her all the story of Edward and Eadie. She wasn’t contemptuous or cynical, I remember the conversation.
“If you make me a promise I’ll make you a promise. Tell me the story as it all comes out and I won’t make any judgements.”
“But there’s just so much of it.”
“I haven’t got a job, except with some of your clients; I don’t have a business to run. I can do pretty much what I like.”
It was agreed there and then. I would be open with Angharad.
After that I phoned her often. She complained if I didn’t phone her almost daily. The phone bill grew enormous.
I told her about the presents Edward received at Christmas, about how he felt. I told her about Edward’s book of King Arthur, that his father had given him.
If anyone listened to our conversations what would they have thought? Few love affairs could be more intense, yet we spoke of Eadie and Edward, of history and magic. Angharad was enthusiastic as to everything. Above all she didn’t think me foolish. Perhaps, but for her, I would have put it all away.
It was Angharad who took the Marbles seriously and encouraged me to go over that dream and tell you about it. She was interested in the Sword, too, and made sketch after sketch until I could see the exact likeness of the one Edward received that Christmas.
When I saw that Sword, and Duke Henry’s letter, I was admittedly excited. But I felt Edward’s reaction, and then my own cold reason set in. It’s one thing to indulge myself with visions of a boy who undoubtedly existed, but where does fantasy step in? We’ve already had the dubious dubbing of Edward as a knight, am I to swallow a mythical sword?
I told Angharad about it in much those words; I remember her reply was stinging,
“Did you channel it honestly? or did you set out to tell yourself a lie?”
“Of course I did it honestly!”
“You can judge evidence can’t you? You always said you could.”
“I saw the Sword, it was as if I held it in my hand, as Edward did, I read the letter in exactly the same way. The only reason to doubt it is the legend of Father John.
My voice sounded tired even to myself, Angharad spoke softly,
“And you verified your channelling against historical facts.”
What could I say? Angharad extracted a promise, over the Marbles, the Sword and anything else I was inclined to doubt. I promised Angharad that I would, at least, suspend disbelief.
She wanted me to tell her Malory’s tale of King Arthur. We went through all the Arthurian legends I could find, stuck away in odd corners of the house. There was Tennyson, of course, Geoffrey Ash and even an abridged version of Malory from my childhood. She pressed me to read them to her, pointing out how Edward himself connected it to Malory.
One thing struck me about King Arthur’s knights, they were all terribly aggressive. They didn’t only save damsels in distress, they fought each other, at the drop of a hat. They were often ‘sore hurt’ but recovered miraculously, usually ready for another fight.
The thing that really laid these knights low in great numbers, before the last battle, when they slaughtered each other, was the peril of the quest for the Holy Grail. This danger appeared from their own minds. Were their delusions themselves dangerous or being possessed of an impure mind to imagine such things?
One night I walked into town, it was only three or four miles from my flat. It was damply cold but the rain and wind had stopped some hours before and it wasn’t at all unpleasant. My thoughts were in complete chaos, to be soothed by the mindless effort of walking. I found myself, as it were all unexpectedly, in the centre of the city and headed for the cathedral. The time was late, after midnight. There were no pedestrians but for the occasional nightclub reveller: no traffic but for two or three young men in their modified production cars, with wide wheels and ‘go faster’ stripes, racing their engines and screeching their tyres round the corners. It crossed my mind they would have made good knights at the court of King Arthur.
The cathedral close was all quiet but for a slow, steady drip from the trees overhead. Floodlights showed the West front in imposing relief, elsewhere there were only holes in the blackness, receding into the depths of unrecorded history. Your eyes were free to make the landscape of your imagination but my mind was too cluttered to make anything happy.
At least and at last, Sarah was coming back, according to Angharad, in the next few days.
***
Peterborough Cathedral