‘We have all been the witness to a very tragic and shocking event,’ Father Godfrey began, leaning his body against his desk. ‘There is no escaping the fact that Father Lambert, in a moment of terrible despair, has succumbed to the prompting of the Devil and has taken his own life.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ muttered the porter.
‘Now I have told Brother Andrew, and I will tell Doctor O’Malley, that if news of this gets out to the wider world it will do incalculable damage to our holy mother, the Church.’
‘Of course,’ said Father Thomas.
‘It is therefore incumbent upon us to make sure that it does not.’
‘Indeed,’ said Gerry.
‘I shall therefore propose to Doctor O’Malley that it be given out that Father Lambert died of a stroke.’
‘And no police?’ asked Gerry.
‘And no police. But clearly, if Doctor O’Malley is to risk his professional reputation for the greater good of the Church, then it is our duty to support him by saying the same thing.’
‘You can count on me,’ said Gerry.
‘Even our brothers in the community?’ asked Father Thomas.
‘Must not know.’
The old mathematician bowed his head. ‘Very well.’
‘I take it upon my own conscience,’ said Father Godfrey, ‘and as your superior I instruct you on pain of sin never to divulge to anyone how Father Lambert met his end.’
Two
Father Godfrey awaited the arrival of the doctor, alone at his desk, his eyes closed, his face pressed against the palms of his hands. He too tried to pray, but the only words that came to him were those of Christ on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The suicide of Father Lambert appeared to undo everything he had achieved since the community had chosen him as their Prior.
His election, seven years before, had marked the end of the long period of turmoil which had followed the Second Vatican Council. When the genial Pope, John XXIII, had summoned all bishops in communion with the Catholic Church to the Vatican in 1962, none among the London Simonites had envisaged the revolution this would bring about. Certainly the Church had become isolated, even aloof, from the outside world. Its light was hidden under a bushel of institutional conceit. The talent of a composer like Elgar, or a writer like Evelyn Waugh, was ascribed by the Simonites to their religion. Those outside the Church – even fellow Christians in the Church of England – were thought damned, if not for what they believed, then for what their forefathers had done to the Catholic martyrs of Elizabethan times. When all the Simonite monks were joined by the boys from their school, and the lay people who belonged to the parish, to sing the Credo in Latin, or a hymn like ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, there was hardly a heart which did not swell with pride, or face flush with triumphalist fervour.
All that changed. First it was ordained that the mass was to be said in English instead of Latin; then, that the celebrant should not face God in the tabernacle but the people in their pews. The mystery of the consecration, once hidden behind the hunched shoulders of the priest, now became a spectacle for all to see, like the feeding of the animals at the zoo. Many of the old moral certainties, so painstakingly transcribed from parchment to parchment by Simonites over the ages, were thrown aside. No sins were now mortal or venial, or even sins at all, if they were done with a comfortable conscience. The relics of the saints, once venerated, suddenly became so many bits of bone. Terms like ‘transubstantiation’ and ‘consubstantiation’ became meaningless distinctions: the only difference in the eucharistic bread of the various Christian denominations was in the way it was baked.
Father Godfrey had not blamed the Council itself for what happened in its wake. It started and finished with the best of intentions, and nowhere in its promulgations can be found the texts and statements which explain why tens of thousands of priests, friars, monks and nuns suddenly threw off their habits and abandoned their calling. Or, more confusingly, threw off their habits without abandoning their calling. Or, most confusingly of all, abandoned their calling without throwing off their habits, remaining as priests, friars and nuns to reform the Church so radically from within that it would bear no resemblance to what it was before.
The English community of Simonites suffered the full force of this hurricane of change. In 1965 there were forty-seven monks in their monastery in London – forty-one priests and six novices. Twenty years later there were twelve. Of the missing thirty-five, nine had died, five had been transferred to the American province, two had defected to the Dominicans, while the remaining seven had been laicized, six of them marrying, two of those to nuns.
The statistics, however, do not tell of the terrible quarrels and conflicts during those twenty years. Rival camps were formed within the community whose mutual antipathy was so great that they would barely speak to one another. A strong Prior might have prevented this degeneration of a community supposedly based upon love; but it was a tradition among the Simonites not to waste the talents of their eminent scholars on administration, but to elect as their superior a monk who had nothing better to do. In untroubled times, this arrangement worked well. Most of the Simonites pursued their careers in secular universities, and the rule of the Prior was a formality.
Suddenly, however, some of the younger monks began to behave in ways which outraged their older and more conservative brethren, discarding the grey habit which had been the uniform of the Simonites since the eleventh century, and even the black suit and clerical collar which was worn in the world outside, and appearing first in suits, with collars and ties, and later in jeans, with shirts open at the neck.
The Prior at the time tried chiding, gently, these rebellious monks, only to be subjected to a counter-blast of progressive theology – Karl Rahner, Hans Kung and ‘the spirit of Vatican II’. He would retreat only to find himself prodded in the rear by the indignation of the conservatives. The matter would then be raised in Chapter, leading to painful debates in which insults were thrown from one side to the other, all couched in convoluted theological jargon. The Council had decided that the Church should be open to the world. How could the monks follow this teaching, the progressives argued, if they wore fancy dress dating from the Middle Ages? How could they keep themselves informed of what was happening in the world if they were not allowed televisions in their cells? Or stereos to listen to the kind of music that was an integral part of contemporary culture?
The community capitulated on the question of clothes and televisions, but worse was to come. One of the progressive monks, a middle-aged man, was seen entering a restaurant with a nun – neither wearing habits, both in lay clothes; and not at midday, but at eight in the evening; and not a straightforward kind of restaurant where two hungry people might go to get something to eat, but somewhere expensive and dimly lit with pink table-cloths and the menu in French.
Then a second monk, who taught Medieval History at Bedford College, began holding tutorials in his cell. Since his students were all girls, and it was an ancient rule that no women were allowed in the monastery, this aroused such indignation that the Prior was forced to call a special meeting of the Chapter. Here the Medievalist argued that the bar against women was the expression of the sexist, paternalist, misogynistic, gynophobic prejudices of the Church which were most emphatically at variance with the spirit of Vatican II. He was supported by the monk dating the nun who, since he was not only the senior theologian in the community, but had also served as a peritus at the final session of the Council itself, persuaded a majority of the community that to bar women from entering the monastery was to disregard the promptings of the Holy Ghost.
It was decided that women should be admitted, but not after dark for fear of scandal. The Medievalist continued to hold afternoon tutorials for his students from Bedford College, one of whom, in particular, seemed to need more supervising than the others. It was reported to the Prior that music was heard from behind the door when she was there. The Medievalist said that it
was a tape of Carmina Burana which was relevant to the subject. Later still, some of the monks heard other sounds of a kind they dared not interpret; but when the Medievalist was laicized, and then married the student, it came to them as no surprise.
There were other sources of dissension, particularly when some of the young monks heard the call of the South American bishops to exercise a preferential option for the poor. Under their influence the community changed their school from a good grammar school to a bad comprehensive where monks who were authorities on the poetry of Catullus or the Theory of Relativity tried to teach Maths and English to the rough little ragamuffins who lived in neighbouring council flats.
There was also the question of the order’s endowments, bank deposits and stocks and shares, and some valuable paintings which had been bequeathed to the Simonites over the years. It was proposed in Chapter – and the motion was carried – that all should be sold and the proceeds given to the poor; and it was only through the deft, and somewhat duplicitous, transactions of the stubborn and conservative procurator that the English province of the Simonites remained solvent.
This procurator had been Father Godfrey who, together with Father Thomas and one or two others, made up the conservative faction. None of them, however, had the qualities to wrest the moral initiative from the progressives. Father Thomas was shy, and could only see the hand of God in the formulas of higher mathematics. Father Godfrey was good at finance and administration, but had a weakness for lunching with rich benefactors of the order, and knew rather too much about wine.
Their fortunes had changed with the return of Father Lambert to be Professor at Huntingdon College. He brought with him not just his prestige as an archaeologist, but also his distinction as a theologian and reputation as a monk of an uncompromising kind. He was known to fast. He was seen to pray. He made a personal confession every week. Yet he accepted whole-heartedly the doctrines of the Council. He was open to the world, teaching at a secular institution. He was also ecumenical in spirit, with more friends than any of the other monks among Anglicans, Muslims and Jews.
Where he differed from the progressives was on the question of what it meant to be holy. Their interpretation of the law of love led them to support famine relief, nuclear disarmament and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Father Lambert could see love in a kind word from a duchess to her servant, or the prayer said by a general with nuclear missiles under his command. It was faith, not good works, which saved man from damnation. To those Simonites who dismissed the ‘cultic priesthood’ in favour of helping the poor, he would say, like the Curé d’Ars, that welfare was merely the work of men, whereas Christ’s sacrifice in the mass was the work of God.
It was not so much what he said, however, as the force of his example which won over the Simonite monks. Under his influence, they revived ceremonies like Benediction which had been abandoned after the Council. On his advice, they dismissed the ineffective headmaster of their school and appointed one of a sterner kind. When their Prior died in 1981, many wanted Father Lambert to take his place. He asked not to be put forward, because, if elected, he would have had to give up his post at Huntingdon College. The candidate he suggested was Father Godfrey, and Father Godfrey was duly chosen.
Three
Andrew, as he left his Prior’s study, felt no appetite for supper – indeed nausea overwhelmed him when he smelt the aroma of sausages, cabbage and coffee from the refectory. He returned to his own room and to the desk where he had placed his books in what now seemed a different life. His window was still open and the lamp switched on, but he went neither to the window nor to his desk but knelt down at his bed and raised his eyes to the crucifix on the wall behind it. Instead of any prayers coming onto his lips, however, or pious thoughts into his mind, the tears which had been seeping into his eyes for some time now flowed freely down his cheeks, and his torso began to shake as he sobbed with an abandon he had not known since he was a child. The image of the leathery cheeks and smiling face of his beloved Professor kept changing to the grotesque grimace of the strangled corpse. He hid his face in the cotton bedspread which covered the blankets on his bed, not so much to muffle the sound of his sobbing or sop up his warm tears as to shut out the light, as if darkness would obscure the reality of what had happened.
In time this physical expression of grief ran its course. The sobbing stopped. He raised his eyes from the bed, though not to the crucifix which, rather, they avoided; and because, at that moment, he felt far from God his thoughts turned instead to his older brother, Henry, who had always been his closest friend.
He went to his desk and put his hand on the telephone, intending to ring Henry and say what had happened. Then he remembered that the Prior had forbidden it and wondered if it would not be worse to tell Henry half the truth than to tell him nothing at all. Yet the thought of never confiding in him, and so never getting the kind of comfort that his sardonic brother always provided, seemed to add to the already intolerable weight of his suffering; for though Henry was not a Catholic, and thought Andrew almost insane for wanting to become a priest, he had nonetheless witnessed the drama of his vocation and so could hardly be excluded from knowing the present tragic turn of events.
As he wondered what to do – whether to ring his brother now, or wait to tell what had happened until they met the next day, or not to tell him at all – Andrew was distracted by a moth which had flown in through the open window and was throwing itself erratically at the bulb of the lamp on his desk. He went to close the window, and as he did so looked up to the spot where he had seen the body hanging from the wall. A light shone in the room below – perhaps the doctor had arrived and was studying the body – and above, Andrew noticed, the window remained open. A reflex sense of responsibility for Father Lambert’s affairs made him decide to go up and close it.
He passed no other monk as he climbed the stairs to the floor above and walked the length of the long corridor to Father Lambert’s cell. He opened the door, switched on the light and went to close the window, squeezing between the bed and the wall. He then turned to push the bed back to its proper place away from the window. The end of the cable remained tied to the bedpost, a short length jutting out to the point where Gerry, the porter, had cut it. Andrew worked the knot loose and, having freed the piece of cable, tied it in a coil and dropped it in the wastepaper basket by Father Lambert’s desk.
He looked around the room, half hoping to see something that might explain why Father Lambert had taken his own life. Everything was so familiar to him that he could see at once that nothing was out of place. There was a crucifix on the wall by the bed, as there was in each of the cells; the narrow bed with its posts of stained pine; the wardrobe, made of a heavier wood – oak or ash – and decorated with the same kind of Gothic embellishments as the banisters of the stairs and the confessionals in the church.
The walls were white, but one was obscured by the books stacked against it from floor to ceiling. On the other three, the only decoration was the crucifix above the bed. There was a sink in the corner of the room, as there was in Andrew’s, with the same small mirror above it; a chest of drawers with Father Lambert’s hairbrush and comb lying on it, together with a small leather box containing his collar-studs and cuff-links; a bedside table, constructed to contain a chamber-pot; and a desk at the book-lined wall, with a filing cabinet at either side, an Anglepoise lamp at one corner and at the other two telephones – one linked to the exchange at the porter’s lodge, and the other a direct line.
He had also had an office at Huntingdon College, but he had preferred to work here in his cell. The desk was therefore covered with papers – issues of archaeological reviews from America, France and Germany; offprints sent by colleagues in different countries; theses sent for an opinion; and letters that were yet to be answered. They were not scattered in disorganized piles as a description of them might suggest, but were laid out either on the large desk or on a shelf behind it which had been cleared of books. Andrew, having a
cted as Father Lambert’s secretary, knew the significance of each particular pile and glanced cursorily over them to see that each was in place.
In the back of his mind was the thought not that Father Lambert would have left a note that was meant for him, or indeed for anyone else, but that there might be something which would explain his state of mind. He had not worked out quite what that clue could be, and so he was not looking for anything in particular when it suddenly struck him that there was something odd about the arrangement of the papers on the desk. They were not displaced but rather lay a little too neatly in their various piles. It was not a difference that anyone could have noticed who was not entirely familiar with Father Lambert’s habits. He had been orderly but not tidy, always able to find what he was looking for among the papers scattered on the desk and shelf.
Now, however, the piles were all neatly stacked, as if a cleaner had been dusting the room. He wondered for a moment whether the old Pole who cooked for the monks and polished the corridors might have broken the rule under which each monk had to clean his own cell; but by lowering his head at an angle to the light from the lamp, he could see that while a thin film of dust had been disturbed around the piles of papers, it had not been wiped away.
The obvious supposition was that Father Lambert himself had rearranged his own papers before taking his life; but to Andrew’s eye the neatness of their arrangement suggested someone else’s hand. Why, moreover, would a man who was about to kill himself tidy a pile of back issues of the American Journal of Archaeology and the Revue d’archéologie Biblique? Yet why should anyone else have moved the magazines, unless looking for something they had not found among his papers?
Andrew went to the desk and opened the drawers. Here too his eyes fell upon familiar objects – paper, pens, a bottle of ink, a magnifying glass, pins, paper-clips and postage stamps – and he stared at them for some time, unable to decide whether they had been moved or not. It seemed once again as if they were all rather more neatly arranged than he had imagined them, but then perhaps they were in exactly the same position as before. He could no longer tell whether he was noticing some subtle change in the arrangement of things or imagining evidence to feed his suspicions. But suspicions of what? If he was searching for anything it was for a note, but he was hardly searching even for that: Father Lambert had considered himself answerable to God alone.