‘Forgive me, Mr Philips, this is all most interesting, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time,’ he said. ‘It is the conversions of the last twenty-five years that are of particular interest to me.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Christopher Philips, and he was off again. The interruption did seem to have accelerated the flow of history, even if only slightly. The decades were now passing, Powerscourt calculated, at the rate of one every five minutes. Maybe he could escape in an hour and a half. He heard about Gladstone’s sister Helen, a passionate convert to the Roman faith, who refused to have lavatory paper in her house. Instead her cloakrooms were liberally provided with the published works of Protestant divines. He heard about Newman’s unhappy attempt to start a Catholic university in Dublin.
‘In some ways, of course, the strange thing about Newman,’ Philips said after seventy-five minutes with scarcely a pause, ‘was not that some people followed him, but that so few did so. The Cardinal at the time believed that Newman would lead a positive stampede of some of the best and brightest of the youth of England into the fold. But it never happened.’
And then, miraculously, Christopher Philips paused. He looked up at his clock.
‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, forgive me. I have talked for far too long already. You want to know about the last twenty-five years, I believe.’
Powerscourt nodded. He wondered how long the man’s lectures went on for. Did he start at ten in the morning and finish about half-past three? Was there anybody left in the hall by the end?
‘The conversions are almost all one way, from Canterbury to Rome, as it were. They are isolated cases. They are steady but not very numerous. There are, of course, a variety of reasons for departure. You could put doubt at the top of the list, I suppose, doubt about the impact of modern science, doubts about miracles, doubts about belonging to a Church that is controlled by man in the form of the government of the day in the House of Commons rather than by a hierarchy of faith that has been in place for nearly two millennia. If you worked in the countryside you might wonder if you were in the wrong place. If you worked in the cities you might despair of ever achieving anything in the midst of such terrible social problems of dreadful housing that saps the body and the lack of work that saps the soul. Roman Catholicism offers faith to the doubtful. It offers certainty to the sceptics. It offers order to the confused. It offers hierarchy to the rootless. It offers historical tradition to those searching for authority. Once you can make the leap of faith to cross the drawbridge into it, as it were, your intellectual problems are resolved.’
‘Have you heard, Mr Philips, of an organization called Civitas Dei?’ Powerscourt fired his arrow into the dark.
Christopher Philips looked at him with great interest. ‘I have, Lord Powerscourt. I have to say I am surprised to hear that you know about it. It is very secretive.’
‘What sort of organization is it?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘And why is it so secret?’
‘I don’t know very much about it, I’m afraid. It’s believed to be related to the Jesuits in some way. The headquarters are in Rome. Its aims are to advance the coming of God’s kingdom, as the title would suggest. I believe it is secretive because they wish to use every means possible to obtain their objectives.’
‘When you say every means possible, are you implying that they might be prepared to use illegal means?’ asked Powerscourt, thinking suddenly of bodies roasted on a spit or cut into pieces and distributed about the countryside.
‘I don’t think they would do anything outside the law,’ said Philips. ‘I’m afraid that’s the sum total of my knowledge.’
As Powerscourt began to say his thank yous and goodbyes Christopher Philips held him back. ‘Just a moment, Lord Powerscourt, I think this might interest you.’
He reached into his desk and pulled out a fading place card from a dinner at High Table. ‘This is the menu and seating plan for the dinner the Master and Fellows gave for John Henry Newman when they invited him back to Oxford in the late 1870s, over thirty years after he left. They say he derived more pleasure from his return to Oxford than he did when the Pope made him a Cardinal. Everyone who attended signed it on the back.’
He handed it over to Powerscourt as if it were a holy relic or the bread at the Communion service. Powerscourt glanced down the menu, thinking that Johnny Fitzgerald would certainly have approved of the wines. Then he turned pale. For in one place at the top table, three places away from the Master’s left, was a Moreton. G.B. Moreton. Powerscourt remembered the Dean telling him about the two different Moretons who had been involved in the succession to the Bishopric of Compton. He checked the signatures on the back. There it was. Gervase Bentley Moreton. Then he had another shock. For seated at the bottom end of the table was one A.C. Talbot. Powerscourt checked the signature again. He knew it well. Like Moreton’s he had seen it before. His head was spinning. Gervase Bentley Moreton was the Bishop, and Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot was the Dean of Compton Cathedral.
19
God in heaven, Powerscourt said to himself. Whose God? Whose heaven? Anglican or Roman Catholic? Not one but two of them. Not just the Dean but the Bishop as well. They must have been Anglican back then or else how could they have reached their present lofty positions in Compton Minster? But suppose they had been planning to convert to Rome even then, or maybe shortly afterwards, seduced perhaps by the beauty of Newman’s prose and the luminous certainties of his faith. In that case they had been sleepers, moles burrowing deep into the Anglican hierarchy, for over twenty years. Hold on a minute, he said to himself, still staring as if hypnotized at the seating plan. It could all be a coincidence, an accident. The Dean and the Bishop could have been Anglicans all along. Maybe they still were. Then he remembered the Archdeacon and his furtive trips to Melbury Clinton on Thursdays. Perhaps there was not one but three of them. But what was the point? Why should they dissemble for so long about their true allegiance? Was there an end point, a time when the pretence could stop? An extravagant, an impossible thought shot through his mind. He put it to one side.
The bells of Oxford were ringing outside, Balliol following Trinity, Wadham following Hertford, the torch passed on down to New College and Queen’s and Magdalen with its deer park by the river. Powerscourt suddenly realized that he had been staring at the menu and the signatures for a couple of minutes at least. He returned it with a smile to Christopher Philips.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘my mind was far away.’
‘You looked, Lord Powerscourt,’ Philips replied, ‘as if you were wrestling with some mighty problem. They say, you know, that Newman stayed in college for three or four days. Apparently he grew very friendly with some of the people he met at the dinner.’
‘Really?’ said Powerscourt. ‘I don’t suppose we know which people, do we?’
‘One of them was certainly the man Moreton,’ said Christopher Philips, totally unaware that he was setting off another depth charge in Powerscourt’s brain. ‘They say they had a lot in common with their interests in early biblical scholarship.’
‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sure they must have had a lot to talk about.’
The rehearsal for Handel’s Messiah was at its end. Vaughan Wyndham, the Compton choirmaster, and his choir were folding up their scores, the musicians returning their instruments into their cases. It was going well, the choirmaster thought. In a few days’ time when they had finally mastered the more difficult sections of ‘Unto us a Child is Born’, he could have a full run-through of the entire oratorio.