BECKETT: No, it’s not the Great War that’s been recently concluded. That was some time earlier, although the Germans were involved in it so you can be forgiven your confusion. We only referred to it as the Great War because we didn’t know that there was going to be another one.
JOHN CLARE: A greater one?
BECKETT: I think a lot of that depends on your perspective.
THOMAS BECKET: [Exasperated.] All I meant by asking where I am, if I’m a saint, is that I do not seem to be in Heaven.
BECKETT: No. I’ll own, it doesn’t look much like it.
THOMAS BECKET: Yet nor is it the unending fire of Heaven’s opposite.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. It’s nothing near as bad as that.
THOMAS BECKET: Am I then to suppose that this is purgatory, this grey place where phantoms wander lost and make their aimless discourse, caught here for all time?
HUSBAND: [Bleakly, still staring into space.] I threw them out, and I got new ones.
WIFE: [The WIFE looks up at her HUSBAND uncomprehendingly.] What?
HUSBAND: The sheets. I threw them out, and I got new ones. And I turned the mattress over.
BECKETT: [To THOMAS BECKET.] What you’ve just said, I think that you might be very near the mark.
WIFE: [She looks at her HUSBAND, shaking her head in incredulous disgust.] That’s you. That’s you forever, in your vest and sweating, trying to turn the mattress over, trying to cover all your stains. And was she watching while you did that? Was she sitting there and watching?
HUSBAND: She were crying.
WIFE: There. What did I say?
HUSBAND: [Hopelessly.] I thought, you know. I thought that it were all of the emotions she was having that had made her weepy.
WIFE: Oh, I dare say. I dare say it was. All the emotions. While she watched her father try to hide her blood because he was so proud of what he’d done.
HUSBAND: [As if understanding what he’s done for the first time.] Oh, God. [After a pause, there is the SOUND from OFF of the CHURCH CLOCK, STRIKING ONCE.] Is that … is that one o’clock, and it was half past twelve before, or is that half past one, and …
WIFE: [Explosively, at her wits end.] Oh, shut up! Shut up! Shut up with everything! It’s always the same time! We can’t move on from this! We’re stuck here on these steps, this night, over and over! [The WIFE starts to weep again. Her HUSBAND also sinks his head in his hands.]
THOMAS BECKET: [Downcast and resigned.] Purgatory, then. But you say they are yet alive?
BECKETT: Again, I think a lot of that depends on your perspective. They’re alive here, in their time, as we are in our own. One way of looking at things, everybody’s dead and always has been. Like your woman here was saying, we’re all stuck. Perhaps we have it all, the good and bad, over and over. Wouldn’t that be all the Heaven and the Hell of it, how everyone was threatened by their pastors?
THOMAS BECKET: I find that a fearful ideology. I had dared hope for better.
JOHN CLARE: I’d feared worse! If it meant I should have my first wife Mary by my side again, then the travails of life should be as nothing and that by itself should be my Heaven.
BECKETT: I’m not saying I believe it. It’s just something I’ve had put to me. The father of the girl I talked about, James Joyce, I can recall him telling me about his fondness for Ouspensky’s notion of what I suppose you’d call a grand recurrence. It had had some bearing upon the eternal day in Dublin that was circumnavigated variously in his greatest novels.
THOMAS BECKET: More and more I hope this to be an outlandish dream and, wishing you no disrespect, the pair of you but figments. It may be this is a night-start after all, born of my apprehensions that I have given the King offence, one that our erstwhile friendship shall not mitigate.
BECKETT: Well, I’ll confess to the same thought myself initially. A dream of some kind would be the most reasonable explanation, although since I don’t subscribe to the interpretations of Professor Freud, I can’t see why I should be dreaming about all this wretched and incestuous back-and-forth. And that’s before I try to fathom how a load of saints and writers that I haven’t thought about in years fit into the arrangement. It’s a mighty puzzle, and I can’t say I’m enjoying it.
THOMAS BECKET: [Looking at couple on steps.] That is the sin that binds them in their disagreement, then? The man has lain down with his daughter?
JOHN CLARE: In the countryside there’s more of it than you’d imagine.
BECKETT: Even in the towns, I wouldn’t say they did so bad. The woman I was talking of, Lucia, there were those who reckoned it was much the same thing that commenced her acting up, all of the incest and the rest of it.
JOHN CLARE: [Shocked.] Her father, that you said was called James Joyce as was my Mary’s, he’d been guilty of the same offence?
BECKETT: Oh, no, not him. He worshipped her. She was the one he wrote for, and about. He might have thought about her in that fashion, I suppose, but if he did he only tried to touch her with his writing, fingering her with a sentence here or there, a feel of tit concealed within a subtext. No, the culprit in a physical regard, if that was anyone, my guess is that it might have been her brother.
THOMAS BECKET: In my day that would be thought as much a sin … at least in open conversation. Privately, I am convinced that there is nowhere it does not go on.
JOHN CLARE: Though I will own it is a grievous matter, I’ve known many that have sported with a brother or a sister and there’s been no great harm come of it.
BECKETT: Well, Lucia was very young when this occurred, now, if occur it did.
JOHN CLARE: But we have said before that your own views upon what is a proper age may not be those appropriate to earlier times.
BECKETT: If I’m right, Lucia would have been ten.
THOMAS BECKET: Unless we speak of Royalty that is an age that even in my times would be thought young.
JOHN CLARE: [Somewhat sheepishly.] Is that a fact? Well, yes, I can see that it would compound the incest.
THOMAS BECKET: Of the sins I would remark it is not, evidently, thought a deadly one, and in my readings of the Holy Bible I have found it something of an ambiguity.
BECKETT: I’d eat my hat if it were not adversely mentioned somewhere in Leviticus.
THOMAS BECKET: That is undoubtedly the truth, but what of the unusual dispensation granted unto Lot after he and his daughters have escaped the Cities of the Plain?
BECKETT: I had assumed that, as a man, God had felt bad about turning the poor chap’s wife to salt. He’d very possibly felt he owed your man Lot a favour and had thought it was the least that he could do, to look the other way for once.
THOMAS BECKET: It’s an unusual interpretation, but …
JOHN CLARE: You know, I’ve always found Eden a puzzle that would suit your argument.
BECKETT: What are you going on about?
JOHN CLARE: Well, Cain and Abel. I’d have thought it would be obvious that even if the Lord had granted Eve and Adam one of each sort rather than two boys, improper love within the family must surely have been unavoidable. More so in Eden than in, say, Green’s Norton, unless there is something I have not considered. It might be that what undid your woman friend and the poor child that is the issue of this sorry pair alike is something that is part of our condition since our origins there in God’s garden.