‘Those things, which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, vouchsafe to give us, for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord: and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with you always.’ There was a silence, then a faint scuffling as the congregation rose from their knees. The communicants, who had dotted themselves sparsely about the huge church, consisted of the following: an elderly Miss Larkin, somehow connected with the ‘famous’ painter; a Miss Amy Burdett, who played the organ, rather slowly, on Sundays; a Mrs Clun, a widow, who ran Anne Lapwing’s Boutique (Anne was an imaginary figure); a youth called Benning recently come to teach engineering at the Polytechnic; Hector Gaines who was a devout man and liked to have learned conversations with Father Bernard; and Miss Dunbury of Blanch Cottages. Miss Dunbury was especially concerned to bewail her manifold sins, which did not include reading detective stories (Father Bernard had assured her this was not a sin) but did include scanning the newspapers for murders and feeling disappointed when there were none.
Saint Paul’s Church, Victoria Park, built in 1860 by an admirer of William Butterfield, was a huge barn-like structure, without side aisles, dominated by the towering gilded reredos. (The rood screen, by Ninian Comper, has been added later.) The dwindling worshippers sat in some stocky modern pews near the east end, leaving the large space behind to be occupied by Victorian ghosts. There were four suitably bedizened side chapels, mere recesses however, not the encrusted caves which Father Bernard would have preferred. The walls of the church were decorated by a large solemn play of reddish and yellowish bricks and tiles, now revealed almost in its entirety since many of the Victorian funeral monuments had been shaken down by the wartime bomb which destroyed the tower and the Rectory. Post-war austerity had not restored these relics which languished in the crypt, ignored by Father Bernard who found the walls quite glorious enough as they were, assuming that they could not be covered by oriental hangings. The floor was paved by matching tiles, bearing many ingenious geometric devices and stylized flowers, from which Father Bernard had stripped away the senseless modern carpets installed by his predecessor. Persian rugs would have been acceptable, but the days of rich patrons were over. There was, one of the last donations, one lonely tapestry hanging under the west window, designed by Ned Larkin, representing Christ as a very pale clean-shaven young working man, holding with evident anxiety the tools of a carpenter. (The same donor had contributed a John the Baptist by a pupil of Eric Gill.) The exquisite rood screen had been miraculously undamaged by the bomb, as had the Victorian glass which a zealous rector had taken down and stored. It was without special merit but ensured darkness.
Father Bernard loved his church and its high Anglican tradition which he did not let down but rather quietly elevated as far as he was able. (Mr Elsworthy at St Olaf’s catered for the lower brethren.) He had however suffered various defeats at the hands of his bishop. He no longer heard confessions, although there was a beautiful confessional, gaudy as a sedan chair, which a devotee had brought over from Germany. His plain-song choir had ceased to be, and he now only said one Latin mass a month. He still otherwise made exclusive use of Cranmer’s Prayer Book although he had been expressly told not to. In return for being allowed to muffle the crucifixes during Lent, he had surrendered no less than three plaster madonnas. He did this, however, with feigned reluctance, since he was not interested in the cult of the Virgin, and it did no harm to have a grievance. Someone, he did not know who, appeared to be informing on him to the bishop. He did not yearn for the big Victorian rectory but lived modestly in a small ‘clergy house’ where he looked after himself, could reasonably dispense with pretentious ‘entertaining’, and was able to practise his private cults unmolested. He had no curate: better so, any curate now would be an episcopal spy. He was well aware of his reputation for being ‘not a priest but a shaman’. He did not mind. Salvation itself was magic: total redemption by cosmic act of the whole visible world. His own cruder spells, material symbols of a spiritual grace, were surely acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Father Bernard had ceased to believe in God. As he paced often alone in his large handsome church he felt increasingly conscious of the absence of God, the presence of Christ. But his Christ was a mystical figure, the blond beardless youth of the early Church, not the tormented crucified one of flesh and blood.
Some of his parishioners once complained that Father Bernard’s sermon on ‘prayer’ consisted of advice about breathing exercises. Yet Father Bernard had once chattered freely to the Almighty; not to the stern Jewish God of his childhood, but to a milder and less manly deity. He had been a student at Birmingham where he studied chemistry and gained a black belt at judo. The hated chemistry was the last thing he did to please his earthly father, whose heart he broke-soon afterwards by his conversion to Christianity. Father Bernard carried that unhealed wound (that crime) secretly within him. His father, never reconciled, was dead now. Father Bernard could no longer commend him to God since that channel of communication was also closed. He often thought about his father, and about his darling mother who had been so dreadfully taken from him before he collapsed into the arms of Christ. He sat and breathed. He knelt and breathed. And every day, by the magic power which had been entrusted to him, he changed bread and wine into flesh and blood. He continued to revere this mystery and to find it endlessly and thrillingly arcane.
Father Bernard had long ago decreed solitude for himself: that included celibacy. He did not disapprove of homosexual love, and would have made the same decision if he had been heterosexual, which he was not. After messing about with human sexual adventures he decided to devote his love, that is his sexuality, to God. When God passed out of his life he loved Christ. When Christ began, so strangely, to withdraw and change he just sat, or knelt, and breathed in the presence of something or in the presence of nothing. He was never now seriously tempted to break his vow of chastity, but he remained, in the common abject sense, a sinner. He had considerably disturbed the equanimity of a young chorister whose hand he had sometimes held in the dark empty church after choir practice. (This was in the days of the plain-song choir, conducted by a Jonathan Treece, sadly gone from Ennistone. The musical art now depended on the simpler skills of lady organists.) Worse still, alarmed by his own feelings, Father Bernard had hurt the boy by suddenly ‘sheering off’ without an explanation. This child, now a youth and no churchgoer, worked in London but occasionally, on visits to Ennistone, met Father Bernard in the street and cut him. This caused the priest much pain and obsessive sessions of planning how to ‘retrieve’ a situation which was, he always had to conclude, better left alone. He could but hope that the main damage was to his own vanity. There were of course young men whom he simply could not get out of his head. Tom McCaffrey was one. Father Bernard had seen Tom grow from a schoolboy into a student. They met frequently. He would very much have liked to take Tom in his arms. Instead he lowered his eyes. Did Tom know? Perhaps.
Father Bernard was well and fairly calmly aware that in many ways he was a perfectly rotten priest. He celebrated, to his own personal satisfaction, the rites that pleased him, often with no one present but himself. He did not go round visiting, as his predecessor had done, and as he had done himself in his early days in the parish in Birmingham. He was uninterested in politics. He did not run debates, or discussion groups, or encounter groups, or a youth club, or a mothers’ union, or a Sunday school. He liked to have his evenings to himself, after evensong, which he celebrated every day, usually alone. He wanted plenty of time to meditate and to read theological books which he perused with a kind of unholy excitement as if they were pornography. Occasionally he spent the evenings having long emotional talks with special penitents. He enjoyed that. He did not go out seeking sinners, but remained comfortably at the receipt of custom in case they should come seeking him. He had steady vaguely sentimental relationships with a small number of women (Diane was one, Gabriel would have been one too if it had not been for Brian) wherein he allowed himself a little bit of hand-holding. He knew how confoundedly lazy and selfish he was. But although this troubled him a little more than his heresy did, it did not trouble him very much. He knew the things which he absolutely must not do. He did not seriously consider that he ought to leave the priesthood. Only very lately had he begun to feel sometimes insecure. Was scandal possible, disgrace, banishment, after all?