Charles Snow - Last Things

With the excessive heartiness that the diffident induced, I asked if he would have some tea.

‘No, thank you. I’m not much good at tea.’

His tone was hesitating, but upper-class – not professional, not high bourgeois. Even my old acquaintance, Lord Boscastle, arbiter of origins, might have performed the extraordinary feat of ‘knowing who he was’ – which meant that his family could be found in reference books.

‘I’m pretty sure’, said Maurice, ‘that Godfrey would like a drink. Wouldn’t you now, Godfrey?’

The doleful plump countenance lightened.

‘If it isn’t any trouble–’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Maurice, used to looking after the other man, was already standing by the bottles, pouring out a formidable whisky. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

Maurice, taking the glass round, explained to me, as though he were an interpreter, that Godfrey had had a busy day, mass in the morning, parish calls, a couple of young delinquents at the vicarage –

‘It must be a tough life,’ I said.

Godfrey smiled tentatively, took a swig at his drink and then, all of a sudden, asked me, with such abruptness that it sounded rough: ‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’

For an instant I was taken by surprise, as though I hadn’t heard the question right, or didn’t understand it. I hadn’t expected him to take the initiative.

‘Maurice says you didn’t remember anything about it. When you came to.’

‘I wasn’t exactly at my most lucid, of course.’

‘But you didn’t remember anything?’

‘I was more concerned with what was happening there and then.’

‘You still don’t remember anything?’

I was ready to persevere with evasion, but he was not giving me much room to manoeuvre.

‘Would you expect me to?’ I asked.

‘It was like waking from a very deep sleep, was it?’

‘I think one might say that.’

Father Ailwyn gave a sharp-eyed glance in Maurice’s direction, as though they were sharing a joke, and then turned to me with an open, slumbrous smile, the kind of smile which transformed depressive faces such as his.

‘Please don’t be afraid of worrying me,’ he said, and added: ‘Lewis, I am interested, you know.’

‘Godfrey said on the way here that he wished he wasn’t a clergyman.’ Maurice was also smiling. ‘He didn’t want to put you off.’

I should have something to report to young Charles when next I saw him, I was thinking.

‘I’m not going to be prissy with you,’ said Godfrey. ‘All I’m asking you is to return the compliment.’

I had come off worst and gave an apologetic smile.

‘Eschatology is rather a concern of ours, you see. But most believers wouldn’t think that you were interfering with their eschatology. They’d be pretty certain to say, and here I don’t mind admitting that they sometimes take an easy way out, that you hadn’t really been dead.’

Instead of being inarticulate, or so shy as to be embarrassing to others, he had begun to talk as though he were in practice.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that, have I?’ I said.

‘I should have thought that, by inference, you had. And most believers would tell you that it’s very difficult to define the threshold of death, and that you hadn’t crossed it.’

‘I can accept that–’

‘They would tell you that the brain has to die as well as the heart stopping before the body is truly dead. And until the body is truly dead, then the soul can’t leave it.’

I still didn’t want to argue, but I respected him now and had to be straightforward.

‘That I can’t accept. Those are just words–’

‘They don’t mean much more to me than they do to you.’

Again Godfrey’s face was one moonlike smile. ‘It’s a very primitive model, of course it is. At the time of the early church, a man’s spirit was supposed to hover over the body for three days, and didn’t depart until the decomposition set in.’

Yes, I said, I’d read that once, in a commentary on the Gospel according to Saint John. It was the priest’s turn to look surprised. He had expected me to be entirely ignorant about the Christian faith, just as I had expected him to be unsophisticated about everything else. In fact, he was at least as far from unsophisticated as Laurence Knight, my first wife’s father, another clergyman, in one of his more convoluted phases.

Godfrey Ailwyn had also one of those minds which were naturally rococo and which moved from flourish to invention and back again, with spiralling whirls and envelopes of thought – quite different from the clear straight cutting-edge mentalities of, say, Francis Getliffe or Austin Davidson in his prime. Quite different, but neither better nor worse, just different: one of the most creative minds I ever met was similar in kind to Father Ailwyn’s, and belonged to a scientist called Constantine.

What did Ailwyn believe about death, the spirit or eternal life? I pressed him, for he had brushed away the surface civilities, and I was genuinely curious to know. Though he was willing to spin beautiful metaphysical structures, I wasn’t sure that I understood him. Certainly he believed, so far as he believed at all, in something very different from what he called the ‘metaphors’ in which he spoke to his parishioners. The body, the memory, this our mortal life – if I didn’t misinterpret him – existed in space and time, and all came to an end with death. The spirit existed outside space and time, and so to talk of a beginning, or an end, or an after-life – they were only ‘metaphors’, which we had to use because our minds were primitive.

It was about memory alone that I could engage with him. He would have liked to believe (for once, he wasn’t intellectually cool) that some part of memory – ‘some subliminal part, if you like’ – was attached to the spirit and so didn’t have to perish. That was why, with more hope than expectation, he had wanted to cross-question me.

On the terms we had now reached (they weren’t those of affection and, though I was interested in him, he wasn’t in me, except as an imparter of information: but still, we had come to terms of trust) it would have been false of me to give him any agreement. No, I said, I was sure that memory was a function of the body: damage the brain, and there was no memory left. When the brain came to its end, so did memory. It was inconceivable that any part of it could outlive the body. If the spirit existed outside space and time (though I couldn’t fix any meaning to his phrase), memory couldn’t. And what possible kind of spiritual existence could that be?

‘By definition,’ said Godfrey Ailwyn, ‘we can’t imagine it. Because we’re limited by our own categories. Sometimes we seem to have intuitions. Perhaps that does suggest that some kind of remembrance isn’t as limited as we are.’

No, whatever it suggested, it couldn’t be that, I said. He was a very honest man, but he wouldn’t give up that toehold of hope. Did I deny the mystical experience, he asked me. No, of course I didn’t deny the experience, I said. But that was different from accepting the interpretation that he might put upon it.

As we went on talking, Maurice, unassuming, bright-faced, poured Godfrey another drink. In time, I came to wonder whether, though Godfrey’s mind was elaborate, his temperament wasn’t quite simple. So that in a sense, detached from his intellect, he wasn’t so far after all from the people he preached to or tried to console, stumbling with his tongue at a sickbed, in a fashion that seemed preposterous when one heard him talk his own language as he had done that afternoon.

Soon they would have to leave, he said, his expression once more owlish and sad. He had to take an evening service. Would be get many people, I asked. Five or six, old ladies, old friends of his.