Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

He can still do his column. He is still doing his column. He wanders Schubertianly in the pine forests in the afternoons, listening to the kuk-kukkings of the wood pigeons. Returns to his little cell on the final squeezing out of light, leaving his muddy boots with all the other muddy boots in the hall below. Washes in the wash basin. Puts on something seemly for compline. A tie. A pullover. Warm but not too — a shiver is in order. Walks over to the church. Drops into his seat where he sits as quiet as a font. Receives the Abbot’s blessing. Watches and wonders as the monks collapse before the Virgin. Enters the Greater Silence. Then returns to his room and switches on his Hitachi portable which he listens to, out of respect for the rule of St Benedict, through headphones.

It’s all there where it always was and always will be. The crap. Leaking out of the sockets even this far north. The soaps. The sitcoms. The scunge. The classics. Oh, worst of all, the classics. Mel’s alter ego, the little fool of Manderley, showing her pink-tipped tits to Maximilian de Winter. Dorothea in her nightie. Nostromo in stereorama. The Three Tenors. Placido, Pavarotti and the little one, still in a sperm-hurling competition at their age. Wouldn’t they be better in a monastery? Isn’t it time, boys?

Frank props up his machine on a little kitchen chair and sits on the edge of his bed in his headphones, looking slightly down at the screen. Anyone catching him in this position would take him to be a spy, unaware that the war is over, still tracking Allied submarine movements in the North Sea. There is something of the Thirty-Nine Steps about him. As there is about this part of the country. Out on his walks, Frank sees men meeting in fields with dogs at their feet and rifles on their shoulders. They wear tweed jackets and deerstalkers and drive away from their assignations in BMWs and Audis. Need one say more? Meanwhile the monks innocently collect the honey from the hives. Ignorant of what goes on. Ignorant of the machinations in the fields and the crap-watching in Frank’s room. Every evening when he’s finished he packs the Hitachi into his travelling bag and pushes it under the bed. Just in case he passes away in the night and they find it in the morning. Just in case they wouldn’t like it.

Slowly, Frank is coming to realise that he is far more censorious of the world than they are. He’s the real monk. They’re not in flight, he is. When they get to see telly they quite like it. They could never understand what he finds in it that makes him so violently angry. One Sunday morning the Father Abbot prays for it, prays for the media that they may be channels of enlightenment and discernment. What about fire and brimstone, Father? Remember Sodom? The monks lower their heads and pray. For the telly. For the radio. And for the morning papers. But then they aren’t spiritual. Spiritual men fuck away the first half of their lives and then expend the second in an illumination of fine discriminations and loathing. Which isn’t at all how monks apportion their time.

It was not knowing that he was of necessity already more spiritual than any unexercised eremite could ever be that brought him up here in the first place. He’d lit upon a metapsychic atlas in a New Age bookshop in Bodmin the morning after his final act of abnegation on the cliffs of Little Cleverley — a guide to establishments offering nourishment of the soul — and had picked the Abbey as the place for him. It did no harm that it was at the other end of the country, at the other end of another country if one was to be strict about it. The drive would have its own significance as pilgrimage. He was off, heading north, Saabing into the cold, silencing the beast. Such indulgent times he lived in. Do it, do it, said the box. If you’re a shagger, shag. If you’re a poofter, poof. Who, anywhere, was for silencing the beast? The monks, obviously. Obviously, the monks. He was heading north for a silencing and a clean-out. Mel periodically had her colon removed and rinsed. He’d do the same with his mind. Cranial irrigation.

It was what Mel had been asking him to do for years. But now he was doing it for himself.

‘Use something,’ he’d begged Clarice that night. ‘Hurt me. Abuse me. Draw blood.’ And Clarice, being Clarice, had hurt him, abused him, drawn blood. Being Clarice, she’d gone further, too. She’d got him to wear her pants. And put lipstick on his mouth. Now who’s the girl, Frank? And he’d gone along with it, taken it like a man, taken it like a girl, because he owed them all, didn’t he — Mel, D, Liz …

But now he had to do something for himself.

‘I’d appreciate some spiritual counselling,’ he said to Brother Cyprian, the Guest Master, somewhere between the third and the fourth week of his stay. He hadn’t wanted to be pushy.

The monks had all been through the hands of Brother Maurus, the monastery hairdresser, that morning. There was a frisky youthful look about them, embarrassed too, selfconsciously naked, like shorn rams. Brother Cyprian, particularly, looked shame-faced and schoolboyish. His ears stuck out. His brow went a long way back. ‘Spiritual counselling?’ He appeared to be alarmed by Frank’s request.

Frank wondered if he’d used the wrong phrase. ‘You do do that?’

‘ I don’t.’ Now Brother Cyprian was truly startled. ‘But I can find you someone wise.’

‘Wise would be good,’ Frank said.

Later that day the monk caught up with Frank as he was coming back from a turn around the cemetery. When it was too wet to walk in the woods Frank would put up his umbrella and go to pay his respects to the dead. It was secluded and squelchy here. A good place for a memorial bench, had Frank still been thinking of memorial benches. This bench is dedicated to the memory of Frank Ritz. Though not a monk himself he was a friend to monks. Kuk-kuk, went the wood pigeons. Fatting themselves up for the slaughter, the pheasants pecked at the nearby fields. No one else was here. Just Frank, the birds, and the dead. He wandered between the wooden crosses. Here a mendicant, there a prior. All that simplicity and wisdom rotting away. A whole meadow of it. And not a fuck between them.

‘I’ve dealt with that,’ Brother Cyprian said, catching him at the cemetery gate.

This time it was Frank’s turn to be startled. He was lost in thought, hidden away under his umbrella.

‘Your counselling …’

‘Ah, yes. Thank you.’

‘Father Lawrence has agreed to talk to you. He used to be our Father Abbot. But he’s retired now. I’ll bring him to your room tomorrow morning at eleven.’

His room! Not a perforated wooden whispering box in a dark corner of the church. His room!

Frank spent the preceding night in an agitated condition. An abbot was surely the highest holder of ecclesiastical office he had ever entertained. And a retired abbot was surely more reverend still. It was like being back in his little room in Oxford preparing tea for his tutor. But there were no entertainment facilities in this room. No kettle, no gas fire, no toasting fork. In a monastery a toasting fork had other connotations. He could drive to Inverness and buy wine, but which wine? Wine too meant something different here. Ditto biscuits. Nothing, was his final decision. Honour his abstemiousness, and give him nothing. What he could do, though, was make sure his room was impeccable. Sweep the floor. Scrub the sink. Tidy the small library of religious works that had been waiting for him on the desk when he first arrived. And of course make sure his adversary the devil was not allowed into his bed that night.

That he watched no crap on his Hitachi goes without saying.

The following morning at eleven sharp, terce over, Brother Cyprian knocked on his door. He had an old man with him, a disapproving-looking monk with a noble profile whom Frank had observed during Mass and meals but had never spoken to. Without really thinking about it, Frank had assumed that this monk above all the others knew about his life and condemned it.