Alan Moore - Jerusalem

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.

BECKETT: Eden. Well, you see, there has been some dispute about that place.

THOMAS BECKET: Dispute? What manner of dispute? I have not heard of one.

BECKETT: Ah, well, I don’t want to get into it. There’s those who say that Genesis was written a lot later than some of the other books and only got put at the start through a misunderstanding in the order of the compilation. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how there could be a populated Land of Nod for Cain to serve his exile in, incest or not.

THOMAS BECKET: And I had thought your news of my impending martyrdom this dream’s most hitherto disquieting aspect. I am hopeful that I will forget all this upon my wakening, and am distressed to think I have such blasphemies in even my unbidden thoughts.

BECKETT: It’s not my wish to be upsetting you. You’re someone that I have admired, and I would not have all my conversation with a saint be taken up by what befell Miss Joyce when she was ten.

JOHN CLARE: [ Suddenly, in a strangled, anguished voice .] It was an act of matrimony!

BECKETT: [ Puzzled .] What? The business with her brother? How do you make that out?

JOHN CLARE: [ Momentarily disoriented, then regaining his composure .] How do I … oh! It’s your Miss Joyce you’re speaking of. Pay no attention to my lunatic outpourings. They are less than chaff. I do not know what I am saying half the time. [ A pause, while he attempts to find a safe direction for the conversation .] You must have a great fondness for her, for your friend, to visit her in her adversity.

BECKETT: She was a lovely, well-intentioned girl and filled with energy and light much as her name suggests. The things she said were funny and were clever if she took the trouble not to get too convoluted. She was what you’d call a dancer in a million, and the way that she impersonated Charlie Chaplin was a treat, although I don’t expect you’ll be familiar with his work.

THOMAS BECKET: I do not think it is a name I know.

JOHN CLARE: I have known various Charlies, but no Chaplins I can think of. What was he like in his manner, that your woman friend made an impersonation of?

BECKETT: He had a walk to him and a moustache, a way he moved his eyebrows and the like. Lucia could do all of that. His art was in the pathos he inspired for the unfortunate or common man, the footsore wayfarer much like yourself but in a time of longer railway lines and higher buildings. He’d make you feel for the great injustices there are in life then make you laugh for all the triumphs of the individual. I do not suppose that he was necessarily a happy man. I can remember reading something by the filmmaker Jean Cocteau … no, don’t ask, it’s far too complicated … where he mentioned Chaplin saying words to the effect that his life’s greatest sadness was the fact he’d gotten rich off playing someone who was poor.

JOHN CLARE: It is the guilt that we were speaking of again, though if my greatest sadness were that I was rich I do not think I should be sad at all.

THOMAS BECKET: It may be that the sorrows of the wealthy life are naught save more expensive ones. It sometimes is as if my king and the companion of my boyhood is made heavy by the weight of gold that’s in his heart.

BECKETT: Well, if it’s guilt you’re after then your royal pal would take some beating. In fact, now I come to think of it that is exactly what he took. The mess he made of things with you, Rome set him to be flogged for penitence and this despite him being king. From what I hear he kneeled there and he took it, too. He must have known he was deserving of his punishment.

THOMAS BECKET: The king was flogged, and he submitted to it?

BECKETT: That he did. It’s a well known occurrence. It was after exhumation when you were discovered to be incorruptible, that was what settled it. In my opinion he was lucky to get off with just the flogging.

JOHN CLARE: I’d have made him get down on his knees and stay there till he’d scrubbed up the cathedral floor. He’d still be there now.

THOMAS BECKET: [ Horrified .] He was flogged. The king was flogged. Because of what he’d done to me.

BECKETT: That is the substance of it. No one thought he was judged harshly, put it that way.

THOMAS BECKET: But if he were treated so, then what must he have —?

BECKETT: You don’t want the details.

JOHN CLARE: All the ins and outs. No, I agree.

BECKETT: You’re better off without them. There’s no benefit in fretting needlessly.

THOMAS BECKET: [ Grumpy and resentful .] No. No, there isn’t. For that matter, I don’t see that you were under a compulsion to be mentioning this business in the first place.

BECKETT: I would hate to think I’d tried your patience to the point where it became proverbial.

THOMAS BECKET: To try my patience is the least of it, when you have sought to undercut my faith itself with your sophistications.

BECKETT: I’ve sought no such thing.

THOMAS BECKET: Yet you speak dismissively of Eden and of our first parents, you insinuate a love between Eve and her sons that is unspeakable, and you insist that here about us is the twentieth century of Our Lord and still God has not come?

JOHN CLARE: Yes, Mr. Bunyan who we spoke to a short while since raised a similar complaint regarding the ongoing absence of Jerusalem.

BECKETT: [ To THOMAS BECKET.] He never comes. That’s my own understanding of the matter. Or at least, He’s not about when you’ve a need of Him, much in the style of a policeman.

JOHN CLARE: There’s a phrase that I have heard in these parts. Now, what is it? It has something of the meaning of “policeman”, but there is a connotation of the tithing man or rent-man there into the bargain. I cannot recall it at this moment but it’s possible that it will come to me.