Alan Moore - Jerusalem

THOMAS BECKET: [ To SAMUEL BECKETT.] If as you say He never comes, can you be certain He is truly there?

BECKETT: I would imagine that is where the faith comes into it. For my own purposes I like to think His non-arrival is not necessarily an indication of His non-existence.

THOMAS BECKET: But He does not speak to you?

BECKETT: It isn’t a great matter of importance if He does or not. There’s lots of people who don’t speak to me, or who I never see, but I don’t have a problem about if they’re there or not. It’s not like I feel snubbed or anything.

THOMAS BECKET: But if you never hear His voice …

BECKETT: Sometimes it seems that there’s a certain quality to the long periods of silence.

THOMAS BECKET: Is there?

BECKETT: I believe so. [CLARE, BECKETT and THOMAS BECKET lapse into a thoughtful silence. There is a long pause .]

HUSBAND: I did all of it. I did the lot of what you said. I’m all of what you called me. [ Pause .] But you knew.

WIFE: [ Turning to regard him contemptuously .] What are you going on about?

HUSBAND: I’m saying that you knew.

WIFE: Knew what?

HUSBAND: About the goings on.

JOHN CLARE: The ins and outs. That’s what he means.

WIFE: The goings on? You’re saying that I knew about them?

HUSBAND: All along. That’s what I’m saying.

WIFE: Oh, how dare you? How dare you sit there and say I knew about the goings on? If I’d have known about the goings on then I’d have stopped them there and then. They wouldn’t have been going on at all.

HUSBAND: You knew. You looked the other way.

WIFE: The other way?

HUSBAND: Deliberately. You know you did. It was convenient.

WIFE: [ Guardedly .] Convenient? I don’t know what you mean by that.

HUSBAND: Celia, yes you do. You know the whole of what I mean by it. We’ve hardly touched each other in this last twelve years of marriage. Or had you not noticed?

WIFE: That’s just normal. That’s how everybody is. The thing with you is you’re sex mad, trying it on every five minutes and not bothered if the other party feels like it or not.

HUSBAND: You never felt like it, not every five months, let alone five minutes. And when I stopped bothering you, when I stopped trying it on, did you really believe that I’d lost interest too? That I’d stopped having feelings of that nature just because that’s how it were with you?

WIFE: I … I suppose that I assumed you’d made other arrangements. That you had resorted to a dirty book or something.

HUSBAND: Oh, and what would something be? Would it be an affair outside of marriage, knocking off the barmaid round at the Black Lion, something of that nature?

WIFE: [ Appalled .] Oh God, Johnny, tell me that you didn’t. Not with that Joan Tanner. Everyone would know! What would they think? What would they think of me?

HUSBAND: Don’t be so daft. Of course I didn’t. I knew that you wouldn’t want that, everybody knowing.

WIFE: [ Relieved .] Oh, thank God. Of course I’d not want anybody knowing. If you’re going to do a bloody stupid thing like that, then you should …

HUSBAND: Keep it to meself?

WIFE: [ Uncertainly .] Well … yes.

HUSBAND: Keep it indoors?

WIFE: Yes, I suppose so.

HUSBAND: Keep it in the family? [ The WIFE stares at her HUSBAND in silence for a few moments, realising her own unacknowledged complicity, then turns from him to stare into space with a haunted expression. The HUSBAND looks away, down and to one side. ]

BECKETT: Well, it’s a fair point. In my own experience, I think it very rare a woman doesn’t know what’s going on in her own home, even if she’d prefer she didn’t. In the case of Miss Joyce that I mentioned earlier, the trouble that she may have had when she was ten, if that was what occurred I can’t imagine Nora — that was Lucia’s mother — I cannot imagine that she would not know of it. I think that very often women are more adept at the managing of a whole spider’s nest of secrets than most men would have within their capability.

JOHN CLARE: I’m still not utterly convinced in my own heart that ten’s too young.

THOMAS BECKET: The victim’s age, I think, has no material bearing on the sin, nor on its gravity. They are condemned, these wretched creatures, to unending misery, sat here on these hard and unyielding steps awaiting absolution that shall not arrive.

BECKETT: They’re damned then, and beyond the reach of mercy or forgiveness. You appear to be quite certain of the fact.

THOMAS BECKET: The husband has made rut with his own child, one of these little ones that God has said we should not harm. It seems the wife has tacitly consented to the ruinous liaison, with a blameless innocent thus doubly betrayed. I cannot think a just Creator might extend his mercy to those who have never thought to exercise that quality themselves.

BECKETT: Well, you being a saint it follows that you would be an authority on such concerns.

JOHN CLARE: Look, now, when God was speaking of these little ones, did he specifically say they were ten? That’s all I’m getting at.

BECKETT: [ Ignoring CLARE.] It seems to me that though the sex of it is very likely woeful and unpleasant, it would still be the betrayal that’s the main thing. With Lucia, when the brother that she thought had loved her more than physically announced that he’d be getting married to an older woman very like his mam, that’s when she started acting up and throwing chairs about. I think it was her brother first suggested she be given psychiatric treatment somewhere, and you might suppose it was because he didn’t want her saying anything that could not be conveniently dismissed as ravings. That, at least, was how it looked to me, and Nora, pretty quickly she fell in with it. Lucia hadn’t been what you might call her favourite child, even before the hurling furniture commenced. They said Lucia was what they called a schizophrenic, although if you ask me it was more that she was young and spoiled and couldn’t cope with disappointment easily. She thought that she was justified in her behaviour. She felt immune because of who she was and never dreamed she could end up stuck in an institution, as in fact turned out to be the case.

JOHN CLARE: Well, to be fair, that manner of confinement is a thing that very few of us have properly anticipated or have made allowance for. The general measure of it is, it’s always a surprise. One moment you’re Lord Byron and the next you’re in a morning room that’s full of idiots eating porridge.

THOMAS BECKET: And you said yourself that I’m to quit Northampton and make off for France where it would seem to me that I’m to be in exile, a confinement I was not anticipating.

JOHN CLARE: From what I heard, in the dead of night you made off through a breach was in the castle wall, and then went out the north gate of the town, what’s up there at the end of Sheep Street just past where the old round church is.

THOMAS BECKET: Aye, I know it.

JOHN CLARE: It appears that you went out the gate and rode off to the north, so they should think that was where you were headed, then you doubled back and made away down south to Dover and from there across to France.

THOMAS BECKET: That seems a cautious and a clever thing to do. I shall remember it when I awake.

BECKETT: Yes, I thought that about a line of dialogue that the wife here spoke not half an hour ago, but I have already forgotten it. It strikes me it was something about earwigs.

JOHN CLARE: [ To THOMAS BECKET.] There is some controversy about the route you took on your escape. It is a common tale that in your leaving of Northampton you made halt to take a drink from the stone well that’s down by Beckett’s Park. But if indeed you left by the north gate then that would not seem likely.