Night of Fire Read online

  But there were other nights when a dark restlessness descended. After struggling with a piece of exegesis or a doctrinal essay, he would find himself rereading Bible texts without faith or consolation, trying to absolve God of everything he found inequitable. Then the surety of Vincent and Ross seemed far away. Obsessively he would alight on those passages that had never featured in the comfortable parish sermons of his childhood, but which were here confronted head-on. Even the fate of the blasted fig tree or the Gadarene swine could surface to unsettle him. Above all he agonised over every Gospel inconsistency, culminating in the differing accounts of the empty tomb, where the holy word seemed to contravene itself at its heart.

  Sometimes he wrestled with the texts far into the night. It was as if there was some chamber of divine grace that he could not enter. So he kept building intellectual edifices to resolve his misgivings. He fell into the sin of judging God. Sometimes, for comfort, he remembered the works of faith that had awed him as a youth – Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the great rose window of Chartres – and felt a fleeting reprieve.

  In the end, exhausted, he confronted his God in prayer. He lit a candle to obscure everything but the wooden cross beside his bed, and this shadowy concentration through the cross – the focus of all redemption and love – would start to calm him. He imagined his fellow ordinands kneeling likewise at this hour, and sensed their prayers massing in the night around him. His supplication and thanksgiving felt warm and answered in the candlelight. Often he whispered aloud, and the words took on a free-floating power. God was beating like a drum in his brain. This was the grace beyond which logic crumbled, the ferment of Christ caring for his flock against all reason, the Christ whom arguments could not wound.

  But then came confession. Its lonely self-scrutiny filled Stephen with despair. It had settled into a grinding cycle of contrition and repentance in the recurring wake of sin. He repented his scriptural doubts and his failure to love, his too-great sensitivity towards himself, and the vanity of his unfocused ambition. He repented his harsh parting from his former girlfriend. And abjectly he repented that he masturbated remembering her, the lissome smoothness of her legs. He would caress himself in half-sleep, as if the deed were unconscious, and afterwards would fall into drowsy remorse.

  Once he dreamt strangely that he was making love to a woman on a summer hillside. Coppery butterflies rose from the shrubs and shimmered above their naked bodies, then alighted on her face, her breasts, as though enacting a private sacrament, and he awoke to wetness and the memory of ecstasy without sin, and the after-scent of asphodel.

  Whenever he left the sanctum of the seminary, the world outside barely jarred on him. He detected God at work even in the ordinary country town nearby. The everyday had become the theatre of divine grace. Twice he was allocated weekend chaplaincies in a neighbouring parish, but he took his visions and anxieties with him, and plagued the overworked vicar with questions that went unanswered. For hours one night he walked in the church graveyard, as if the dead might still him, while the winter sky opened in a blaze of stars. It was years since he had seen such a sky. Those tremendous galaxies glittered down in silence on the graves: a fathomless order where trillions of suns and planets spun in their orbits, suspended in an open miracle above him. He was astonished by their colours: golden, silver-white, pale blue. And once a comet flared like Lucifer across the dark.

  He went back into the church with wincing eyes. He was shaking. He slotted Sunday’s hymn numbers into their place above the pulpit, then subsided into a choir stall. Behind the altar a dark green drapery shifted in the cold air. It stirred in dim columns. He wanted, for some reason, to part it, and got shakily to his feet. It could only conceal a stone wall, he knew; but he hesitated, as though there were another possibility, as though behind the curtain was something unimaginable. Perhaps it would merely open on a memorial plaque; but perhaps – he was feeling faint now – on a landscape he had never known, the door to lost grace. Then he laughed out loud, a clatter of self-deprecation in the silence, and sat down again. He thrust his head between his knees to revive his circulation. The curtain had gone still, as if the mana had departed from it, and he closed his eyes.

  A week later, the seminary was shaken to its roots. The principal did not often give addresses, but when he did, the lecture was attended by all staff and eighty students. He spoke with clipped precision on Heidegger’s ‘primordial thinking’, but nobody later could remember a word. What no one forgot was the third-year student, Bradley, who stood up to speak afterwards. Everyone imagined that he was about to ask a question, or even to offer a sycophantic thank-you. Instead he announced that he was quitting the seminary because he had ceased to believe. He thanked his tutors for their care and scholarship, and was sad that their trust in him had been misplaced. His decision was no reflection on them, he added, but was the result of a long inner conflict which had now resolved itself, he said, with a feeling of release and cleansing. This last he spoke with a hint of defiance, and as he looked round at his erstwhile friends, his face seemed tinged disturbingly with pity.

  Shock waves of disbelief went through his audience. Most of them froze where they sat. They simply stared back at him with drained faces. Some of their mouths had fallen open, but one or two retained leftover smiles. The effect was only deepened by Bradley’s lack of anything distinctive. He was a sallow, slimmish man in a tired cassock: he might have been any of them.

  As the meaning of his words sank in, two of the teachers rose to their feet in half-suppressed alarm. The principal, usually aloof, seemed overcome by fatherly concern, as if Bradley were ill, and left his lectern to go to him. But the student was already walking to the door. The dignity of his retreat was marred only by his shoes, which squeaked like mice across the floorboards. Stephen never forgot how he half turned to look back at them all, then disappeared under the Exit sign.

  The atmosphere in the seminary changed that evening. Several formerly quiet students became boisterous and voluble, as if to stress their firmness of faith, while others had turned sombre. Two of the teachers moved solicitously among them, speculating that Christ in His mercy would redeem Bradley after this inexplicable crisis. Stephen’s group huddled instinctively into his room for privacy. Vincent was angry. ‘Why did he have to do that in front of the whole seminary? Why couldn’t he just sneak away? I think he wanted to drag us down with him.’

  Ross’s eyes were darting between them all, almost in panic, he so rarely clashed with Vincent. But he said: ‘There wasn’t evil in him. Bradley was eaten up by something. I don’t know what it was. Once he asked me: “Can a person walk on water?” He was strange.’

  Their dialogue lurched into talk of Hell and the afterlife. It was as if Bradley’s exit was a prefiguration of death, as if he had gone out into the dark, leaving them all behind in the wan light of speculation. Nothing seemed stranger to Stephen than the contrast between Vincent and Ross as they talked: the gaunt handsomeness of the one, and the other like his acolyte, frail and shocked. Ross would have seemed comical had he been less distressed. His blond hair lapped around his head like a disordered halo. Several times he murmured to himself: ‘I’ll stand on the promise of Your word’, as if dropping anchor in a storm. Vincent, meanwhile, seemed ever harder and more secure. He spoke with gravelly authority, his bible in his hands. Occasionally he tried to make a joke, but it came out wooden, as if the language was foreign to him, and he was the only one who laughed. And between them sat Julian, suave and apparently unruffled, his triangle of a head registering alternative amusement and objection.

  Around the critical doctrine of Hell, the seminary had left unwonted latitude. In trembling tones Ross maintained that the damned were not tormented for ever, but simply fell into extinction.

  But Vincent shook his head with a tinge of regret. ‘Christ’s sense of justice isn’t ours, Ross. Punishment isn’t evil. It’s the cancellation of evil.’ He returned remorselessly to the Gospels. There was already a bookma
rk in the passage, Stephen noticed. Then shall he say also unto those on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire . . .

  Ross murmured: ‘Let us pray for him.’

  A familiar tension had started up in Stephen. Cold air seemed to be blowing through him, and his stomach contracting. He had combed through the New Testament verses on the fate of the lost – there were more than two hundred and fifty such verses. He heard his own voice out of the blue: ‘How can evil and good coexist in God’s universe for ever, Vincent? That would be divine failure. “Christ remains on the Cross as long as one sinner remains in Hell.”’ He couldn’t remember which Church Father had said that, but he knew Vincent would.

  ‘God permits evil, Stephen. He permitted the greatest cruelty of all, in the Crucifixion.’

  ‘But surely not evil for ever, Vincent.’ Stephen was surprised by the harshness in his own voice. ‘Not in the hereafter.’

  He stopped as suddenly as he had begun. He wondered if he had slipped into heresy. The breath was beating up inside him in a hot, tearful agitation. He knew its cause but was helpless to stop it. He let his head sink down, as if acquiescing in whatever Vincent was saying, but he did not hear a word. He clenched his eyes shut and choked back the pity engulfing him.

  Sometimes her hand returned his grip, as it had done since childhood. Each time he felt a rush of hope. But increasingly her fingers stayed lax in his, or – far worse – they twisted away. He knew she was sunk in a sedated dream, and that this repudiation was only the instinct of a wounded brain. But every time, it hit him with new anguish, so that he massaged her fingers tensely in his, willing their grip to return.

  There was no hope of real return, he knew. But his mother’s face was still her own, fair and high-boned. A massive stroke, at forty-seven, with no time for a coherent thought or prayer. Yet he did not think about her repentance, although fervent from his first year in theology. The chasm between saved and damned had faded before her, who had never pretended Christianity. Some agitation travelled through her in unpredictable waves. She murmured things he could not catch, and imagined visitors who were far away, or dead, or unknown to him. She never called his name.

  At night, the nurses allowed him to sit beside her, unable to share her sleep. The ward groaned in the dark. Dim-lit machines purred and beeped by the bedsides, keeping the dying alive. His eyes grew used to no light. Hour after hour, compulsively, she raised a leg as if to climb from the bed, threatening to sever her intravenous tubes and catheter. Gently, again and again, he lifted the leg back to lie beside the other. But he hated himself for resisting her, because he had the idea that she knew where she wanted to go, and was trying to break free.

  After two more days she had slipped further away from him (they had injected morphine). Her hands were no longer clasping anything. He held one for comfort, in case it was still feeling something. They drew a curtain round the bed. Near the end he whispered in her ear, ‘All will be well.’ He had read that hearing was the last of the senses to fade, and perhaps, for a little, survived death.

  When he raised his head again, Ross was talking to Vincent. He might have been going on for an hour or a minute, Stephen did not know. The afterlife, Ross imagined, might not be of the body or even of the soul, but in the memory of God. He had been reading Tillich and Hartshorne. The book of life would be closed, but its pages remained perfect for ever in the cosmic mind.

  Stephen thought only: What resurrection is that? God’s memories are not living people.

  Julian, scenting false consolation, asked: ‘And will evil still exist?’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ Ross looked alarmed. ‘But the theory says that evil will be forgotten by God.’

  Vincent said: ‘It sounds like universal salvation to me.’ This was a concept he hated. Salvation for all cheapened the severity of sin, he said, and gutted Christ’s atonement of its meaning. ‘This doctrine is a fallacy of modern humanism. Nothing in scripture supports it.’

  Watching the points of colour rise in Vincent’s cheeks, and the way his eyes focused unseeing, and his long hands interlace as if for future prayer, Stephen was surprised by an upsurge of anger, an anger that left him unashamed. Who was Vincent to deny her salvation? For the first time, he thought he hated him. Yet nothing Vincent said perturbed him deeply, or marred his mother’s decency. In the voice that was still not quite his own, he said: ‘Christ died on the cross for all. It was a universal act.’

  Vincent began sifting his bible. But Stephen did not wait. He felt a perverse desire to annoy him. He brought up the old riddle of pagan conversion – a subject Vincent disliked – and wandered through its tired questions with feigned naivety: would all those from pre-Christian history be doomed to everlasting torment? And all those who lived and died in distant countries and cultures?

  Julian inserted a moment’s mischief: ‘Rousseau called religion une affaire de géographie.’

  Or would Vincent agree with the Papal encyclical that ignorant humans may be saved by grace without knowing it?

  For once Vincent did not instantly reply. Instead he went to the basin and dabbed water over his eyes. It was odd. He had even laid aside his bible. Perhaps Julian’s quip had irritated him; but Stephen felt rather that his austere friend had sensed a particular sorrow in him, and did not know what to do. At last Vincent sat down again and said: ‘I know I’m too much sometimes. I’m sorry . . . I’ve no business to preach. But I’ve always thought the act of choosing was crucial. That’s how I was brought up. But certainties change . . .’ He made one of his laboured jokes, and his lonely laughter was echoed by Ross. He looked strangely crestfallen. ‘Sometimes I think we’ve all been here too long. It’s time we were out in the world, doing God’s work.’

  It was at this moment, Stephen remembered, that the idea of the journey to Mount Athos took hold. They had each mentioned it from time to time, but only now did it seem practical. In two weeks’ time, at the term’s end, they could take the train to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, then reach Athos by ferry. Its other-worldly solitude appealed to them all at this moment. Its high peninsula was a theocracy within the Greek state, an ancient Orthodox precinct confined to monks and a few travellers. For more than ten centuries it had existed in its own sealed authority, like a time warp in Christian faith.

  Stephen thought: perhaps its transcendence will revive us all. Yes, we need to leave here for a while. Maybe it will calm Ross, loosen up Vincent. I need this too. I need other voices, other rites. Perhaps the Orthodox way with death is better than ours. They seem to lay less weight on the human agony of Christ. The torment of atonement is swallowed up in triumph and resurrection. We’ll forget all this theological turmoil for a while, the endless questioning. Perhaps I’ll find some very old monk, and imagine that I’m closer to divinity. (It helps that they have beards.) Perhaps the mountain will even be beautiful, and we will find peace.

  That Sunday, the sermon concerned the denial of St Peter. It was delivered trenchantly by Howell, Stephen’s tutor, whose chest heaved under his rhetoric, his red jowls quivering with authority. Denial was different from betrayal, he said, as Peter was from Judas. One was the result of momentary terror, the other of premeditated perfidy. One man, of course, would return to sainthood, the other hang himself. Even while invoking the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, Howell made no mention of Bradley; but the ex-student loomed like a ghost in all their minds.

  * * *

  For thirty miles the spurs of the peninsula receded into haze, repeating themselves in fainter echoes until they fused with the sky. Beyond the ferry’s bows the land fell in forested walls, split by ravines where winter torrents had swept down orange scree. To the west the twin peninsula of Sithonia left a shadow on the sea.

  A few gulls wheeled in our wake, crying. We had all grown quiet. A brisk wind was in our faces, and we felt its purging. None of us had been in such country before. Julian was humming a song to himself, trying to remember the Greek w
ords, and the rest of us were smiling into the wind. The only other passengers were a group of Orthodox pilgrims, whose language we did not know.

  Ahead of us the promontories unfurled ever more steeply. In this unaccustomed brilliance – the rinsed Greek light – a sense of other-worldliness descended before we even set foot on the holy mountain. The only noise was the weak blend of gulls and waves and the guttural murmurs of the crew. And then out of the sky the scarp of Mount Athos emerged in a snow-streaked pyramid – more precipitous and remote than anything we had imagined – streaming with cloud, six thousand feet above the sea.

  After a while, some signs of life began. We could make out the landing stages for hermitages invisible in gullies beyond, then monasteries appeared, one by one, along the shores. Above their ancient walls, fortified against piracy, a crowd of pink-stoned cupolas and filigreed crosses jostled against clock towers telling unfamiliar times. Not a soul was in sight. Once bells sounded quaintly over the water, like the tinkle of a musical box. As we neared the promontory’s end, the spurs steepened into cliffs. The walls of the monasteries rose in blank escarpments for fifty feet or more, then burst into precarious windows and galleries. We all stared up in astonishment. We forgot even to take photographs.

  At last, as the headland’s tip slid behind us, there sailed into view the mother monastery of Athos: less a building than a whole fortified settlement crossing the heights in battlements and turrets, dark with cypress trees. By the time the ferry crunched against the jetty, the place had withdrawn five hundred feet above us. We were the only ones to disembark. The pier was empty, and I wondered if the monastery too might be deserted. For twenty minutes we toiled up the track to its gates. Behind us the slopes dropped to grey rocks above the sea. My breathlessness rose more from excitement than strain – the place so alien and silent – and we all seemed curiously small with our rucksacks and improvised pilgrims’ staves, which made a lonely clinking on the path.