The Rebel Angels

"I had a little money, now, because my parents had died and although their last, long illnesses had gobbled up a lot of the family substance, I had enough money to go travelling, and where did I go? To Capri! Yes, Capri, that cliche of wickedness, although it is now so overrun with tourists that the wicked can hardly find room to get on with their sin; the great days of Norman Douglas have utterly departed. So, eastward to the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung but has been edged out of the limelight now by the beautiful fisher-boys who will share a seaside place with you for a substantial price, plus gifts, and who may turn ugly and beat you up now and then, just for kicks. One of them put me in the hospital for six weeks, one bad springtime. Am I shocking you, Maria?"

"Certainly not by telling me you're one of the Gays."

"Ah, but I'm not, you see; I'm one of the Sads, and one of the Uglies. The Gays make me laugh; they're so middle class and political about the whole thing. They'll destroy it all with their clamour about Gay Lib and alternative life-styles, and all love is holy, and 'both partners must be squeaky clean'. That's putting the old game on a level with No-Cal pop or decaffeinated coffee – appearance without reality. Strip it of its darkness and danger and what is left? An eccentricity, as if I stuck this spaghetti into my ear instead of into my mouth. Now that would be an alternative life-style, and undoubtedly a perversion, but who would care? No: let my sin be Sin or it loses all stature."

"If you prefer men to women, what's it to me?"

"I don't, except for one form of satisfaction. No, I want no truck with 'homo-eroticism' and the awful, treacherous, gold-digging little queens you get stuck with in that caper: I want no truck with Gay Liberation or hokum about alternative life-styles: I want neither the love that dare not speak its name nor the love that blats its name to every grievance committee. Gnosce teipsum says the Oracle at Delphi; know thyself, and I do. I'm just a gross old bugger and I like it rough – I like the mess and I like the stink. But don't ask me to like the people. They aren't my kind."

"From what you tell me, Brother John, not many people seem to be your kind."

"I'm not impossibly choosy: I just ask for a high level of intelligence and honesty about things that really matter."

"That's choosy enough to exclude most of us. But something must have happened to get you out of Greece and into that robe."

"You mistrust the robe?"

"Not entirely, but it makes me cautious. You know what Rabelais says – "Never trust those who look through the hole of a hood."

"Well, he looked through that hole for much of his life, so he ought to know. You've never told me, Maria, what brings you to devote so much of your time to that dirty-minded, anti-feminist old renegade monk. Could he have been one of my persuasion, do you suppose?"

"No. He didn't like women much, though he seems to have liked one of them enough to have a couple of children by her, and he certainly loved the son. Maybe he didn't meet the right kind of women. Peasant women, and women at court, but did he meet any intelligent, educated women? They must have been rarities in his experience. He couldn't have been like you, Brother John, because he loved greatly, and he rejoiced greatly, and he certainly wasn't a university hanger-on, which is what you are now. He loved learning, and didn't use it as a way of beating other people to their knees, which seems to be your game. No, no; don't put yourself on the same shelf as Master François Rabelais. But the monk – come on, how did you become a monk?"

"Aha, here's the zabaglione, which should just see us through. Excuse me for a moment, while I retire to the gentlemen's room. I wish you could come with me; it is always good sport to see the look on the faces of the other gentlemen when a monk strides up to the urinal and hoists his robe. And how they peep! They want to know what a monk wears underneath. Just a cleanish pair of boxer shorts, I assure you."

Off he went, rather unsteadily, and when people at other tables stared at him, he gave them a beaming smile, so unctuous that they turned to their plates as fast as they could.