The Rebel Angels

I suppose he thought of this as taking up from where we had left off, twenty-five years ago. He had loved to prattle in this campy way, because he knew it made me laugh. But I had never played that game except on the surface; I had never been one of his "boys", the student gang who called themselves Gentleman's Relish. I was interested in them – fascinated might be a better word – but I never wanted to join them in the intimacies that bound them together, whatever those may have been. That I never really knew, because although they talked a lot about homosexuality, most of them had, after graduation, married and settled into what looked like the uttermost bourgeois respectability, leavened by occasional divorce and remarriage. One was now on the Bench, and was addressed as My Lord by obsequious or mock-obsequious lawyers. I suppose that, like Parlabane himself, they had played the field; one or two, I knew, had been on gusty terms with omnivorous Elsie Whistlecraft, who had thought of herself as a great hetaera, inducting the dewy young into the arts of love. A lot of young men try varied aspects of sex before they settle on the one that suits them best, which is usually the ordinary one. But I had been cautious, discreet, and probably craven, and I had never been one of Parlabane's "boys". But it had once tickled me to hear him talk as if I were.

A foolish state of mind, but who has not been foolish, one way or another? It would not do now, after a quarter of a century. I suppose I was austere.

"Well, John, I had heard you were back, and I expected you'd come to see me some time."

"I've left it inexcusably long. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as we say in the trade. But here I am. I hear great things of you. Excellent books."

"Not bad, I hope."

"And a priest. Well – better get it over with; you can see from my habit that I've had a change of mind. I think I have you to thank for that, at least in part. During the past years, I've thought of you often, you know. Things you used to say kept recurring. You were wiser than I. And I turned to the Church at last."

"You had a shot at being a monk. Let's put it that way. But obviously it hasn't worked."

"Don't be rough on me, Sim. I've had a rotten time. Everything seemed to go sour. Surely you aren't surprised that I turned at last to the place where nothing can go sour."

"Can't it? Then what are you doing here?"

"You would understand, if anybody would. I entered the S.S.M. because I wanted to get away from all the things that had made my life a hell – the worst of which was my own self-will. Abandon self-will, I thought, and you may find peace, and with it salvation. If thou bear the Cross cheerfully, it will bear thee."

"Thomas à Kempis – an unreliable guide for a man like you, John."

"Really? I'd have thought he was very much your man."

"He isn't. Which is not to say I don't pay him all proper respect. But he's for the honest, you know, and you have never been quite honest. No, don't interrupt, I'm not insulting you; but Thomas à Kempis's kind of honesty is impossible for a man with as much subtlety as you have always possessed. Just as Thomas Aquinas was always too subtle a man to be a safe guide for you, because you blotted up his subtlety but kept your fingers crossed about his priciples."

"Is that so? You seem to be a great authority about me."

"Fair play; when we were younger you set up to be a great authority about me. – I gather you were not able to bear the Cross cheerfully, so you skipped out of the monastery."

"You lent me the money for that. I can never be grateful enough."

"Divide any gratitude you have between me and Clem Hollier. Unless there were others on your five-hundred-dollar campaign list."

"You never thought a measly five hundred would do the job, did you?"

"That was certainly what your eloquent letter suggested."

"Well, that's water over the dam. I had to get out, by hook or crook."

"An unfortunate choice of expression."

"God, you've turned nasty! We are brothers in the Faith, surely. Haven't you any charity?"

"I have thought a good deal about what charity is, John, and it isn't being a patsy. Why did you have to get out of the Sacred Mission? Were they getting ready to throw you out?"

"No such luck! But they wouldn't let me move towards becoming a priest."

"Funny thing! And why was that, pray tell?"

"You are slipping back into undergraduate irony. Look, I'll level with you: have you ever been in one of those places?"

"A retreat or two when I was younger."