“Sounds like a first-rate system for its purpose, doesn’t it? Yet, you know, Maria, within it there was all kinds of difficulty, where what people now call democracy and the old monastic system didn’t gibe. So, now and then, somebody was not confirmed as a Brother after his noviciate, and went back to the world. I mean, he became part of the world again; our order did lots of work in the world besides teaching, and there were missions for down-and-outs where particular monks worked themselves almost to death—though I never heard of anybody actually dying. But they were not of the world, you see, though they were certainly in it.

“Now, let me give you a useful tip: always keep your eye on anybody who has been in a monastery and has come out again. He is sure to say that he chose to leave before taking his final vows, but the chances are strong that he was thrown out, and for excellent reasons, even if for nothing more than being a disruptive nuisance. There are more failed monks than you would imagine, and they can all bear watching.”

“Including you, Brother John?”

“I wasn’t thrown out; I went over the wall. I’d made it, you know; I’d expressed my intention to stay with the Society all my life, and I’d passed the novice stage and was a Lay Brother, vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience, and I had hopes of going on to priesthood. I knew the Rule inside and out, and I knew where I was weak—Article Nine, which is Silence, and Article Fifteen, Concerning Obedience. I couldn’t hold my tongue and I hated being disciplined by somebody I regarded as an inferior.”

“Yes; I thought so.”

“Yes, and undoubtedly you thought something totally wrong. I wasn’t like some of the sniffy postulants and Brothers who hated being told off by Father Sub-Prior because he had a low-comedy Yorkshire accent. I wasn’t a social snob. But I had won my place in a demanding intellectual world before I ever heard of the Mission, and the Rule said plainly: Everybody is clever enough for what God wants of him, and strong enough for what he is set to do, if not for what he would like to be. Father Prior and my confessor were always unyielding when I asked, humbly and reverently, for work that would use what was best in me, meaning my knowledge and the intelligence with which I could employ it. They could quote the Rules as well as I: You cannot seek God’s will and your own too, unless your own is perfectly confirmed to it. If it be so, there will be no need to consider it, though if it be not, there will be much need to mortify it. So they mortified me, but as they too were fallible beings they made one wrong choice and put me on the job of getting things ready for Mass, and that meant that big jugs of Communion wine were right under my hand, and after some sipping, and swigging, and topping the jugs up with water, there was a morning when I forgot myself and they found me pissed to hell in the vestry. Never drink that cheap wine on an empty stomach, Maria. I suppose I took it too lightly, and did my penances in a froward spirit. Anyhow things went from bad to worse, and I knew I was in danger of being thrown out, and the Society made it clear when a postulant was accepted that there would be no argument or explanation if that happened.

“I could have weathered it through, but I began to be hungry for another kind of life. The Society offered a good life, but that was precisely the trouble—it was so unremittingly good. I had known another world, and I became positively sick for the existentialist gloom, the malicious joy at the misfortunes of others, and the gallows-humour that gave zest to modern intellectual life outside the monastery. I was like a child who is given nothing but the most wholesome food; my soul yearned for unwholesome trash, to keep me somehow in balance.

“So I sneaked a letter out with a visitor who had come for a retreat, and dear Clem sent me some money, and I went over the wall.

“Just an expression; there was no wall. But one day at recreation time I walked down the drive in a suit and a red wig out of the box of costumes the school used for Christmas theatricals. Monasteries don’t send out dogs after escapees. I am sure they were glad to be rid of me.

“Then off with the wig and on with the robe, which I had providentially, if not quite honestly, brought with me. It smooths the path wonderfully. On the plane and back to the embraces of my Bounteous Mother, to dear old Spook.—Brraaaaaph! Excuse me if I appear to belch—Molly, may I just have the teeniest peep at that diamond you whipped out of sight so quickly?”

“No. It’s just like any other diamond.”

“Not in the least, my darling. How could it be like any other diamond when it is your diamond? You give it splendour; it is not in the power of any stone to give splendour to you.”

“We’d better go, now. I have some things to do before I go home.”

“Aha, she has a home! Beautiful Maria Magdalena of God’s Motherhood has a home! Where do you suppose it can be?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“She has a home and she has a diamond ring. And that ring is greatly privileged! You know old Burton—The Anatomy of Melancholy—contemporary of Shakespeare? He has something about a diamond ring that I memorized in my pre-monastery days, and which sometimes wickedly crept into my mind in Chapel; the Devil whispered it, one supposes. And it went like this: ‘A lover, in Calcagninus’ Apologues, wished with all his heart he were his mistress’s ring, to hear, embrace, see and do I know not what; O thou fool, quoth the ring, if thou wer’st in my room, thou shouldst hear, observe and see pudenda et poenitenda, that which would make thee loathe and hate her, yea, peradventure, all women for her sake.’ But the ring was a prissy fool, because it saw what the lover would have given his soul to see.”

“Come on, Brother John, this is foolish. Let’s be on our way.”

“No, no, not yet—you understand what I mean? There’s even a song about it.” He sang loudly, pounding out the time on the table with the handle of a knife:

“Come on; time for us to go now.”

“Don’t be so prim! Do you think I haven’t seen through you? You buy my story with a cheap meal and you sit there with a face like a hanging judge. And now you fuss and want to run away as if you’d never heard a dirty song in your whole life. And I bet you haven’t! I bet you don’t know a single dirty song, you stone-faced bitch—”

I don’t know why I did it. No, that’s wrong—I do know. My ancestry forbids me to resist a challenge. Ancestry on both sides of my family. I was suddenly furious and disgusted with Parlabane. I threw back my head and in a loud voice—and I have a really loud voice, when I need it—I sang:

and so on.

That caused a sensation. When Parlabane sang, the people at the other tables, most of whom were students, took care not to look. Shouting a rowdy song was within their range of what was permissible. But I had been really dirty. I had used an inexcusable racist word. “Nigger” brought immediate hisses and shushes, and one young man rose to his feet, as though to address a grievance meeting. In no time the proprietor was at my elbow, lifting, urging, bustling me towards the door; he only permitted me time to pay the bill as we passed the cash-desk.