to be happy. That’s why I resent religious belief, even among my nearest and dearest - indeed especially among my nearest and dearest, since with them the impossibility of discussing religion dispassionately is most apparent. Fred goes off every Sunday morning to Mass, leaving me behind with the Sunday papers, and comes back ninety minutes later looking virtuously pleased with herself. I might ask her what the sermon was like, and she will say something vague in reply - frankly I doubt whether she listens to it attentively - but I wouldn’t dream of asking her if, for example, she received Communion with unreserved assent to the doctrine of transubstantiation. I don’t think Fred’s faith ever had a strong intellectual basis. It was an effect of upbringing and education and family tradition. The storms of sexuality and an unhappy marriage in early adulthood blew her away from the Catholic faith, and when those subsided she returned to its safe haven. From the few occasions when I have accompanied her to Mass for family reasons I would say it’s pure ritual for her, a ritual of reassurance.
She sits and stands and kneels and sings the hymns and murmurs the responses in a kind of trance, happy to be connected to a general ambience of transcendental faith and hope without needing to enquire closely into the rational basis of it all. And who am I to say she is deluding herself, left alone in the house with my doubts and my deafness and the shallow excitable chatter of the Sunday newspapers?
Marcia and family came round to lunch today, as they often do on a Sunday. Of all our children Fred’s Marcia lives the closest, indeed only a couple of miles away, so we see more of them than of the others. I’m always pleased to see Dauphin Daniel and his older sister Helena - ‘Lena’ as she’s familiarly known. Marcia and her husband Peter I get along with up to a point, but I have a feeling that as a teenager Marcia was the most resistant of Fred’s children to the idea of her mother marrying me - an older man, her teacher, a non-Catholic, with kids of his own - and that she has never quite overcome her early resentment of our union. Indeed, as Fred blossomed and became successful in business, while I shrank into retirement and succumbed to deafness, I suspect I appeared to Marcia more and more as a redundant appendage to the family, an unfortunate liability. As she is the dominant partner in their marriage Peter takes his cues from her and is guarded in his attitude to me. When I hinted as much to Fred one day, she said, ‘Nonsense, Marcia has a great respect for you, and if Peter seems a little “guarded” as you say, it’s because he thinks you must be silently criticising his English all the time because you’re a Professor of Linguistics.’ I laughed at that, because modern linguistics is almost excessively non-prescriptive, but I suppose there might be some truth in it. Peter is from a working-class background, speaks with a perceptible local accent and uses the occasional dialect word. He studied accountancy at what was then the Poly and works in industry, so he is culturally a little undernourished and a bit in awe of the family he has married into. I tried to put him at ease next time I saw him by attacking Lynne Truss’s bestselling book on the apostrophe, but only succeeded in upsetting him - it turned out he is a devout believer in Truss and uses her book as a kind of bible. Oh well . . . They’re an admirable couple in many ways, both with demanding careers, but dedicated to the welfare of their children, making quality time for them in the evenings and at weekends, never as far as I can tell having any quality time to themselves, and I wish I could love them more. That’s no problem with the children, who are beautiful and charming, and at that interesting age when they begin to acquire language with astonishing rapidity, and sometimes make expressive mistakes, if I could only hear them. Today when I complimented Lena on her pretty dress, and she replied that her Mummy had bought it at Marks & Spencer, everybody laughed except me. When I looked puzzled, Fred explained that she had said, ‘Mummy bought it at Marks and Spensive.’ Then I laughed on my own.
6
7