The Bell - Iris Murdoch [36]
It was too late now to go to bed again, so Michael sat down for a while with his Bible. Then he addressed himself to the problems of the day. He remembered with a little distress that it was Saturday, and the weekly Meeting of the community was to take place during the morning. This week there was a rather troublesome agenda. The Meeting was fairly informal and Michael himself usually prepared just beforehand a list of topics to be discussed; and members of the Meeting could then raise their own topics if they wished. He began now to jot down on a piece of paper: mechanical cultivator, financial appeal, squirrels, etc., arrangements for belt. His pencil paused as he mused over the list. He glanced at his watch. Still twenty minutes before it was time to go to Mass.
The Imber community in its present form had existed for just under a year. Its beginnings, in which Michael had played a crucial part, had been casual, and its future was uncertain. Imber Court itself had been for several generations the home of Michael's family, but Michael himself had never lived there, and the house, too expensive to keep up, had mostly been let, and during the war and for a few years after was used as offices by a Government department. Then it became empty and the question had arisen of its being sold. Michael, who had always been profoundly attracted by the place, avoided it for this reason. He hardly ever went there, and retained only a vague conception of the house and the estate. As a younger man he had intended to become a priest, but had failed to do so, and had spent a number of years as a schoolmaster Although he had kept his sense of a religious vocation he had never until very recently made any visit to Imber Abbey; the taboo which rested for him upon the Court had included the Abbey also. It now seemed to him, looking back, as if this ground had been kept sacred, forbidden to him until the time when it should be the scene of decisive changes in his life. He visited the Court in the course of business, when the question of its sale was in the air, and, because it seemed proper, asked to pay his respects to the Abbess. The future destiny of the Court would naturally be of keen interest to the Abbey. Michael was also curious, and now that he was at last close by, very anxious to make the acquaintance of the Benedictine community of whose holiness he had heard so much.
His encounter with the Abbess changed his life and his plans completely. With an ease which at first surprised him and which later seemed part of an inevitable pattern, the Abbess imparted to Michael the idea of making the Court the home of a permanent lay community attached to the Abbey, a 'buffer state', as she put it, between the Abbey and the world, a reflection, a benevolent and useful parasite, an intermediary form of life. There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical