The Bell - Iris Murdoch [46]
CHAPTER 7
Michael had known Nick Fawley for a long time. Their acquaintance was a curious one, the details of which were not known to the other members of the Imber community. Michael did not share James's view that suppressio veri was equivalent to suggestio falsi. He had first encountered Nick about fourteen years ago, when Nick was a schoolboy of fourteen, and Michael a young schoolmaster of twenty-five, hoping to be ordained a priest. Michael Meade at twenty-five had already known for some while that he was what the world calls perverted. He had been seduced at his public school at the age of fourteen and had had while still at school two homosexual love affairs which remained among the most intense experiences of his life. On more mature reflection he took the conventional view of these aberrations and when he came up to the University he sought every opportunity to encounter members of the other sex. But he found himself unmoved by women; and in his second year as a student he began to fall more naturally into the company of those with inclinations similar to his own. What was customary in his circle soon seemed to him once again permissible.
During this time Michael remained, as he had been since his confirmation, a somewhat emotional and irregular member of the Anglican church. It scarcely occurred to him that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Indeed, in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source, and some vague awareness of this kept him from a more minute reflection. Toward the end of his student days, however, when the conception of perhaps becoming a priest took shape with more reality in his mind, Michael awoke to the inconsistencies of his position. He had been an occasional communicant. It now seemed to him fantastic that he could, in the circumstances, have come to approach the communion table. He did not, for the moment, alter the mode of his friendships, but he ceased to receive the sacrament and went through a time of considerable distress, during which he continued rather hopelessly to do what he now felt the most dreadful guilt for doing. Even the attraction which his religion exercised upon him, his very love for his God, seemed to be corrupted at the source. After a while, however, and with the help of a priest to whom he had confided his difficulties, more robust counsels prevailed. He gave up the practice of what he had come to regard as his vice, and returned to the practice of his religion.
The change, once he had made up his mind, was attended by surprisingly transitory pains. He emerged from Cambridge chastened and, as it seemed to him, cured. Equally far away now were the days of his indifference and the days of his guilt. His love affairs appeared as the étourderies of a much younger man. Michael set his face towards life, knowing that his tastes would almost undoubtedly remain with him, but certain too that he would never again, in any way which could conflict with his now much stricter sense of morality, gratify them. He had passed through a spiritual crisis and emerged triumphant. Now when he knelt to pray he found himself devoid of the guilt and fear which had previously choked him to silence and made of his prayers mere incoherent moments of emotion. He saw himself with a more rational and a more quiet eye: confident of a Love which lay deeper than the contortions of his egoistic and unenlightened guilt, and which worked patiently to set him free. He looked to the future.
After he left Cambridge he spent a year abroad, teaching in a school in Switzerland, and then came back to a post