Читать книгу Glamorous Powers - Susan Howatch - Страница 41

I shall not record the mental torment of the next four weeks as I examined each of my interviews with Francis and lurched from confidence to doubt and from despair to hope. Suffice it to say that I meditated on my crisis as conscientiously as I could and somehow, amidst bouts of the most crippling anxiety, contrived to present a semblance of normality to my community as I went about my daily work. Day after day I prayed for a further divine communication, but God, the utterly transcendent God of Karl Barth’s repellent anti-mystical theology, appeared to have withdrawn from that scrap of finite time in which my soul was imprisoned and no matter how hard I prayed for a manifestation of his immanence I was disappointed.

In Europe God also appeared to be absent. The Germans slaughtered thirty thousand people in Rotterdam, bombed the Channel Islands and abolished the famous motto of France, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. In their shock and fear the British seemed to find such events almost impossible to digest; they twittered about tea-rationing (my drones were very cross) and talked righteously about the evils of the ‘chatterbugs’ who threatened the national security by their gossiping. But we all listened to Churchill with a new intensity. I fell into the habit of reading aloud his speeches, printed in The Times, to my men after breakfast; the national peril was so great that I did not think it right that they should be obliged to wait a full week before hearing the news in the Saturday recreation hour. Monks may live apart from the world but they do not reject it, and day after day we prayed for all those whose lives were being ravaged by the war.

However I was eventually diverted from this urgent work by the inevitable summons from Francis. Three weeks after my return to Grantchester I received a communication which read: ‘Please confirm that you will return to London on Monday to re-examine the matter which we discussed last month,’ and at once I sent an obedient message in reply.

The most arduous part of my ordeal was now confronting me.

I began to steel myself for the inquisition.