Not Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, though that splendidly titled figure had to be given his due, because the University paid him to be both reverend and a professor. The priest and the professor would function suitably if Simon Darcourt, the whole of him, lived in a serious awareness of what he was and spoke to the rest of the world from that awareness, as a priest and a professor and always as a man who was humble before God but not necessarily humble before his fellows.

This was the real Imitation of Christ, and if Thomas à Kempis didn’t like it, it was because Thomas à Kempis wasn’t Simon Darcourt. But old Thomas could be a friend. “If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?” he asked. You can’t, of course. But I had decided that the strenuous moulding of my earlier days, the prayers and austerities (there had been a short time when I went in for peas in my shoes and even flirted with a scourge, till my mother found it) and playing the Stupid Ass when I thought I was being the Suffering Servant, was nonsense. I had given up moulding myself externally and was patiently waiting to be moulded from within by my destiny.

Patiently waiting! In my soul, perhaps, but the University does not pay people for patient waiting, and I had my classes to teach, my theologues to push towards ordination, and a muddle of committees and professional university groups to attend to. I was a busy academic, but I found time for what I hoped was spiritual growth.

My greatest handicap, I discovered, was a sense of humour. If Urquhart McVarish’s humour was irresponsibility and contempt for the rest of mankind, mine was a leaning towards topsy-turveydom, likely to stand things on their heads at inopportune moments. As a professor in a theological faculty I have some priestly duties and at Spook we are ritualists. I am in entire agreement with that. What did Yeats say? “How else but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” But just when custom and ceremony should most incline me towards worship, I may have to contend with a fit of the giggles. Was that what ailed Lewis Carroll, I wonder? Religion and mathematics, two realms in which humour seems to be wholly out of place, drove him to write the Alicebooks. Christianity has no place for topsy-turveydom, little tolerance of humour. People have tried to assure me that St. Francis was rich in humour, but I don’t believe it. He was merry, perhaps, but that is something else. And there have been moments when I have wondered if St. Francis were not just the tiniest bit off his nut. Didn’t eat enough, which is not necessarily a path to holiness. How many visions of Eternity have been born of low blood-sugar? (This as I prepare a third piece of toast thickly spread with honey.) Indeed some measure of what might be called cynicism, but which could also be clarity of vision, tempered with charity, is an element in the Simon Darcourt I am trying to discover and set free. It was that which made it impossible for me not to take note that Urky McVarish’s picture of Sir Thomas Urquhart, looking so strikingly like himself, had been touched up to give precisely that impression. The green coat, the hair (a wig), and most of the face were original, but there had been some helpful work on the resemblance. When you looked at the picture sideways, under the light that shone so strongly on it, the over-painting could be plainly seen. I know a little about pictures.

Poor old Urky. I hadn’t liked the way he pestered the Theotoky girl about virginity, and gentlewomen’s thighs. I looked up the passage in my Rabelais in English: yes, the thighs were cool and moist because women were supposed to pee a bit at odd times (why, I wonder? they don’t seem to do it now) and because the sun never shone there, and they were cooled by farts. Nasty old Rabelais and nasty old Urky! But Maria was not to be disconcerted. Good for her!

What a pitiable bag of tricks Urky was! Could it be that his whole life was as false as his outward man?

Was this charitable thinking? Paul tells us that Charity is many things, but nowhere does he tell us that it is blind.

It would certainly be false to the real Simon Darcourt to leave Urky out of The New Aubrey. And it would be equally false not to seek out and say something friendly to the much-beset Professor Ozias Froats, whom I once had known fairly well, in his great football days.

“No, I cannot give any undertaking that I will not get drunk this time. Why are you so against a pleasing elevation of the spirits, Molly?”

“Because it isn’t pleasing. It’s noisy and tiresome and makes people stare.”

“What a middle-class attitude! I would have expected better from you, a scholar and a Rabelaisian. I expect you to have a scholarly freedom from vulgar prejudice, and a Rabelaisian’s breadth of spirit. Get drunk with me, and you won’t notice that the common horde is staring.”

“I hate drunkenness. I’ve seen too much of it.”

“Have you, indeed? There’s a revelation—the first one I have ever had from you, Molly. You’re a great girl for secrets.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s inhuman, and probably unhealthy. Unbutton a little, Molly. Tell me the story of your life.”

“I thought I was to hear the story of your life. A fair exchange. I pay for the dinner: you do the talking.”

“But I can’t talk into a void.”

“I’m not a void; I have a splendid memory for what I hear—better, really, than for what I read.”

“That’s interesting. Sounds like a peasant background.”

“Everybody has a peasant background, if you travel back in the right directions. I hate talking in a place like this. Too noisy.”

“Well, you brought me here. The Rude Plenty—a student beanery.”

“It’s quite a decent Italian restaurant. And it’s cheap for what you get.”

“Maria, that is gross! You invite a needy and wretched man to dinner—because that’s what we call ourselves in the Spook grace, remember, miseri homines et egentes—and you tell him to his face that it’s a cheap joint, implying that you could do better for somebody else. You are not a scholar and a gentleman, you are a female pedant and a cad.”

“Very likely. You can’t bounce me with abuse, Parlabane.”

“Brother John, if you please. Damn you, you are always so afraid somebody is going to bounce you, as you put it. What do you mean? Bounce you up and down on some yielding surface? What Rabelais calls the two-backed beast?”

“Oh shut up, you sound like Urky McVarish. Every man who can spell out the words picks up a few nasty expressions from the English Rabelais and tries them on women, and thinks he’s a real devil. It gives me a royal pain in the arse, if you want a Rabelaisian opinion. By bounce I mean men always want to disconcert women and put them at a disadvantage; bouncing is genial, patronizing bullying and I won’t put up with it.”

“You wound me more deeply than I can say.”

“No, I don’t. You’re a cultivated sponger, Brother John. But I don’t care. You’re interesting, and I’m happy to pay if you’ll talk. I call it a fair exchange. I’ve told you, I hate talking against noise.”

“Oh, this overbred passion for quiet! Totally unnatural. We are usually begotten with a certain amount of noise. For our first nine months we are carried in the womb in a positive hubbub—the loud tom-tom of the heart, the croaking and gurgling of the guts, which must sound like the noise of the rigging on a sailing-ship, and a mother’s loud laughter—can you imagine what that must be like to Little Nemo, lurching and heaving in his watery bottle while the diaphragm hops up and down? Why are children noisy? Because, literally, they’re bred to it. People find fault with their kids when they say they can do their homework better while the radio is playing, but the kids are simply trying to recover the primal racket in which they learned to be everything from a blob, to a fish, to a human creature. Silence is entirely a sophisticated, acquired taste. Silence is anti-human.”