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simply too, too tiresome pain in this simply too, too awkward place …’
    I was punting idly with the lady on the Cam two days later when Francis approached me in another punt with two henchmen and tried to ram me. I managed to deflect the full force of the assault but when he tried to use the punting pole as a bayonet I lost my temper. Abandoning the lady, who was feigning hysterics and enjoying herself immensely, I leapt aboard Francis’ punt and tried to wrest the pole from him with the result that we both plunged into the river.
    ‘You charlatan!’ he yelled at me as we emerged dripping on the bank. ‘You
common
swinish rotter! You ought to be castrated like Peter Abelard and then burnt at the stake for bloody sorcery!’
    I told him it was hardly my fault if he was too effete to satisfy the opposite sex, and after that it took five men to separate us. I remember being startled by his pugnacity. Perhaps it was then that I first realized there was very much more to Francis Ingram than was allowed to meet the eye.
    In the end his henchmen dragged him away and I was left to laugh at the incident, but I only laughed because at that momentmy psychic faculty was dormant and I never foresaw the future. A month later the lady, who had been telling everyone I had miraculously cured her abdominal pain, became violently ill, and in hospital it was discovered that her appendix had ruptured. She died twenty-four hours later.
    I knew that because I had temporarily removed the pain she had refrained from seeking medical advice until it was too late, and as the enormity of the catastrophe overwhelmed me I perceived for the first time the danger in which I stood. Contrary to what I had supposed my psychic powers made me not strong and impregnable but weak and vulnerable, a prey to any passing demonic force. I had used my powers to serve myself and the result had been tragedy. I now realized I had to use my powers to serve God, not merely in order to be a good man but in order to survive as a sane rational being, and as I finally recognized a genuine call to the priesthood I stumbled through the meadows which separated Cambridge from Grantchester and knocked on the door of the Fordite monks.

IX
    At that stage of my life I had no thought of being a monk. I was merely desperate to obtain absolution from someone who, unlike the stern authorities at Laud’s College, might hear my confession with compassion, and if anyone had told me that one day I would myself enter the Order I would have laughed in scorn.
    It would be edifying to record that my spiritual problems were solved once I came under the Abbot of Grantchester’s direction, but although James Reid was the holiest of men he was quite the wrong director for me. I liked him because he was fascinated by my psychic gifts and this, I regret to say, enhanced my pride by making me feel special. The result was that I fell into the habit of using my powers to manipulate him until we had both fooled ourselves into believing that we had achieved a successful ‘rapport’. In retrospect the truth seemsobvious: I was still so spiritually immature that I could only tolerate a director who cocooned me in indulgence, and beyond my genuine desire to devote my life to God’s service, my psyche was as disruptive and undisciplined as ever. The years of my troubled priesthood had begun.
    I saw no more of Francis after we came down from Cambridge, and for a time I was so absorbed by my preparations for ordination that I never thought of him, but five years later when I was a married Naval chaplain I heard the astonishing news that he had entered the Order. He began his monastic career at the Starwater house, some forty miles from where I worked at the Naval base in Starmouth, but I had lost touch with the Fordites by that time and I saw no reason why I should ever meet Francis again.
    However word of his progress continued to reach me as he rose with lightning speed to the office of Bursar, no