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saying, ‘and why shouldn’t that be a comfort to me in my old age? Francis said I should never tell you about the vision because you might start believing you had to be a replica, but you wouldn’t think that, would you, Nicholas? Francis was wrong. On this point I know best — I know you’ll reverence my cherished vision as a gift from God, just as I do, and so therefore it can’t possibly have a malign effect. I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right. I know it.’
    Proud, arrogant, ancient, miserable and misguided, he glared at me in a pathetic plea for reassurance.
    Taking his hand in mine I said: ‘Of course you’re right, Father. You always are.’
    No doubt my mother would have made some very robust comment at that point.
    But my mother was no longer there.
    VI
    The next holidays I returned from school to find that a cottage was being built for my father in the grounds by the chapel. He said it would make it easier for him to be secluded. Then he said I could visit him whenever I wished because I was quite different from everyone else and he didn’t find my presence a strain. As an afterthought he added that he couldn’t bear to go on living at the main house now that my mother was no longer there; he’d never liked living there much anyway; his middle-class upbringing as a schoolmaster’s son had ensured he had never felt at ease in my mother’s county setting.
    I was stunned. My father, educated on scholarships at public school and university, had appeared to fit neatly into my mother’s world. I had had no idea he had such a chip on his shoulder about class. I knew, of course, that his mother had been a parlourmaid, but my own mother had said how interesting that was and what a remarkable woman my unknown grandmother must have been to succeed in marrying ‘above her station’, so I had accepted my grandparents’ mésalliance as merely an unusual piece of family history. Now for the first time I saw that my father also had married ‘above his station’ and it occurred to me that my parents’ marriage too had been, in a less obvious way, a mésalliance which had caused problems.
    I was still recovering from the shock that my father had never felt at ease in the home I loved when he began to explain to me his plan for ensuring that my inheritance was properly looked after: he intended to let the Home Farm and found a small religious community which would run the house and tend the grounds.
    I disliked this scheme – though I said nothing for fear of upsetting him – but as time passed I realised how clever the plan was. Not only did I never have to worry about the property but I never had to worry that my father was failing to take care of himself when I was away. The members of the Community tended the garden, looked after the house and worshipped my father whenever they weren’t busy worshipping God. Their devotion was my passport to a normal life unburdened by abnormal anxieties.
    I finished school, went up to Laud’s, my father’s old college at Cambridge, came down with my degree, dabbled disastrously with voluntary work and dabbled disastrously with Debbie. My father was still living as a recluse in his cottage, but now in 1966, nine years after my mother’s death, he had come to terms with his loss and his biggest problem was the old age he hated so much. But I could see he was looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.
    I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin