scholar, he was no fool or half-baked schoolboy. He said to us, “What is Darwinism? I will tell you. Darwinism is atheism,” he said. I have always remembered those words. I have seen nothing in my life since to convince me that he was wrong.’
‘But if you thought about it now,’ Ralph said, ‘if you thought about it all over again, you might be able to see that he was wrong.’ Something bubbled inside him: intellectual panic? ‘What’s the point of just repeating what you were told when you were a boy? You can be an evolutionist, Darwinian or some other kind, and still believe that everything that exists is intended by God. It’s an old debate, it’s stale, it was never necessary in the first place.’
‘My own beliefs,’ his father said, ‘have never been subject to the vagaries of fashion.’
Days of war followed. Silences. Ralph couldn’t eat. Food stuck in his dry mouth; it was like trying to swallow rocks, he thought. He hated quarrels, hated silences too: those silences that thickened the air in rooms and made it electric.
Matthew closed in on him, and so did his mother: a pincer movement. ‘Are you going to take evidence, what you call evidence, from a few bones and shells, and use them to oppose the word of God?’
‘I told you,’ Ralph said, ‘that there is no opposition.’
‘There is opposition from me,’ his father said: shifting the ground.
‘It is impossible to have a discussion with you.’
‘No doubt,’ Matthew said. ‘I am not a scientist, am I? I am so backward in my outlook that I wonder you condescend to talk to me at all. I wonder you condescend to stay under my roof. Good God, boy – look around you. Look at the design of the world. Do you think some blind stupid mechanism controls it? Do you think we got here out of chance?’
‘Please be calm,’ Ralph said. He tried to take a deep breath, but it seemed to stick half-way. ‘It’s no good waving your arms at me and saying, look at God’s creation. You don’t have to force it down my throat, the miracles of nature, the design of the universe – I know about those, more, I’d say, than you.’ (More than you, he thought, who have lived your life with your eyes on your well-blacked boots.) ‘If I believe in God I believe from choice. Not because of evidence. From choice. Not because I’m compelled.’
‘You believe from choice’?’ Matthew was revolted. ‘From choice? Where did you get this stupid notion from?’
‘I thought of it myself.’
‘Can you believe in anything you like, then? Can you believe the moon is made of green cheese? Is there no truth you recognize?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said quietly. ‘We used to go to sermons that said the truth was what God revealed, that you don’t find the truth by looking for it. At least, that’s what I think they were saying. Well – not to put too fine a point on it – I can’t wait around all my life. If I’ve been given the faculty of reasoning, I may as well use it to dig out what truth I can.’
‘You’ll kill me, Ralph,’ his father said. ‘Your pride and your self-regard will kill me.’
Ralph was afraid his father might ask, with one old divine, ‘What can the geologist tell you about the Rock of Ages?’ He spared him that, but not episodes of choking rage, which terrified Ralph and made him regret what he had begun.
His mother took him aside. ‘You are making your father very unhappy,’ she said. ‘I have never seen him more miserable. And he has done everything for you, and would give you anything. If you do this thing, if you insist on it, if you insist on this as your life’s work, I’ll not be able to hold my head up before our friends. They’ll say we have not brought you up properly.’
‘Look,’ Ralph said, ‘what I want is to go to university. I want to read geology. Just that, that’s all. I didn’t set out to upset anybody. That was the last thing on my mind.’
‘I know you have your ambitions,’ Dorcas said, with that frayed sigh only mothers can perform. ‘But your abilities, Ralph, are not for you to enjoy – they are given to you to use for the Christian community.’
‘Yes. All right. I will use them.’
‘You’ve closed your mind,’ she said.
Astonishment wrenched him out of his misery. She left him incoherent. ‘Me? I’ve closed my mind?’
‘You spoke to your father of reason,’ she said. ‘You’ll find there is a point where reason fails.’
‘Stop talking at me,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’
His mother left him alone. Her mouth drew in as though she were eating sour plums. If James were here it would be different, Ralph thought; he wanted to cry like a child for his uncle, of whom he knew so little. James could talk to them, he believed, James could ridicule them out of their caution and their scruples and their superstitions, James could talk them into the twentieth century. James is not like them, he knows it from his letters; James is liberal, educated, sympathetic. Ralph saw himself losing, being driven into the ground. All he believed, all he wished to believe – the march of order, progress – all diminished by his father’s hard deriding stare and his mother’s puckered mouth.
Why didn’t he fetch in the schoolmaster who encouraged him? Why didn’t he appeal to his headmaster, who knew him to be a bright, studious, serious boy? Why didn’t he get some other, reasonable adult to weigh in on his behalf – at least to referee the argument, make sure his father obeyed the laws of war?
Because he was ashamed of his father’s stupidity, ashamed of the terms of the quarrel. Because in families, you never think of appealing for help to the outside world; your quarrels are too particular, too specific, too complex. And because you never think of these reasonable solutions, till it is far too late.
‘Ralph,’ his father said, ‘be guided by me. You are a mere boy. Oh, you don’t want to hear that, I know. You think you are very adult and smart. But you will come to thank me, Ralphie, in the days ahead.’
Ralph felt he was trapped in an ancient argument. These are the things sons say to fathers; these are the things fathers say to sons. The knowledge didn’t help him; nor did the knowledge that his father was behaving like a caricature of a Victorian patriarch. His family had always been cripplingly old-fashioned; till now he had not realized the deformity’s extent. Why should he, when all his family’s friends were the same, and he had spent his life hobbling along with them? They were churchgoers; not great readers; not travellers, but people who on principle entertained narrow ideas and stayed at home. He saw them for the first time as the outside world might see them – East Anglian fossils.
‘There will be no money for you, Ralphie,’ his father said. ‘And you will hardly be able to support yourself through your proposed course at university. You may try, of course.’
‘James will help me,’ Ralph said, without believing it.
‘Your Uncle James has not a brass farthing of his own. And you’re quite mistaken if you think he would set himself up against his own brother.’
‘Of course, I could see it coming,’ Emma said. ‘After all the fine theories and pieties have been aired, what it comes down to is their hand on the purse-strings. That’s their final argument.’
Ralph
