C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (23 page)

‘From that cryptic remark, young Morris, I presume you have thrown the switch from Connie Worth, blackmailer and murderer, to another topic?’

‘Yes, sorry, I should have said. I’m back to the “D” topic again.’

Jack smiled and said, ‘You refer there, in your coy manner, to death, I take it?’

‘Yes. I can understand the logic of immortality—and even of an immortality that begins with judgment. I can see how that judgment could be reflected in either separation or connection—either welcome or exile—for the “sheep” or the “goats” respectively. I can see how that whole concept is coherent. But how can there be any certainty that it will happen? And how can you be so certain that when it does we’ll all be found to be “unrighteous”, to use your bone-chilling word?’

‘Now that’s an entire bundle of questions. In fact, Morris, you’re doing what I recall you doing in tutorials—firing a machine gun load of questions all at once. So let’s unbundle them a bit. The first part of the question was: can we be certain? Well, I think we can be certain that this world, this universe, is a reasonable place.’

Jack paused to relight his pipe, then resumed, ‘Those scientists you love to quote have told us that much. They’ve told us that the universe is regular and reasonable—that if you ask the universe the same question in the same way on two different days, it will give you the same answer. The universe is regular, it’s reasonable. And reasonableness is the product of a Mind.’

Jack never rushed his words. He had a deliberate, almost slow way of rolling out his sentences in that rich voice of his—a manner that always carried me along with him, step by step.

‘That reasonableness,’ he continued, ‘is clearly universal. That means it applies to the non-physical realm as well as the physical. Those unseen things—your mind, or spirit, or self-awareness, or soul—are governed by the same reasonableness as the physical world we see around us.’

‘So you say that physical regularity and reasonableness apply in the physical realm and therefore regularity and reasonableness apply also in the unseen realm?’

‘Precisely. But we know there is this one difference: that unseen things, such as ideas, don’t decay and dissipate in the way physical things do. Plato’s ideas are just as alive today as they were in ancient Athens—while Plato’s body has been buried and has decayed, and the stones on which he walked are weathered and crumbling.’

Jack took a sip from his brandy and soda. ‘There is a pattern of continuation in the unseen world just as there is a pattern of decay and dissipation in the seen world. And this pattern of the continuation of the unseen is entirely reasonable since every human life here on earth promises more than it attains, aspires beyond its grasp and longs for that which is unattainable in the earthly realm.’

I nodded as I said, ‘And that continuation, beyond physical death, gives meaning to our lives?’

‘In
Alice in Wonderland
the King of Hearts, when he looks at a document in the trial scene, says, “If there is no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, as we needn’t try to find any.” Our lives
are
meaningless unless they continue and thus fulfil the potential that only begins to emerge in this life, in this world.’

‘What you say,’ I remarked, ‘reminds me of the way astronomers seem to work these days.’

Jack chuckled, ‘You’ve been reading those popular science articles in the Sunday supplements again, haven’t you?’

I ignored this dig and continued, ‘Astronomers, so I read, often discover
unseen
heavenly bodies by noticing the perturbations in the obits, the movements, of those heavenly bodies they
can
see. Similarly, the longings, the incompleteness, in the earthly lives we
can
see are the perturbations, the disturbances, that act as evidence of a larger
unseen
existence beyond this earthly life. I think I can see the sense in that—if I think about it long enough and hard enough.’

There was a long silence with Jack’s eyes glittering at me intelligently, waiting for me to absorb all these heavy ideas, grasp them and make sense of them. He could see that the wheels in my head were clattering away busily trying to process all these big concepts.

At length he said, ‘God, the Great Mind behind the universe, is not a lunatic artist who starts a million portraits and finishes none of them. He’s not a lunatic writer who starts a million novels and finishes none. The rest of our story, the rest of the picture, is coming for each one of us. We are already on the road towards that.’

‘Which means . . . ?’

‘Death is not an end—it is an incident. The road we are on now continues ever, ever on—as Tollers would say—down from the door where it began. At death our lives don’t end, they change.’

‘Meaning that immortality is what we have now?’

‘Precisely. We are already in possession of immortality—but not of eternal life. That is the change that is wrought by death: the “sheep” and the “goats” find death to be a junction point where they are separated. The “sheep” to eternal life, permanent connection, and the “goats” to eternal death, permanent separation.’

‘And which is which depends on a judgment that pronounces us either “righteous” or “unrighteous”—or so you said. But what is worse, you said earlier that each of us deserves to be pronounced “unrighteous”, which makes us all goats and none of us sheep!’

‘Or it would,’ said Jack, ‘if there were not an intervention.’

I asked him to explain.

‘Christ is God’s intervention in this world: the great invasion of this world from the unseen realm beyond. And this intervention could best be called a rescue mission. Christ came to create a new track for us to travel on—leading us off the goat track and into the way of the sheep.’

‘Hang on, get back to this ugly word “unrighteous”, please.’

‘Very well. None of us succeeds in fulfilling all the obligations of all our relationships. And that is true of each one of us. I pose this question: Morris, has any other person ever hurt you—either knowingly or unknowingly—in the course of your life?’

‘Well, of course. That sort of thing happens to everyone.’

‘That’s unrighteousness in action. And then there’s the reverse of that question: have you, Morris, ever hurt anyone else—either knowingly or unknowingly—in the course of your life? There’s no need to say anything, old chap, since the only honest answer is “yes”. Again, that’s unrighteousness in action; that’s us failing to get our relationships right.’

‘Well, none of us is perfect,’ I protested.

‘That’s my point: all of us are unrighteous. All of us are guilty of separation from God, and that broken relationship means that we fail in our other relationships with each other. That’s what I mean by us being “unrighteous” and deserving of eternal death, not eternal life—permanent isolation and separation rather than a living, loving connectedness.’

‘So everything is hopeless then?’

‘It would be. Except, as I say, for God’s intervention. In his death on the Cross, Christ was intervening on our behalf.’

Jack paused for a moment, and then, in his deep, warm voice, said quietly, ‘Do you remember his famous cry at the time of his death? He called out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Can you hear what’s happening there? That is Christ going through that final, total, ultimate separation that
is
death and hell. We deserve that—he didn’t. If we were ever that cut off, that isolated from God we would remain that cut off forever. But Christ was and is the Son of the Living God, and he went through death and hell on our behalf and came out triumphantly on the other side. That’s the Great Intervention that means we goats can be transformed into sheep.’

That night I found it hard to sleep. I lay in bed restless and sleepless. I could feel the ants of anxiety crawling up and down my spine—as if they had decided to have a party on my torso, invite all their friends and family, and do a lot of dancing on my nerve ends.

So it was that I lay awake late into the night, seeing the pale blue moonlight flood into my room where I had left the curtains drawn back, feeling a gentle night breeze wafting in through the open window, hearing the distant hoot of an owl and trying to pick out patterns in the oak beams as I stared listlessly at the ceiling.

Finally, some time after midnight, I was starting to drift away when I was startled into wakefulness by the sound of voices beneath my open window. What, I asked myself, was someone—or two someones, by the sound of it—doing on the manicured lawns of Plumwood Hall at . . . and here I looked at my bedside clock . . . at one o’clock in the morning?

Not able to answer my own question, I slipped out of bed and went to the open window, leaned forward and looked down. The lights were on in the drawing room below, and the curtains must have been open because light was spilling in golden bands across the terrace as far as the edge of the lawn. There was a dark figure standing in the shadows just beyond the light under the old ash tree.

And, I now realised, there was someone standing on the terrace in front of the open French windows.

Leaning a little further forward I got the shock of my life. It was Lady Pamela! I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps the youngsters, Douglas and Will, out on night escapades, or perhaps Sir William roused from his bed with some emergency message from his biscuit factory, if biscuit factories have emergencies (‘Sir! Sir! The strawberry cream is leaking into the vanilla nougat!’). But I certainly didn’t expect the lady of the house.

Lady Pamela was rugged up in a quilted dressing gown of a rather fetching shade of mauve, and she appeared to be talking, in hushed tones, to the shadowy figure in the darkness at the edge of the lawn. Why wasn’t she raising the alarm? Why hadn’t she roused the whole house? Why hadn’t she alerted everyone to the presence of this, I presumed, intruder? And why was I asking myself all these questions? Why didn’t I just look and listen? So, I did.

She took a step further forward and gestured impatiently for her interlocutor to step closer. Presumably she wanted to keep their voices as quiet as possible. Slipping out of the blackness under the ash tree and into the pale, yellow light thrown by the drawing room candelabra was . . . it took me a moment to register the identity. It was Drax! What was the South American native doing conferring with Lady Pamela in the middle of the night? Was he threatening her in some way?

But no, that appeared not to be the case. Their heads were almost together now and they were talking in hushed tones. I couldn’t make out any of the words; I could only hear the low murmur of the conversation. Rather like an audience watching those actors who huddle at the edge of the stage in crowd scenes muttering ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ to each other—all I could hear was sound, not words.

There was no sense, however, of antagonism in their colloquy. Neither of them appeared to be particularly happy. Well, who would be at one o’clock on a cool spring morning? But their tones and their gestures suggested some sort of mutual concern rather than antagonism.

Then Lady Pamela seemed to make up her mind. She stepped back into the drawing room and returned a moment later carrying an electric torch and tying a scarf over her head. Then she looked back over her shoulder, once again retreated to the drawing room, and this time the lights went out. But there was a full moon and I could see clearly as she stepped back onto the terrace and turned on her torch, and she and Drax walked off side by side towards the stand of trees that bordered the lawn.

Well, this was a fine pickle. What ought I to do? I mean, Lady Pamela was a middle-aged lady and she was in the company of a wild-looking native in the dark of night. Could I in good conscience let her walk off alone, with no one to keep an eye on her? No, I decided, I could not. I thought for a moment of rousing Sir William, but decided there wasn’t time.

Instead, I went to my wardrobe and hastily put on a pair of trousers and a heavy overcoat. I pulled some boots onto my feet and hurried, as quietly as my boots would allow, down the stairs to the drawing room. The light there was, as I had noticed, now off—but the French windows facing the terrace were still standing open.

I hurried outside, across the terrace and onto the lawn. Drax and Lady Pamela were now completely out of sight. My hurried dressing had taken longer than I had imagined. I took some tentative steps towards the distant stand of trees—the way I had seen them heading—and then hesitated. Where were they now?

Almost as soon as the question entered my head the answer was provided. I caught a glimpse of the dim gleam of an electric torch, bouncing in a walking pattern, beyond the trees. I set off at a good pace in that direction.

For the next little while I was engaged in tracking those two through the shrubbery and then across the moors. Now, I must admit I have no special skills as a tracker. As a boy I used to read those stories in
Chums
about intrepid trackers in the backwoods of Canada who could follow fugitives through wild country for miles and miles—tracing a faint footprint here, a snapped twig there. Even with the light of a full moon there was no question of my looking for such tell-tale signs. So I had to keep the bobbing torch in view at all times.