A month or so ago, dining in Dijon on the way
back to England from our house in France, I had a spirited argument with my 28-year-old daughter about sexual morality. It centred on a man of my age who, since the 1970s. had had an 'open marriage'. I said I disapproved of his lifestyle; she said I was bigoted and judgmental. I was also a hypocrite because 1 purported to be a Christian, yet Christ had been kind and forgiving, never condemning the sinner, only the sin. The next morning, at Mass at the church of St Michael the Archangel, the Gospel quoted Jesus: 'Do you suppose I am to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a house of five will be divided: three against two and two against three.' Apposite, I thought, to my family, except the division is five against one.
Is this the ratio, I wonder, of Christian to non-Christian in the nation at large? Cardinal Murphy O'Connor tells us that Christianity is all but vanquished in Britain. I see the truth of this in both my immediate and my extended family: of my mother's four children, all are practising Catholics; of her 12 grandchildren, only one has been known to go occasionally to Mass. Why have we failed so lamentably to pass on our beliefs to our children? It is tempting to blame the permissive climate of the times, but 1 suspect it is also because we have tried to have our cake and eat it, keeping the Commandments, more or less, without missing out on the good things of this life. In the village where we live in France, a Catholic couple with two children of their own have adopted three others — an Ethiopian orphan, a brain-damaged boy and a girl with Down's syndrome. Perhaps if I had shown such heroic virtue, my children might have been more inclined to adopt my beliefs. And then again, perhaps not.
We bought a house in France 18 months ago, after my family home in Yorkshire was sold. I have loved France since reading the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant in my adolescence. I greatly preferred them to dreary Dickens and Hardy. I speak some French, my wife speaks it fluently: but buying a house was, nonetheless, something of a leap into the unknown. In the event, the leap was not just 500 miles south but 30 years back in time. The southern Burgundy of today resembles the North Yorkshire of my childhood in the 1950s — placid cattle, small fields, thick hedgerows, empty roads, abundant wild flowers and wild animals, clear starlit skies. There are no posturing pseudo-squires in Range Rovers; no organised 'shoots'. Apart from the fact that they speak French rather than English, our
French neighbours are very like our neighbours in Yorkshire — reserved but, once they get to know you, welcoming and kind. There seems to be no resentment at the English incomers who can enjoy the benefits of high French taxation in the form of good roads, superb railways and a health service that works.
The story of Alec Guinness, whose biography I have now started, and Alice Fry, the heroine of my new novel, both begin in 1913 — with the conception of Alec and the seduction of Alice. In doing some research for the novel in the newspapers and magazines of the period, I was struck by how preoccupied they were by three issues that are all too familiar to us today: Ireland, the Balkans and the role of women. The struggle for women at the time was for the vote. It now seems baffling that anyone could have been against it. The radical journal the New Age was against female suffrage: it argued that if they were given the vote women would forfeit any claim to 'chivalry' from men. It was not quite clear what was meant by chivalry. The editor of the New Age, A.R. Orage, was a well-known womaniser. So was another radical journalist of a slightly earlier period, Edward Aveling. Aveling was the lover of Marx's youngest daughter Eleanor, nicknamed `Tussy', the factional heroine of my first novel. They lived together out of wedlock: marriage was a 'bourgeois institution'. Then Aveling left her for a young actress whom he married.
Tussy poisoned herself with arsenic, an early casualty of the post-chivalrous age. Now the sexual mores of that radical minority are the norm, and one finds a fair number of women in their thirties who have broken up with their boyfriends after a liaison of five, six or seven years. Of course, they cannot call the blokes 'cads' in this age of gender equality, but it seems to be as true now as it was in Aveling's day that bachelors in their mid-thirties can attract younger women more easily than spinsters of the same age can attract younger men.
Here I go again — a moralising fossil. I read the first paragraph of this diary to my daughter for her imprimatur. She adds, apropos of our argument in Dijon, that whether or not he was a better or a worse person than I am, the ageing roué seemed to have more joie de vivre. I am obliged to agree. I loathe discos, restaurants, nightclubs and bars, and am invariably disappointed by exhibitions, plays and films. But I don't think this has anything to do with my religious convictions. It is rather the condition of a certain kind of novelist. When Chekhov was attacked for creating gloomy characters, he pointed out that 'the writings of those full of joy are depressing' whereas 'those of a melancholy disposition always write cheerfully'. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was, according to Proust, 'ultrarespectable and the best of husbands', yet he wrote Les Liaisons Dangereuses, that sparkling, decadent novel that has been one of my models since my youth.
The rentree, as the French call it — the return to town after the holidays — is usually my favourite time of year. The temperature drops; my brain begins to function again; and the pattern established over decades of sending children back to school makes it the time to start new projects and re-establish a working routine. This year it is marred by a deluge of tragedy: news of the suicide, anorexia, and schizophrenia of young people on the threshold of life; a marriage in jeopardy; and inoperable cancer in one of our closest friends. If there is a God, asks my younger son, why is He so cruel? The age-old question. Do not blame God, I say, blame the Devil. My answer does not convince him. What can one say to console one's friends? So few, even among Christians, seem to believe that paradise awaits them. Think, then, not of what one has lost or is losing, but of what one has had and might never have been.
Alice in Exile, by Piers Paul Read, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on 13 September.
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