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THOMAS BECKET: [Very upset.] Does it seem to you that I am comforted? You tell me I am made a saint, and yet where am I?
JOHN CLARE: Why, that’s nothing but geography. There’s no theology about it. You are underneath the portico of All Saint’s Church here in Northampton and it’s halfway through the century after the one I died in, making it the twentieth. I’m informed that a great war with the Germans has been recently concluded in our favour.
BECKETT: No, it’s not the Great War that’s been recently concluded. That was some time earlier, although the Germans were involved in it so you can be forgiven your confusion. We only referred to it as the Great War because we didn’t know that there was going to be another one.
JOHN CLARE: A greater one?
BECKETT: I think a lot of that depends on your perspective.
THOMAS BECKET: [Exasperated.] All I meant by asking where I am, if I’m a saint, is that I do not seem to be in Heaven.
BECKETT: No. I’ll own, it doesn’t look much like it.
THOMAS BECKET: Yet nor is it the unending fire of Heaven’s opposite.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. It’s nothing near as bad as that.
THOMAS BECKET: Am I then to suppose that this is purgatory, this grey place where phantoms wander lost and make their aimless discourse, caught here for all time?
HUSBAND: [Bleakly, still staring into space.] I threw them out, and I got new ones.
WIFE: [The WIFE looks up at her HUSBAND uncomprehendingly.] What?
HUSBAND: The sheets. I threw them out, and I got new ones. And I turned the mattress over.
BECKETT: [To THOMAS BECKET.] What you’ve just said, I think that you might be very near the mark.
WIFE: [She looks at her HUSBAND, shaking her head in incredulous disgust.] That’s you. That’s you forever, in your vest and sweating, trying to turn the mattress over, trying to cover all your stains. And was she watching while you did that? Was she sitting there and watching?
HUSBAND: She were crying.
WIFE: There. What did I say?
HUSBAND: [Hopelessly.] I thought, you know. I thought that it were all of the emotions she was having that had made her weepy.
WIFE: Oh, I dare say. I dare say it was. All the emotions. While she watched her father try to hide her blood because he was so proud of what he’d done.
HUSBAND: [As if understanding what he’s done for the first time.] Oh, God. [After a pause, there is the SOUND from OFF of the CHURCH CLOCK, STRIKING ONCE.] Is that … is that one o’clock, and it was half past twelve before, or is that half past one, and …
WIFE: [Explosively, at her wits end.] Oh, shut up! Shut up! Shut up with everything! It’s always the same time! We can’t move on from this! We’re stuck here on these steps, this night, over and over! [The WIFE starts to weep again. Her HUSBAND also sinks his head in his hands.]
THOMAS BECKET: [Downcast and resigned.] Purgatory, then. But you say they are yet alive?
BECKETT: Again, I think a lot of that depends on your perspective. They’re alive here, in their time, as we are in our own. One way of looking at things, everybody’s dead and always has been. Like your woman here was saying, we’re all stuck. Perhaps we have it all, the good and bad, over and over. Wouldn’t that be all the Heaven and the Hell of it, how everyone was threatened by their pastors?
THOMAS BECKET: I find that a fearful ideology. I had dared hope for better.
JOHN CLARE: I’d feared worse! If it meant I should have my first wife Mary by my side again, then the travails of life should be as nothing and that by itself should be my Heaven.
BECKETT: I’m not saying I believe it. It’s just something I’ve had put to me. The father of the girl I talked about, James Joyce, I can recall him telling me about his fondness for Ouspensky’s notion of what I suppose you’d call a grand recurrence. It had had some bearing upon the eternal day in Dublin that was circumnavigated variously in his greatest novels.
THOMAS BECKET: More and more I hope this to be an outlandish dream and, wishing you no disrespect, the pair of you but figments. It may be this is a night-start after all, born of my apprehensions that I have given the King offence, one that our erstwhile friendship shall not mitigate.
BECKETT: Well, I’ll confess to the same thought myself initially. A dream of some kind would be the most reasonable explanation, although since I don’t subscribe to the interpretations of Professor Freud, I can’t see why I should be dreaming about all this wretched and incestuous back-and-forth. And that’s before I try to fathom how a load of saints and writers that I haven’t thought about in years fit into the arrangement. It’s a mighty puzzle, and I can’t say I’m enjoying it.
THOMAS BECKET: [Looking at couple on steps.] That is the sin that binds them in their disagreement, then? The man has lain down with his daughter?
JOHN CLARE: In the countryside there’s more of it than you’d imagine.
