Jerusalem

BECKETT: He had a walk to him and a moustache, a way he moved his eyebrows and the like. Lucia could do all of that. His art was in the pathos he inspired for the unfortunate or common man, the footsore wayfarer much like yourself but in a time of longer railway lines and higher buildings. He’d make you feel for the great injustices there are in life then make you laugh for all the triumphs of the individual. I do not suppose that he was necessarily a happy man. I can remember reading something by the filmmaker Jean Cocteau … no, don’t ask, it’s far too complicated … where he mentioned Chaplin saying words to the effect that his life’s greatest sadness was the fact he’d gotten rich off playing someone who was poor.

JOHN CLARE: It is the guilt that we were speaking of again, though if my greatest sadness were that I was rich I do not think I should be sad at all.

THOMAS BECKET: It may be that the sorrows of the wealthy life are naught save more expensive ones. It sometimes is as if my king and the companion of my boyhood is made heavy by the weight of gold that’s in his heart.

BECKETT: Well, if it’s guilt you’re after then your royal pal would take some beating. In fact, now I come to think of it that is exactly what he took. The mess he made of things with you, Rome set him to be flogged for penitence and this despite him being king. From what I hear he kneeled there and he took it, too. He must have known he was deserving of his punishment.

THOMAS BECKET: The king was flogged, and he submitted to it?

BECKETT: That he did. It’s a well known occurrence. It was after exhumation when you were discovered to be incorruptible, that was what settled it. In my opinion he was lucky to get off with just the flogging.

JOHN CLARE: I’d have made him get down on his knees and stay there till he’d scrubbed up the cathedral floor. He’d still be there now.

THOMAS BECKET: [Horrified.] He was flogged. The king was flogged. Because of what he’d done to me.

BECKETT: That is the substance of it. No one thought he was judged harshly, put it that way.

THOMAS BECKET: But if he were treated so, then what must he have – ?

BECKETT: You don’t want the details.

JOHN CLARE: All the ins and outs. No, I agree.

BECKETT: You’re better off without them. There’s no benefit in fretting needlessly.

THOMAS BECKET: [Grumpy and resentful.] No. No, there isn’t. For that matter, I don’t see that you were under a compulsion to be mentioning this business in the first place.

BECKETT: I would hate to think I’d tried your patience to the point where it became proverbial.

THOMAS BECKET: To try my patience is the least of it, when you have sought to undercut my faith itself with your sophistications.

BECKETT: I’ve sought no such thing.

THOMAS BECKET: Yet you speak dismissively of Eden and of our first parents, you insinuate a love between Eve and her sons that is unspeakable, and you insist that here about us is the twentieth century of Our Lord and still God has not come?

JOHN CLARE: Yes, Mr. Bunyan who we spoke to a short while since raised a similar complaint regarding the ongoing absence of Jerusalem.

BECKETT: [To THOMAS BECKET.] He never comes. That’s my own understanding of the matter. Or at least, He’s not about when you’ve a need of Him, much in the style of a policeman.

JOHN CLARE: There’s a phrase that I have heard in these parts. Now, what is it? It has something of the meaning of “policeman”, but there is a connotation of the tithing man or rent-man there into the bargain. I cannot recall it at this moment but it’s possible that it will come to me.

THOMAS BECKET: [To SAMUEL BECKETT.] If as you say He never comes, can you be certain He is truly there?

BECKETT: I would imagine that is where the faith comes into it. For my own purposes I like to think His non-arrival is not necessarily an indication of His non-existence.

THOMAS BECKET: But He does not speak to you?

BECKETT: It isn’t a great matter of importance if He does or not. There’s lots of people who don’t speak to me, or who I never see, but I don’t have a problem about if they’re there or not. It’s not like I feel snubbed or anything.

THOMAS BECKET: But if you never hear His voice …

BECKETT: Sometimes it seems that there’s a certain quality to the long periods of silence.

THOMAS BECKET: Is there?

BECKETT: I believe so. [CLARE, BECKETT and THOMAS BECKET lapse into a thoughtful silence. There is a long pause.]

HUSBAND: I did all of it. I did the lot of what you said. I’m all of what you called me. [Pause.] But you knew.