Each night he read to them from the scriptures. His daughters and his wife became the congregation he had lost that fateful day in Cullybackey. From her father Catherine first heard warnings against the sins of the flesh through the words lust, carnal, licentious. The words swooped from her father’s tongue onto hers, words that years later used to send dizzy tremors of desire through Jack Ferris.

“Lust,” Jonathan Adams would say, and the girls could feel it – a surge of feeling that started in the body and entered the spirit like a black wind.

11. The News at Six

11

The News at Six

Along with geese and apples and Catholics, Maisie Ruttle brought fiction into Jonathan Adams’ life. On the mantelpiece, leaning against a clock shaped like a windmill, were copies of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac – novels belonging to an earlier generation on Maisie’s side. Jonathan Adams was a widely read man, but unlike his wife or daughters he did not read fiction. Fiction contained inaccuracies, untruths, generalizations, assumptions. The real world was a poor metaphor for what might happen in the hereafter, but at least it was more true than fiction.

The language of the imagination offered licentious freedom. It acquired trappings, idols, delusions, false promises, too much madness. Not till Matti Bonner died did Jonathan Adams rediscover fiction. And this was his attempt at trying to recall Matti Bonner’s life. That life, which he had presumed he was familiar with, now grew strange.

He could not place his hand on the facts. Yet throughout his life Jonathan Adams at heart was a reader. The real world, with its physical discomforts, could not accommodate the shocking facts that remained to the fore in his brain. He wanted knowledge of God, and though he baulked at attributing to Him human qualities, this he did, in the full awareness of the fragility of human knowledge when faced with the Uncognoscibility of the Absolute, as John Stuart Mill called it.