Evenings after school you hung about the shops waiting for Mary Moran to pass down from the Convent, let her cycle out the road a little ahead, and pedal furiously to catch her round Clark’s.
“How are you, Mary?”
“Oh, you gave me a fright.”
“I thought you’d not be out yet and I got a surprise when I came round the turn and saw you ahead,” you explained, though you’d waited for twenty minutes in the hammering of Gill’s bicycle shop with eyes never off the road till she passed.
“No. We didn’t delay around the Convent. I came straight. Don’t you seem to be late?”
“We hung about the alley. The others are mostly there yet. Was there anything strange today?”
Her voice was pure music, it sent shivers of delight trembling. No one ever smiled as she did. A secret world was around her. Her thighs moved on the saddle, you got conscious of the friction of your own thighs, got roused, desperate in case she’d notice. Every bit of the road was precious, only it went so fast, so much to tell and to hear, and it was marvel, the world for the very first time. If you had twenty miles to travel it wouldn’t be enough, and the four went past before you could hold or taste them and you were saying an impossible good-bye.
She was gone and dream of her took over, Mary and you together, and married. With her you’d walk a life as under the shade of trees, a life in a wild summer that’d last for ever.
But you couldn’t even hold her pure, you took her into your mind a wet Saturday, excited her, put foul abuse in her mouth. Afterwards took the woollen sock that had soaked the seed and held it to the light.
“Fuck it,” was said quiet, eyes on the wet stain, dust of tiredness or hopelessness dry in your mouth.
You couldn’t have Mary Moran if you went to be a priest and you couldn’t be a priest as you were. The only way you could have her anyhow was as an old whore of your mind, and everything was growing fouled.
Summer came, the days closing on when you’d have to go to Father Gerald, Corpus Christi the last feast before.
The rhododendron branches were cut out of Oakport same as always to decorate the grass margins of the processional route, banners of red and gold stretched overhead from the telegraph poles with “O Sacred Heart of Jesus”; and the altars stood before the houses of the way, candles burning among the flowers, the picture of the Sacred Heart torn bleeding from its breast against the white linen.
Under the gold canopy the priest moved with the Sacrament, girls in their communion dresses strewing rose petals in its path, and behind the choir the banners of the sodalities self-conscious in the wake of the hymns. At the bridges and crossroads the police stood to salute.
Before the post office the people knelt in the dry dust of the road for Benediction. The humeral veil was laid on the priest’s shoulders, the tiny bell tinkled in the open day, the host was raised and all heads bowed, utter silence except for the bell and some donkey braying in the distance. Kneeling in the dust among the huddled crowd it was hard to fight back tears. This was the way your life was, you belonged to these people, as they to you, you were linked together. One day that Sacred Host would be your burden to uphold for them while the bell rang, but it was still impossible to join in the singing as the procession resumed its way, only listen to the shuffle of boots through the dust. Wash me ye waters streaming from His side, it was strange, all strange, and the candles burning against the yew trees in the day.
Or was it all mere pomp and ceremony to cover up the unendurable mystery, the red petals withering in the centre of the road with the people drinking or gone home? It was impossible to know, and in that uncertainty you went to confession, you had to find some limbo of control before facing the priest, but you were farther from any decision or certainty than ever before in your life.
11
Cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac pinu iacentes sic temere et rosa
canos odorati capillos
dum licet, Assyriaque nardo
potamus uncti? dissipat Euius
curas edaces.
THE ROCKING OF THE BUS JOGGED THE SMALL BLUE TEXTBOOK in his hands as he read, writing first the meaning of the new words on the margin after he’d looked up the vocabulary in the back. Once he was sure of all the meanings he’d try to translate.
Why should we not lie stretched carelessly under that pine-tree or the tall plane, and scent our white hair with roses while we may, and anointed with Syrian spikenard let us drink? Bacchus drives eating cares away.
He was able to translate it. He lifted his eyes and smiled, whether from the satisfaction, it seemed to make meaning enough, or because it evoked a beautiful life and way—old men fragrant with roses drinking life heedlessly away under the plane tree.
He’d not be asked about beauty in the leaving next June. He’d be asked to translate it, to scan it, to comment on grammatical usages. Horace wasn’t easy, he was for the Honours. So he laboured on mechanically through the notes and text.
Later he closed the book, his eyes tired from the print jogging before them. Outside the dusty windows of the bus a bright day in August was ending, the few women in the seats beginning to wear cardigans loose about the shoulders of their summer dresses.
Since midday he’d travelled in this reek of diesel and warm rubber and leather, an hour’s wait in Cavan that he’d used to hang about the streets, football fever in the town, references in the passing salutations.
“If Peter Donoughue has his shooting boots on Cavan will win, though it’ll be tight,” a conductor with a green tin box in his hands said outside the waiting-room door, and it had for some reason stayed.
“Is it long more?” he turned and asked as he let the Latin textbook slip into his pocket.
“No. Not long. Eight or ten minutes.”
“Thanks.”
He stared ahead. Father Gerald would be waiting. In eight or ten minutes they’d meet, and the strange thing was that the whole decision and meeting had seemed closer and more definite six months before, the day the priest took Joan away. The nearer the waiting got to its end the more certain it seemed that it could never end, it must surely last for ever, though it was actually ending even now. A country town huddled beneath church spires was in sight; and the conductor nodded. He’d arrived. As the bus slowed he took his coat and case from the overhead rack and the black figure of the priest with Joan at his side grew recognizable out of the few people waiting on the pavement.
After the first greetings, the inquiries and answers about the journey, it was Father Gerald who told him that they’d been invited to tea in Ryans, where Joan worked. They went towards it down the street, Ο Riain in florid Celtic lettering on the draper’s lintel. The shop was closed. They knocked on the hall door, up steps one side of the shop.
Mrs. Ryan welcomed them, a large woman with a mass of hair that must have been black once, her big body showing well out of the grey tweed dress. Three daughters and a son waited in the dining-room with their father. He seemed dominated in some way. She introduced them, one by one, shaking hands with father and son and bowing to the daughters with such strain that he was only half aware of what he was doing. They sat to the laden table. After the tea was poured the priest offered Grace.
The meal passed in continual pleasantry and gossip, even Ryan towards the end asserted himself enough to tell a safe joke. Afterwards they sat together till close to midnight, a kind of intensity or excitement gathering, whether from the closeness of bodies or personalities, for the local talk hardly deserved such eagerness or passion. The priest’s face was flushed when he rose, he lingering for twenty minutes pro¬ longing it between the chair and the door, reluctant to let the evening go, though it was past its time.
That was the one chance he got alone with Joan. She’d grown since she left them, but her face was more pale and drawn.
“Are you alright?”
She said nothing, he knew something was the matter.
“Are you not happy, Joan, or what?”
> “No, it’s worse than home,” she said and that was all there was time for before they were joined by Mrs. Ryan.
“It’s worse than home,” troubled him in the priest’s car but he had no time to hunt to see.
“We’re late, strange how you hang too long talking once it goes late, anything rather than go home. And when you think back you can’t know what you’ve been talking all the time about,” the priest said as he drove fast into the empty night, the branches of the trees along the road clean in the moon.
He sat on the leather seat, the flies flaring constantly into the sweep of the headlamps, worse than home fading from his mind. He was driving with a priest in the night, his father and home miles away. This night he’d sleep in a strange house. He knew nothing.
The car slowed in the road of sycamores, and turned in open gates, the tyres sounding on the gravel. The church with its bell-rope dangling and the presbytery at the end of the circular drive were clear in the moon, the graveyard between, the headstones showing over the laurels along the drive. In the gravel clearing before the house the car stopped beside where a cactus flowered out of a bugled pedestal. He got out his case and coat and stood in the moon. Between the laurels of the drive a path of white gravel ran unbordered through the graves to the sacristy door.
“We have the good company of the dead about us,” the priest smiled as if he’d read his mind, “but there’s no need for them to disturb you, they do not walk, not till the Last Day.”
“It’s a strange feeling though.”
“It’ll pass, don’t worry.”
The house was cluttered with old and ponderous furniture, religious pictures in heavy gilt frames and an amazing collection of grandfather clocks on the walls. Two glasses with sandwiches and a jug of milk stood on a tray in the sitting-room.
“John has left us something. We might as well eat,” the priest said and filled both glasses.
“Who is John?”
“I never told you, he keeps house for me.”
“And is he old?”
“Younger than you, just sixteen. He’s from a large family at the other end of the parish.”
“Isn’t it unusual for a boy?”
“I suppose. It was his mother mentioned to me that he was fond of housework, which is unusual, I suppose. I was driven crazy at the time with an old harridan of a priest’s housekeeper who was trying at the time to run me and the parish as well as the house. So I suggested to the mother that he should come to me until he is eighteen, I’ll try to use what influence I have to get him placed in a good hotel then. It’s a career with enormous opportunity these days. So everyone is quite happy with the arrangement. I give him some training, so I’d be glad while you’re here if you’re not free with him, treat him respectfully of course, but never forget that both of you are in unequal positions. Anything else would do his training no good.”
They’d finished eating. The priest’s eyes fixed on the mantelpiece where two delf bulldogs flanked a statue of St. Martin de Porres as he returned to his chair from leaving the tray back on the table.
“This is what I mean,” he said. “He must have dusted the mantelpiece and look how he’s arranged the things, absolutely no sense of placing.”
He gazed respectfully as the priest changed the bulldogs to a position that satisfied him but he could see no difference now than before, just bulldogs about a statue of a small negro in brown and cream robes on the white marble.
“Absolutely no sense of taste, a very uncultivated people even after forty years of freedom the mass of Irish are. You just can’t make silk out of sow’s ear at the drop of a hat,” he smiled and took off his Roman collar and lay back in the chair.
It was shocking to see a priest without his collar for the first time. The neck was chafed red. The priest looked human and frail.
“I always have to eat just before bed, since I was operated on, they cut two-thirds of my stomach away that time.”
“When was that, father?”
“In Birmingham. I hadn’t felt well for ages but put it on the long finger. Then I suddenly collapsed in the sacristy as I was unrobing myself after Mass. The surgeon said it was a miracle I pulled through.”
He yawned and in the same sleepy movement began to unbutton his trousers. He drew up the shirt and vest to show his naked stomach, criss-crossed by two long scars, the blue toothmarks of the stitches clear. He showed the pattern of the operation with a finger spelling it out on the shocking white flesh.
“One-third has to do the work of the whole now, so it’s why I have to eat late, you can never take much at any one sitting,” he was saying as he replaced his clothes when a clock chimed once in the hallway. Its echoes hadn’t died when another struck, harsher and more metallic, and then a medley of single strikes from all the house, startling when two clocks struck on the wall of the room.
“The last curate died here, he was a collector, and left them to the parish. They say the collection is worth something but you can’t very well go and sell them so soon. They’re a nuisance but John takes some curious delight in keeping them wound.
“It’s one anyhow,” he rose.
They knelt beside the armchairs, continual yawns impossible to suppress in the prayerful murmur.
Then he took the oil-lamp to show the way upstairs to the room.
12
“THERE’S THE WARDROBE, YOU CAN HANG YOUR CLOTHES. John’s left a candle and matches. Would you like to light it before I go?”
“No, thanks, father, it’s bright enough. I’ll just get into bed.”
“Don’t worry about the morning. Sleep as long as you want. We’ll call you for breakfast.”
“What time will you say Mass, father?”
“Early but there’s no need for you to go. You came a long journey. There’ll be other mornings. If you’re awake you’ll hear noises.”
“I’ll probably be awake, father.”
“If you are you can come down but it doesn’t matter.”
Yet he didn’t move. He stayed with the lamp in his hand at the door, as if he expected to say a closer goodnight than the word, the collarless shirt was open on the chafed throat, and not the goodnight kiss your cursed father took years ago now on this priested mouth.
“Thanks, father. You’re very good to me,” you managed to shift away to the foot of the bed.
“I hope you sleep and are comfortable,” he made uneasy pause before he dipped his fingers into the holy water container in the robes about the feet of the statue of the Virgin on the wall and sprinkled drops towards you and said, “Good night. God guard you.”
“Good night, father,” you said as you made the sign of the cross, and he was gone, the door closed.
You took the few things you’d brought out of the suitcase and left them in the wardrobe, the textbooks you hoped to study while you were here to one side on the bed, with the nightclothes. The moon came across the graveyard, its image cut in two by a diagonal crack in the dressing-table mirror the other end of the room. Underneath the window the car shone black on the gravel beside the cactus. Wild grasses twisted on the iron railings in the graveyard grew living and yellow. The bell-rope dangled from the tower down over the gravel path to the sacristy in the moonlight.
You had come. You were in the priest’s house, you could draw back the linen sheet and get into bed. A picture of your father’s house in your mind, all the others sleeping there miles away, and you here. Joan in bed in the town four miles away, all the world you knew mostly in bed in the night as you now too, Joan’s voice, “It’s even worse than home,” in your ears, a moment passing, she must not be happy, you must find out more, you had no chance or you were too involved in your own affairs to make any effort, though what could be wrong.
Through the window the stones of the graveyard stood out beyond the laurels in the moon, all the dead about, lives as much filled with themselves and their importance once as you this night, indecision and trouble and yearning put down equal with lau
ghing into that area of clay, and they lay calm as you would one eternal night while someone full of problems and uncertainties would lie as awake as you in a room.
At night they left their graves to walk in search of forgiveness, driven by remorse, you’d heard many times. They came most to the house of the priest to beg: the flesh same as their own and able to understand, but the unearthly power of God in his hands, power to pardon. But the house seemed still as the graveyard tonight.
The moment of death was the one real moment in life; everything took its proper position there, and was fixed for ever, whether to live in joy or hell for all eternity, or had your life been the haphazard flicker between nothingness and nothingness.
All pleasure was lost, whether you’d eaten flesh or worn roses, it was over, or whether you had gone bare and without. The wreaths and the Mass cards and the words meant nothing, these were for the living, to obscure the starkness with images of death, nothing got to do at all with the reality, just images of death for the living, images of life and love in black cloth.
The presence of the dead seemed all about, every stir of mouse or bird in the moonlit night, the crowded graves, the dead priest who’d collected the grandfather clocks. You grew frightened though you told yourself there was no reason for fear and still your fear increased, same in this bed as on the road in the country dark after people and cards, nothing about, till haunted by your own footsteps your feet go faster. You tell yourself that there’s nothing to be afraid of, you stand and listen and silence mocks you, but you cannot walk calm any more. The darkness brushes about your face and throat. You stand breathing, but you can stand for ever for all the darkness cares. Openness is everywhere about you, and at last you take to your heels and run shamelessly, driven by the one urge to get to where there are walls and lamps.
In this room and house there was no place to run though, only turn and turn, nothing but hooting silence and the hotness of your enfevered body when you held yourself rigid to listen.