A kind of war, p.22
A Kind of War, page 22
‘I don’t want to hear of your dreams, my child,’ gently said, ‘God doesn’t hold us responsible for our dreams, just our wilful thoughts –’
‘For how long does the punishment go on, the more especially as it doesn’t come from you, and doesn’t come from God, but comes from – who? Shall we lay it all at Barney’s door? But I am the door –’
‘… now thank God for a good confession, and for your penance say – no, wait, something unusual, we are back in the Middle Ages, 300 days – No, better still, what is this, forty years in the wilderness. May you never feel what you caused to feel, may your body punish you. But since it cannot be killed, you may dream. You will be allowed to dream …’
So absurd and so fanciful, fancy and horror running away with her. She saw the elderly woman go over and light a candle. She got up and lit one too – she had grown a modern mind now, acquired one: a candle, even when blessed, was no longer just a candle. It was as a symbol that she lit it. Tenderness was what it stood for. It flickered and went out. A second symbol would be too much, so that she laughed, almost out loud, and energetically and sensibly lit it again…
She had to ring the bell of the presbytery twice. Rain was dripping from the rhododendron leaves. The woman who opened the door had heavy frown lines between her eyes. ‘Which one is it?’ she asked, ‘the young one’s away – ’ Tessie explained. ‘He’s not in,’ the woman said. Would he be in later then? (Looking at her and thinking, she is the one who has to care for him, who sees and worries if he catches cold, doesn’t eat enough…)
‘When he’s back it’s his tea-time.’ She looked at Tessie suspiciously, and as if by rote: ‘Is it urgent?’
‘I’m a friend you see. I was in the town for a meeting. He’s an old family friend, he –’
‘Oh well, if it’s family. But you’ll have to let him have his tea because he’s to go out again, he always goes out Wednesday evenings –’
She would have liked to look around the room while she waited. It would have told her something, but she sat shaking, feeling suddenly sick again. Rain was falling heavily outside now. A big clock above the fireplace ticked slowly, loudly. Recovering a little she was about to snoop when the door banging, voices muttering, sent her scurrying back to her chair.
He was standing in the doorway.
‘But it’s Tessie! It’s my Tessie!’ She rushed forward as if propelled, they clasped hands, both hands, she was clinging to him or he was clinging to her: ‘The surprise of it!’
He crossed quickly to a seat, an uncomfortable chair, hard-backed, leaned forward: ‘Tell me everything, all about it, what became of you. We wondered always what became of you – I heard you were married – ’ His voice was the same, a little deeper, but as quick although, she thought, perhaps more Irish than she’d remembered. ‘You’re married – and you’ve got children? What are you doing here? Tell me why you’re here, Tessie, are you staying locally?’
Time for the lie and so she said, ‘I came up for this meeting, you see – and I suddenly remembered that was where someone had said your parish was. I thought – I’ll just look in on the off-chance.’
She was still trying to get used to the physical shock: because he had changed so much, or rather he was the same but obscured, overlaid by fat. She could she supposed have just as well been confronted by a beaky, emaciated, ascetic figure, voice rasping. At moments she could recognize him, but mostly she struggled to find him somewhere in this altered, thickened man: the fat had given him a high colour so that he looked jolly rather than lively. His neck which had swivelled so agilely looked now too thick to move – and yet she shouldn’t have been surprised: this was surely just Philomena’s bulk: the big woman she remembered sitting there so cosily…
There was a knock at the door. He jumped up, nimbly for his weight. ‘A moment,’ he said to Tessie. He conferred with the housekeeper at the door, then coming back he said, ‘You’ll have some too, won’t you, Tessie? It’s only boiled eggs and tea, a cake or something…’
Twenty-five years of accumulated news and it was really quite easy to relate in ten minutes. Some of it of course he’d heard:
‘It was great, your marrying one of the Willinghams – although I’d never have thought of it, your marrying a non-Catholic. Was there any trouble with the family? It must have been a great love – I heard about it, I heard, but such a while after. When I think of him, you know – when I think of him now, Tessie – I was thinking, it’s a funny thing, only the other day I was thinking of that concert. He’d a fine voice. Remember how he made Miss Thackray race – she was in a terrible fluster and he was saying, “faster Miss T., faster” – I shouldn’t think she’s ever forgotten it. And Stan, do you remember how shirty he got…’
They were launched on that safest sea of all, reminiscence. It could have been dangerous but, ships now passing in the night again, they would not so much as graze against the rocks, the iceberg. A sea so well charted they knew its dangers. The real folly would have been questions of cautious, albeit terrifying immediacy. ‘Tell me, has he made you happy? Have you got over me because that was what was wrong, wasn’t it? I thought I was bound by childhood ties of easy friendship, that we would merely sadly miss each other, and instead you terrified me with your demands, your explicit declaration that it was something quite other for which you hoped,’ and she in reply would say, ‘Has it been all right, really, deep down, really, or have you woken in the night and longed and thought, even if it wasn’t Tessie I would have loved after all, someone to love exclusively I do need – this coruscating loneliness, this being everything to everybody and nothing to any person in particular, all things to all men but nothing to any one woman. Only a grey-haired battle-axe to worry about my food and sleep, and that not because I am Mike Kelly the beloved but because I am Father Kelly the parish priest, ordained of God, the holy object…’
‘I have to be there half past six, quarter to seven – ’ he said, ‘but it’s only just up the road. It would be just the night of the club – can you come along, would you come along? Where are you staying? Far?’
She began to think desperately of alterations, of rearrangements (‘Yes, I’m at the Grand, the Metropole, the – ’ Surely every town had a small hotel called ‘Avonlea’?…), but it was too difficult, and to tell him lies too difficult; she had managed just the one, and that not well.
‘My train’s at eight.’ Their meal had been brought in and he was busy arranging everything for her. They ate at a small table in the same room. Outside the rain splashed down still. ‘I wonder how many will turn out,’ he said. ‘Though the young don’t usually mind. But you, Tessie, should you order a taxi for the station?’
She asked politely about the club. They were a grand lot, he said. Whoever said there was anything wrong with the youth today? ‘They have their problems, Tessie – and in a town like this, with the way the world is today – but it’s surprising how easy, how spontaneous they are. And –’
‘Have you been happy?’ she asked.
As if it were the most natural question in the world, which on the face of it perhaps it was, he said, ‘I have, I have. The life has been hard sometimes. You know, once or twice – and then it hasn’t been an easy time for anyone in the Church, but no, Tessie, I never questioned it, not really, once I’d decided, gone in for it, I was always sure.’
I am sure of nothing, she was about to say. Help me. Un-attracted by his certainties, desolated with doubts, she changed topics. Philomena, what of Philomena?
Dead: thirteen years ago now; she’d never seen him in a parish. ‘She was joking to the end, you know. “I’m sure of heaven,” she kept saying, “I’ve just to say to St Peter, it’s Father Kelly’s mother and he’ll open up, that’s my passport…” The ease of it. The cheek of it’
‘… on mother Kelly’s doorstep, down Paradise Row … does she love me like she used to, on mother Kelly’s doorstep? …’
When she took the top off the egg the sulphurous smell hit her – it wasn’t bad, just an egg. The bread was sliced, spread she thought with margarine; the cake, which he pressed on her, was dry and powdery. ‘She makes them herself,’ he said. ‘You know, from these packets. In the bowl and into the oven in record time. When I think of Ma and all that stirring and pounding…’ Imagining the train, she felt sick already. She thought yearningly again of the salsiccia. She wanted to say, ‘Have you some pickle, some chutney?’ – she thought she would eat HP sauce on the bread she craved the sour so greatly. The strong tea she could not touch. I am going to have some humiliating stomach upset, she thought: be nervously sick, here in the presbytery.
They had managed to talk for three-quarters of an hour. He looked up at the clock and she felt the hourglass running out as if it were in her body. She said wildly, the last resort, the last link: ‘But your dancing, singing, you know – has that all gone, Mike? Some of the people who get a hearing nowadays – you were good, you know.’
His face lit up. ‘But I do a lot. Whenever they put on anything, the club you know, I design the routines, coach them. I have enormous fun, Tessie. And usually I always do a turn or two – If I had the time now I’d show you – my size, look at me, so it is enormous fun …’
Then suddenly time was up. He was saying: ‘Look, we mustn’t lose touch. I pray for you of course, you know I always prayed for you. But I mean, to see you, Tessie. The thing is it’s difficult for me to get away. Late in the summer – if you …’
A voice from the grave. How do the dead not know that they are dead? The Mike who moved in my skull, in my guts; that homunculus – where is he?
Mike Kelly is dead. Long live Father Michael!
On the journey home she slept as if she’d been drugged. Back in the house, queasy, drowsy, she went straight to the fridge and getting out the salsiccia sat at the kitchen table eating it in great greedy mouthfuls. Feeling suddenly better – just immensely, enormously tired. I could sleep for ever, she thought. For ever. Oh God, may I never wake again.
Chapter 8
They sat out in the small walled garden at the back of Bill Bentley’s in Beauchamp Place. Polly wore her new Laura Ashley and a creamy floppy hat; her hair trying to burst from it. Happiness, excitement, spilling out in the June evening.
‘What’s in them?’ Sam asked. ‘Smoked salmon – honestly. I’ve got to have a meal later. Sorry about the rosé.’
‘Never mind the taste,’ she said, ‘it’s so pretty – the colour, here, now. Can you afford me?’
‘Easily. This is a treat – it’s not my local on the way home…’
‘It’s some people’s –’
‘Inside doesn’t look exactly stiff with Hatter’s. And the people who were out here when we came left at the double. You’re the great turn-off – oozing sexy satisfaction and lack of interest in any other male.’
‘You make me sick. Who’s satisfied now?’
‘We both are–’
‘Serious,’ she said, ‘let’s both be serious. I’m in the middle of exams – I haven’t been doing half the work that I should and I wouldn’t have done even that if you weren’t a night worker – and no, I didn’t mean that. I said, let’s be serious. If I’d been offered a place at some other university, not London –’
‘What would you have done?’
‘Thrown it all up.’
‘That’s rash – if flattering. Won’t dare mention marriage again though, because I know what happens. From the way you carry on anyone would think I’d seen some lovely bird flying in the sky and wanted to put it in a cage right off.’
‘Absolutely. I don’t know about the “lovely” though –’
‘The cage is reasonably gilded. Free-lance is free-lance, I know – but I trust the living a bit now. It’s going the right way.’
‘I’m mad, I’m terrible I know – being like that, when I don’t want to love anyone else, ever, till the end of my life –’
‘And that’s about me too … Drink up so that I can buy you another bottle … I’ll allow you five years for ripening – makes me a tottering thirty-three-year-old – then I’ll ask again.’
‘You’ll have tired then –’
‘We’ll be together, we’ll be together. For now though, OK, you’re moving in. What’s that going to do to them at home?’
‘You must be joking – they won’t notice. Not so as you’d notice them noticing. Except Muff. And I’ve told her so much that I can’t imagine – well, she couldn’t pretend to be surprised. She certainly got around in her time, I think anyway. If you’d seen the photographs – she was absolutely fabulous. She never holds forth on morals actually, it’s much more people’s bad manners or goods in the shops being shoddy. No, I’m just going to announce it and that’s that.’
‘You’ll bring me back and get me looked over, won’t you? Would I pass with Christopher?’
‘Christopher’ll be fearfully impressed. But about showing you off, you won’t guess who I’ve actually heard from at last – I could hardly do the paper this morning for thinking about it. Alice…’
‘In one piece?’
‘Very much. She’s all right, not just well. Real all right. Wait and I’ll get it out of my tagari – her writing’s ghastly and you can’t read a word, but was I glad to see it –
‘All these bits first about feeling dreadful not writing, then a sort of resumé – Alice’s Adventures really – I’ll show it to you. The drug bit after the first break-up and all that, then the Krishna phase and marriage and everything, then the hitching and busking. Then this bit. She’s landed up in France, in Taizé, as a pilgrim at the monastery. That community there. “All I could want is for you to be here too. I came at Easter and I’ve signed in for six months – I haven’t done anything really religious yet, tho’ I might do a retreat in a bit, but I talk and talk and talk, all the things we used to discuss when we were being serious – there’s so many of us here you’re bound to find someone who’s been through the same sort of fire. We’re all in it together, we’re all searching for meaning and all in different ways. You can’t imagine – when I got here – it’s like being hungry and suddenly being fed, we talk about everything, it’s a most terrific feeling the whole place. All sorts of us – there were 70,000 came last year – and it’s not like being lost, it’s searching. You feel quite sure you’ll find something even though it mayn’t be anything you could imagine…” She goes on and on, there’s lots and lots, I’ll show you it all later. But she’s happy –’
‘She’s found a reason for living.’
‘So have I though. That’s what it feels like – so happy. I mean, you’re it, aren’t you?’
Waiting for a car to take her to the Home, she felt a sudden surge of irritation. It was towards Teresa – she was worse than ever at the moment. Slow, yawning continually, every movement seemingly an effort. And yet she is not ill, Muff thought.
To think that once it seemed to me that she would do. They were the very words I used, quickly, mentally, that day in Harrods. ‘She will do.’ As if she had been sent, planted there. And looking so well too (she has never looked so well again).
Eldest daughter of a loyal, hardworking, thoroughly good man. Accustomed to responsibility, home-loving but with a highly developed sense of duty. And malleable too, surely? She would rid me of Barney. A good Catholic (when they are good they can be trusted not to stray; perhaps), but unlikely to make any difficulties over religion. Socially more or less acceptable – possibly less. (But then did not June née Tripp, singing so charmingly ‘Little Boy Blues’, become Lady Inverclyde? And all those Gaiety girls …)
When then did I see my mistake? (I don’t admit mistakes.) It was gradual, I think. Like all unpleasant truths. A poor wife, a poor hostess, a poor mother. A lump of dough, the leaven missing. Why? What went wrong?
But he must live with his mistakes. It is only that I must live here too … Downstairs, the bell rang loudly. Her car.
On the way to the Home, she decided she would not be visiting Frank again. It was proving too much for her. Now in the summer it was just possible, but as autumn approached … Most important of all however she doubted if she was giving any pleasure…
It was a long slow walk from the lift to the ward. A nurse accompanied her. Today the next bed but one was occupied: a much younger man, his dark hair only partly greyed, sat up in bed in a maroon cardigan. He was coughing vigorously as Muff was brought in.
The nurse said to Frank, ‘Has he been smoking? No tales, but has he? Has Bert been smoking?’
‘Sneaky,’ said Bert in a surprisingly loud voice. ‘Don’t you say nothing, Frank – ’ Then seeing Muff: ‘Lookey, lookey!’ he said. ‘I say, I say, I say, who have we here?’
