The Collar (5 page)

‘Do you mind telling me,' he inquired politely, ‘am I mad or are you?'

‘But I mean it, father,' she said eagerly. ‘It's all over and done with now. It's something I used to dream about, and it was grand, but you can't do a thing like that a second time.'

‘You can't what?' he asked sternly.

‘I mean, I suppose you can, really,' she said, waving her piously joined hands at him as if she were handcuffed, ‘but you can't get back the magic of it. Terry is light-hearted and good-natured, but I couldn't live with him. He's completely irresponsible.'

‘And what do you think you are?' cried Father Cassidy, at the end of his patience. ‘Have you thought of all the dangers you're running, girl? If you have a child who'll give you work? If you have to leave this country to earn a living what's going to become of you? I tell you it's your bounden duty to marry this man if he can be got to marry you – which, let me tell you,' he added with a toss of his great head, ‘I very much doubt.'

‘To tell you the truth I doubt it myself,' she replied with a shrug that fully expressed her feelings about Terry and nearly drove Father Cassidy insane. He looked at her for a moment or two and then an incredible idea began to dawn on his bothered old brain. He sighed and covered his face with his hand.

‘Tell me,' he asked in a faraway voice, ‘when did this take place?'

‘Last night, father,' she said gently, almost as if she were glad to see him come to his senses again.

‘My God,' he thought despairingly, ‘I was right!'

‘In town, was it?' he went on.

‘Yes, father. We met on the train coming down.'

‘And where is he now?'

‘He went home this morning, father.'

‘Why didn't you do the same?'

‘I don't know, father,' she replied doubtfully as though the question had now only struck herself for the first time.

‘Why didn't you go home this morning?' he repeated angrily. ‘What were you doing round town all day?'

‘I suppose I was walking,' she replied uncertainly.

‘And of course you didn't tell anyone?'

‘I hadn't anyone to tell,' she said plaintively. ‘Anyway,' she added with a shrug, ‘it's not the sort of thing you can tell people.'

‘No, of course,' said Father Cassidy. ‘Only a priest,' he added grimly to himself. He saw now how he had been taken in. This little trollop, wandering about town in a daze of bliss, had to tell someone her secret, and he, a good-natured old fool of sixty, had allowed her to use him as a confidant. A philosopher of sixty letting Eve, aged nineteen, tell him all about the apple! He could never live it down.

Then the fighting blood of the Cassidys began to warm in him. Oh, couldn't he, though? He had never tasted the apple himself, but he knew a few things about apples in general and that apple in particular that little Miss Eve wouldn't learn in a whole lifetime of apple-eating. Theory might have its drawbacks but there were times when it was better than practice. ‘All right, my lass,' he thought grimly, ‘we'll see which of us knows most!'

In a casual tone he began to ask her questions. They were rather intimate questions, such as doctor or priest may ask, and, feeling broadminded and worldly-wise in her new experience, she answered courageously and straightforwardly, trying to suppress all signs of her embarrassment. It emerged only once or twice, in a brief pause before she replied. He stole a furtive look at her to see how she was taking it, and once more he couldn't withhold his admiration. But she couldn't keep it up. First she grew uncomfortable and then alarmed, frowning and shaking herself in her clothes as if something were biting her. He grew graver and more personal. She didn't see his purpose; she only saw that he was stripping off veil after veil of romance, leaving her with nothing but a cold, sordid, cynical adventure like a bit of greasy meat on a plate.

‘And what did he do next?' he asked.

‘Ah,' she said in disgust, ‘I didn't notice.'

‘You didn't notice!' he repeated ironically.

‘But does it make any difference?' she burst out despairingly, trying to pull the few shreds of illusion she had left more tightly about her.

‘I presume you thought so when you came to confess it,' he replied sternly.

‘But you're making it sound so beastly!' she wailed.

‘And wasn't it?' he whispered, bending closer, lips pursed and brows raised. He had her now, he knew.

‘Ah, it wasn't, father,' she said earnestly. ‘Honest to God it wasn't. At least at the time I didn't think it was.'

‘No,' he said grimly, ‘you thought it was a nice little story to run and tell your sister. You won't be in such a hurry to tell her now. Say an Act of Contrition.'

She said it.

‘And for your penance say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.'

He knew that was hitting below the belt, but he couldn't resist the parting shot of a penance such as he might have given a child. He knew it would rankle in that fanciful little head of hers when all his other warnings were forgotten. Then he drew the shutter and didn't open the farther one. There was a noisy woman behind, groaning in an excess of contrition. The mere volume of sound told him it was drink. He felt he needed a breath of fresh air.

He went down the aisle creakily on his heavy policeman's-feet and in the dusk walked up and down the path before the presbytery, head bowed, hands behind his back. He saw the girl come out and descend the steps under the massive fluted columns of the portico, a tiny, limp, dejected figure. As she reached the pavement she pulled herself together with a jaunty twitch of her shoulders and then collapsed again. The city lights went on and made globes of coloured light in the mist. As he returned to the church he suddenly began to chuckle, a fat good-natured chuckle, and as he passed the statue of St Anne, patron of marriageable girls, he almost found himself giving her a wink.

T
HE
S
ENTRY

F
ATHER MACENERNEY WAS FINDING
it hard to keep Sister Margaret quiet. The woman was lonesome, but he was lonesome himself. He liked his little parish outside the big military camp near Salisbury; he liked the country and the people, and he liked his little garden (even if it was raided twice a week by the soldiers), but he suffered from the lack of friends. Apart from his housekeeper and a couple of private soldiers in the camp, the only Irish people he had to talk to were the three nuns in the convent, and that was why he went there so frequently for his supper and to say his office in the convent garden.

But even here his peace was being threatened by Sister Margaret's obstreperousness. The trouble was, of course, that before the war fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, as well as innumberable aunts and cousins, had looked into the convent or spent a few days at the inn, and every week long, juicy letters had arrived from home, telling the nuns by what political intrigue Paddy Dunphy had had himself appointed warble-fly inspector for the Benlicky area, but now it was years since anyone from Ireland had called and the letters from home were censored at both sides of the channel by inquisitive girls with a taste for scandal until a sort of creeping paralysis had descended on every form of intimacy. Sister Margaret was the worst hit, because a girl from her own town was in the Dublin censorship, and, according to Sister Margaret, she was a scandalmonger of the most objectionable kind. He had a job keeping her contented.

‘Oh, Father Michael,' she sighed one evening as they were walking round the garden, ‘I'm afraid I made a great mistake. A terrible mistake! I don't know how it is, but the English seem to me to have no nature.'

‘Ah, now, I wouldn't say that,' protested Father Michael in his deep, sombre voice. ‘They have their little ways, and we have ours, and if we both knew more about one another we'd like one another better.'

Then, to illustrate what he meant, he told her the story of old Father Dan Murphy, a Tipperary priest who had spent his life on the mission, and the Bishop. The Bishop was a decent, honourable little man, but quite unable to understand the ways of his Irish priests. One evening old Father Dan had called on Father Michael to tell him he would have to go home. The old man was terribly shaken. He had just received a letter from the Bishop, a terrible letter, a letter so bad that he couldn't even show it. It wasn't so much what the Bishop had said as the way he put it! And when Father Michael had pressed him the old man had whispered that the Bishop had begun his letter: ‘Dear Murphy'.

‘Oh!' cried Sister Margaret, clapping her hand to her mouth. ‘He didn't, Father Michael?'

So, seeing that she didn't understand the situation any more than Father Dan had done, Father Michael explained that this was how an Englishman would address anyone except a particular friend. It was a convention; nothing more.

‘Oh, I wouldn't say that at all,' Sister Margaret exclaimed indignantly. ‘“Dear Murphy”? Oh, I'm surprised at you, Father Michael! What way is that to write to a priest? How can they expect people to have respect for religion when they show no respect for it themselves? Oh, that's the English all out! Listen, I have it every day of my life from them. I don't know how anyone can stand them.'

Sister Margaret was his best friend in the community; he knew the other nuns relied on him to handle her, and it was a genuine worry to him to see her getting into this unreasonable state.

‘Oh, come! Come!' he said reproachfully. ‘How well Sister Teresa and Sister Bonaventura get on with them!'

‘I suppose I shouldn't say it,' she replied in a low, brooding voice, ‘but, God forgive me, I can't help it. I'm afraid Sister Teresa and Sister Bonaventura are not
genuine
.'

‘Now, you're not being fair,' he said gravely.

‘Oh, now, it's no good you talking,' she cried, waving her hand petulantly. ‘They're not genuine, and you know they're not genuine. They're lickspittles. They give in to the English nuns in everything. Oh, they have no independence! You wouldn't believe it.'

‘We all have to give in to things for the sake of charity,' he said.

‘I don't call that charity at all, father,' she replied obstinately. ‘I call that moral cowardice. Why should the English have it all their own way? Even in religion they go on as if they owned the earth. They tell me I'm disloyal and a pro-German, and I say to them: “What did you ever do to make me anything else?” Then they pretend that we were savages, and they came over and civilised us! Did you ever in all your life hear such impudence? People that couldn't even keep their religion when they had it, and now they have to send for us to teach it to them again.'

‘Well, of course, that's all true enough,' he said, ‘but we must remember what they're going through.'

‘And what did we have to go through?' she asked shortly. ‘Oh, now, father, it's all very well to be talking, but I don't see why we should have to make all the sacrifices. Why don't they think of all the terrible things they did to us? And all because we were true to our religion when they weren't! I'm after sending home for an Irish history, father, and, mark my words, the next time one of them begins picking at me, I'll give her her answer. The impudence!'

Suddenly Father Michael stopped and frowned.

‘What is it, father?' she asked anxiously.

‘I just got a queer feeling,' he muttered. ‘I was wondering was there someone at my onions.'

The sudden sensation was quite genuine, though it might have happened in a normal way, for his onions were the greatest anxiety of Father Michael's life. He could grow them when the convent gardener failed, but, unlike the convent gardener, he grew them where they were a constant temptation to the soldiers at the other side of his wall.

‘They only wait till they get me out of their sight,' he said, and then got on one knee and laid his ear to the earth. As a country boy he knew what a conductor of sound the earth is.

‘I was right,' he shouted triumphantly as he sprang to his feet and made for his bicycle. ‘If I catch them at it they'll leave me alone for the future. I'll give you a ring, sister.'

A moment later, doubled over the handlebars, he was pedalling down the hill towards his house. As he passed the camp gate he noticed that there was no sentry on duty, and it didn't take him long to see why. With a whoop of rage he threw his bicycle down by the gate and rushed across the garden. The sentry, a small man with fair hair, blue eyes and a worried expression, dropped the handful of onions he was holding. His rifle was standing beside the wall.

‘Aha!' shouted Father Michael. ‘So you're the man I was waiting for! You're the fellow that was stealing my onions!' He caught the sentry by the arm and twisted it viciously behind his back. ‘Now you can come up to the camp with me and explain yourself.'

‘I'm going, I'm going,' the sentry cried in alarm, trying to wrench himself free.

‘Oh, yes, you're going all right,' Father Michael said grimly, urging him forward with his knee.

‘Here!' the sentry cried in alarm. ‘You let me go! I haven't done anything, have I?'

‘You haven't done anything?' echoed the priest, giving his wrist another spin. ‘You weren't stealing my onions!'

‘Don't twist my wrist!' screamed the sentry, swinging round on him. ‘Try to behave like a civilised human being. I didn't take your onions. I don't even know what you're talking about.'

‘You dirty little English liar!' shouted Father Michael, beside himself with rage. He dropped the man's wrist and pointed at the onions. ‘Hadn't you them there, in your hand, when I came in? Didn't I see them with you, God blast you!'

‘Oh, those things?' exclaimed the sentry, as though he had suddenly seen a great light. ‘Some kids dropped them and I picked them up.'