The Dark (5 page)

T
HE 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.

“T
HERE’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 laughing 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.

Real noises came. A door opened down the landing, it was not shut. Feet padded on the boards, the whisper of clothes brushing. You raised yourself on your hands, the grip of terror close, for what could be moving at this hour of night?

A low knock came on the door. Before you could say, “Come in,” it opened. A figure stood in the darkness along the wall.

“You’re not asleep?”

It was the priest’s voice, some of the terror broke, you let yourself back on your arms again.

“No,” there was relief, but soon suspicion grew in place of the terror, what could the priest want in the room at this hour, the things that have to happen.

“I heard you restless. I couldn’t sleep either, so I thought it might be a good time for us to talk.”

He wore a striped shirt and pyjamas, blue stripes on grey flannel it seemed when he moved into the moonlight to draw back a corner of the bedclothes.

“You don’t mind, do you—it’s easier to talk this way, and even in the summer the middle of the night gets cold.”

“No, father. I don’t mind,” what else was there to say, and move far out to the other edge of the bed, even then his feet touching you as they went down. The bodies lay side by side in the single bed.

“You find it hard to sleep? I often do. It’s the worst of all, I often think, to be sleepless at night,” he said, and you stiffened when his arm went about your shoulder, was this to be another of the midnight horrors with your father. His hand closed on your arm. You wanted to curse or wrench yourself free but you had to lie stiff as a board, stare straight ahead at
the wall, afraid before anything of meeting the eyes you knew were searching your face.

“Do you sleep well usually?”

“Alright, father. The first night in a strange house is hard.”

“It’s always hard in a strange house, if you’re not a traveller. I used never be able to sleep the first night home from college, or the first night in the college after the holidays, what you’re not used to I suppose, and the strange excitement.”

His hand was moving on your shoulder. You could think of nothing to say. The roving fingers touched your throat. You couldn’t do or say anything.

“You have a good idea why I invited you here?”

“Yes, father.”

“I was going to broach it in the sitting-room, but I thought you might be too fagged out after the journey. When I heard you restless I thought it might be a good time to talk, in fact I thought it might be the cause of the restlessness. It’s always better to talk no matter what. You’ve thought about the priesthood since? You know that that’s one of the main reasons I wanted you here?”

“Yes, father.”

“Have you come to any decision or any closer to one?” he moved his face closer to ask, his hand quiet, clasping tighter on the shoulder.

“No, father,” you couldn’t say any more, you had to fight back tears, it was too horrid and hopeless.

“You haven’t decided either one way or the other?”

“No, father, but I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

You felt cornered and desperate, wanting to struggle far more free by this of the questions than the body and en¬ circling arm.

“What troubles you most? Do you want to be a priest?”

“Yes, father.”

“What then troubles you most?”

“I’m not sure if I have a vocation. I don’t know.”

“You know that God won’t come down out of his heaven to call you. The Holy Father defined a vocation as three things: good moral character, at least average intelligence, a good state of health. If you have these and the desire to give your life to God, then you have a vocation, it’s as easily recognizable as that. Does that help you to see your way any more clearly?”

“I don’t think I’m good enough, father,” was what you said twisting away from it put so close and plain as this, tears started to flow down your face.

“How?”

“I can’t be certain. I thought maybe if I went out into the world for a few years to test myself, then I could be sure. It wouldn’t be too late to become a priest then. Don’t some become priests in that way?”

“It’d be unlikely. People get into ruts and habits and drift. Once you’ve got a taste of the world—it’s hard to settle down at any time to the daily habitual service of God—but it’s worse if you come late. It’d be unlikely you’d ever leave the world once you got its taste and if you did it would be harder than now. The excitement and novelty would soon go. And then and then and then.”

He stopped, the conversation against a wall, and as suddenly his whole voice changed.

“Have you ever kissed a girl?” it came with the shock of a blow.

“No, father. Never.”

“Have you ever wanted or desired to kiss?”

“Yes, father,” the tears flowed hopelessly, just broken, he was cutting through to the nothingness and squalor of your life, you were now as you were born, as low as the dirt.

“Did you take pleasure in it?”

“Yes, father,” it choked out.

“You excited yourself, brought them into your mind. You caused seed to spill in your excitement?”

“Yes, father.”

“How often did it happen?”

“Several times a week sometimes. More times not at all.”

“How many times a week?”

“Seven or eight sometimes, father.”

“Did you try to break it?”

“Yes. Always after Confession.”

“Did you succeed for long?”

“It’s six weeks since it happened last.”

“Did you bring one woman or many women into these pleasures?”

“Many women, father.”

“Were they real or imaginary?”

“Both, father.”

“You don’t think this vice has got a grip on you, you think you could break it?”

“Yes, father, I think I might.”

“This is the most reason why you’re not sure, why you think you’re not good enough, is it?”

“Yes, father. Do you think I might be good enough?”

You still felt a nothing and broken, cheap as dirt, but hope was rising, would the priest restore the wreckage, would he say—yes, yes, you’re good enough.

“I don’t see any reason why not if you fight that sin.”

Joy rose, the world was beautiful again, all was beautiful.

“Had you ever to fight that sin when you were my age, father?” you asked, everything was open, you could share your lives, both of you fellow-passengers in the same rocked boat.

There was such silence that you winced, you had committed an impertinence, you were by no means in the same boat, you were out there alone with your sins.

“The only thing I see wrong with you is that you take things far too serious, and bottle them up, and brood,” he completely ignored the question. “Most of those in my youth who became priests were gay. They kicked football, they went to dances in the holidays, flirted with girls, even sometimes saw them home from the dances. They made good normal priests.”

You barely listened this time, resentment risen close to hatred. He had broken down your life to the dirt, he’d reduced you to that, and no flesh was superior to other flesh. You’d wanted to share, rise on admittance together into joy, but he was different, he was above that, you were impertinent to ask. He must have committed sins the same as yours once too, if he was flesh.

What right had he to come and lie with you in bed, his body hot against yours, his arm about your shoulders. Almost as the cursed nights when your father used stroke your thighs. You remembered the blue scars on the stomach by your side.

“You must pray to God to give you Grace to avoid this sin, and be constantly on your guard. As you grow older you’ll find your passion easier to control. It weakens,” he was saying. “You can stay here long as you want, you’ll have time and quiet to think, you can bring any trouble or scruple to me. We can talk. And pray, as I will pray for you too, that God may well direct you.”

He paused. You’d listened with increasing irritation and hatred, you wished the night could happen again. You’d tell him nothing. You’d give him his own steel.

You felt him release his arm and get out on the floor and replace the bedclothes. Your hands clenched as he sprinkled holy water on your burning face, though the drops fell cool as sprigs of parsley.

“God guard you and bless you. Sleep if you can,” he said as he left the room noiselessly as he’d entered it.