The Dark (6 page)

A
NGUISH STAYED AFTER THE PRIEST HAD GONE—RAGE, YOU’D
been stripped down to the last squalor, and no one had right to do that to anybody: shame, what must the priest think of you every time he looked at you any more: and if it could happen again what you’d say and not say, what you’d want to happen, you’d give nothing away, you’d destroy him, but it was all over now, except for the feverish restlessness of the anguish. The moonlight was still in the room, the crack across the mirror. The clocks beat the half-hours, single quick chimes, but you couldn’t tell the hours, none of the clocks struck alone or together, just one broken medley. And it was impossible to sleep, the mind a preying whirl.

At last, restless and hot, you reached out and found a sock across your shoes on the floor, pulled your prick till it grew stiff, and you could push it into the sock. You were all turbed
and it was something to do and it would draw off some of the fever. You turned and started to pump, rhythmically but without imagination till you heard the springs creaking. You moved out to the very edge of the bed, where the solid rail was under the mattress. You imagined nothing, neither edge of nylon nor pink nipple in your teeth, nor hands thrusting through your hair, but just pumped mechanical as a slow piston up and down, you got hot and you could press your mouth on the pillow, pumping madly, till you started to beat out into the sock. You turned at the last flutter, so that it wouldn’t have chance to seep through the wool and stain the sheet. Wet came on your hand as you removed the sock and let it fall over the shoes on the floor again. You were able to lie on your back and stare at the ceiling in more stupor than calm.

You’d broken the three weeks discipline since Confession, you’d not be able to go to Communion in the morning. You’d never be able to be a priest either, you’d drift on without being able to decide anything, it was easier to let it go. You shivered as the interrogation of an hour ago came back, the squalor, but it was better try and shut it out.

The clocks kept up their insane medley, the single strikes of the half-hours, the medley of the hours. The yellow of the moonlight faded as the day grew light. You stared at the ceiling, different number of boards than over the old bed with the broken brass bells at home, so much variation too in the grain and the knots.

“Will the morning ever come, ever come, ever come?” as you waited for the cursed clocks, until you could stand it no longer, and dressed and went down outside, holding the knocker as you closed the hall door so as to make no noise.

The white ground mist filled the morning, promise of a blazing day, the church vague in white twenty yards away. A spider netting of it lay on the laurels, on the cactus leaves
above the iron bugle, it lay on the grass across the graves. Your hand left a gleaming black handtrack on the mudguard of the car, your feet left shining wet tracks on the grass between the graves.

Your cheeks burned with the fever of fatigue, you wished you could lie naked on all this wet coolness and suck and roll your face in the wet grass, press the hot pores of your body against the wetness.

You noticed nothing except these and the flitting of a wren low in the laurels. You ground your teeth, your hands clenched and unclenched, the mind bent on destruction of the night before, but only managing to circle and circle in its own futility.

You couldn’t be a priest, never now, that was all. You’d never raise anointed hands. You’d drift into the world, world of girls and women, company in gay evenings, exact opposite of the lonely dedication of the priesthood unto death. Your life seemed set, without knowing why, it was fixed, you had no choice. You were a drifter, you’d drift a whole life long after pleasure, but at the end there’d be the reckoning. If you could be a priest you’d be able to enter that choking moment without fear, you’d have already died to longing, you’d have already abandoned the world for that reality, there’d be no confusion. But the night and room and your father and even the hedge around the orchard at home were all confusion, there was no beginning nor end.

In the grappling the things of the morning lost their starkness, you were standing lost between the graves when the door opened, and the priest was there, in his soutane, a jug and heavy latchkey in his hand.

“Good morning. I didn’t expect to find you afoot so early.”

“Good morning, father. I couldn’t sleep much.”

“The first night in a strange house is always bad. By the look of the mist the day’ll be another scorcher.”

‘It looks as if it’s going to be hot, father. It’s nearly always hot when the mist’s like that,” the pingball went, and did you wonder how much of your life would go on these courteous noises.

“Would you like to serve Mass for me?” the priest said, you’d joined each other on the gravel path.

“I’d be glad to, father.”

“Usually John serves it, but a break will do him no harm. He’ll have breakfast for us soon as it’s over.”

“That’s fine so, father.”

“We’re not very likely to have worshippers. No one comes on the weekdays except seldom. It’s the real country.”

With the latchkey he unlocked the sacristy door, then went out through the altar and down to the main door, where he lifted off the heavy iron bar, and opened both doors wide. The cruets had to be filled with water and wine, the bowl with water, the white cloth laid across. He gave you a soutane and surplice of his own to wear.

“We’re ready now, but it’s not eight yet,” he said when they stood robed before the crucifix on the sacristy wall. “A Miss Brady, a retired schoolmistress, used come but she hasn’t put in an appearance for over a week, I think she may be gone to the sea, but we’d better wait till eight just in case.”

There was silence in the sacristy, except for birds outside, waiting for eight, now as always tension of something strange about to happen, and then both of you bowing together to the crucifix at eight.

You had to concentrate too much to wander or think during the Mass, follow the words and movements to make the responses, pour wine and water, ring the small bell though no one was there to hear, and change the missal. The priest moved as in a dream, in the formality of the ritual and black vestments of the dead, nothing whatever to the priest of the night before.

You served too the rite as in a dream, the bread and wine were utterly changed without you knowing. Only at the Communion did any disturbance come, you could not receive, you had sinned. You watched the priest but he didn’t seem to notice or else it meant nothing to him. Then dumbly you went and poured the last water and wine and followed the Mass through to its end.

Breakfast was ready in the house. A boy of fifteen with blond hair, his face so pale that it seemed to belong more to the city than here, came with the tea, and the priest said, “John, this is Mr. Mahoney.”

“You’re welcome here, sir,” the boy smiled as he shook your hand, and you could get nothing out, you’d never been called Mr. Mahoney or sirred before, it was too unreal.

The newspaper had come. The priest commented on the headlines, and then as he folded it up towards the end of breakfast he said, “They’re such a waste of time, but strange the grip they get on you, it’s habit or curiosity, you feel there’s something important that you may miss. It’s some sort of illusion that you’re in contact with a greater world outside your own little corner.”

“I suppose so, father. I never thought of it like that.”

It went so, nothing was spoken of the night before. The priest said he had to go away for the day. He’d not be back till the late evening.

“You can amuse yourself in any way you wish. John will get you your lunch. There are books, the key’s in the bookcase, you can search and find for yourself. I used to spend a lot of my holidays with Uncle Michael, the Canon now, and I used read and read.

“You know you can stay as long as you wish: a week, or a fortnight. I’ll be away a good deal. You’ll have plenty of time to think and come to a decision. You can make yourself completely free and at home.”

“Thank you, father,” you bowed your head, there was nothing else to say.

The priest went and gave some instructions to John, then he left, offering no explanation for his going, nor could you ask. You watched the car turn round the pedestal, the tyres crunching on the gravel, and you answered the priest’s wave before he went out of sight on the circling drive of laurel and through the gates that no one seemed to ever close.

O
NCE BACK IN THE ROOM YOU HAD THE PURE DAY ON YOUR
hands, without distraction, except what you wished to be without, the fears and doubts and longings, coming and going.

The mahogany bookcase stood solid. Scott, Dickens, Canon Sheehan under glass: Wordsworth, Milton, volumes in brown leather, gold on the spines: staunch religious books, doctrine, histories of the church, books of sermons. One lone paperback, Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
in a red and white Penguin, and you turned the small key to get it out, though you’d never heard of it or Tolstoy. It didn’t look such a tomb as the others, there were more green leaves and living light of the day about it than the dust and memory of the others, it was too new for many dead hands to have turned the pages.

You took it outside, your feet on the ground. The sun was beating through the last shades of mist, the blazing day close. You watched the cactus, colour of ripe vegetable marrow, and wondered had it religious significance, the one place you’d seen it before was in front of the Convent of Mercy in Long¬ ford, in a bugled pedestal too, and surrounded too by white gravel, but that faded, to look at the yellow cactus long enough was to come to silence and fear.

But where were you to go? What were you to do with yourself and this book?

Round by the side was the apple garden. The white paint was new on the iron gate. Just inside was a green seat, fuchsia bushes overhanging it, their bells so brute red, and the purple tongues. You sat there, and looked at the row of cabbages beyond the apple trees, and then turned to the book, but not for long.

Why are you here? the questioning started.

To sit and read a book.

But no, beyond that, why did you come, why are you alone here?

To think about being a priest.

You’ll not be able. Even last night you had to sin again. You weren’t able to go to Communion this morning. The only reason you stopped abuse for the last weeks was to be able to put a face on it before the priest.

You want to go out into the world? You want girls and women, to touch their dresses, to kiss, to hold soft flesh, to be held in their caressing arms? To bury everything in one swoon into their savage darkness?

Dream of peace and loveliness, charm of security: picture of one woman, the sound of
wife
, a house with a garden and trees near the bend of a river. She your love waiting at a wooden gate in the evening, her black hair brushed high, a mustard-coloured dress of corduroy or whipcord low from
the throat, a boy and a girl, the girl with a blue ribbon in her hair, playing on the grass. You’d lift and kiss them, girl and boy. Then softly kiss her, your wife and love, secrets in eyes. Picnics down the river Sunday afternoons, playing and laughing on the river-bank, a white cloth spread on the grass. Winter evenings with slippers and a book, in the firelight she is playing the piano. In the mirror you’d watch her comb her black hair, so long, the even brush strokes. The long nights together, making love so gently it lingered for hours, your lips kissing, “I love you. I love you, my darling. I am so happy.” A Christmas of rejoicing and feasting. You’d hear the thawing snow outside slip from the branches, the radio playing:

World of happiness without end.

You’d have to give that up to be a priest, but it would come to nothing on its own anyhow, the moments couldn’t be for long escaped. Death would come. Everything riveted into that. Possession of neither a world nor a woman mattered then, whether you could go to the Judgment or not without flinching was all that would matter. I strove as fierce as I was able, would be a lot to be able to say. A priest could say that. He’d chosen God before life.

Though who wanted happiness of heaven, to sing hymns for ever in an eternal garden, no change and no hunger or longing.

Hell was there too, the fires and crawling worms, sweat and curses, the despair of for ever. How would the innocent afternoons on the river look from hell, the brush strokes through the black hair in the mirror. Was it better never to know happiness so that there’d be no anguish of loss. A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving
in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.

Yet your father was no priest, he’d gone out into the world, played football in the Rock Field, danced in the summer marquees and at winter parties under the mistletoe: he’d married, children had come, and he didn’t seem to have got much sweetness. But what has your father’s life got to do with your life?

If you married you would plant a tree to deny and break finally your father’s power, completely supplant it by the graciousness and marvel of your life, but as a priest you’d remain just fruit of the cursed house gone to God.

If you became a priest, would you not be crazed on your deathbed because of the way you’d cheated your life out of human fulfilment, never to have loved and received love, never to have married in the June of passion. Three months of it would have been a great gift.

I married when I was passionately in love, would be something to look back on no matter what the present horror. It would be something too to haunt you, you’d always hanker after it, it was the red rose of life, you’d never been even given it for a day.

Though what was the use, there was no escape. You were only a drifter and you’d drift. You couldn’t carry the responsibility of a decision. You were only a hankerer. You’d drift and drift. You’d just dream of the ecstasy of destruction on a woman’s mouth.

You were sitting on a green bench in the morning, was that not enough. The sun was blazing clear as glass. Your hands were damp with sweat. A ceaseless hum was droning into the heat. You could take off your coat and tie.

Six apple trees stood in the garden: three cookers, a honeycomb, Beauty of Bath, apples with the rust of pears and not ripe till the frosts. Jam-jars half full of syrup hung on twine
from the branches. Wasps circled and circled the rims before they were tempted into the struggling froth of the dead and dying trapped in the sweetness. Some apples had fallen on the ground, shells of flaming colour, rotting brown of the flesh eaten far as the skins. The Beauty of Baths on the tree were cold and sharp, the teeth shivered once they sank in, there was nothing to do but throw it out of sight into the tall cocksfoot along the hedge.

You left coat and tie with the Penguin on the seat and idled back into the graveyard, alive with bees moving between the small flowers of the graves. There was such heat and nothingness now. A white clover at your feet swayed under the clambering of a sucking bee. You watched it, the trembling flower, the black bee unsteady and awkward on the ruffled whiteness, and suddenly you jumped and trampled bee and flower into the earth of the grave. More were moving between the red and white and yellow heads in the sunshine. You could turn it into a sport, tramp bee after bee down, it’d amuse the morning, you could keep a count, as they grew scarce in the graveyard the stalking’d grow more difficult. Nero used tear wings off flies above Rome once, though what was the use. After all you were in the graveyard in the day.

This place was such a green prison. The wall of sycamores shut it away from the road. The tall graveyard hedges and the steep furze-covered hill at the back of the house, only one green patch in its centre where a lone donkey grazed, closed it to the fields around, it ran to no horizon. There was little movement. A general noise of machinery came. A car or van went by behind the sycamore screen. Two living voices in conversation drifted from some field. Somewhere a hen cackled with fright. Here was only interest of the graves and names, the verses, the dates, the weeds and withered wreaths, the ghastly artificial roses and lilies under globes of glass. You could make a catalogue of all these, they’d pass the time just
as well as the slaughter of bees, whatever either would really do. The day would probably go its own way anyhow.

The toll of a funeral bell sounded close, after a minute a slow second followed. What was obviously a funeral went past through the sycamores, shod hooves coming clean through the noise of motors. John came towards you out of the house.

“I was wondering where the bell is ringing from, John.”

“From the Protestant church, sir. Mr. Munro’s funeral is there today, sir.”

It brought you to a halt, the sirring was so strange, you’d never been sirred by anyone before, and there seemed no reason for it now either. It was as uncomfortable as any pretending.

“Why do you call me
sir
, John? We’re not much different in years or anything.”

He stopped. A quick flash showed in the eyes, and the pale face flushed.

“I don’t know, sir. You’re stopping here, sir,” he said doggedly, after a long embarrassed pause, a dogged defiance in the voice, you’d blundered, though you’d never discover how from him. The slow tolling of the Protestant bell continued.

“Have you to go far?” you tried to make conversation on the gravel.

“Just to the church to ring the Angelus, sir. It’s probably better to wait till the funeral’s over now, sir.”

“Are there many Protestants here?”

“About half as many as Catholics but they have the good land, sir.”

At the church door he caught the wire bell-rope in his hand but he didn’t pull it till he was sure the last funeral toll had sounded. You blessed yourself and tried to pray but couldn’t, his white arms went up and down with the bell-rope, that was all.

“What time would you like your lunch at, sir?” he asked when he’d finished.

“I’m not particular, whatever time is easy for you.”

“In about an hour so, sir. At one.”

“That’ll be all right, if it’s easy for you then.”

“Thanks, sir.”

You watched him on the gravel to the front door. The sirring was strange, the boy housekeeper, you here alone in the day, it was all baffling and strange.

What was there to do for the hour but wander, from gravel to grave to garden, examine the cactus leaves, wonder what your father was doing at this time, shudder at the memory of the night before, the mind not able to stay on anything for long. When the hands touched anything they wanted to grip it tight enough for the knuckles to whiten and the hour went hours long, real relief when the absurd gong was struck at exactly one for lunch.

You’d no hunger but you forced yourself to eat. There was too much clamminess even with the doors and windows open. From time to time you had to lay down the knife and fork to crush a sucking leg. John came and went but would not be drawn into conversation.

Afterwards you stood in front of the mantelpiece of white marble with its bulldogs and St. Martin de Porres before you tried the bookcase again. You took out several books and it was the same performance each time. Your eye roved angrily over the print, you replaced it and took out another, replaced it, on and on, till you hurled a big history on the floor, and jumped on it with rage, crying, “I’ll do for you, I’ll do for you, do for you.”

The fit brought release once it spent itself. You wondered if John had heard in the kitchen, you must be half going crazy. You wondered if the damage to the book on the floor would ever be noticed. Then you picked it up and with sense
of foolishness replaced it in the press and turned the key. You sat again in the chairs. The collection of clocks started up the confused medley of another half-hour.

This utter sense of decrepitude and dust over the house—the clocks, the bulldogs, the mahogany case of books, the black leather armchairs, the unlived in room. At least in your own house there was life, no matter what little else.

In these houses priests lived, you’d be alone in one of them one day too, idling through the pages of books, reading the Office as you walked between the laurels. Girls in summer dresses would stroll past free under the sycamores, You could go to the sick rooms to comfort the defeated and the dying. People would come to the door to have Masses said for their wishes and their dead, they’d need certificates of birth and marriage, letters of freedom. It was summer now. It’d be hardly different with newspapers and whiskey watching the pain of the leaves fall and the rain gather to drip the long evenings from the eaves.

Though that was far ahead, it didn’t remove your presence from this actual day, in this black leather armchair, a vision of green laurels through the window. The best thing was to go somewhere.

“No. It’s worse than home,” Joan had said the night before, it was impossible to know what was wrong, you’d not remembered it much either, too squalidly involved in your own affairs. It brought new lease of energy, at least that much. It’d be better to tell John before going. He was in his shirt-sleeves, baking, when you went down, the smell of stewing apples mixed with the dough.

“I’m sorry,” you had to apologize when he started. “I wondered is the town far?”

“Three miles or about, sir.”

“You could walk it in an hour?”

“Yes. Easy, sir.”

“I think I’ll go so—to see my sister. Did you see her since she came?”

“She was out two Sundays, sir,” he said everything guardedly, there was no use.

“Will you tell Father where I’ve gone if he comes before me?”

You looked at John, you wished you could talk, whether he was happy here or not, how long more he’d stay with the priest and where he’d go then, if he had interest in books or sports or anything, but you couldn’t, and the more you heard of the sirring the more unreal it got.

“Good-bye so, John.”

“Good-bye so, sir.”

Across the stone stile out by the front of the church you went into the cool of the sycamores, a few hundred yards down the road the Protestant church where the funeral bell had tolled. The sycamores gave way there, and the narrow dirt-track ran between high grass margins with thorn hedges out of which ash saplings rose. You had to carry your coat on your arm the day was so hot. Close to the town tar replaced the earth and stones, the day full of the smell of melting tar, sticking to your shoes to gather the dust and fine pebbles. The gnawing in the guts started as you came into the town and kept on towards Ryan’s.