The Slow Natives (10 page)

“Which one?”

“Ah. There. It's gone now. Run it back, man. There. God love us, Doug, you've missed it again. With the boys swimming.”

“I couldn't see much wrong with that. They all seemed clad.”

“No. It's not that. It's the spirit of the thing, now. It had a sort of pagan flavour, you might say. Remember, as their
spiritual pastor I ought to know what's good for them and what isn't.”

He was very old. He won all arguments.

“I'm sure you do,” Lingard would sigh, careful not to excite him.

“Well, there's a good fellow. We'll snip it off before we send it up now.”

“Skyros Skouros,” said Lingard good-humouredly enough to Father Lake, and they called the Mons that privately, but not even the jokes and the shared smiles could warm the coldness that seeped in from his own Antarctic.

Yet God being on his side should have made the difference that palpably touched his one lung, his thin blood, even his seedy suits. Gardening, getting the air in a grey cardigan and braces, the festival wear of relaxing clerics, his handsome ashy face rose above the collarless neckline of his shirt where the stud still plopped dangerously, a second Adam's apple wagging and glistening in the sun. The thin grey biretta of his thin hair was worn a little uncertainly. His lips compressed over aphides or scale on the lemon or grimaced tenderly at his dog's ripped pad. He was good with all manner of growing things, blessing them perhaps unconsciously and without unction or sentimentality, for he was a man who gave few backward glances at his own kindnesses. During his seminary years he had pasted to the surface of his desk a few lines of Hopkins:

I remember a house where all were good
To me, God knows, deserving no such thing . . .

Someone had scraped it off without reading it a few months after his ordination and parish appointment, but it could not be scraped from him. He was fond of quoting Saint John of the Cross, recalling his “where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love”. And sometimes he went so far as to say this to various people he knew who were wrestling with God and each other—but never didactically, for he had believed since his illness that over-active apostleship did more harm than good. (One day in the Sanatorium not long after his lobectomy, a tract-bearing enthusiast had insisted on
praying aloud over him for his conversion to a more acceptable faith, and he had joined his voice with the other man's, for reasons of the most exquisite charity.) Yes, he would say it absentmindedly, as if recalling the advice for himself, so that not a soul could have been affronted by aggressive pietism.

Last March at St Scholastica's concert literal collapse had been near from silent banked-up laughter in his single lung when Father Lake had done his imitations. Not so much was it the skill of his colleague as the stunned faces of two elderly nuns a row away—Sister Philomene was leaning sideways against shock and the grey moustache on Sister Aloysius's face shook with outrage. He thought they might have been saying aspirations but couldn't be sure.

“The top o' the mornin' to you!” bellowed Tom Brophy, sweating into a borrowed stiff front while choruses drowned the crashing supper cups that clinked like the money being counted at the door. Irish reels, St Patrick tableaux, the mountains o' Mourne. Fake brogues thickened with treacle of nostalgia and sentimental expatriates all Hibernian tipsy in the school hall until eleven o'clock tipped them out, nuns scandalously late to crunch back to their cells above the courtyard. Father Lake had driven him and the Mons home like a lair cabbie, both of his passengers clutching special St Patrick medals mounted on pads of green and white satin which Mother St Jude had worked with bredes of shamrocks. Father Lingard gave his to the housekeeper, a keepsake she slipped into her bag to be forgotten with half a dozen blessed articles and a memory of lavender water and Palm Sunday.

He inspected the last negative and rewound. From the parlour came confusion and distorted television blare that he dreaded but offered himself to in private atonement.

“Tarradiddle!” Monsignor Connolly was saying testily as he pottered across the sitting-room and fiddled with the aerial and then an array of adjustment knobs. Four horse-riding thugs blurred, wobbled, faded completely, and returned with phantom doubles.

“I do think if you tried contrast it would help,” Father
Lake said stubbornly. “You can't expect divine intervention every time.” But the Mons twitched at the knobs without bothering to reply.

“The only decent programme, too,” he moaned. His chins gave the simplest statement a pontifical veneer of authority that caused Father Lingard, sitting back against the book-wall, to smile and smile.

“Why don't you try the national channel?” he asked mildly. “It's the best reception on the Downs.”

“Why?” Monsignor Connolly held the aerial two feet over the cabinet. “Why? Because—oh! That's it! Look at that now! I said before it was—oh, God love us! It's gone again!—because I can't stand the heavyweight stuff after a day around the parish. This sort of thing relaxes me. I'm no stuffy intellectual, thank God, and I'm not ashamed to admit there's nothing I like more than a Western. There now—now . . . c'mon now. . . .” He coaxed the aerial across the set and put it down gently as the screen sharpened. “There.” He watched entranced as a baby. “Ooh, did you see that now! Ooh! There's a nasty customer for you, Father Vince. I'd give him a good stiff penance.”

Father Lingard shifted sadly and tried not to watch. If only he wouldn't talk, he thought. If only he'd stop and let the racket on the hellish machine batter them insensible.

Hideously clear a fag ad dominated the eye.

“No wonder all the Children of Mary smoke,” commented Monsignor Connolly, glaring at a pretty thing on a ski-lift. “They've made it a snob symbol.”

Lingard soothed. “I never understand why you get so worked up about it Everyone does it. It doesn't seem a sign of moral turpitude to me.”

Connolly scowled under his peat-thick eyebrows.

“That's just it. The smoke, then the teeny drink, and then on to—ah, here it comes again. Faint as ever.”

“An old film, perhaps,” Lake said placatingly.

Monsignor Connolly sagged fatly into his chair. “Never mind,” he said. “I'll offer it up. Remember the time I went on that Bay trip and caught the wrong launch with a lot of gospel students from some exclusive sect now. There I was,
trapped on a teeny island down the Bay, with nothing but me breviary to read and not a sausage to eat. And there they were with their barbecue steaks going like mad things. But I kept right out of their way. I was in me cassock, y'see, being a Church picnic and all, and God knows what happened to the other ferry.”

“But surely they called you over and shared lunch,” Father Lingard said wonderingly.

“Well, now, it was only a bit of an island, mind you, but there was a hill on it and all, and I was too proud—me dreadful pride—and too cross having got the wrong boat, and I wouldn't give in and go round. Not till the launch came back late that afternoon and we all got on together.”

Lingard laughed as he went out to heat the cocoa, rattling cups in gigantic signal to bring Lake from the other room. Each evening after she had prepared dinner, the housekeeper went home and the three men shared out cleaning up and getting breakfast. Everything had shabbiness and shoddiness, except for a row of gleaming vulgarity, a marching rank of plastic food containers given by a mother's committee last Christmas. Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. And now plastic. He hummed a hymn savagely as he put the spoons and sugar out on the tray. Even on Palm Sunday last the Pascal palm had been piled and tumbled into two enormous green plastic washing baskets over which Monsignor Connolly swung an anachronistic censer.

Through kitchen window and across whiter grass the white stone church hung over him in the moonlight, came at him across the lawn through the narrow pane, leaned, crushed.

His tongue swelled round conversational nothings as he found the difficulty of being cheerful, of creating illusions of light in his almost ever-present dusk.

“Want a hand?” inquired cheerful Father Lake, who was schoolboy sanguine.

“In more ways than this.”

“Oh? Two lumps for the Mons?”

“Cut him down to one, Vince. He's always complaining about the weight he's putting on.”

“Shan't we even let him make his own sacrifices?”

“Oh dear, no,” Lingard said, smiling smoothly. “Some are born sacrificed, some achieve sacrifice, and others . . . but set him out an extra biscuit then.”

God knows, he tried to be sprightly, to keep it up, to live with eyes unblinking and aware in the full blinding light of divine love which, he seemed to feel more and more intensely, appeared to withdraw itself until one day it would become the eye-ball splitting pinhead of light, or to flow just past him or beyond or fall short of that distance requisite for ecstasy. But he was a nothing-man this year, a priest with his vocation askew, no other object in view but a detailless desert whose wells of prayer had all dried up.

It was not, he supposed, that he had lost faith; or perhaps it was that and he didn't know any more. Who had he become but the confessor with the automatic replies? You put a mortal sin into the slot and out gushes the advice with your penance in small change.

“Do you know, Vince”—his confession gushed unexpectedly—“last Sunday, quite suddenly in the middle of Mass, looking down at face after face raised blindly to receive its God at the altar rails, I was filled with terrible boredom. Not horror, mind you. Or rage or anger or anything understandable, really. Just boredom.” He poured the cocoa deliberately from saucepan to pot, carefully spilling nothing physical, and added salt to it—or his wound. “If I could care enough, you understand, to weep, to be emotional, to cry out against or to God. But no. I feel like the symbol of a yawn. A great yawn incarnate.”

Simple Lake was staggered. But he managed, “It's nothing, Doug. We all get it. It's just a patch to be lived through.” He remembered something he never could bear to remember.

“But what do I do?” Lingard asked. “Do I need a holiday? Could it be as easy as that?”

Once, he recalled, he used to be a sponge, an emotional junky, a soak during a
Missa Cantata
, enjoying himself enjoying God, and his superiors had warned him that emotionalism would fail him, that during the barren patches all he could do would be wait until he emerged to find God exactly where He had always been. When you are our age, they said, the
false comforters, you will be aware of the symptoms long before the despair sets in.

“Perhaps,” Lingard suggested dubiously, “I could confess this to you. Perhaps if I committed some whacking great sin I'd regain the sense of communication, of being taken back.”

“It would hardly be worth it,” Lake said. “Breaking a leg to get to know your doctor!” And again the little thing he hated to remember hailed him jauntily across the park of his soul.

“Oh, for God's sake,” snapped Lingard, “spare me the corny comparisons of the mission pulpit.” He hesitated. “Sorry, Vince. I didn't mean to be rude.”

“Check!” said Father Lake in fake American to disguise his embarrassment. “It was rather silly. It's too hard to talk about without being sententious. Maybe all you do need is a holiday like me.”

He groaned and grinned, the shape, the substance of apology just not here. He was doing all the inner parish rounds on a push-bike, not from asceticism, but because for the second time he had overturned Monsignor Connolly's car on the Killarney Road. Not that the Mons drove any less recklessly. “Never bother about me insurance, man,” he'd say, spinning the wheel at a bend. “I just say a Hail Mary and hope for the best. Put your trust in God now, is what I say, and there's nothing we can do about it after that.” Parishioners being kindly transported to christenings shuddered whitely in the back seat as Monsignor Connolly overtook at seventy, gabbling “prayferusnowandatthehourof”—then, turning at right angles from the steering to say to transfixed passengers, “What a wonderful thing to know there's no death”. Yet—“You make it very hard for me to keep me temper, Father Vince”, he complained. “Very hard. God knows being a Christian isn't a profitable business at all.” For the three weeks the parish car had been at the panel-beaters the Mons was forced to share the apostolate with his good friend and golfing partner, the Presbyterian minister. “Drop me a little farther along,” he'd say, “and I can be calling at the Mumbersons while you drop in on the Duckworths.”

“Shall we make it the other way round, John,” Rod Auld
used to suggest, “and let's see who gets a conversion first?”

“Let's go back to the gangsters,” Lingard said, balancing their tray.

The parlour whined with bullets while Connolly, sitting a bucking metaphor like an old stager, loped across the mesa towards heaven, easy in the saddle. The sixty seconds of commercial were a special purgatory that made him aware of time and place.

“Where's me cocoa, Father Vince?” he called over his querulous old shoulder.

And it rocked towards him obligingly as he swung back on to the trail.

Lingard, conscious only of his spiritual weightlessness, settled with difficulty into a chair and supported the next unendurable half-hour for the sake of charity and the glittering-eyed sponsor who, somewhere behind packets of useless goodies, would be counting gold nuggets.

“I am a nothing-man,” he prayed later that evening after he finished reading his office. “Deliver me.”

Sick to his core, he edged his way between the cold still sheets and remembered as he did so that he had forgotten to put the presbytery cat into the laundry at the back where it could coil up near the boiler. So he went out again, shivering in pyjamas, and called and mewed till a narrow shadow pelted across the frosty grass and gave his thin legs one bleak rub.