“By the by, Cyril, where are you, well, finding the money necessary to get married?” The question seemed direct, the problem vital, enough.
Cyril bit his lip. “Funds,” he answered.
“Sorry?”
“Funds.”
“Does this mean someone’s seeing you along, a foundation, Oxfam, or, well, a close relative?”
“Funds.”
The inscrutable African mind was this, Which wondered, or just pure out-and-out idiocy? Doubtless, the answer was as inscrutable. Or idiotic. And yet, in spite of it all, this was a wonderful specimen of man before him, uncomplicatedly black, a body hard as nacre, a sweet someone with the makings of a substantial epigone who preserved the forthright, if ingenuous, sense of compliance that both gladdened and provided maintenance for the Courts of England ever since the days of stately Jack Lackland. Here were the hands to lead a choir, stay a horse, bake a pie, card wool, hold a bridge hand, and—O Altitudo!—give a rubdown. Here was a man with a voice like Farinelli, a body like the Apollo Belvedere, the strength of the Farnese Hercules, and the dedication of Gunga Din, and now, chances missed, he was about to be lost forever to some owlet moth of a dancer for a life of duncery and cold meals, this to be underwritten and clerically blessed, paradoxically enough, by the very man who stood to lose so much—and who was now extending a conciliatory tray of sugar biscuits and shortbread.
“Goodies?”
“Sweeties,” Cyril said, “are being prohibited me.”
So it was. The bilateral assault on Which’s part, the trouncing stratagem that sought to insinuate reformation in two ways: to induce to stay on at St. Peter’s the Cyril over whom he had lost so much unrequited sleep, and to reduce, by clarifying logic, his affections for a girl who simply did not count. From the very first day he had met Cyril, Which had hoped he could balance argument with invective that he might seduce him from the employ of the world and—before one grew old, rachitic, loose in the fundament, and weak in the sphincter—bring him to share in the small beauties, forbidden but forgiveable, that he had found when, secretly, he tiptoed into the privacy of his own heart.
The conference, along with the morning, would soon end. Rev. Which Therefore, somewhat diffident now as to his oversimplified and crude first attempts at appropriation, knew he must not mismanage any another opportunity to win Cyril over. Background music might be a start.
“Perhaps a bit of music to soothe the—” He hesitated. No, Which reflected, that might be just this side de trop. “To, ah, restore a bit of the hale and hearty, shall we say?” He skipped into the bedroom, past his flowers, and returned just as quickly to the strains of Blow’s Venus and Adonis. Cyril cocked his ear, and, in response to the music, he weaved through the room on his large serviceable feet, swaying like a cobra and punctuating each high note with a modulated yip. Which feared that at any moment he might suddenly leap through a pane of glass or splinter a chair from sheer exuberance—breakage, Which thought, he could ill afford to restore. The money issue again.
“Now,” Which took the it’s-all-very-well-to-dream-but-this-is-real-life tone, “you’re perfectly skint, old boy, poor as dace—except for the odd guinea I can see you, now and again—and yet you jolly well know, and with good reason of course, as soon as you are married, bang!, you’ll wake up one day to find six to a dozen little creatures with their teeth on edge, barking way into the night for even so much as a smell of a marmite sandwich or else a mere thimbleful of that cheap stirabout on which you’re so keen.” He took Cyril’s hand. “A man of your talent.”
“I can cook,” said Cyril, extracting his hand. The black nitwit, Which thought turning away.
“Given, you can cook. See? But what will you cook: snow? linoleum? your trousers? (imperfectly buttoned, Which saw)” Which walked into the bedroom, shaking his head, and shut off the gramophone.
There came a long pause.
Cyril whistled a dry note. “I have to contracieve, man. Centrecept.” He squinted in confusion and nipped at the cuticle of his thumb. “Contrasumpt?”
Which leaned through the doorway. “Have to...?”
“Bung her.”
Happily, Which thought he saw light at the end of the tunnel, an intellectual slype now easily traversed, for, he knew, it was only a short step from abolishing the desire for children to making gratuitous the need for marriage. It was the Split Hair Aspect of Theology. Which thought of St. Drogo, patron saint of the “Chapel of Balances” in which persons who came to be cured miraculously were weighed, as a final test of sincerity, in order to ascertain whether their weight diminished when they offered up their prayers.
“There. Now, no one is punished in Dante for using contraceptives (an argument he once used to confound a seminar of forty mature nuns at a guest lecture at the Brompton Oratory), but, you see, it’s a dicey little trick,” Which said with a fussy gesture. “Or haven’t you heard?”
“I have already try her with this trick.” Cyril grinned.
“How, pray?”
“After we go boom-boom, I am making Miss Anita the girl jump backward nine times each.” He did not hesitate. “Like this.” He jumped backwards nine times.
“Good God, man, are we jumping beans?”
How dark the Dark Continent, Which realized, as he heard Cyril then promptly give a recitation of the time-worn abortifacients (“gree-gree,” in Cyril’s vernacular) which enjoyed popular use in his village: panax soap, sticklewort, chaste tree, calamint, house leek, and, given top priority, the application of burning prunes worn in a bit of linen as an amulet over the navel. They sat on their hands. They gobbled umbrella chestnut. They sucked rue seed, and they forced each other to sneeze with ostrich plumes. Cyril, finally, placed a great deal of stress, so effective it was, on the efficacious value of oiling the virile member with ceruse.
“Ceruse?” asked Which, picking up a pencil.
“But me, aaach! I don’t like that. It burn my pipestem.”
Which registered amused shock and made as if to strike Cyril; he swung a limp wrist and uttered a word like poo. He stood up and took from a shelf a toy plastic chicken, into whose colon he pushed the pencil, spun it, and pulled it out again, sharpened. Then the priest wrote out an orderly item-by-item list of the other possibilities available to his tutee, hoping, all the while, to reveal the inner mechanics of Woman—which he compared to the underground sewage system in Red China—and revolt him. Methods he touched on included post-coital exercises, I.U.D., coitus interruptus, and occlusive pessaries, to which he added, quoting a memorized passage from what he said was a directly revealed sermonette of St. Jerome and the holy Eusebius, on the Need for, but Impossibility of, Purification in the Inferior Sex, various jams, jellies, and foams—the very same commodities enjoying world-wide use, Which added, to kill rats, fire ants, arachnids, and, a more localized concern, to spray into belfries as a safeguard against bats and possibly vampires. The awesome polysyllables of the contraceptive techniques bewildered Cyril, however, and when Which asked him to give on-the-spot phonetic renderings, part of the tutorial, it sounded as if he were speaking futhark, and Which saw that it would take a good three days, something for which he had neither the time nor the inclination.
“Consider the elephant,” Which said with a flagging sigh. “Such is his pudicity, according to the Great Cham, that he never covers the female as long as anyone comes into sight.” He cosseted Cyril’s fingers. “Such a thing we call prudence. Now. What can we learn from the elephant?”
Cyril giggled. “Not to shag one?”
“Go on.” This was no time for humour.
“Look sharp, man, yes?”
“Righto, you see. And how does one manage that, you’ll ask. My only answer is be true blue, old man, as I would be with you,” Which effervesced. “You are not a chocolate face. You’re not smelly, not by a long chalk. You smell a perfect rose, if the truth be known.” He swallowed. “May I say you are the apple of my eye?”
“Yes,” Cyril n
odded. Which got flummoxed.
“Well, that’s just it, you are the apple of my eye.”
“I like to be your apple, Sir Reverend.”
It was touching. “You mean that? I say, thanks awfully, Cyril. Apples just don’t grow on trees, you know.”
Cyril rolled his head toward Which. “Thank you for have asking me to be your apple.”
“Don’t mention it, old boy.”
“Indeed,” Cyril recoiled, taking him literally. “I am sorry.”
“Heavens why?”
“Insisting for to be your apple.”
“O larks!” Which gave a croon of admiration. How too divine! He felt he had him now. “You can be the perfect dear. I want you for my apple—and to lead my choir, I want to add. What I’m trying to say is, have done with this preposterous idea of marriage, for heaven’s sake. You, a young man, why it’s the purest bosh. A wider reader, you won’t be insulted?, a wider reader, even one more widely read than you”—Which jammed out the beeps in a conscience that were now deafening, ferocious—“well, he is just absolutely forever tripping upon a proverb that has, goodness, just about become part of the language. Freely rendered, it is poorly put. The linchpin of it all is that women are like pianos, some are upright, some are grand, but a rather inviolate law is that eventually they all go out of tune.” Which coughed earnestly. “The simile spares me a vividness that would embarrass us both.”
At which juncture, the Reverend Therefore penetrated into the laurelled recesses of history and proceeded to set in motion, for Cyril, a caravan of celibates and soloists whose chastity, it was common knowledge, stood absolutely above reproach. He cited Dominic Savio; the castrated Abelard; Little Black Mumbo; Katerina Tekakwitha, the Virgin of the Mohawks; the Archangel Gabriel; the fifteenth-century monk, Bernardine, who, as a reason for avoiding intercourse altogether, wrote a treatise on animals who blushed; and, finally, the renowned St. Asella who flattered herself at the age of fifty that she had never in her whole life spoken to a man.
“Is it for nothing that married rhymes with harried?” he asked pointblank.
“I have yet to know.” Cyril seemed a shadow of his former self.
“Would I have you on?” the priest asked, desperately pressing Cyril’s hands together in a gesture of exquisite bathos. He wanted to rinse out Cyril’s soul. “To err is human, to repent divine,” Which offered with certainty, “but to persevere is diabolical.”
Cyril, not of the subtle school, was sucking his lower lip as he pondered Which’s words; he smacked his wet lips, made noises, slurped. It sounded like the deglaciation of an ice-sheet.
Rev. Which Therefore drove on toward the breech. “Doesn’t St. Paul, a veritable factotum in matters touching on the lower appetites, well, doesn’t he give pride of place to the perfectability of the single life, which is to say, Supernatural Marriage?” The Pauline alternative to inflammability Which dismissed merely as a useless extension of the frying pan/fire metaphor or an interpolated palimpsest, applicable only to teenagers and the publicly intemperate, that had been written into the margins of Scripture by one of the monks of the Monastery of Carmina Burana, who, in what had been perhaps a weak, possibly waggish, moment, got into the cruets one night, took a few belts, and tried as best he could to become the Fifth Evangelist. “Nuns marry God, you see? Much as I serve Him in, well, the wifely duties, if you will: keeping His House in fresh linen, dusting away heresy, putting out the eucharistic napkin ring, et cetera, et cetera. By serving me, you serve the Church, which is only, in a way, the dulce domum God rents for His family. We can be wives together, as it were—to God. Lest you think Him a bigamist, of course, I shan’t explain how He proposes to us all. He simply does, that’s all. It’s a mystery.”
And so Cyril was suddenly presented with an encouragingly domestic but rather atypical ikon: a Picture of God rising up at midnight in a rumpled nightie and bleary eyes, with uxorious requests, he imagined, that he, Cyril—transexualized, presumably, by an Eighth Gift of the Holy Ghost or the lonely but powerful magic of a despirited Bachelor, quondam Creator of the World—fill the toastrack, warm the teapot, or put out the cat. It all seemed rather beyond him, and, of course, his interests in Anita, if the parallel must be made, were something less than eschatological. The ut infra, ut supra reasoning was impossible; it gave Cyril a headache. An epithalamium on a pink cloud in the middle of Outer Space, if beatific, lost something in specificity. And it seemed an exclusive blasphemy to desire in Anita those compelling attributes, both concave and convex, which he simultaneously found less acceptable in the God Who created them. Complexities now arose between the spiritual and the physical, and the ultimate question, of course, was to which (i.e., to whom) should one be loyal—all this, quite naturally, raising the ancillary but parallel question sought after over the centuries by many an exegete: had David’s lyre been less shaped like Bathsheba, might not there be now more than 150 psalms?
“Anita the girl has wifery in mind, I tell you,” Cyril finally replied, striking a blow for humanism. Curse his eyes, Which thought, he’s like a cushion: he bears the impression of the last person who sat on him. Sat on? Leaned against. Draped all over!
“So?”
“I have signified my promise.”
“Literalist,” Which muttered.
Cyril hesitated, his tongue protruding like a bell-pull. “My goodness, Sir Reverend, man, I don’t want to rook you of your musics.” He held his palms upwards to show how simple, he felt, everything seemed to be. “I am going to turn into a spouse,” he added earnestly. The fool, of course, is thinking of “The Ripsaw,” Which thought.
“May I suggest that you’ll live to regret it?”
“Yes,” Cyril nodded. Which got flummoxed.
“Well, that’s just it, you will live to regret it.”
The catechumen apparently did not think so. A last ditch effort on the part of the catechizer took the form of prophecies: that those who shunned the too-nimble and easily possessed alone could count themselves happy; that to be famished and to simultaneously refrain alone heightened awareness; and that marriage was the rummiest of mistakes that always put the coordinate partners into a fearful hash and sent them on an odyssey of tearful and wool-gathering reparation that would last forever; so it was in the days of Hungus, King of the Picts, so it would be When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder On that Final Day. Then Which grabbed the bottle and poured two more drinks, and, while he sucked the bubbles from his thumb, he threw out some lesser artillery: that amber, rubbed, acquires fluff; that the Churching of Women was not just hollow ceremonialism; then advancing notably Sir Thomas Browne’s theory that man might soon procreate like trees, without conjunction, and asking all the while would it not seem more seraphic, more provably divine? All to no avail.
Which was spent. He stood up and held out his arms.
“I have revolved it in my head,” Cyril said with a small but obtrusive smile that flowered into a rosy laugh.
“And you’re going to see it through?” Which wimpered in a voice orant, strained, cross-hatched with worry. It seemed a prayer. It was a kind of prayer, for what, in fact, is worry but prayer, that hoped-for conspiracy shot north by the constantly plagued and desperately hysterical? Here came a graphic picture of St. Ebba who chastised herself by spending her meditations and lectio divina up to her neck in ice water.
“God willing.”
It was a knife to the very apostolic scrinium of his heart. Which turned slowly toward the mirror and noticed a face like a sad white moon speak from the reflection.
“But, can’t you see, that is another matter entirely?”
And Which moped away from the morning window, stricken, like Agrippina bearing the ashes of Germanicus.
III
It was the day of the wedding. Rev. Which Therefore, in his toga praetexta, sat alone in the vestry. He was wearing sunglasses to make less bright a world he had seen, with sardonic awareness, become increasingly dark, for in these last few days he
had taken refuge from his tribulations at the Athenaeum, where bottle after bottle of the house chablis had raddled him and did nothing to soothe what had metamorphosed, especially this morning, into a pair of loose, unready eyes. He was in a dreadful wax, aware that hangovers themselves constitute a kind of intoxication, and had sent the altar boys out, who were being perfect jackals. Their exit became Lady Therefore’s entrance: she padded in, as punctual as Nemesis, armed with a box of headache powders and, upon seeing Which, pretended to jump out of her skin.
“Good heavens,” she gasped, clutching her heart, “I took you for Dracula, the Vampire Bat!”
“Twaddle,” Which snapped. He well knew she loved these exaggerated dramatics, staged as they had been all through his life whenever she wanted to disclose to him his perceptible decline. How could someone so old, he wondered, be so juvenile?—though he was perfectly aware that this was her afternoon for cards, when, somewhere else, she might be playing for incommensurably high stakes (buttons), hour after hour, in crucial hands of Beggar My Neighbour.
“You rather put the wind up one, you do,” she said. “I’ve never seen you looking so ropey. Drinking into the wee hours on these binges, you wonder you’re all in a pucker.”
“Who’s in a pucker?”
“Say me, I dare you.”
“I so hate a nagger, Mother,” complained Which. He could not help but think of the not overly taciturn St. Poppo the Abbess, put to the sword by having the sword put to her.
“That means me, of course, doesn’t it?” she said, filling a glass with water and splitting an envelope of powder. “Oh, I know. You certainly couldn’t have in mind, could you, that horrid spider monkey out front, all gussied up in his tatty rumpled morning suit and looking quite the ponce?”
“Cyril?”
“No, Boris Godunov, the Czar of Muscovy.”
“I am not amused.”
“That insufferable little bounder, yes—and a bit high in the instep, I might add. He is mincing around out there like Lord Strutt.” Lady Therefore took a knot out of the priest’s cincture and gave him a sidelong glance as if from without a duckblind. “But isn’t that more or less where the Church falls short anyway?”
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