The Keys of the Kingdom

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘Yes.’ He stumbled out the answer.

  ‘I’m glad … I thought of you.’ She threw him a swift glance, made as though to speak, and was silent.

  Presently they reached the Gosforth market garden. Geordie Lang, Ned’s good friend and the owner of the garden, was in the orchard, among the half-denuded trees, burning leaves. He gave them a friendly nod, an invitation to join them. They raked the crackling brown and yellow leaves towards the great smouldering cone he had already built, until the smell of the leaf smoke impregnated their clothing. It was not work but glorious sport. They forgot their earlier embarrassment, competed as to who should rake the most. When he had raked a great pile for himself Nora mischievously despoiled it. Their laughter rang in the high clear air. Geordie Lang grinned in broad sympathy. ‘That’s women, lad. Take your pile and laugh at ye.’

  At last Lang waved them towards the apple shed, a wooden erection at the end of the orchard.

  ‘You’ve earned your keep. Go and help yourself!’ he called after them. ‘And give my best respects to Mr Bannon. Tell him I’ll look in for my drop of spirits sometime this week.’

  The apple shed was soft with crepuscular twilight. They climbed the ladder to the loft where, spaced out on straw, not touching, were rows and rows of the Ribston Pippins for which the garden was renowned. While Francis filled the basket, crouching under the low roof, Nora sat cross-legged on the straw, picked an apple, shone it on her bony hip and began to eat.

  ‘Oh, my it’s good,’ she said. ‘Have one, Francis?’

  He sat down opposite, took the apple she held out to him. The taste was delicious. They watched each other eating. When her small teeth bit through the amber skin into the crisp white flesh, little spurts of juice ran down her chin. He did not feel so shy in the dark little loft, but dreamy and warm, suffused with the joy of living. He had never liked anything so much as being here, in the garden, eating the apple she had given him. Their eyes, meeting frequently, smiled; but she had a half-smile, strange and inward, that seemed entirely for herself.

  ‘I dare you to eat the seeds,’ she teased suddenly; then added quickly: ‘No, don’t, Francis! Sister Margaret Mary says they give you colic. Besides a new apple tree will grow from each of those seeds. Isn’t it funny! Listen, Francis … you’re fond of Polly and Ned?’

  ‘Very.’ He stared. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course … except when Polly coddles me every time I get a cough … and when Ned pets me on his knee – I hate that.’

  She hesitated, lowered her gaze for the first time. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t, Sister Margaret Mary thinks I’m imprudent, do you?’

  He glanced away awkwardly, his passionate repudiation of the charge condensed in a clumsy: ‘No!’

  She smiled almost timidly. ‘We’re friends, Francis, so I will say it, and spite old Margaret Mary. When you’re a man what are you going to be?’

  Startled, he stared at her. ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  She picked with sudden nervousness at the serge of her dress. ‘Oh, nothing … only, well… I like you. I’ve always liked you. All those years I’ve thought of you a lot and it wouldn’t be nice if you … sort of disappeared again.’

  ‘Why should I disappear?’ he laughed.

  ‘You’d be surprised!’ Her eyes, still childish, were wide and wise. ‘I know Aunt Polly … I heard her again today. She’d give anything to see you made a priest. Then you’d have to give up everything, even me.’ Before he could reply she jumped up, shaking herself, with a great show of animation. ‘Come on, don’t be silly, sitting here all day. It’s ridiculous with the sun shining outside, and the party tonight.’ He made to rise. ‘ No, wait a minute. Shut your eyes and you might get a present.’

  Even before he thought of complying she darted over and gave him a hurried little kiss on the cheek. The quick warm contact, the touch of her breath, the closeness of her thin face with the tiny brown mole on the cheekbone, stunned him. Blushing deeply, unexpectedly she slipped down the ladder and ran out of the shed. He followed slowly, darkly red, rubbing the small moist spot upon his cheek as though it were a wound. His heart was pounding.

  That night the Halloween party began at seven o’clock. Ned, with a sultan’s privilege, closed the bar at five minutes to the hour. All but a few favoured patrons were politely asked to leave. The guests assembled upstairs, in the parlour, with its glass cases of wax fruit, the picture of Parnell above the blue-glass lustres, the velvet-framed photograph of Ned and Polly at the Giant’s Causeway, the bog oak jaunting car, – a present from Killarney, – the aspidistra, the varnished shillelagh hung on the wall with green ribbon, the heavy padded furniture which emitted a puff of dust when heavily sat upon. The mahogany table was fully extended, with legs like a dropsical woman, and set for twenty. The coal fire, banked halfway up the chimney, would have prostrated an African explorer. The smell, off, was of rich basting birds. Maggie Magoon, in cap and apron, ran about like a maniac. In the crowded room were the young curate, Father Clancy, Thaddeus Gilfoyle, several of the neighbouring tradesmen, Mr Austin the manager of the tramways, his wife and three children, and, of course, Ned, Polly, Nora and Francis.

  Amidst the din, with beaming benevolence and a sixpenny cigar, Ned stood laying down the law to his friend Gilfoyle. A pale, prosaic and slightly catarrhal young man of thirty was Thaddeus Gilfoyle, clerk at the gasworks – who in his spare time collected the rents of Ned’s property in Varrell Street, was a sidesman at St Dominic’s, a steady-going chap who could always be relied on to do an odd job, to fill the breach, to ‘come forward’, as Ned phrased it – who never had two words to rub against one another or a single idea that might be called his own, yet who somehow managed to be there, hanging around, on the spot when he was wanted, dull and dependable, nodding in agreement, blowing his nose, fingering his confraternity badge, fish-eyed, flat-footed, solemn, safe.

  ‘You’ll be for making a speech tonight?’ he now inquired of Ned, in a tone which implied that if Ned did not make a speech the world would be desolate.

  ‘Ah, I don’t know now.’ Modestly yet profoundly, Ned considered the end of his cigar.

  ‘Ah, you will now, Ned!’

  ‘They’ll not expect it.’

  ‘Pardon me, Ned, if I beg to differ.’

  ‘Ye think I should?’

  With solemnity, ‘Ned, ye both should and would!’

  ‘Ye mean … I ought to?’

  ‘You must, Ned, and you will.’

  Delighted, Ned rolled the cigar across his mouth. ‘As a matter of fact, I had,’ he cocked his eye, significantly, ‘I have a announcement … a important announcement I want to make. I’ll say a few words later, since you press me.’

  Led by Polly as a kind of overture to the main event, the children began to play Halloween games – first snapdragon, scrambling for the flat blue raisins, ablaze with spirit, on a big china dish, then duck-apple, dropping a fork from between the teeth over the back of a chair into a tub of swimming apples.

  At seven o’clock the ‘gowks’ came in: working lads from the neighbourhood, with soot-blackened faces and grotesque attire, mumming their way around the district, singing for sixpences, in the strange tradition of All Hallows Eve. They knew how to please Ned. They sang ‘Dear Little Shamrock’, ‘ Kathleen Mavourneen’, and ‘Maggie Murphy’s Home’. Largesse was distributed. They clattered out. ‘Thank you, Mr Bannon! Up the Union! Good night, Ned!’

  ‘Good lads. Good lads all of them!’ Ned rubbed his hands, his eye still moist with Celtic sentiment. ‘Now, Polly, our friends’ stomachs will be thinking their throats is cut.’

  The company sat down at table, Father Clancy said grace, and Maggie Magoon staggered in with the largest goose in Tynecastle. Francis had never tasted such a goose – it dissolved, in rich flavours, upon the tongue. His body glowed from the long excursion in the keen air and from a strange interior joy. Now and then his eyes met Nora’s across the table, shyly, with exquisite understan
ding. Though he was so quiet her gaiety thrilled him. The wonder of this happy day, of the secret bond which lay between them, was like a pain.

  When the repast was over Ned got up slowly, amidst applause. He struck an oratorical attitude, one thumb in his arm-pit. He was absurdly nervous.

  ‘Your Reverence, Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you one and all. I’m a man of few words,’ – a cry of ‘No, No’ from Thaddeus Gilfoyle – ‘I say what I mean, and I mean what I say!’ A short pause while Ned struggled for more confidence. ‘I like to see my friends happy and contented round about me – good company and good beer never hurt any man.’ Interruption at the doorway from Scanty Magoon, who had sneaked in with the gowks and contrived to remain. ‘God save you, Mr Bannon!’ – brandishing a drumstick of the goose. ‘You’re a fine man!’ Ned remained unperturbable – every great man has his sycophants. ‘As I was remarkin’ when Mrs Magoon’s husband flung a brick at me …’ Laughter. ‘… I favour the social occasion. I’m sure we’re proud and pleased, every mother’s son of us, – and daughter, – to welcome into our midst my poor wife’s brother’s boy!’ Loud applause and Polly’s voice: ‘Take a bow, Francis.’ ‘ I’m not going into recent history. Let the past bury its dead, I say. But I say and say it I will, Look at him now, I say, and when he came!’ Applause and Scanty’s voice in the corridor: ‘Maggie, for the love of God, will ye bring some more of the goose!’ ‘Now, I’m not one to blow my own trumpet! I try to do fair between God and man and beast. Look at my whippets if ye don’t believe me.’ Gilfoyle’s voice: ‘The best dogs in Tynecastle!’ A longer pause, during which Ned lost the thread of his speech. ‘Where am I?’ ‘Francis!’ Polly prompted quickly. ‘Ah, yes.’ Ned raised his voice. ‘When Francis came, I said to myself, says I, Here’s a boy that might be useful. Shove him behind the bar and let him earn his keep? No, by God – Saving your presence, Father Clancy – that’s not us. We talk it over, Polly and me. The boy’s young, the boy’s been ill-treated, the boy has a future before him, the boy’s my poor dear wife’s brother’s boy. Let’s send him to college, we say; we can manage it between us.’ Ned paused. ‘Your Reverence, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m pleased and proud to announce that next month Francis starts off for Holywell!’ Making the name the triumphant keystone of his peroration, Ned sat down, perspiring, amidst loud applause.

  IV

  Though the elm shadows were long upon the cropped lawns of Holywell, the northern June evening was still light as noon. The darkness would come late, so closely to dawn the aurora borealis would but briefly glitter across the high pale heavens. As Francis sat at the open window of the high little study which he shared, since his election to the ‘Philosophers’, with Laurence Hudson and Anselm Mealey, he felt his attention wander from the notebook, drawn, almost sadly, with a sense of the transience of beauty, to the lovely scene before him.

  From the steep angle of his vision he could see the school, a noble grey granite baronial mansion, built for Sir Archibald Frazer in 1609, and endowed, this century, as a Catholic College. The chapel, styled in the same severity, lay at right angles, linked by a cloister, to the library, enclosing a quadrangle of historic turf. Beyond were the fives and handball courts, the playing fields, the end of a game still in progress, wide reaches of pasture threaded by the Stinchar River with stumpy black Polled Angus cattle grazing stolidly, woods of beech and oak and rowan clustering the lodge, and in the ultimate distance the backdrop, blue, faintly serrated, of the Aberdeenshire Grampians.

  Without knowing, Francis sighed. It seemed only yesterday that he had landed at Doune, the draughty northern junction, a new boy, scared out of his wits, facing the unknown and that first frightful interview with the Headmaster, Father Hamish MacNabb. He remembered how ‘ Rusty Mac’, great little Highland gentleman, blood cousin to MacNabb of the Isles, had crouched at his desk beneath his tartan cape, peering from bushy red eyebrows, dread-fully formidable.

  ‘Well, boy, what can you do?’

  ‘Please, sir … nothing.’

  ‘Nothing! Can’t you dance the Highland Fling?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What! With a grand name like Chisholm?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘Humph! There’s not much profit in you, is there boy?’

  ‘No, sir, except sir …’ Trembling: ‘… Maybe I can fish.’

  ‘Maybe, eh?’ A slow dry smile. ‘Then maybe we’ll be friends.’ The smile deepened. ‘The clans of Chisholm and MacNabb fished together, ay, and fought together, before you or I were thought of. Run now, before I cane ye.’

  And now, in one more term, he would be leaving Holywell. Again his gaze slanted down to the little groups promenading to and fro on the gravelled terraces beside the fountain. A seminary custom! Well, what of it? Most of them would go from here to the Seminary of San Morales in Spain. He discerned his room-mates walking together: Anselm, as usual, extrovert in his affections, one arm tenderly linking his companion’s, the other gesticulating, but nicely, as befitted the outright winner of the Frazer Good Fellowship Prize! Behind the two, surrounded by his coterie, paced Father Tarrant – tall, dark, thin … intense yet sardonic … classically remote.

  At the sight of the youngish priest Francis’ expression tightened oddly. He viewed the open notebook before him on the window ledge with distaste, picked up his pen and began, after a moment, his imposition. His frown of resolution did not mar the clean brown moulding of his cheek or the sombre clearness of his hazel eyes. Now, at eighteen, his body had a wiry grace. The chaste light heightened absurdly his physical attractiveness, that air, unspoiled and touching, which – inescapable – so often humiliated him.

  ‘June-14th, 1887. Today there occurred an incident of such phenomenal and thrilling impropriety I must revenge myself on this beastly diary, and Father Tarrant, by recording it. I oughtn’t really to waste this hour before vespers – afterwards I shall be dutifully cornered by Anselm to play handball – I should jot down Ascension Thursday: Fine day; memorable adventure with Rusty Mac, and leave it. But even our incisive Adminstrator of Studies admitted the virtue of my breed – conscientiousness – when he said to me, after his lecture: “Chisholm! I suggest you keep a diary. Not of course for publication,” – his confounded satire flashed out, – “as a form of examen. You suffer, Chisholm, inordinately, from a kind of spiritual obstinacy. By writing your inmost heart out … if you could … you might possibly reduce it.”

  ‘I blushed, of course, like a fool, as my wretched temper flared “Do you mean I don’t do what I’m told, Father Tarrant?”

  ‘He barely looked at me, hands tucked away in the sleeves of his habit, thin, dark, pinched in at the nostrils and oh, so unanswerably clever. As he tried to conceal his dislike of me, I had a sharp awareness of his hard shirt, of the iron discipline I know he uses unsparingly upon himself. He said vaguely: “There is a mental disobedience …” and walked away.

  ‘Is it conceit to imagine he has his knife in me because I do not model myself upon him? Most of us do. Since he came here two years ago he has led quite a cult of which Anselm is deacon. Perhaps he cannot forget the occasion when, at his instruction to us upon the “one, true, and apostolic religion” I suddenly remarked: “ Surely, sir, creed is such an accident of birth God can’t set an exclusive value on it.” In the shocked hush which followed he stood nonplussed, but icy cold. “What an admirable heretic you would have made, my good Chisholm.”

  ‘At least we have one point in common: agreement that I shall never have a vocation.

  ‘I’m writing ridiculously pompously for a callow youth of eighteen. Perhaps it is what is named the affectation of my age. But I’m worried … about several things. Firstly, I’m terribly, probably absurdly, worried about Tynecastle. I suppose it’s inevitable that one should lose touch, when one’s “ home-leave” is limited to four short summer weeks. This brief annual vacation, Holywell’s only rigour, may serve its purpose of keeping vocations firm, but it also strains the imaginatio
n. Ned never writes. His correspondence during my three years at Holywell has been effected through the medium of sudden and fantastic gifts of food: that colossal sack of walnuts for instance, from the docks, in my first winter, and last spring, the crate of bananas, three quarters of which were over-ripe and created an undignified epidemic amongst the “ clergy and laity” here.

  ‘But even in Ned’s silence there’s something queer. And Aunt Polly’s letters make me more apprehensive. Her dear inimitable gossip about parochial events has been replaced by a meagre catalogue of, mainly, meteorological facts. And this change in tone arrived so suddenly. Naturally Nora hasn’t helped me. She is the original postcard girl, who scribbles off her obligations in five minutes, once a year, at the seaside. It seems, however, centuries since her last brilliant Sunset from Scarborough Pier and two letters of mine have failed even to produce a Moon over Whitley Bay. Dear Nora! I shall never forget your Eve-like gesture in the apple loft. It’s because of you that I anticipate these coming holidays so eagerly. Shall we walk again, I wonder, to Gosforth? I have watched you grow, holding my breath – seen your character – by which I mean your contradictions – develop. I know you as someone quick, shy, bold, sensitive and gay, a little spoiled by flattery, full of innocence and fun. Even now, I see your impudent sharp little face, lit up from within as you indulge your amazing gift of mimicry – “taking off” Aunt Polly … or me – your skinny arms akimbo, blue eyes provoking, reckless, ending by flinging yourself into a dance of gleeful malice. Everything about you is so – human and alive, and – even those flashes of petulance and fits of temper which shake your delicate physique and end in such tremendous weepings. And I know, despite your faults, how warm and impulsive is your nature, making you run, with a quick and shamefaced blush, towards someone you have hurt … unconsciously. I lie awake thinking of you, of the look in your eyes, the tender pathos of your collar bones above your small round breasts…’