Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Fed Joseph drink, did he? Burned Matilda’s hands, did he? Did you think I was a total fool, Francis? Well, so I was, you devil. You try to rape a bride of Christ and you’re as dead as I’ve been blind.’

  Her anger was shimmering hot, the voice colder than ice.

  Anna stood behind her. Agnes and Margaret stood either side. Anna wanted to go to Therese, soon she would go to Therese, and even now, in the midst of everything else, she felt an overpowering relief that it was not her who had done this. Three reedy voices rose into the air, chanting. To you we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears . . . Turn then your eyes of mercy towards us. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria . . .

  They faltered on the notes. Then there was a long silence. Barbara’s torchlight did not waver. Her bosom heaved.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Do we bury him or burn him?’ She turned to the others.

  A small voice, coming from nowhere, said that perhaps they should call for the priest.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the second week of the month, Kay McQuaid busied herself in the middle of a rainy day by dragging the golden Buddha out of the house and down to the back fence, where she could see it from the kitchen window. It tarnished to a fuller sheen almost overnight. For something else to do the next day, she surrounded it with small evergreen shrubs of the kind she had been told would attract the birds. She buried a small gold crucifix on a chain amongst them. Standing with gin in hand and sweat on her brow, she decided she needed more work of the same kind and went back into town for dozens of bulbs to plant for the spring. The statue had already melded into the right place, and sat there, contentedly, surrounded by fertile attention. It was the best she could do to create a shrine and it gave her peace of a kind. Next year, she would really get to work out here, now that she knew she was not going anywhere else. Make something of it. Scrap those neat borders and fill it with shaggy shapes and colours. She muttered a guilty prayer of thanks, for feeling safe. The garden would help her make amends. It would be a labour of love. Someone Up There, whoever it was, would approve.

  The third week of October, and by some miracle, there was a fire lit in the parlour.

  ‘I don’t have much belief in the existence of the devil, myself,’ Father Goodwin was saying to Anna. ‘I find him far too convenient a concept. Evil, yes, the devil, no. Not a devil with horns and a tail. Maybe a fallen angel. That’s the way Satan started, after all. The angel separated from God in a messy divorce.’

  They were sitting in the back of the chapel, talking in normal voices as if the crucifix did not loom over them. The place smelled clean and chilly with the side windows open. Not a trace of incense or added decoration. There had been no recent funerals; those four in the four weeks behind that, Sister Jude, Edmund, Matilda, Jack McQuaid, had all been conducted with the fullest of honours and amounted to a record and now there had been none for a month. It often happened like that, Christopher Goodwin had stated, firmly. A cycle of disasters do not amount to a permanent pattern, like the corridor floor. Nothing is predictable, other than seasons, and now we have the welcome hint of winter, with the promise of dark, protective nights, things on toast and the blessing of sleep. Think of that and other small mercies.

  ‘Thank you for that, Christopher, but I do not think it is an idea I could share with Therese. It is easier for her to believe in simple miracles. Such as the devil in disguise taking on a human form, just as Christ is supposed to have done, although with the opposite purpose. It’s more picturesque to believe in two superhuman men slugging it out, with the devil as the force for evil, which only God can recognise and destroy. It makes it easier to rely on God.’

  He thrust his hands under his armpits in order to warm them.

  ‘Well, then, she is not equipped for the Christian life, or any religious life, for that matter. If she clings to such concepts, particularly if she trusts in the ultimate reliability of God, she denies herself essential knowledge. As soon as a God takes on human form, which all Gods do, they take on frailty, also. And they are frail. They can only work in cooperation with us. Likewise the so-called devil, and Francis was not the devil incarnate, whatever Therese wants to believe. Although he may have evolved into something devilish, with plenty of human help.’

  ‘But he was evil, wasn’t he? Not born, but made, I concede that, but he must have been already fully evolved when he came here. Beyond redemption. Perhaps it’s better to say he was cursed . . .’

  ‘I prefer that,’ Father Goodwin interrupted, adjusting himself to the uncomfortable rush seat. ‘Cursed, rather than innately evil. Cursed in a way to which many other people contributed. Including his abandoned mother, his friends he may not have chosen, and the way he came to look for recognition. A cursed man will take revenge for the absence of an identity.’

  ‘He was a rent boy . . . once?’

  Christopher sighed. ‘Yes, I’m told so. From time to time. Which is why the police are disposed to believe that he was a sexual deviant, caught in the act and killed in vicarious self-defence, as he richly deserved, by a woman not in command of her right mind.’

  ‘And all that’s true, too. In a manner of speaking.’

  He thought of Kay McQuaid and the annotated version of events he had tried to give her, until he saw how she preferred the truth.

  ‘In a manner of convenient speaking, although I might not take the risk of setting it in stone. I am afflicted by the idea that after he came here, there may have been moments when he could have been redeemed if he had not been so positively misjudged. You cannot know for certain sure if he killed Edmund or merely watched him die. Or if, when he delivered you to Barbara to the tune of lies, he was merely trying to consolidate a position he knew was precarious, because it always was, you know. Nor do we know if he intended Matilda’s fate, or if his jealous washing of St Michael’s feet was intended as a favour to her. Or a favour to the saint, or a response to a request. He was a tidy and domesticated man, like his mother. And how strange it was that he signalled what he had done, and what he was going to do, at every turn, as if he wanted to be stopped . . . He let his mother know he was there, he wore the crucifix . . . We don’t know what moved him. We do not know, either, if he actually locked Therese in her cell, or if the door jammed.’

  ‘It was him who came back, nobody else.’

  ‘And found a naked girl, waiting for him.’

  ‘He came back. He orchestrated it. You can’t suggest otherwise.’

  ‘No, I don’t suggest otherwise. But the nakedness was a contributory factor, and that is my point entirely. Therese had no idea of what she had aroused by being what she was and where she was, but she still contributed, even with innocence, just as she did otherwise. The point, my dear, is that devils, if they exist, thrive on circumstance. They graduate because of ignorance. They are not clever enough to invent the culture that lets them thrive and cannot, should not, be blamed for everything.’

  ‘And you are the devil’s advocate.’ She sat down in the aisle. ‘Making the opposite point that virtue cannot afford to be blind or it isn’t real virtue. And also that anyone can do a wicked deed by default, since neither God nor the devil know what the hell they’re doing. She won’t find that particularly helpful. I don’t find it nearly as useful as my own intelligence.’

  ‘Exactly, my dear.You’ve arrived where we began.’

  She stood, physically restless, but otherwise calm. The long hair was cropped: she looked like an adolescent boy with feminine curves. His heart ached for her survival, by which he meant survival with honours, so that she might become the extraordinary woman he knew she could be. Someone who could love and be loved and act on that furious intellect, perhaps with a belief to sustain her, any positive belief. He had hopes for her, such hopes, they made him determined to stay alive and do what he was good at. Nurture. Debate. Talk. They had been debating and discussing every known fact every day. The chapel
was the place for it. She paced forward and then back, sat down again.

  ‘You don’t think I haven’t thought of any of that, or imagined alternative explanations to the poor old devil, do you? I’ve had no choice about that. After all, I might have killed Francis myself, on no better basis than what I thought I could see, and while I believe my impulse was right, and he was cursed, I sincerely wish he was not dead, whatever he was. I can’t see the justice in that. It was my family that added a crucial contribution to the evolution of Francis. And it was my father who set the whole thing running by inventing that wretched, meaningless will. That was what started the last chapter, and then there was us, continuing it by not reading his letters. We contributed too.’

  ‘You were very young.’ Us, he noticed. We. Not Therese. Anna was still taking responsibility for Therese. She still wanted that burden.

  ‘Let’s go out in the garden for a cigarette.’

  ‘No. It’s cold. The Lord won’t mind if we smoke in here. The Apostles probably smoked dope at the Last Supper, for God’s sake. Here, have one of mine. When can I meet Kay McQuaid?’

  ‘When she’s ready. Do you know, I think you’re perverse enough to actually like her.’

  ‘Unless she’s changed, I always did. She was kind to me. How else do you judge?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Christopher said, looking at his watch, ‘you were starting on the last chapter, but the story began with the first. It started with a rape. It started with a child no one wanted, but no one could destroy. It started with Jack McQuaid’s isolation. It continued, after a few intervening chapters, with your father’s grief and bitterness on a cold wet night when he drafted a will. Probably after a few drinks. You know what an influence that can be.’

  She thought of herself pulling faces at Barbara, that abiding shame which somehow persisted.

  ‘Tell me again what Francis said to you when you arrived in time for the last Sacrament. When he wasn’t quite dead.’

  ‘He said, Tell them their father was a good man.’

  ‘It sounds like an act of contrition. And highly ambiguous. Which father? Forgive me, Christopher, I’m not entirely sure I believe you.’

  ‘You know very well that I cannot influence what you believe.’

  ‘I believe that God, some God, some hound of heaven, helped me to see, and helps me still. I no longer have the arrogance to deny the existence of Gods, nor do I want to, but I couldn’t just believe in one. Monotheism is what makes for wars. Anyway, not one of them can make me see clearly enough why my father did it. I don’t mean write the will, but write it that way and send it.’

  This was old ground.

  ‘Pay attention, that’s all, and then you can see. Use your intelligence. He wanted to attract your attention. He wanted you to think. He wanted you to know what moved him to write such a document. He wanted you to be curious, at least. He wanted to upset and surprise you into thinking and discovering. He wanted you to know what he was like. He was terrified that you would be perverted by your mother’s religious mania, and he was furious with you, and of course, he never intended this result either. Never in a million years. No one could ever have planned this. He merely wanted to provoke.’

  She puffed at the cigarette and watched sacrilegious smoke spiral into the air in the direction of the side window. The bare branches of the trees beyond the big, curved window they faced moved gently. It was these they addressed when they avoided the eyes of each other.

  ‘Christopher, I think it’s a bit much to expect me to forgive Francis for what he was and did, or my father, for that matter. I loathe that old cliché, to understand all is to forgive all, blah, blah, blah. It denies the right to be angry, which is often more constructive.’

  ‘Oh, blah, blah, blah, it happens to be true, and I expect no such thing, but invite you to consider. The impact of the works of the so-called devil is not always entirely negative, I think. Look at what Francis has done by accident. Made your sister re-evaluate her vocation, sooner rather than later. Made her remember the hand of your mother pressing against her neck? Jolted her into an existence based on truth? Made you and she recognise the murderous potential of love and lies . . .’

  ‘Also of good intentions. And made me grateful for Joseph. For doing what I might have done. From which I would not have recovered my heart, my soul or anything. I owe her my life.’

  ‘That is her sole consolation. Apart from the fact that she killed him in revenge for Matilda and does not really regret it, she is comforted by the fact that she saved another from the same deed. I was merely hoping that you might have been able to forgive your father, in the same, exceptionally generous way you seem to have been able to forgive your mother.’

  ‘Now, wait a minute . . . What is this? This imposition of virtue? Christopher, we’ve talked so much, I’m beginning to talk like an old cleric like you. Make no mistake, I don’t forgive her. To use your vernacular, I’ve simply done her the courtesy of trying to understand what dreadful fear she felt for us, what dreadful madness in herself it was that made her imprison us, what fear of abandonment she had, and her only saving grace is the fact I know it was not hatred. I think she was stupid, beyond self-analysis, full of self-loathing. What she did was a perversion of love, but I’m a long way from forgiving, you better believe. I blame Him.’ She jerked her thumb in the direction of the crucifix. ‘Blessing her every action. Good boy, Jesus.’

  This moved him to anger, so that he almost shouted. One of the Sisters was at the door and went away, rapidly. What had this child done to him, apart from renew his faith? He could not have Christ impugned and insulted.

  ‘No, He did not! She reinvented the God who would do that. People reinvent God all the time. To whom do you think the terrorist prays? The God of his Bible, or the God of his own invention?’

  She grinned at him and he groaned. He was always taking the bait.

  ‘I knew that would get you going. Let’s go in the garden, after all. It’s wrong to smoke in here.’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  He shuffled nervously out of the chapel, through the parlour, looking round as if pursued. How odd of God to make it warmer out here than in that chilly, elegant space. They finished the cigarettes by the statue of St Michael. Christopher seemed anxious and she felt protective about his persistence and what it cost him, but also cautious. She didn’t wish anyone else messing with her mind. She had had enough of that. It didn’t want messing with, it wanted all the education it had missed, exercise. It wanted to learn.

  ‘What about your father?’ he asked, sweeping the ash from St Michael’s foot. If she wanted him to go further into this garden, he would not, could not: it haunted him as the place where he would always arrive too late. She took a deep breath. Nothing else in the last month had made her tearful. Not even telling Ravi it was better they did not see each other until she was a little further down some path or other, maybe then, when she was fit.

  ‘What about my father? I wish, wish, wish I had known him. I wish it had been allowed. I wish it wasn’t the reason for not being able to forgive my mother, because that was the worst she did. She taught us to hate him, because she did. I suppose we contributed. I suppose he did. How lonely he must have been, lonelier than me, and all I can remember is the laughter in church. The questions. He was like me, he’s as angry as me. I’d have liked the chance for a row. I’ve had no one to learn from and only religion to rebel against. I’d have liked the chance to make reparation. The chance to put it right, as far as it could be. To take back misjudgement and all that bloody ignorance.’

  Christopher Goodwin felt himself beginning to sweat.

  ‘Even if he was manipulative, a player of games? Occasionally untruthful?’

  ‘So are the best of people, when they need to be. I might be all of those things, you certainly are, so was Sister Jude. It depends on the motive. You can be all of those things in a vain attempt to be good. Or be listened to. Or avoid causing hurt. They’re not incompatible.’r />
  She let out a long, regretful sigh.

  ‘So, I’ve only got one problem, Christopher, and it’s the one I can’t handle. One great big area of sheer self-pity. And it’s all because I’m just too young to be an orphan. I wish I wasn’t. It’s the gap I can’t cure with my mind. It puts me at risk of creating something unreal, to fill the gap. I feel cheated. And so was my father.’

  He tried to breathe deeply, speak slowly and carefully, and still choked on the words.

  ‘I think he should be waiting in the parlour, by now. Twelve o’clock, he said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father. You might recognise his voice. Although he’s quite good at disguising it.’

  She stood up and wiped a trace of grime from the back of her jeans. Then slapped her own face, lightly, to stop herself trembling. He blanched, as if he could feel the imprint of her hand. Then she laughed uncertainly.

  ‘Is this a miracle? You liar. I thought we agreed you would never lie to me.’

  ‘And I never have,’ he said, crossing his fingers behind his back. ‘Not about your father’s grief or his motives or why he found his life so unbearable he made a will and disappeared. Or about what he hoped to achieve by dying. The attention of his daughters’ souls. An elaborate, stupid, selfish, wicked conspiracy, because he did not die. He simply waited. And as we discussed, the devil himself is rarely worse than a man with good intentions.’

  ‘You talk too much. He phoned me. It was him. I used to dream it was him. Oh Christ, you bastard. What on earth shall I say? Where did you say he was?’

  ‘You heard me the first time. In the parlour. Why else would Barbara light a fire?’