by Patrick Gale
Avon
Very late Thursday night
Darling Mina,
This’ll be short and sharp. I’ve tried to go to bed and not worry about this, which in my present condition would not be Sisyphean, but it’s rankling, so I’ve got to speak to you, as it were. I’ll give it to you straight.
I just dropped in on Randy, just to see how he was and so on, see if he had enough food etc. etc. and that McNichol girl walked in (don’t know if you know her, but she’s New York, twenty-one, absurdly lithe, and very, very pretty) and was all too palpably not popping in to drop off an essay. She wasn’t exactly in one of his dressing-gowns, but she came down from upstairs to say she was ‘off to bed now’ in a manner calculated to tell me it was time to leave, and she went upstairs again, into your bedroom.
There. I’ve told you. I had tried convincing myself that it was better for all concerned to pretend I didn’t know, and to trust Randy to keep the whole thing well hidden, but that felt so bloody like late Henry James, treating you like the sacrificial angel figure you aren’t and saying, ‘Oh doesn’t she take it too beautifully!’ So, I’ve told you. Besides, what are friends for if not to tell you when your relationships need a little careful revision.
Please, Mina, don’t think I’m telling you this out of aggression. Heaven knows I’m just not the type. If my hands weren’t so full with keeping track of Rick’s boyfriends and if I had more illusions about my personal charms, I might be after your man, but they are, I don’t, so I’m not. Let’s face it – I never could have kept a secret like that. I think it’s better you hear now, when you’ve time and privacy to think things out, than later, when you might feel pressurized.
Darling Girl, if there’s any way I can help, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Love love love,
Ginny B. xxxxxxxx
18
The Sunday Times lay in pieces across her unmade bed. Domina was in her dressing-gown. She sat at the typewriter, one leg tucked underneath her, sipping coffee and casting a critical eye over Saturday’s work. Occasionally she would frown and, resting a page against the typewriter, make quick pencil revisions. It was only half-past nine, she had risen early to get to work. The hours before lunch were always the sharpest.
Saturday had seen the completed draft of a first act, a quick-paced playlet of ecclesiastical and maternal politics. Riding high on a sense of rekindled creative energy, she had worked almost all day. She had paused only to invite Des to tea by way of excusing herself from a film that evening, to assure Avril, fingers crossed, that she’d start work on the manuscript just as soon as she could polish off a friend’s thesis on Job and Twentieth Century Suffering in Faith, and to buy a walnut cake. She had worked through until nearly midnight, when she had taken a congratulatory bath before accepting Thierry’s invitation to come down to the kitchen and share some boeuf en daube à la Provençale, and fill in the conversational gaps left by Danny. Or was it Peter?
The three letters which Des had brought were now on the mantelpiece where they had been left after the third perusal. She had decided to consign the matter of the McNichol girl to cold storage where, though all was peaceful now, she suspected it would soon begin to make its presence felt.
Domina set aside the last, now corrected, page and fed a fresh piece of A4 into Ray, her faithful Olivetti.
‘Act Two, Scene One,’ she typed. ‘A large bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush. The room is freshly painted, yet irredeemably seedy – grotty furniture a must.’ Then she stopped.
She stopped and stared at what she had typed. It was always the same – the exhaustive notes, the title, the stage directions, then the wait. The wait could last from ten minutes to ninety or more. She had learnt never to force herself. If nothing came and she sensed impending frustration, she would leave her typewriter and get on with something else. Occasionally the latter would be letter writing, more often it was related homework. She had no books on theological students or young priests, so she opted, after a longish wait and another cup of coffee, for letter writing.
‘Dearest Pluto,’ she wrote, then stopped. Someone had knocked at the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Sorry. It’s Quintus.’ The door opened and the pale, decidedly interesting face appeared. ‘Sorry. You’re working, aren’t you? I’ll go away.’
‘No. Do come in.’ She slid a blank sheet over Saturday’s work. ‘It’s only some typing.’
He was in a suit. It took her wholly by surprise. Something about him, perhaps the winceyette pyjamas, had led her to expect a dull, charcoal grey school affair. But this was lightweight wool, the Italian kind whose minute squares of black and white produce an almost silvery grey. It was faultlessly tailored, though from the slight overhang beyond each shoulder, she evinced for somebody else.
‘What a lovely suit.’
‘Oh.’ He cast his eyes down and patted the material bashfully. ‘It’s ancient, really. It used to be my uncle’s. We are almost the same size so it was handed down to me. Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?’
‘’Course not. Sit down.’ He perched on an arm of the armchair. ‘Are you going out?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I’m off to Eucharist.’
‘Oh of course. Silly me.’ Bloody fool.
‘Actually, that’s why I dropped in. Partly.’
‘What?’
‘Well, I wondered whether you’d like to come. To Santa Sofia. The music’s special today.’
‘Is it a Saint’s day?’
‘Sort of. Sorry. Of course you don’t want to.’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘It would be rather fun. I’ve never seen an Orthodox service. But is it all right my coming? I’m not a member or anything.’
‘As Philip said to Nathaniel, “Come and see”.’
‘But don’t you have to bow and cross yourselves like mad? I won’t have the first idea when to do things.’
He grinned. ‘There aren’t many points where you have to do anything. For the most part it’s up to the individual. If you feel the need, you can lie flat on your face. There aren’t any pews or seats, you see. We just stand in a crowd. You mustn’t laugh – old biddies often leave half-way through to get on with Sunday lunch. It can be like Victoria Station.’
Domina sprang to her wardrobe.
‘I must wear something black with sleeves – that much I do know.’
‘Well, not if you …’
‘It’ll help me feel less conspicuous when I make howlers.’
‘I’ll be sitting on the porch. I’ve got to see Tilly to pay my rent.’
Apart from the brief revival of her faith after the success of Onwards and Upwards in the middle seventies, Domina had only set foot in church for funerals, weddings and for midnight mass, for which she reserved a nostalgic affection. As she walked with Quintus along Queensway to the Moscow Road, he explained things to the best of his ability, but failed to dispel her mounting sense of dread. She feared the inevitable sense of shame at her lapsed attendance and at being a voyeuse. As Quintus talked earnestly about the Diaspora, the Sacraments, the earthly heaven, the iconostasis and the Diakonikon, she trawled her mind for images of Greek Orthodoxy.
Apart from the obvious one of tall, bearded priests in high, black hats, she found only toothless, sabled crones who shut the windows in stifling Greek trains, solemn children in Corfu Town leading lambs on string, and a terrible, curiously guilt-ridden encounter with a cursing lavatory attendant in Knossos. Irreverently inappropriate snatches of Fiddler on the Roof would keep emerging as well, although she did her utmost to beat them back. Just as they were passing the bakery, she was saved by a sparkling recollection of a history lesson on the lawn in the convent cloisters. Sister Margaret was reading an extract from the Russian Primary Chronicle. It was brilliantly sunny and Domina had been paying her unwonted attention. The followers of Vladimir, a pagan prince of Kiev, arrived in Constantinople at the end of their quest for the true religion. They found the Church of the Holy Wisdom and were allowe
d to attend the Divine Liturgy.
‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth,’ read Sister Margaret who, though plain, was rumoured to be charismatic. ‘For surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.’ The memory gave Domina succour; as ever, beauty should prove a point of access.
Quintus had said that visitors were welcome, but no one seemed to notice her arrival.
‘Do you want to go near the back?’
‘Please,’ she whispered back, ‘it’s beautiful.’
It wasn’t terribly beautiful, in fact. The icons were undoubtedly expensive reproductions, and the architecture was similarly styled to type rather than to fancy. The most disappointing thing was the congregation. Apart from the few glaringly prominent converts and visitors, it was certainly composed of expatriate Greeks, but they were expatriate to the point of drabness. There were a few who had motored over from Knightsbridge and its environs, and some well-heeled families from the Holland Park community, but the rest were indelibly Bayswater, with drawn faces and characterless clothes. Domina’s initial deflation was acute.
Once the Proskomidia started, and she had overcome her surprise at its being both in English and not so removed from the common or garden Mass, she felt a gradual change in the crowd before her. It was less that they became more Greek than that they became more of a congregation. Her sense of exclusion swelled as that sense of unity of faith, of knowledge, of custom rose to the surface, and with that sense of exclusion came a perception of loveliness. The tonality of the hymns and chanting was alien, vaguely Slavonic, and unutterably sad. As the incense flowed, and was caught in the beams of light from the high windows, the icons seemed less blatantly new. As the first of the old women prostrated herself with a low Attic moan, the shades of Bayswater fled. The service had far more mystery, magic even, than any Roman Mass she had ever attended. She had witnessed pomp, certainly, as in High Mass at Saint Peter’s, to which Mamma had so often taken her, and in the still dawn ceremonies in the little Lady Chapel at Saint Mary’s she had felt herself in the presence of strong piety, but never had she felt such a powerful sense of conjury. It was partly a stage-managed effect, with music, smells, lights, gold and the eerie sound of Greek muttered defiantly in the face of the priest’s English text. But there was something deeper than all this. Quintus had described the Orthodox belief that Eucharist is a joint celebration in which the congregation is as vital a participant as the priests, and it was this spirit of unanimous concentration, Domina reflected, that would have been extremely frightening were the service not taking place in the noonday sun.
When Quintus turned to whisper in her ear, she realized that she had not been following the service but had been staring, entranced at the activities before her.
‘There’s Brother Jerome, over there by the old man in the brown suit.’
She looked, found the old man in the brown suit, saw the man in a black cassock beside him, and was aghast. She turned her eyes at once to the front, so that Quintus should not see her concern. The similarity was undeniable, the suggestions, abhorrent. She glanced again to her left. As she did so, the man in the cassock turned to look at something to his right, and her fears were confirmed. It was Seb Saunders.
Seb Saunders had killed her cousin, or so it had always seemed to her. Seb was the presiding homosexual of her year. Everyone’s year at Cambridge had one. Seb, who was one of those people who read philosophy because they already knew all there was to know about literature, had been hers. He was the only one who had ever posed a threat. He had been conspicuously beautiful, quite without the sickening taint of camp, and his notoriety lay in his ability to throw quite happily heterosexual men into confusion. Domina was not the only woman to have spent an exhausting night persuading her man that he was no less masculine for having been drawn into a dance, and at least tempted into more, with young Saunders. She had managed to keep Randy, but it was well known that many couples and even a marriage or two had been damaged by Seb’s spell.
He had met Gregory at her twenty-first birthday party. Mamma and Jacoby had made one last, great effort, and had laid on a weekend in Sussex for her and as many of her friends as could be fitted on to a dance floor. The obligatory smattering of aunts and godparents had been there too, including her cousin. Six years her senior, Greg was an up-and-coming barrister. Amusing in her childhood, he had become necessarily conservative. At some stage in the party Seb had introduced himself, and the two of them were seen to spend the rest of the Saturday night side by side, deep in conversation. On the Sunday morning, amid the debris, they were perceived to have gone. Nothing extraordinary was read into this. Seb was a notorious party-leaver, and Gregory was known to be overladen with work in London. It was only the next term, when her cousin surprised her by paying frequent unexpected calls and was sighted on numerous occasions prowling Seb’s college at night, that she realized he was besotted.
One morning Mamma appeared in Domina’s rooms and announced that her quiet, rather pompous cousin had taken rat poison. Seb only slipped through his degree, having long since outgrown his syllabus, and was believed to have drifted to Greece and taken to small girls and ouzo. Nothing had been heard of him and he had entered the annals of brandy-fired reminiscence, a paradigm of burnt-out youthful folly.
Seeing Seb now, after so many years, Domina was ambushed by the pain of her cousin’s death, a pain she had supposed to be quiescent. Seb had grown a beard.
‘Oh God of spirits and of all flesh, who hast trampled down death and overthrown the Devil and given life unto Thy world: do Thou, the same Lord, give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants, in a place of light, refreshment, and repose, whence all pain, sorrow, and sighing have fled away. Pardon every transgression which they have committed, whether by word or deed or thought.’
As the prayer for the dead rose around her, Domina bit her lip in an effort not to cry, but felt the tears already brimming in her eyes. Her throat burnt. A sob came and she tried to turn it into a cough. Whipping out a handkerchief, she blew her nose and bit her knuckles through the linen. She was crying freely, out of love for Greg, concern for what might happen to Quintus, and terror lest Seb Saunders had recognized her. Turning, she hurried to the porch and found herself out on the steps in the sunshine whiteness. Standing for so long, and breathing the thick, scented air had made her dizzy. She allowed herself to sink into a crouching position on the steps.
‘Domina, here. It’s all right. What’s the matter? I am sorry. I shouldn’t have … Was it the prayer for the Departed? Perhaps … your husband?’ Quintus was crouching beside her, beautifully suited, a long arm across her shoulders. She was mutely grateful for the proffered excuse.
‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’ She choked, and sounded her nose like a bugle. She mopped her eyes. ‘Yes. It’s so silly. It’s well over a year, now. It does this. Just takes me by surprise. Normally I’m lucky and it happens when I’m alone, listening to the radio or something. Elgar.’
‘Ssh. Don’t talk. Here. Have mine. Yours is drenched.’ He passed her a handkerchief. It was neatly ironed, white, with a blue Q in one corner.
‘Thanks.’ She blew her nose again and stood up. ‘I am sorry. Look, I’ll be OK. You go back inside.’
‘Nonsense. I couldn’t receive in any case.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I haven’t fasted.’
‘Oh.’
‘Let’s walk around the block. It’s nice and empty and you can talk.’
‘Bless you.’
They set off in silence towards Leinster Square. The sun-splashed pavements were deserted. Here and there a radio could be heard clucking out Sunday morning requests. Nostalgia and roast beef hung in the air. Quintus seemed to be waiting for her to talk. Domina blew her nose hard on his handkerchief and stuffed it into her sleeve.
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‘I’ll give it back when I’ve washed it,’ she said.
‘Oh. That’s all right.’
‘You know. My husband committed suicide.’ He only frowned. She went on. ‘I tell people it was galloping cancer, and it was in a way. He knew he had only a few weeks to live, and felt that it would make less suffering for me if he killed himself.’
‘How awful. I …’
‘It wasn’t until then that I realized how little he could have known me. I’d have nursed him quite happily. Bedroom deaths are so kind. They give one time to come to terms with what is happening. Oh, I know it would have been painful for him, but the way he decided … It was the shock that was so cruel.’
‘Do you want to … ?’
‘Rat poison. We’d had rats, you see, so there were tins of the stuff in the potting shed. I think it contains some form of cyanide. You add water and it produces a poisonous gas.’ Domina could feel the conversation twisting away from her grasp, yet the game of his discomfiture was intoxicating. ‘Do you believe it’s a sin – suicide?’
‘Well, I … I’ve always thought it depended on the circumstances. Despair is a sin, because it implies insuperable doubt, but one could do it out of mercy, and that certainly isn’t a sin. Sometimes I think it would be good to die for joy, in a sort of extremity of worship. I mentioned that to Brother Jerome as it worried me, and he said that an element of selfish joy could always be perceived in martyrdom but only from a doubting viewpoint – if one couldn’t understand that the pleasure of worship is selfless.’
‘Why wasn’t Brother Jerome up at the altar, behind the … er … the –?’
‘The iconostasis?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because he isn’t a priest. He’s just a monk. Well, I say “just”, but actually it means much more in some ways. The monks and the priests function side by side. The priests have a responsibility to their flock and parish and lead the congregation in the celebration of the Eucharist, but they tend not to go any higher in the hierarchy. In Greece they’re usually married villagers. The monks take vows of celibacy and abstinence, and can progress to become hierodeacons, and bishops and so forth.’
