Be Near Me
Andrew O'Hagan
* * *
HARCOURT, INC.
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* * *
© Andrew O'Hagan, 2006
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First published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber Limited
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O'Hagan, Andrew, 1968–
Be near me/Andrew O'Hagan.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. Catholic Church—Clergy—Fiction. 2. Problem youth—Fiction.
3. Scandals—Fiction. 4. Memory—Fiction. 5. Scotland—Fiction.
6. Psychological fiction. I. Tide.
PR6065.H18B42 2006
823'.914-dc22 2006030402
ISBN 978-0-15-101303-6
Text set in Minion
Designed by April Ward
Printed in the United States of America
First U.S. edition
A C E G I K J H F D B
* * *
for Mary-Kay Wilmers
* * *
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And when the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
'In Memoriam A. H. H.'
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
* * *
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE January 1976 1
ONE Sundial 4
TWO The Mouth of the River 26
THREE Mr Perhaps 53
FOUR Ailsa Craig 78
FIVE Schoolboy on an Elephant 102
SIX The Nights 122
SEVEN The Economy of Grace 146
EIGHT Balliol 175
NINE The People 212
TEN The Echo of Something Real 235
ELEVEN Kilmarnock 258
TWELVE The Single Life 285
* * *
PROLOGUE: January 1976
MY MOTHER ONCE TOOK an hour out of her romances to cast some light on the surface of things. I was just back from Rome and we stood together on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, watching the sky go black above a warship anchored in the Firth of Forth. Picture that time of day in the old city when the shop windows stand out and the streets of the New Town begin to glow with moral sentiment. She took my arm and we rested like passengers bound for distant lives, warm in our coats and weak in our hearts, the rain falling down on the stone.
'David,' she said, 'I'm going to give you some guidance that is more serious than the afternoon requires.'
My mother turned and I saw the gleam of old stories in her eyes. 'Always trust a stranger,' she said. 'In this life, it's the people you know who let you down.'
'You are a great tonic,' I said. 'If I go too long without exposure to your bad character I begin to grow affectionate.'
'An adverse growth, as your father might have said.'
'Quite so.'
When the light had disappeared and our hands were cold, we thought better of going round a pictorial history of the one o'clock gun, walking instead to a chintzy tea room at the top of the Royal Mile. The place smelled of wet carpets and Calor gas, and the counter was taken up with those three-tier cake stands, ornate and sad and heavy with scones. 'Lovely plates,' said my mother. 'Bohemian glass.'
We warmed our fingers round cups of tea.
'A person not willing to have their heart broken is barely alive,' she said, putting a piece of shortbread into her mouth. 'I don't mean you, David. You're a different case altogether.'
'Stop it, Mother,' I said. 'I'm not some whey-faced character from one of your books. Crazy-haired. Mad with grief.'
'I don't see why not,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with grief. You've been through such a lot.'
'Rome put it behind me.'
'I don't know about "behind you". In my experience, nothing is ever behind anyone.'
'Oxford has vanished,' I remember saying. 'All that stuff. It seems so mysterious to me now. You know, Conor almost gave me a way of thinking. It was like the world was going to go our way at last.'
'It might still,' she said.
'We would fight all the spite and shame of the world.'
I told her I was looking forward now to a quiet ministry in Blackpool. 'Maybe that will be my tribute to Conor,' I said. 'Just working in an ordinary parish and greeting the faith of ordinary people.'
'You've always been addicted to sweet thoughts,' she said. 'But I advise you to put your faith in strangers. Sometimes it's nice to just be on the surface of things.'
'Not easy for a priest,' I said.
She paused to lick her finger and dab some grains of sugar from the corner of her mouth. Her watch said twenty past five and it gleamed as she reapplied her make-up.
'Just don't forget your way back.'
'No,' I said. 'I won't.'
People passed outside in the rain. I could see them stooped beneath their umbrellas, voyaging home, wrapped in privacy. 'I suppose you belong to Lancashire,' she said. 'But there is always a place for you here.'
'I know.' I lifted my cup. 'But here's to the south. We go where we must go to find the right weather, don't we, Mother?'
'Oh, yes,' she said. 'If we have the wings, that is what we do. Just keep your scarf round your neck and your phone numbers handy.'
'You're so practical, Mother.'
'I know,' she said, with a lipstick smile, 'but what else is there?'
CHAPTER ONE
Sundial
ONE IS NEVER PREPARED for the manner in which home changes over time. That tea room was twenty-nine years ago. Scotland was my mother's world, and my years in Blackpool were spent in pastoral oblivion, a kind of homelessness which has followed me everywhere. Lancashire was the place where I grew up, my father's world, but serving there as a parish priest provided me with nothing much greater than the small comforts afforded in my line by the habits of duty.
I wanted to add something new to my mother's life. She had always been so original, so full of words, so ready with money, the distances between us being no bar to her encouragement of me, her enjoyment of our hard-hearted jokes. But she was growing old. I thought we might do more laughing together and visit the places she liked. The year before last, I came back and took charge of a small Ayrshire parish, to see her, to be close to her, though I can hardly say that the move was made in heaven.
Troubles like mine begin, as they end, in a thousand places, but my year in that Scottish parish would serve to unlock everything. There is no other way of putting the matter. Dalga
rnock seems now like the central place in a story I had known all along, as if each year and each quiet hour of my professional life had only been preparation for the darkness of that town, where hope is like a harebell ringing at night.
It all began to happen on Good Friday. The rectory was pleasant and well-groomed, and my housekeeper, Mrs Poole, brought two large bowls of lettuce soup to the sitting-room table. I had just come back from the second service of the day, feeling tired, with a heaviness in my legs that made me wonder if I wasn't ageing rather badly. It is not always easy to know the difference between religious passion and exalted grief. I felt Mrs Poole was watching me and ready to say a number of things, but the light of the chapel still glowered in my head, willing me to regret the need for human contact and the niceties of lunch. Mrs Poole was in her most efficient mode and soon had me smiling.
After several months in Dalgarnock I noticed she was more at home in the rectory than one would have expected. She loved it there, loved what she called 'the feel of the house', and her admiration was particularly drawn to the presence of numerous clocks and books and second-rate pictures, the stuff of my own past.
'You've a bit of education up yer sleeve, Father. That's the thing. When people have been places you can just tell. What a house for pictures. You are somebody just like me: you like yer wee things round about you. Now, half the people you meet go on like their home is a prison. But when you walk in here, you see right away it's a place for thinking.'
'I don't know about that, Mrs Poole.'
'Oh, away ye go. A man like you knows how to think.'
She made a fetish of the house plants, speaking to them, paying tribute as she bent with the watering can to the good company they provided. She was a great enthusiast for the environment, by which she meant the outside world, but the inside world was the domain of her greatest exactitude. Hours would come and go as she moved about the place, the dust a sign of some freedom she had barely known, the cluttered rooms full of corkscrews, prayer books, exhibition catalogues and seed packets seeming to her to indicate a peaceable universe very unlike the one she maintained in her house by the railway bridge.
'Mrs Poole,' I said, 'don't get me started on big topics. I'm looking for laughter today.'
'You've picked a fine day for it,' she said. 'There's a dirty great sponge of vinegar being presented to the Lord's face as we speak.'
'That's fine,' I said. 'But I need a glass of wine.'
'Bloody hell,' said Mrs Poole. 'When I was a girl, Good Friday was a day for closing the curtains and hanging yer head. Now you're all calling for the wine bottle. You'll be casting lots for the bloody cloak next.'
I spun my keys and looked up at the ceiling. A frosting of cobwebs sat lightly over the old chandelier.
'Did I ever tell you, Mrs Poole?' I plucked at my bottom lip and pointed up.
'What's that?' she said.
'This very chandelier was hung in my first set of rooms at Balliol. Can you imagine? A present from one of the Anderton aunts.'
'Heaven save us.'
'It's true. My aunt thought it was criminal for a young man to have to study under an oil lamp. I used to stare up at it during the night instead of writing essays on the English Civil War. It was even dirtier then. Can you imagine that, now? This very chandelier?'
'A right ticket you must have been, Father,' she said, 'with your chandeliers and all the rest of it. Very nice. As you lay there inspecting your fancy light, my sister and I, we were five years younger than you and working nightshifts.'
'Hard work. How dreadful. Was she cured of it?'
'Oh, aye,' said Mrs Poole. 'We were all cured of that soon enough.'
'I'll take your word for it,' I said, 'given the amount of muck on that chandelier up there.'
'Don't start me,' she said. 'There's work enough to be done. Too much work to be bothering wi' yer daft lights.'
'Get you,' I said. 'It's Mutiny on the Bounty.'
'Slave driver.'
'Yes, indeed,' I said. 'You wouldn't want it any other way.'
Mrs Poole was forty-two, but her attitudes made her seem older. Only when she smiled did one notice she was quite young. She had no college education, nor did she come from a background that supported her enthusiasms, but she had schooled herself with the kind of personal passion that verges on panic, and her mind absorbed and retained. This process had started years before I met her—with night classes in French, with cookbooks—but she always said that side of her had become important in her time with me.
'You just sit there quiet half the time,' she said. 'But I know you're boiling with arguments, Father.'
'Is that right?'
'Oh, piping! And don't be shy. There's a thousand things to discuss and hardly anybody to talk to.'
'Very good, Mrs Poole.'
My mother made the point that my housekeeper was like a heroine in Jane Austen: she would have distinguished herself in any class, yet her circumstances acted upon her like a series of privations she was determined to overcome. The fact made her unsteady sometimes but pretty much always likeable. She had little time for The Tongues, as she called them, the people of the town, and saw our friendship as an overdue reward and a lucky extension of her long dedication to self-improvement.
'I have finally found my job,' she said. 'And a person who knows how to put a sentence together.'
'Good stuff,' I said. 'Just don't forget I've a gangplank through there for people who yell about their rights.'
'Fascist,' she said.
'Uh-huh.'
'Roman soldier!'
'That's right,' I said. 'That's my job.'
She smiled and hooked a dish towel over her shoulder. 'That's enough of your cheek, Father. Come and have your lunch.' She swept a theatrical hand over the dining table in the manner of a far-travelled merchant presenting his latest silks. 'Quickly now. It's soup. Potage de Père Tranquille.'
'Du Père,' I said.
'Right. The best abstinence money can buy.'
'Goodness, Mrs Poole. Lettuce soup. There are monks and starving people who would thank you for this. Can we go wild and add a few bits of bread to the feast?'
'Suit yourself. Be my guest. If you want to remember Christ's agony by gorging on crusts, I can't stop you.'
'Just a few delicious dods of the old pain de campagne."
'That's fine,' she said. 'I bought the organic stuff.'
Mrs Poole worked only two and a half days a week. She liked to smile at unpredictable things and gave the impression she showed sides of herself in the rectory that she couldn't show at home. Her husband Jack was a part-time gardener for the council. 'He just cuts the grass,' she said, as if to separate his efforts from the sorts of things we might do ourselves.
Mr and Mrs Poole appeared to live together in a state of settled resentment. She said they seldom went out and that he had given up on trying to make her happy. He wasn't the man she had married, apparently, and a thousand things had happened, she said, that made it clear he couldn't deal with responsibility. Even after the events of that year, I don't think I ever came to understand what Mr Poole really thought of his wife and the world she craved. But she may have been wrong to assume that his drinking was the biggest part of him, that he was, in some barely conscious way, a standard-bearer for the town's worst prejudices. Some might have called him a broken person, yet there was more to him, and more to her, than either of them would find time to recognise.
It was Mrs Poole's habit to see him as a failure. I think perhaps his biggest failure, in her eyes, was to seem to deny something very essential in her as they got older, something that might have made them more elevated and more sophisticated than the people around them, the people—'his people', she would say—of whom Mrs Poole had come to feel perhaps too easily scornful, and whom he, Jack, had an equally natural ability to understand and to rub along with quite nicely.
'Yes,' she said once. 'Being one of them.'
'Don't be too hard on Dalgarnock,' I said.
'The people from here are no different from people elsewhere, except they probably have more to deal with and smaller means to do it.'
'You'll find out if I'm too hard on them,' she said, and I knew from the way she said it that she'd heard things against me or against priests in general or people from England.
Mrs Poole thought that Jack saw her new habits and interests as being pretentious and wanted to deny her an opportunity for personal growth. 'He doesn't know me,' she said. 'You know me better than him.'
'I don't know about that, Mrs Poole. I only know a few old prayers and a dozen facts about Marcel Proust.'
'That's you then,' she said. 'But it's not nothing. It's a damn sight more than most people round here. Most of those people wouldn't give you daylight in a dark corner.'
'Is that one of your native expressions?'
'That's right. They wouldn't give you the shine off their sweat.'
'Nice,' I said. 'Proust would be proud of you.'
'Shush,' she said. 'You know what I mean. You can't expect a priest to know much about life, but at least you've read a couple of books.'
'Whatever you say,' I said.
I could only assume Mrs Poole came to work to live another sort of life. As with all her jealously guarded, self-defining hours—the night classes, the environment, the afternoons down at the Red Cross shop—her time at the rectory was spent, at least in part, in solid opposition to her husband's view of her as a person gaining airs and ignoring the hands of her biological clock.
One day we visited the garden centre. It must have been a month into my time there in the parish. I had been telling Mrs Poole a thing or two about the older kinds of rose. We looked up some books, and it was decided that rose bushes were exactly the thing for the rectory garden, planted with care round the walls, each of us falling by degrees into a strictly imagined world of old fragrances. That day, Jack was in the children's playground next to the garden centre when we came out bearing our new plants. He didn't see us coming along, though I suspect Mrs Poole saw him, for she flinched and the small leaves on the bushes shuddered as we walked across the gravel.
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