She was on the phone when I arrived that day, and I tried to ignore the fact that her hair was gone as I placed the newspaper on the bed. 'I have to go,' she said into the receiver. 'It's him.'
Illness had made great and small modifications to Mrs Poole's face during those months. There was a certain shine in her cheeks, just where the bones pressed at the skin, and her lips were chapped. 'Have you no music?' I said.
'I'm just scunnered,' she said. 'Fed up with music.'
'That's a pity.'
'I've got this,' she said, pointing to a small unit shaped like an egg. The words 'Sound & Nature' were printed on the front. She twisted a grey knob and pressed a button: the sound of waves came surging into the room, water trickling onto sand, surf lapping over itself and gulls yelling above the waves. It suddenly felt absurd to hear these things amid the medical smells and signals of hospital efficiency. 'Sometimes you want to cut to the chase,' she said. 'These are natural sounds. I've been playing them through the day. At night too, sometimes, when I wake up and can't sleep. It's a very handy object. It makes me think of outside.'
The machine offered choices. The one we were listening to—the sea surf with urgent gulls—was called 'Ocean Beach', but one could also have 'Mountain Sunrise', a cacophony of singing birds and forest scrapings, or 'Gentle Stream', a noise to encourage the notion that one was idling beside a babbling brook. Mrs Poole leaned over and pressed the fourth button, 'Soothing Heartbeat', which seemed to suck all the action of the outside world into a single cell. 'This one is good at night,' she said. 'It just keeps going. It helps me think.'
I continued hearing the sound after she had turned it off. It played in my head like a stunning essay on the real and the imaginary. 'It's been a busy time in the parish,' I said.
'How's that?'
'Weddings,' I said. 'The parents seem to spend more and more money on outfits and dance bands. You should see the length of the limousines they hire. I was up at some of the houses, and all they ever talk about are the photographs and the cars.'
'Typical,' said Mrs Poole. 'You should put your foot down on that. You should tell them holy sacraments aren't about big cars. Plus they're wasting good resources and using up petrol. They all live within walking distance of the chapel. Why put out emissions for no reason?'
'Mass attendance is down, though.'
'That's right,' she said. 'They'll hire yer fancy photographers but they won't take their children to Mass. That's because the people round here are more interested in their mantelpieces than they are in their souls.'
'They have their moments,' I said. 'There was a great concert up at the Arranview Hospice. I led the prayers and some of them are very responsive. A very old lady—not in the best of health—wanted me to bless her room with holy water and say a decade of the rosary with her.'
'To improve her health?'
'No. She said it was in aid of her granddaughters, who are working the season in Jersey. She's worried about them. After the prayers and a cup of tea, the lady asked me to explain a word in her prayer book. "Manifestation".'
Mrs Poole looked at me with a second twinge of impatience. 'You've been doing some work in your parish, then,' she said. 'Well, at least that's something. I hope you didn't baffle the old woman with science.'
The quiet in the room was very different in texture from the quiet we used to enjoy in the rectory. Also different in meaning.
'I brought you a book,' I said.
'What is it?'
'An old one of my mother's. A Parliament of Crows'
'What's it about?'
'Oh, the usual. Everything and nothing. It's about the lengths people will go to in order to remain unhappy.'
'Stop it. Your mother's good at what she does.' She turned the book in her hands and examined its cover.
'Indeed,' I said. 'It's a novel about the last years of Fanny Osbourne, the woman who married Robert Louis Stevenson. He was the one with the famous stories, of course, but Fanny had her stories too, secret ones. Her life was in some ways more interesting than his, according to my mother.'
Mrs Poole looked at me and licked her lips, as if to lubricate them out of her practised silence. Her face was pale. I poured some barley water into a glass and swigged it as she inspected the front page of the newspaper. 'It's a horrible world we're living in,' she said. 'I'll be glad to read the book rather than all this stuff.'
'The paper,' I said. 'No, it's not cheering.'
'Bloody shambles,' she said. 'Why don't we just leave people in peace?'
'Because some people don't know what peace is.'
'And you a good socialist as well.'
'Oh, that old chestnut,' I said. 'I'm just praying that things turn out well for everyone.'
'That'll be useful,' she said.
'Don't be sarcastic.'
'Well, don't be shallow. I'll tell you, Father David, I think you are getting more like those warmongers by the second.'
'No,' I said. 'Just by the decade.'
She tossed the paper further down the bed and I felt a slight tremor in the atmosphere as her mood changed. The more ill she got, the more eager she became to run me down on moral grounds. There was no longer an imagined life we could easily sustain together. 'You have more faces than the town clock,' she said.
I walked to the window and back and felt the sudden burden of her feelings towards me, her rising dislike, as if she imagined that I myself were master of all the world's wrong-doings. 'I think you expect too much of me, Mrs Poole,' I said. My words appeared to extinguish a light in her eyes, as if a person with bad breath had just blown out a candle.
'You are repulsive,' she said.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You are a coward. A hypocrite.'
'Mrs Poole, please...'
'What do you know of the world? Where have you been? Had you any life at all, ever?'
'I've had some.'
'You had none! None. I am nothing to you. We are all nothing to you. What do you care now for people? Oh, you had your five minutes of being the big man of action. Where was that? At Oxford University? Don't make me laugh. You told me about it yourself. You were the sort of person who had a chandelier when you were a student.'
'I've never spoken to anybody about my life.'
'And no wonder,' she said. 'There is no life. Nothing. It's all invisible with your kind. You had a good way of thinking once. Just once. How long did it last? A month? A year? And now you're like those warmongers, believing whatever it suits you to believe.'
'Mrs Poole,' I said, 'you're not well.'
'Aye,' she said. 'But I know what my illness is. What is yours?'
'Mrs Poole.'
'You talk about morality. What morality? I tried to do the right thing and Jack knows that. But everything is just lies. People just lie about who they are and you are just ... you are just part of it.'
I said it was just the way she was feeling. I was a priest and that was what priests were here for, times of crisis. 'Oh, please,' she said. 'Don't make a hero of yourself every time.'
'The house misses you,' I said.
'No,' she said. 'You. It misses you. At least I'm there in my head.'
'Mrs Poole, let me help you.'
'I saw you with him. You desecrated that house. And I loved it there.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I loved it too.'
'The garden,' she said.
'It will always be there,' I said, and she turned her eyes to me, her eyes filled with tears and full of pity.
'You are a fool, Father,' she said. 'And I feel sorry for you. I really do. You don't know what you've done.'
I rubbed my hands with the alcohol cleanser by the sink, and it dried very cold on them. 'You know so much,' she said from the bed. 'Except loyalty. You know nothing about loyalty, Father.'
'Listen to the way you talk,' I said. 'You didn't learn that from your husband.'
'I know,' she said, quite sadly. 'I learnt it from you.'
There's a way of feeling
homesick, not for any house, not for any particular place, but just feeling homesick as a manner of being alive, every day a sense of existing in exile from a place where you might belong. The Germans have a word for it: Heimweh. I sat in the chair and the chair was a momentary prison: Mrs Poole had her view of me now, and there was no way back to our jokes and our music. At last she put down my mother's book and smiled oddly.
'His name is Toby,' she said. 'My own son.'
She looked at the window, seeing something through the glass, I imagine, that none of us will ever see precisely the same way, not mere clouds and streaks of blue next to Arran but a vast and personal ether of possible rights and wrongs. She seemed to draw all confusion down from the sky and through the windows and into her lungs as she sat upright in the bed with her eyes shining.
'That's a fine name,' I said. 'Different.'
'I suppose you think it's very wrong,' she said, 'for a mother to give her child away to someone else. But Irene's a special person. I knew she would give him the life he deserves.'
'Everyone has their reasons,' I said.
'Yes,' she said. 'We do, don't we? I didn't save Jack or myself any unhappiness by it, but I think I saved the boy some.'
'Perhaps that's true.'
She looked at me. 'I had a great-aunt who did the same,' she said. 'She had a handicapped son. And she let my granny bring the boy up because she had a better husband. It worked out, but the boy never really knew his mother again, and that's how it goes.'
We sat for half an hour with our own thoughts, a nurse coming at one point to take a menu away. I washed my hands again with the alcohol cleanser and sat back down with things to say but no way to say them. 'Families,' said Mrs Poole after a while. 'More than anything, I didn't want to have the same disease as Jack's mother died of. I really didn't want that. I wanted to show him I was better.'
'You are better,' I said.
She smiled. 'See how easy it comes to you, Father? You didn't even know the woman.' She patted the sound machine on the bedside cabinet. 'You're just like this,' she said. 'You sound perfectly natural but you are not natural at all.'
I bought the fish at a little shop in Troon. It all lay there in the window on hillocks of crushed ice—the clear-eyed perch, the pike, eels and carp, the shellfish heaped all orange and black—everything framed not like a haul from that morning's boats, not like a piece of reality standing at the centre of an actual day but like a picture of freshness invented and frozen behind glass: a still life with haggis. I took the credit card from my pocket. 'David,' my mother had said years before when she handed me the card and told me to sign the back. 'Spend whatever you have to in order to be yourself. I don't care about money.'
In the kitchen, I took out a small knife. I sliced the fish into slivers and cooked them in the pan with a dozen small onions. I crushed six cloves of garlic and noticed the clock. The voices in the next room were rising together in soft agreement, giving way to one another, allowing the room's atmosphere to expand into the music coming from the corner speakers, an attempt by Schumann at something blithe. The book was balanced on a perspex stand: Les meilleures recettes de ma pauvre mère by M. Huguenin, a first edition from 1936. I did as I was told and added the butter little by little, after the wine, and I shook the pan and watched the flame and thought of my father's meanness at games. He had that horrible habit of thinking card games were a wonderful test of human character: those evenings in Heysham, he laid the cards out like a man exposing his best instincts. I used to get nervous playing games with him. So did my mother. 'You don't keep your cards in good order,' he said. 'Tidy your cards. Then see.'
The supper was for Bishop Gerard. He sat at the table, using his hands, as usual, to weigh the words he spoke, fondling the air in front of him, shaping their rhyme and reason. He appeared to think all said things were over-said, and no sooner had he come out with something than his hands would knead the words down from their clear, high summit of expression. He would grab the words back, to leaven them, to limit their potential for damage. One imagines the little he spoke was measured well enough before he opened his mouth, but that was never the end of it: he continued to inflect those phrases with his fingers, as if it were part of the body's function, or a bishop's function, to protect the world from the motions of the mind. This was a delicate, parsimonious business, one made odd by the look of the hands themselves: in their ruddy plumpness they showed evidence of some gouging work on the part of his ancestors.
'Now, David,' he said, 'what is this you're giving us?'
'Burgundian fish stew,' I said. 'A favourite recipe. I'm afraid I'll have to insist on you all drinking the wine in the prescribed order. No mixing the wine in your glasses, either. I'm feeling very bossy tonight.'
I put His Lordship at the head of the table, and, on either side of him, two priests from the nearby parishes of Dairy and Irvine. I have to confess it was Gerard who preferred that I ask Father Damian, a young, untutored, patriotic fool, encumbered with a giant chip and a very broad sense of class merit, the latter facet owing everything to the impeccable miserableness of his origins. He was thought to put all this resentment to very good use in the former mining town of Dairy.
The other guests were charming. Father Michael was fifty-something, bookish, perfectly capable, and I noticed, while giving out the stew, that his eyebrows had been trimmed with scissors. Michael knew how to enjoy himself and I always found him generous. That evening, he spoke little and ate a lot, just as Father Damian ate nothing and spoke incessantly. At the other end of the table I put Mr McCallum, the headmaster of St Andrew's, wearing a blue pinstripe suit and a thin smile of alcoholic amity. I was very glad of him, though everybody else found him troublesome, and perhaps—with hindsight's unsparing clarity—I can see that it was unfair of me to expose him to the rigours of such a supper, where ambition and obligation tinkled with such menace among the bottles.
I imagined McCallum might do well next to Angela Path. She was one of those rather likeable, big-laughing women, redheaded and plastic-bangled and impatiently lipsticked, cynical by experience and intrepid by temperament, one would have thought. At any rate, she was quite high up in the Dalgarnock social-work department. I saw her often as I went about my business, and I knew she liked dinners and liked saying all her monstrous things about men and oppression and so on. She made me laugh. She had a frightful tendency to use the word 'dichotomies'. She was into astrology and something in her manner suggested she mightn't believe anything she said, which is rather exciting in its own way.
She handed me a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. 'Right, listen,' she said. 'I've been keeping it since last November. Is that a mistake?'
'Il est arrivé!' I said and kissed her on both cheeks. I remember taking her rather theatrical coat and putting the bottle in the fridge. I came back to the sitting room with a sparkling Burgundy, by which time Angela was already laughing gutsily with the Bishop.
After serving the fish stew, I opened an Aligoté from Meursault, a very nice Clos Vougeot and a Musigny. 'These two are from vineyards right next to each other,' I said.
'I'm not really a wine man,' said Father Damian. 'You couldn't manage a wee whisky?'
'Ice?'
'You're joking, man,' said Damian. 'We don't have ice in our whisky up here. This is Scotland.'
'Oh.'
'Talk about sacrilegious.'
Damian looked to the Bishop for confirmation and received it with a careful ghost of a smile. Then the young priest made a cradle of his fork and scooped up some peas, while Gerard, I noticed, set about spearing each pea with his fork.
'A lovely glass of wine, that,' said Mr McCallum. 'Not too dry.'
'Each is from the same region as the recipe for the stew,' I said.
'Very nice,' said Mr McCallum. Then he blushed. 'You certainly know your way around a menu, Father David.'
'It was ever thus,' said the Bishop.
'It must have cost you,' said Father Damian.
'Oh,' I said, 'we don't discuss that.'
'It was ever thus,' said the Bishop, but again good-naturedly. I went to the cupboard and brought back a bottle of Laphroaig and sat it down in front of Damian. He sniffed as some people do when they feel they are required to make a polite response.
'That'll do,' he said.
'What a totally divine concoction,' said Angela, speaking of the fish stew. 'You can taste the sea. Is that not what they say, Bishop?'
'You'll know better than me, I'm sure,' he said. 'But it's interesting, you know, when it comes to the sea.' The Bishop put down his fork and began moving his hands. 'I've always been quite nervous of it. I don't like the sea one bit. Of course, the gospels have a great deal to say about the sea, and where would the human family be without it? I think of Galilee and the Apostles out there with Christ. I get the message of all that, of course, but I never liked the actual water myself. That's my own opinion. And I stick to it. I think the ocean is a very overrated thing.'
'Well, perhaps if you walked on it, Bishop,' said Angela. 'I don't know if you've quite got to that yet. Ha! But they say it's a nice stroll once you get used to it.'
A moment of cordial laughter curled around the table.
'I'm willing to see it as a family thing,' said the Bishop. 'My people came from County Monaghan. That's a landlocked county. We don't have a strong sense of the sea.'
'That's a pity, Gerard,' I said. 'The sea is a great fund of miracles. And we have crossed a great many seas to be where we are now.'
'That's true,' said Father Michael.
'And we are fisher priests,' I said.
'You need to beware what you catch,' said Father Damian. He laughed loudly at his own remark and Angela joined him, though there was something rather different in the tone of each person's mirth. I cast a look in the direction of the Bishop.
'Untoward, Father Damian,' he said.
'Sorry, My Lord,' said Damian. 'Just one of my wee jokes. You can't get far in this world without a wee joke, sure you can't.'
'Well, I grew up by the sea,' I said.
'In England,' said Damian, but I ignored him, addressing my remarks to the ruby-coloured cheeks of Mr McCallum.
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