Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

  “Are you living with anyone?” said Fingal.

  “No.” An Italian writer came down from Milan every second weekend to stay with her, but that couldn’t be called living with anyone. “Are you?”

  Kerry was the one who looked shocked, not Fingal. “What sort of question is that!”

  “It’s all right, Kerry,” said Fingal. “I asked her the same question. She has a right to throw it back at me. No, I’m not, Brigid.”

  “Why did you never marry again?”

  “Because I’m still in love with your mother.” It was an amazing admission from him: he had never mentioned the word love in their hearing. Both of them waited for him to go on; but he had said enough. “Do you want sweets?”

  “No,” said Brigid, “I want you to talk about Mother, what she was like before . . .”

  “That’s a closed book.”

  “You obviously haven’t closed it, not entirely.”

  Fingal sat silent, suddenly withdrawn, and after a moment Kerry said quietly, “I think we’d better leave it, Bridie.” It was the name he had called her as a child.

  Brigid felt she had almost entered a half-closed door; or rather, the closed book that had been their father’s life. She had felt on the verge of knowing him at long last, but he had shut her out once again. She decided, then and there, that it would be for the last time.

  She went back to Lerici, to the delightful village on the Gulf of La Spezia where she was renting a villa once owned by the Baroness Orczy, where that lady had written The Scarlet Pimpernel. Brigid looked down over olive groves, across the village to the old castle high on the point; beyond it was the arm of the gulf that reached round to Portavenere. She had tried painting the landscape and the seascape, experimenting with the interpretation of light, but her brush, she knew, was lifeless. It only came alive when she painted people, but even with them as subjects she was finding it difficult to have something to say. Mostly, she sat in the sun on her terrace and took delight in being a mother as Teresa continued to grow.

  Three months after her return from Zurich, someone turned up on her doorstep; but he was no pimpernel, even though he carried a bunch of primroses. Tewsday had always been heavy-handed in his courting.

  “I was in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d drop in.”

  “The neighbourhood? In Lerici?”

  “Well, not Lerici, exactly. Genoa, actually. Your father is buying into a shipping line and he sent me over to look into it.”

  “Did he tell you I was living here?” She knew he would not have.

  “No. You know your father, he never tells anyone about his family. No, I dropped in on Kerry in Rome.”

  “Dropped in again?”

  “Well, not dropped in, exactly. Bumped into, actually. I met him at the airport. He was going back to Sydney and I was changing planes to go up to Genoa.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Well, actually—” He was still out on the terrace, had not yet been invited inside. He stood back and looked at the villa. “I was hoping it was big enough for you to have a spare room for the night. Oh, who’s this? One of your servant’s children?”

  “No, she’s mine,” said Brigid flatly and made no attempt to introduce the 2-year-old Teresa. “Well, come in.”

  It was a Thursday and the Italian writer was not due till tomorrow night. Tewsday took her to dinner that evening in the Albergo Shelley and across the zabaglione and the last of the Tuscan wine he said, “Kerry told me about your villa and The Scarlet Pimpernel. You’re like the Pimpernel himself, so damned elusive.”

  “You read it?”

  “Oh, I used to be a great reader.”

  “Shelley lived here in this house, before it became a hotel.” The great reader looked blank. “Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poet. Byron lived down there, at the Casa Magni. He used to swim across here to visit Shelley.”

  “Ah, I never read much poetry. Queers, were they?”

  She took him home then, but not to her bed. He tried to get into it, but she kicked him out. “What about your wife?”

  “I’m not married, for God’s sake!”

  That surprised her. She thought he would be well married by now, smug and snug with a businessman’s wife in a businessman’s home, the kids, born or unborn, already registered for Cranbrook or Ascham schools, their lives mapped out like business charts.

  “Brigid—listen—I want to marry you!” His voice was loud in the bare-walled, marble-tiled bedroom.

  She fell back amongst the pillows laughing till she gave herself a stitch. He stood at the end of her bed in his pyjama trousers, Richard Hunt’s best silk, the long hair along histemples standing out: his plump face looked like a moon about to fly off in a fury. It is not true that there is no fury like a woman scorned; Congreve, who said that, had never been spurned by a man. Tewsday came close to murder that night. All that saved her was that he did not have the courage to strike the blow himself, there were no thugs to do the deed for him. He had been rejected before, but he could not stand being laughed at. From that moment on he hated her; had he loved her, he might have reacted differently. But he loved only three things: money, success and himself. He stamped out of her room, out of the house, out of Italy, went back to courting success and money. He did not need to court himself: that love was consummated every time he looked in the mirror.

  Back in Sydney, meanwhile, Father Kerry Hourigan made his first mistake as a priest. He had been moved from the Catholic Education Office to be an assistant to the Bishop-Coadjutor, a man so renowned for his misogynism that he made St. Paul look like Don Juan. A newspaper columnist rang the Bishop’s office and asked for a comment on Australian women’s apparent hunger for the Pill, which they were swallowing at twice the rate of women elsewhere. Kerry answered the phone, said, “Perhaps they think they’re jelly-beans,” and hung up.

  It was a harmless, facetious remark; but the columnist that day was short of material. He rang a well-known chain of confectionery shops, asked its opinion of the relationship between the Pill and jellybeans, then wrote his column. The next day the LOLLY WAR BETWEEN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND DARREL LEA was the joke of Sydney.

  Kerry was sent for by the Bishop-Coadjutor and exiled to the bush. “I have no time for women, but I’m not prepared to be made a fool of because of them and their lust.” He was as purple-faced as his shirt-front.

  Fingal got in touch with the monsignor at the seminary, who managed to get him a meeting with the Cardinal, a man known as Cement Crotch because of his habit of sitting on the fence on all controversial matters. The Cardinal was sympathetic, but said he couldn’t over-rule the Bishop-Coadjutor.

  Kerry was sent to a country town as curate to an old Irish priest who drank beer by the gallon, coached the local rugby team, understood the sins of those who crowded his confessional and gave them lenient penance, and who preached against Communism with all the fire and rhetoric of an old-time evangelist. Kerry hated life in the country town, hated the Saturday evenings in the confessional, but the old Irish priest, unwittingly, put him on to the cause that would lead him to Rome. The Vietnam War was warming up, the Domino Theory was a constant catch-cry in editorials and the Threat of Communism was now more important than the possibility of defeat at cricket by the West Indians or the Englishmen. Kerry had discovered the torch he had to carry into the future.

  Brigid wrote to him to commiserate, in a mildly sarcastic way, on his having to go out and wash away the sins of the Great Unwashed. She mentioned, in passing, that Jonathan Tewsday had paid her an unwelcome visit and had reduced her to hysterics by asking her to marry him. It was not just him, she wrote, but the thought of marrying any businessman just breaks me up. I can’t imagine anything more boring . . .

  Kerry didn’t share his sister’s jaundiced opinion of businessmen; they certainly weren’t as boring as farmers. He did not, however, like Jonathan Tewsday, whom he had now met several times and he would certainly not want him as a brother-in-law. He wrote
his father a weekly letter and in one of them he mentioned Tewsday’s visit to Brigid and his proposal of marriage.

  A day after receiving the letter Fingal sent for Tewsday. “Pack your bags. I’m sending you to Wellington.”

  “Wellington, New Zealand? But that’s Antarctica!”

  “Then you’d better take a fur coat. You’re taking over our office there and I’m bringing Parkinson to Sydney.”

  “I’d like to know what I’ve done to deserve this, Mr. Hourigan—”

  “You’ve stepped out of line,” said Fingal.

  Tewsday knew at once what he meant. “I think my private life is my own affair, Mr. Hourigan—”

  “Not when you try to link it with mine.”

  Fingal had thought long and hard last night whether he should get rid of Tewsday altogether. He recognized the social as well as the business ambitions of the younger man; not that he concerned himself too much with his own social status, but he knew that Fingal Hourigan’s son-in-law would always be in demand for the big social occasions. He also knew that there was no risk that Brigid would take Tewsday as her husband; she, too, was without social ambition. Tewsday’s crime was that he had dared to think of himself as Fingal’s son-in-law.

  Tewsday pondered a moment, then said, “I think I’ll resign, then.”

  Fingal remarked the half-hearted threat. He was tempted for a moment to accept the resignation: he wanted to drive the knife deep into the smug young man. He was, however, a businessman and he could never shut out business, not even to feed his spite. Tewsday was the up-and-coming young man in Sydney’s, if not the country’s, business world. He would be grabbed by any one of half a dozen other corporations, and Fingal would never give a competitor the time of day let alone his most valued protégé. Yet Tewsday had to be taught a lesson.

  “A year in New Zealand will give you time to think about it. There’s nothing else there to do.”

  Tewsday, for his part, did not want to leave Ballyduff. He knew he could walk into any other corporation in town and virtually write his own ticket. There was, however, no other corporation in town, or indeed the country, which showed the potential to dominate the national scene as Ballyduff undoubtedly would in the next five years. Tewsday had developed the long view into an art; tomorrow was next year, the day after, five years hence. If he stayed with Ballyduff, put up with the year’s exile in Wellington, he would be running this company before he was fifty years old. In his late forties, amongst the greybeards then running most of the country’s corporations, he would be the Young Turk.

  “Just a year?”

  “That will depend on what you do with the possibilities there. There must be something that can be developed there.” Fingal never looked in the direction of New Zealand; to him it was just a northern suburb of Antarctica. The national religion was rugby, there were fifteen Apostles called the All Blacks, and New Zealand racehorses always won the Melbourne Cup. He sometimes wondered why, like Tasmania, it was on the map. He was not alone in his myopia in Australia. “You can leave on Friday.”

  So Jonathan Tewsday went to New Zealand to do his penance. He did not beat his breast or order sackcloth from Richard Hunt’s. He did, however, take the long view on his growing hatred of the Hourigans. Some day they would all pay.

  IV

  Tewsday returned to Sydney and the headquarters of Ballyduff in September 1967, bringing back with him a pregnant wife. She came from one of the most socially acceptable families in New Zealand, a pioneer clan that had produced some of the finest merino wool in the world, though not from family members; two of the country’s leading bankers; a Cabinet minister; and three All Blacks. The family didn’t think much of the Australian who had no interest in sheep or rugby, but the daughter of the clan, a good-looking girl named Fiona, had a mind of her own and, like her husband-to-be, a long view. She knew she could never be an All Black, would always be a second-class citizen, always in the shadows in the Land of the Long White Cloud, so she took the opportunity to escape to Australia where, she had heard, women were learning to break free of their chains. She also loved Jonathan, though she sometimes wondered why. She consoled herself that she was probably not the first woman who had had doubts about her one true love. There is no evidence that she was blind in love after she dipped into the fruit.

  Tewsday, with that sleek confidence of the unabashable, moved back into Ballyduff as if he had never been away. Fingal gave him no special welcome, did not even bother to mention his stay in New Zealand. He had done his exile term, had brought back a wife and so settled his social course and, most importantly, had trebled the investments and profits of the New Zealand subsidiary. Tewsday had also multiplied his hatred of Fingal Hourigan, but was prepared to bide his time for his revenge.

  Kerry also came back from exile. His talents, the archdiocese soon realized, were too great to be wasted in the bush; the farmers could be relied upon to find their own way to salvation. Word of his understanding of and passion against the threat of Communism had got back to Sydney. He was what was needed in Rome, where there was a new crusade and where, said the Cardinal, separating national pride from religious expediency, there were not enough Australians.

  “You’re on your way,” said Fingal. “Now don’t bugger it up by making any more facetious remarks. Stick to Communism—you can never be facetious about that. Will you want any more money?”

  “I’d like something comfortable in Rome. I don’t want to have to share accommodation with some other recruit from overseas—Lord knows whom I might get.” Kerry would always look for creature comforts; he had no wish to be compared with St Francis of Assisi, poverty was for the birds. “Perhaps you could buy one of the old palazzi, say it was your Rome pied-a-terre, and I could live in it.”

  Fingal smiled, “You sound just like you did when you were fourteen years old. Show a little modesty for a start. We’ll get you a small flat, something that won’t make the bishops or even the monsignors envious. We’ll get you a car, too.”

  “A Lancia,” said Kerry, who, had he been a disciple, would never have followed The Lord on foot.

  “A Fiat cinquecento,” said Fingal, who had a better sense of the value of modesty.

  “I’ll never fit into it.”

  “Just shrink your ego, that’s all you need to do.”

  Kerry went to Rome, where Brigid came once to visit him with her new lover, a Communist Party official from Bologna. The two men got on well together, much to the chagrin of both of them and the amusement of Brigid; each recognized in the other a man constrained by the austerities of his beliefs. Brigid took them out to dinner at the Grand Hotel, fed them lobster and pheasant and wild strawberries from Sardinia and had a wonderful time, since she was the only one not troubled by conscience. She did not bring Teresa to Rome and Kerry made only a polite enquiry about his niece.

  On her return to Lerici Brigid broke up with her Communist lover, who wanted her to paint pictures of social significance. With Teresa and an Italian nurse she left Italy for London to throw herself into the last years of the Swinging Sixties. She was surprised to find that she now envied Kerry, began to wish she had some vocation of her own. Romance, or lust, call it what one liked, was no vocation.

  Fingal, meanwhile, was discovering his own loneliness. He had enough acquaintances to fill in what empty hours he had; but he had no friends and, despite his bouts of loneliness, wished for none. He also had no desire for romance; but lust still troubled him. A young whore named Tilly Mosman satisfied him there.

  He had taken a small apartment in the medical specialists’ street, Macquarie Street, in a building where all the other suites were occupied by doctors. If he were seen entering the building, which happened every Thursday in the early evening, it would be assumed that he was visiting one of the doctors. He and Tilly were never seen together; she was always waiting for him in the apartment when he arrived and always left after him. She already had a discretion that was advanced for her years.

 
; “Do you have any other clients?” said Fingal, being indiscreet.

  “No,” she said, lying.

  “Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life?”

  “No, I’d like to own my own house, a high-class one, the best in town. I’ve been reading the business pages in the Herald. They say that service industries are going to be the big thing.”

  He smiled. “This is a service industry? Well, yes, I guess it is. If I financed you, would you ever mention my name to anyone?”

  “Have I done that so far?”

  “I don’t know. Have you?”

  “No. What would you do to me if I did?”

  “I think I’d have you killed.”

  “You wouldn’t!” She started up in the bed, suddenly afraid of him for the first time.

  “No,” he said; but, he thought, he probably would have to have it done. He would have to give up a lot of pleasures when he became the Pope’s father. Though by then he would be beyond all this. “When the time comes, I’ll see what we can do about setting you up in your own establishment. But not yet—you’re too young.”

  “That’s what I’d like to be—the youngest madam in the country.”

  He couldn’t blame her; he had been just as ambitious at her age, even younger. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  In 1969 Australia discovered nickel. Holes suddenly appeared all over the Outback; some of the most worthless land on the planet became as valuable as a building site on Wall Street. Companies sprang up like financial weeds; ordinary men, and women, in the street rushed to fertilize the weeds with their savings. Mining shares rose from ten cents to a hundred dollars almost overnight. Entrepreneurs, a word most Australians had never heard of up till then and certainly couldn’t pronounce, came out of the scrub, the desert and the woodwork of one-room offices in the cities and became millionaires as fast as one could say, No Capital Gains Tax. It was the gold-rush of the nineteenth century all over again, except that it took place on the stock exchanges of the nation.

  Tewsday floated a new mining company for Ballyduff and Fingal let him have his head. But Tewsday made one of his rare business mistakes. In the rush to beat the competition to the bonanza, he only cursorily checked the so-called mining experts who came to him for backing. Bundiwindi Mining turned out to have much less nickel content in its ore than the “experts” had claimed.