by David Lodge
Her air and expression subtly altered in that period, though I was probably the only one to register the change. She lost some of her usual exuberance. There was a kind of abstractedness in her eyes, a wanness about her smile. Even her complexion suffered: her skin lost its glow, a rash of pimples occasionally broke out round her mouth. But most significant of all, she allowed me more freedoms than before, as if she had abandoned all hope of being good, or as she would have put it, in a state of grace, and further defence of her modesty was therefore pointless. When, one warm September night, I unbuttoned her blouse, and unfastened, with infinite care and delicacy, like a burglar picking a lock, the hook and eye that fastened her brassière, I encountered no resistance, nor did she utter a word of protest. She just stood there in the dark, beside the dustbins, passive and trembling very slightly, like a lamb brought to the sacrifice. She wasn’t wearing a slip. Holding my breath I gently released a breast, the left one, from its cup. It rolled into my palm like a ripe fruit. God! I’ve never felt a sensation like it, before or since, like the first feel of Maureen’s young breast – so soft, so smooth, so tender, so firm, so elastic, so mysteriously gravity-defying. I lifted the breast a centimetre, and weighed it in my cupped palm, then gently lowered my hand again until it just fitted the shape without supporting it. That her breast should still hang there, proud and firm, seemed as miraculous a phenomenon as the Earth itself floating in space. I took the weight again and gently squeezed the breast as it lolled in my palm like a naked cherub. I don’t know how long we stood there in the dark, not speaking, hardly breathing, until she murmured, “I must go,” put her hands behind her back to do up the fastener of her brassiere, and vanished up the steps.
From that night onwards our kissing sessions invariably incorporated my touching her breasts under her clothing. It was the climax of the ritual, like the priest raising the glittering monstrance aloft at Benediction. I learned the contours of her breasts so well that I could have moulded them in plaster blindfolded. They were almost perfect hemispheres, tipped with small pointed nipples that hardened under my touch like tiny erections. How I longed to see them as well as touch them, and to suck and nuzzle them and bury my head in the warm valley between them! I was also beginning to harbour designs on the lower half of her anatomy, and to dwell licentiously on the possibility of getting my hands inside her knickers. Obviously none of this could be decently accomplished standing up in the dank basement area. Somehow or other I must contrive to be alone with her indoors somewhere. I was racking my brains for some such stratagem, when I suffered a sudden and unexpected setback. As I was seeing her home one night, she came to a halt under a lamp-post at some distance from her house and said, looking at me earnestly and twisting her hair in her fingers, that the kissing, and everything that went with it, had to stop. It was all because of the youth-club Nativity play.
The idea of the play had come from Bede Harrington, the chairman of the club committee. I had never heard of anyone called Bede before, and when I first met him I asked him in all innocence if his name was spelled B-e-a-d, as in rosary. He obviously thought I was taking the piss and informed me stiffly that Bede was the name of an ancient British saint, a monk known as the Venerable Bede. Bede Harrington himself enjoyed a fair amount of veneration in the parish, especially from the adult members. He was a year or two older than me and Maureen, and had had a brilliant academic career at St Aloysius’s, the local Catholic grammar school. At the time of which I write he was Head Boy, in the third-year Sixth, and had just obtained a place at Oxford to study – or, as he liked to say, showing off his inside knowledge, “read” – English the following year. He was tall, with a long, thin, white face, its pallor heightened by his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and by the coarse black hair that seemed to part in the wrong place, since it was always sticking up in the air or falling over his eyes. In spite of his intellectual achievements, Bede Harrington lacked the accomplishments most highly valued in the youth club. He didn’t dance and he didn’t play football, or indeed do any other sport. He had always been excused games at school because of his shortsightedness, and he claimed simply not to be interested in dancing. I believe he was in fact very interested in the opportunities it offered to get into physical contact with girls, but knew that, with his gangly, ill-co-ordinated limbs and enormous feet, he probably wouldn’t be much good at it, and couldn’t bear to look ridiculous while he was learning. Bede Harrington had to excel at whatever he did. So he made his mark on the youth club by getting himself elected as chairman of the committee and bossing everybody else around. He edited a club Newsletter, a smudgy, cyclostyled document written largely by himself, and forced upon the reluctant membership occasional events of an intellectual nature, like debates and quizzes, at which he could shine. During the Sunday-night socials he was to be seen in deep conference with Father Jerome, or frowning over the club’s catering accounts, or sitting alone on a tilted chair, with his hands in his pockets and his long legs stretched out, surveying the shuffling, rotating throng with a faint, superior smile, like a schoolmaster indulging the childish pastimes of his charges. There was a wistful longing in his eyes, though, and it sometimes seemed to me that they lingered with particular covetousness on Maureen, as she swayed in my arms to the music.
The Nativity play was a typical piece of Bede Harrington self-promotion. Not only did he write the script himself; he directed it, acted in it, designed it, selected the recorded music for it, and did almost everything else to do with it except sew the costumes, a task delegated to his adoring mother and hapless sisters. The play was to be performed in the Infants’ school on three evenings in the week before Christmas, and again at a local old people’s home run by nuns, for one night only, on January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany – “Twelfth Night”, as he pedantically informed us at the first auditions.
These took place on a Wednesday club night early in November. I went along to keep a proprietorial eye on Maureen. Bede Harrington had taken her aside the previous Sunday evening while I was dancing with somebody else, and extracted a promise from her to read for the part of the Virgin Mary. She was flattered and excited at the prospect, and since I was unable to persuade her to withdraw, I thought I had better join her. Bede looked surprised and not very pleased to see me at the auditions. “I didn’t think this was your sort of thing,” he said. “And, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure it would be quite right to have a non-Catholic in the parish Nativity play. I’d have to ask Father Jerome.”
It came as no surprise that Bede had reserved the part of Joseph for himself. I daresay he would have doubled as the Angel Gabriel, and played all three Kings as well, if it had been practicable. Maureen was quickly confirmed in the part of Mary. I flipped through a copy of the cyclostyled script in search of a suitable part for myself. “What about Herod?” I said. “Surely you don’t have to be a Catholic to play him?’
“You can have a go if you like,” Bede said grudgingly.
I did the scene where Herod realizes that the Three Kings are not going to return to tell him where they found the infant Messiah, as he had hypocritically asked them to do, pretending he wanted to pay homage himself, and ruthlessly orders the massacre of every male child under two in the region of Bethlehem. As I mentioned earlier, acting was about the only thing I was any good at, at school. I gave a terrific audition. I out-Heroded Herod, to coin a phrase. When I finished the other aspirant actors spontaneously applauded, and Bede could hardly avoid giving me the part. Maureen looked at me adoringly: not only was I the best dancer and top scorer in the club, I was also obviously the star actor too. She herself was not, to be honest, much of an actress. Her voice was too small, her body-language too timid, to communicate across the footlights. (A figure of speech, of course: we had no footlights. All we had in the way of stage lighting was a battery of desk lamps with coloured bulbs.) But her part mainly required her to look meek and serenely beautiful, which she was able to do without speaking or moving about much.
I quite enjoyed the first weeks of rehearsals. I particularly enjoyed teasing Bede Harrington and undermining his authority. I quarrelled with his direction, offered suggestions for improving his script, continually improvised new business, and blinded him with theatrical science, throwing around technical terms I had picked up from work, and with which he was unfamiliar, like “block”, “dry” and “upstage”. I said the title of his play, The Fruit of the Womb (an allusion to the “Hail Mary”) reminded me of “Fruit of the Loom” on the label inside my vests, provoking such mirth that he was obliged to change it to The Story of Christmas. I clowned outrageously, reading the part of Herod in a variety of funny voices, impersonations of Tony Hancock and Bluebottle and Father Jerome, and causing the rest of the cast to collapse in hysterics. Bede, needless to say, responded to these antics with ill grace, and threatened to expel me at one point, but I backed down and apologized. I didn’t want to be fired from the show. Not only was it rather fun, but it afforded me many extra opportunities to meet Maureen, and see her home, which Mr and Mrs Kavanagh could not possibly veto. And I certainly didn’t want to leave her unprotected in Bede Harrington’s directorial power. I had noticed that, in his role as Joseph, he took every opportunity to put a supporting arm round Mary’s shoulder on the journey to Bethlehem and during the Flight into Egypt. By watching his performance very intently, with a faint, sardonic smile on my face, I was confident that I deprived him of any thrill from these physical contacts; and afterwards, when I walked Maureen home, I enjoyed my own sensual pleasures all the more.
Then Bede succumbed, rather late in life, to chicken pox, and was off sick for two weeks. He sent a message that we should carry on rehearsing under the direction of a boy called Peter Marello, who was playing the Chief Shepherd. But Peter was also captain of the football team and a good mate of mine. He deferred readily to my judgement in matters theatrical, as did the other members of the cast, and I became in effect the acting director. I thought I improved the show no end, but Bede wasn’t best pleased when he returned, spotted with fading pustules and pockmarks, to see the result.
I had cut out the tedious recitation of the whole of T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” which Bede had put into the mouth of one of the Three Kings, and written two big new scenes for Herod, based on memories of Sunday-School bible stories and Scripture lessons at school. One had Herod dying horribly, eaten up by worms – this promised to be a wonderful Grand-Guignol spectacle, involving the use of Heinz tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce as a prop. The other was a kind of flash-forward to the beheading of John the Baptist by Herod at the behest of Salomé. I had persuaded a girl called Josie, in principle, to do the dance of the seven veils in a body-stocking; she was a cheerful peroxide-assisted blonde who worked in Woolworths, wore bright red lipstick, and had a reputation for being a good sport, or rather vulgar, according to your point of view. Unfortunately it appeared that I had muddled up three different Herods in the New Testament, so Bede deleted these “excrescences”, as he called them, without my being able to put up much of a fight. Even so, I think it is safe to say that the character of Herod figured more prominently in our nativity play than in any version since the Wakefield cycle.
We were now well into December, and Father Jerome, who had left us very much to our own devices up till then, requested to see a run-through. It was perhaps just as well that Salomé’s dance of the seven veils had been cut, because even without it our play was insufficiently reverent for Father Jerome’s taste. To do Bede Harrington justice, he had tried to get away from the usual series of pious tableaux, and to write something more modern, or as we would learn to say in another decade, “relevant”. After the Annunciation, for example, Mary suffered from her Nazarene neighbours something of the prejudice experienced by unmarried mothers in modern Britain, and the difficulty of finding room in the inn at Bethlehem was obliquely linked to the contemporary housing shortage. Father Jerome insisted on the removal of all such unscriptural material. But it was the spirit of the whole production which really disturbed him. It was too profane. “It’s more like a pantomime than a Nativity play,” he said, baring his fangs in a mirthless grin. “Herod, for instance, puts the Holy Family in the shade entirely.” Bede looked at me reproachfully, but his long face lengthened even more as Father Jerome went on: “That’s not Laurence’s fault. He’s a fine actor, giving his best. The trouble is with the rest of youse. There’s not half enough spirituality. Just consider what this play is about. The Word made Flesh. God Himself come down from heaven as a helpless babby, to dwell amongst men. Tink of what it meant to Mary to be singled out to be the Mother of God –” here he looked searchingly at Maureen, who blushed deeply and lowered her eyes. “Tink what it meant to Saint Joseph, responsible for the safety of the Mother of God, and her infant Son. Tink what it meant to the shepherds, poor hopeless fellas whose lives were little better than the beasts they looked after, when the Angel of the Lord appeared to them saying, ‘I bring you tidings of great joy, that shall be to all people, for this day is born to you a saviour, which is Christ the Lord.’ You have got to become those people. It’s not enough to play parts. You’ve got to pray parts. You should begin every rehearsal with a prayer.”
Father Jerome went on for some time in this vein. It was in its way a remarkable speech, worthy of Stanislavsky. He completely transformed the atmosphere of our rehearsals, which he regularly attended from that day on. The cast approached their parts with a new seriousness and dedication. Father Jerome had convinced them that they must draw on their own spiritual life for inspiration, and if they didn’t have a spiritual life they had better acquire one. This of course was very bad news for me, as regards my relationship with Maureen. After his public homily, I noticed that the priest drew her aside and engaged her in earnest conversation. There was something ominously suggestive of a penitent in her posture as she sat beside him, her eyes lowered, hands joined in her lap, nodding silently as she listened. Sure enough, on our way home that evening, she stopped me at the corner of her street and said, “It’s late, Laurence. I’d better go straight in. Let’s say goodnight.” “But we can’t kiss properly here,” I said. She was silent for a moment, twisting and untwisting a strand of hair round her finger. “I don’t think we should kiss any more,” she said. “Not like we usually do. Not while I’m Our Lady.”
Perhaps Father Jerome had observed that Maureen and I were very close. Maybe he suspected that I was leading her astray in the Temple of the Holy Ghost department. I don’t know, but he certainly did the business on her conscience that evening. He told her what an extraordinary privilege it was for any young girl to portray the Mother of God. He reminded her that her own name was an Irish form of “Mary”. He said how pleased and proud her parents must be that she had been chosen for the part, and how she must strive to be worthy of it, in thought, word and deed. As Maureen relayed his words in a mumbled paraphrase I tried to laugh off their effect, without success. Then I attempted rational persuasion, holding her hands and looking earnestly into her eyes, also in vain. Then I tried sulking. “Goodnight, then,” I said, plunging my hands into my raincoat pockets. “You can kiss me once,” said Maureen miserably, her lifted face blue under the streetlamp. “Just once? Under Rule Five?” I sneered. “Don’t,” she said, her lip trembling, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, grow up, Maureen,” I said, and turned on my heel and walked away.
I spent a miserable, restless night, and next morning I was late for work because instead of catching my usual train I stood at the corner of Hatchford Five Ways and waited for Maureen. I could see her figure stiffen with sudden self-consciousness, even a hundred yards away, as she recognized me. Of course she had spent a wretched night too – her face was pale and her eyelids swollen. We were reconciled almost before my words of apology were out, and she went off to school with a buoyant step and a smile on her face.
I was confident that, as before, I would gradually overcome her scruples. I was wrong. It was no longer just a
private matter of conscience for Maureen. She was convinced that to go on necking with me while portraying the Virgin Mary would be a kind of sacrilege, which might bring the wrath of God down not only upon herself but upon the play itself and everyone concerned in it. She still loved me, it caused her real anguish to deny me her embraces, but she was determined to remain pure for the duration of the production. Indeed, she made a kind of vow to that effect, after going to Confession (to old Father Malachi, the parish priest) and Communion, the weekend after Father Jerome’s intervention.
If I’d had any sense or tact, I would have resigned myself to the situation, and bided my time. But I was young, and arrogant and selfish. I didn’t relish the prospect of a chaste Christmas and New Year, a season when it seemed to me one was entitled to expect a greater, not a lesser, degree of sensual licence. The 6th of January seemed a long way off. I suggested a compromise: no necking until after the first run of the play was over, but a relaxation of the rule between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, inclusive. Maureen shook her head. “Don’t,” she murmured, “Please don’t bargain with me.” “Well, when then?” I insisted brutally. “How soon after the last performance are we going to get back to normal?” “I don’t know,” she said, “I’m not sure it was normal.” “Are you trying to tell me we’re never going to?” I demanded. Then she burst into tears, and I sighed and apologized and we made it up, for a while, until I couldn’t resist nagging her again.
All this time the play was in the throes of final rehearsals, so we were forced constantly into each other’s company. But tempers were short and nerves frayed all round, so I don’t think anyone in the cast noticed that Maureen and I were going through a sticky patch except perhaps Josie, who had a small part as the Innkeeper’s wife. I had long been aware that Josie fancied me from the regularity with which she asked me to dance in Ladies’ Invitations, and I was aware, too, that she was jealous of Maureen’s starring role in The Story of Christmas. Apart from Herod, Josie’s was the only really unsympathetic character in the play; we were drawn together in rehearsals by this circumstance, and by a shared indifference to the religiosity which had overtaken the production, and deprived it of most of its fun. When the rest of the cast solemnly recited the rosary at the beginning of every rehearsal, led by Father Jerome or Bede Harrington, I would catch her eye and try to make her giggle. I flattered her performance at rehearsals and coached her in her lines. At the Sunday-night socials I asked her to dance more frequently than before.
