by Thea Astley
Last March at St Scholastica’s concert literal collapse had been near from silent banked-up laughter in his single lung when Father Lake had done his imitations. Not so much was it the skill of his colleague as the stunned faces of two elderly nuns a row away—Sister Philomene was leaning sideways against shock and the grey moustache on Sister Aloysius’s face shook with outrage. He thought they might have been saying aspirations but couldn’t be sure.
“The top o’ the mornin’ to you!” bellowed Tom Brophy, sweating into a borrowed stiff front while choruses drowned the crashing supper cups that clinked like the money being counted at the door. Irish reels, St Patrick tableaux, the mountains o’ Mourne. Fake brogues thickened with treacle of nostalgia and sentimental expatriates all Hibernian tipsy in the school hall until eleven o’clock tipped them out, nuns scandalously late to crunch back to their cells above the courtyard. Father Lake had driven him and the Mons home like a lair cabbie, both of his passengers clutching special St Patrick medals mounted on pads of green and white satin which Mother St Jude had worked with bredes of shamrocks. Father Lingard gave his to the housekeeper, a keepsake she slipped into her bag to be forgotten with half a dozen blessed articles and a memory of lavender water and Palm Sunday.
He inspected the last negative and rewound. From the parlour came confusion and distorted television blare that he dreaded but offered himself to in private atonement.
“Tarradiddle!” Monsignor Connolly was saying testily as he pottered across the sitting-room and fiddled with the aerial and then an array of adjustment knobs. Four horse-riding thugs blurred, wobbled, faded completely, and returned with phantom doubles.
“I do think if you tried contrast it would help,” Father Lake said stubbornly. “You can’t expect divine intervention every time.” But the Mons twitched at the knobs without bothering to reply.
“The only decent programme, too,” he moaned. His chins gave the simplest statement a pontifical veneer of authority that caused Father Lingard, sitting back against the book-wall, to smile and smile.
“Why don’t you try the national channel?” he asked mildly. “It’s the best reception on the Downs.”
“Why?” Monsignor Connolly held the aerial two feet over the cabinet. “Why? Because—oh! That’s it! Look at that now! I said before it was—oh, God love us! It’s gone again!—because I can’t stand the heavyweight stuff after a day around the parish. This sort of thing relaxes me. I’m no stuffy intellectual, thank God, and I’m not ashamed to admit there’s nothing I like more than a Western. There now—now . . . c’mon now. . . .” He coaxed the aerial across the set and put it down gently as the screen sharpened. “There.” He watched entranced as a baby. “Ooh, did you see that now! Ooh! There’s a nasty customer for you, Father Vince. I’d give him a good stiff penance.”
Father Lingard shifted sadly and tried not to watch. If only he wouldn’t talk, he thought. If only he’d stop and let the racket on the hellish machine batter them insensible.
Hideously clear a fag ad dominated the eye.
“No wonder all the Children of Mary smoke,” commented Monsignor Connolly, glaring at a pretty thing on a ski-lift. “They’ve made it a snob symbol.”
Lingard soothed. “I never understand why you get so worked up about it Everyone does it. It doesn’t seem a sign of moral turpitude to me.”
Connolly scowled under his peat-thick eyebrows.
“That’s just it. The smoke, then the teeny drink, and then on to—ah, here it comes again. Faint as ever.”
“An old film, perhaps,” Lake said placatingly.
Monsignor Connolly sagged fatly into his chair. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll offer it up. Remember the time I went on that Bay trip and caught the wrong launch with a lot of gospel students from some exclusive sect now. There I was, trapped on a teeny island down the Bay, with nothing but me breviary to read and not a sausage to eat. And there they were with their barbecue steaks going like mad things. But I kept right out of their way. I was in me cassock, y’see, being a Church picnic and all, and God knows what happened to the other ferry.”
“But surely they called you over and shared lunch,” Father Lingard said wonderingly.
“Well, now, it was only a bit of an island, mind you, but there was a hill on it and all, and I was too proud—me dreadful pride—and too cross having got the wrong boat, and I wouldn’t give in and go round. Not till the launch came back late that afternoon and we all got on together.”
Lingard laughed as he went out to heat the cocoa, rattling cups in gigantic signal to bring Lake from the other room. Each evening after she had prepared dinner, the housekeeper went home and the three men shared out cleaning up and getting breakfast. Everything had shabbiness and shoddiness, except for a row of gleaming vulgarity, a marching rank of plastic food containers given by a mother’s committee last Christmas. Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. And now plastic. He hummed a hymn savagely as he put the spoons and sugar out on the tray. Even on Palm Sunday last the Pascal palm had been piled and tumbled into two enormous green plastic washing baskets over which Monsignor Connolly swung an anachronistic censer.
Through kitchen window and across whiter grass the white stone church hung over him in the moonlight, came at him across the lawn through the narrow pane, leaned, crushed.
His tongue swelled round conversational nothings as he found the difficulty of being cheerful, of creating illusions of light in his almost ever-present dusk.
“Want a hand?” inquired cheerful Father Lake, who was schoolboy sanguine.
“In more ways than this.”
“Oh? Two lumps for the Mons?”
“Cut him down to one, Vince. He’s always complaining about the weight he’s putting on.”
“Shan’t we even let him make his own sacrifices?”
“Oh dear, no,” Lingard said, smiling smoothly. “Some are born sacrificed, some achieve sacrifice, and others . . . but set him out an extra biscuit then.”
God knows, he tried to be sprightly, to keep it up, to live with eyes unblinking and aware in the full blinding light of divine love which, he seemed to feel more and more intensely, appeared to withdraw itself until one day it would become the eye-ball splitting pinhead of light, or to flow just past him or beyond or fall short of that distance requisite for ecstasy. But he was a nothing-man this year, a priest with his vocation askew, no other object in view but a detailless desert whose wells of prayer had all dried up.
It was not, he supposed, that he had lost faith; or perhaps it was that and he didn’t know any more. Who had he become but the confessor with the automatic replies? You put a mortal sin into the slot and out gushes the advice with your penance in small change.
“Do you know, Vince”—his confession gushed unexpectedly—“last Sunday, quite suddenly in the middle of Mass, looking down at face after face raised blindly to receive its God at the altar rails, I was filled with terrible boredom. Not horror, mind you. Or rage or anger or anything understandable, really. Just boredom.” He poured the cocoa deliberately from saucepan to pot, carefully spilling nothing physical, and added salt to it—or his wound. “If I could care enough, you understand, to weep, to be emotional, to cry out against or to God. But no. I feel like the symbol of a yawn. A great yawn incarnate.”
Simple Lake was staggered. But he managed, “It’s nothing, Doug. We all get it. It’s just a patch to be lived through.” He remembered something he never could bear to remember.
“But what do I do?” Lingard asked. “Do I need a holiday? Could it be as easy as that?”
Once, he recalled, he used to be a sponge, an emotional junky, a soak during a Missa Cantata, enjoying himself enjoying God, and his superiors had warned him that emotionalism would fail him, that during the barren patches all he could do would be wait until he emerged to find God exactly where He had always been. When you are our age, they said, the false comforters, you will be aware of the symptoms long before the despair sets in.
“Perhaps,” Lingard suggeste
d dubiously, “I could confess this to you. Perhaps if I committed some whacking great sin I’d regain the sense of communication, of being taken back.”
“It would hardly be worth it,” Lake said. “Breaking a leg to get to know your doctor!” And again the little thing he hated to remember hailed him jauntily across the park of his soul.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped Lingard, “spare me the corny comparisons of the mission pulpit.” He hesitated. “Sorry, Vince. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Check!” said Father Lake in fake American to disguise his embarrassment. “It was rather silly. It’s too hard to talk about without being sententious. Maybe all you do need is a holiday like me.”
He groaned and grinned, the shape, the substance of apology just not here. He was doing all the inner parish rounds on a push-bike, not from asceticism, but because for the second time he had overturned Monsignor Connolly’s car on the Killarney Road. Not that the Mons drove any less recklessly. “Never bother about me insurance, man,” he’d say, spinning the wheel at a bend. “I just say a Hail Mary and hope for the best. Put your trust in God now, is what I say, and there’s nothing we can do about it after that.” Parishioners being kindly transported to christenings shuddered whitely in the back seat as Monsignor Connolly overtook at seventy, gabbling “prayferusnowandatthehourof”—then, turning at right angles from the steering to say to transfixed passengers, “What a wonderful thing to know there’s no death”. Yet—“You make it very hard for me to keep me temper, Father Vince”, he complained. “Very hard. God knows being a Christian isn’t a profitable business at all.” For the three weeks the parish car had been at the panel-beaters the Mons was forced to share the apostolate with his good friend and golfing partner, the Presbyterian minister. “Drop me a little farther along,” he’d say, “and I can be calling at the Mumbersons while you drop in on the Duckworths.”
“Shall we make it the other way round, John,” Rod Auld used to suggest, “and let’s see who gets a conversion first?”
“Let’s go back to the gangsters,” Lingard said, balancing their tray.
The parlour whined with bullets while Connolly, sitting a bucking metaphor like an old stager, loped across the mesa towards heaven, easy in the saddle. The sixty seconds of commercial were a special purgatory that made him aware of time and place.
“Where’s me cocoa, Father Vince?” he called over his querulous old shoulder.
And it rocked towards him obligingly as he swung back on to the trail.
Lingard, conscious only of his spiritual weightlessness, settled with difficulty into a chair and supported the next unendurable half-hour for the sake of charity and the glittering-eyed sponsor who, somewhere behind packets of useless goodies, would be counting gold nuggets.
“I am a nothing-man,” he prayed later that evening after he finished reading his office. “Deliver me.”
Sick to his core, he edged his way between the cold still sheets and remembered as he did so that he had forgotten to put the presbytery cat into the laundry at the back where it could coil up near the boiler. So he went out again, shivering in pyjamas, and called and mewed till a narrow shadow pelted across the frosty grass and gave his thin legs one bleak rub.
Through late afternoon air, ale-pale, Bernard drove back from Stanthorpe, sucking a humbug, longing for a cigarette, and promising faithfully across his untuned heart a double Scotch as soon as he reached town. Events followed their deadly sequence. Ten miles out he had to refill his petrol tank, and between the space of that and one more boiled sweet he found the outskirts of Condamine again, crunched the last bits of lolly, and was all in order sluicing cold water over his face, his soul coming up for air. Jupiter Pluvius in shirt-sleeves, he made chopping movements with a comb, straightened a less conservative tie, and went shaggily down to the lounge where he waited for Father Lingard to join him for lunch. He arrived sick, late, calm, pushing through the gluey pre-summer air of the pub like a drowning man.
“Are you ill?” Bernard asked, concerned.
“Not really.” Lingard gave what he intended as a smile. “Nothing the medico could put his finger on. There was some worry with a parishioner. Monsignor Connolly asked me along and it all took more time than we expected. I’m sorry. Why, do I look sick?”
“You’re very pale.”
“Hunger, perhaps. Shall we go in?”
There were two travellers, the dusty men in suits two years out of date, the wide-lapelled boys with the wide line of talk. They had red faces and gluttonous eyes, and expense accounts that worried them even as they diddled their bosses. They were spooning up soup. And at the proprietor’s table a proprietorial wife managed a steak and put it in its place.
“Everything finished now?” Lingard asked out of politeness as they separated salad leaves in a search for ham.
How true! Bernard thought, sensing irony. He extracts it from me, this prelate with the persuasive voice and the unhappy eyes.
“Yes. Everything. After everything is finished there’s a feeling of complete relaxation.”
“True,” the other agreed with his own irony. “True, true. Yet I cannot say relaxed is the exact word . . . more butter? . . . empty, rather. Or nothingness.”
“Yes, thank you,” Bernard said. He greased another fraction of his bread roll. “That gets very close to my feelings lately. Seven days ago it hit me at last that I was adult and freed of certain relationships that had bound me for years. For a couple of days, you know, I was sustained by a tremendous exhilaration. Saw things for the first time. Read posters and the legalese on the back of bus tickets. It felt exactly like the time I had a stroke and afterwards discovered I’d sharpened a semitone.”
The gloom lightened.
“A semitone?”
“Yes. After perfect pitch, you know, very odd my dear fellow to hear things like the Bach Passion in C when you’re expecting it in B minor. Everything—well, not exactly—had a rebirth. But there was certainly a fillip to everything.”
“And your feelings? You were saying something about your feelings?”
Bernard paused. The volta in the sonnet. He saw Keith come up the back stairs in his creased jeans, his jumper wrinkled and grimy, his face sullen, his words insolent. He watched Iris plead with him and he said, “Well, my marriage is—not on the rocks—one hardly knows what to say when that is a positive condition which would be better than it is now. My marriage is not on the rocks, but should be.”
“It perseveres then?”
“Yes. It perseveres.”
“Against reason? Against comfort?”
“Against all those things.”
“Without love, too?”
“Yes. Certainly that.”
His doggy eyes became curious. Here was that confessional precision that insisted on the exact nature, and how often and with whom.
“But your boy? You have a son. There’s your love.”
Bernard waggled his head. “No. There is something wrong. Lately he even hates—I think that may be the word—his mother. I can’t say that the love is there for me.”
With the penultimate care of the executioner Father Lingard placed knife and fork together over a piece of beetroot.
“Perhaps he has discovered you hate each other,” he said.
“But we don’t. Not at all. That’s what I’m trying to explain. There’s nothing positive like hatred. There’s simply—nothing.”
Lingard almost smiled. Brother, he said inwardly, come in! And welcome!
“Does this upset you, this conversation?”
“No. You see, not even that. It would upset me if I cared. I think maybe I do care about Keith and his mother—but not sufficiently.”
“Have his feelings towards you changed?”
“Not appreciably. He’s been going through a difficult spot. Goes he won’t say where. Arrives home at impossible hours, dresses shockingly.”
“That’s natural enough, though,” Lingard said. “Every third family
has teen-age sons behaving that way. But it does seem odd he directs his hostility towards only one of you.” He reflected. “You know, Leverson, on second thoughts, maybe that is not so odd. His age. His mother. Curiosity and hostility might be intermingled. Sex does idiotic things with boys.”
Bernard, although unwilling to release his son’s conscience, managed to admit awkwardly, “He insists he is no longer innocent.”
“Oh?”
“Some woman picked him up one night when he walked out.”
“The top of the iceberg, as the brain-shrinkers say! Why did he walk out?”
“Who knows?”
“Do you believe him?”
“No. Not really.”
“It’s an explanation, of course.”
“Yes, of course, but it’s one of those histrionic remarks Keith is rather given to.”
“Well, there’s his guilt, and then there’s the simple fact that at fourteen—is that his age?—he simply hasn’t the maturity to cope with the situation. It could be perfectly true. And he could be suffering the most fearful shock. You didn’t punish him, did you?”
“No, of course not!” Bernard protested indignantly. “You surely don’t think I’m a complete medievalist.”
“Shouldn’t I be?” Lingard inquired wryly. “No, I never suggested it. You anticipated me. I was only going to say we carry our own hells within.”
They ate sombrely, dealing with geometric custards and stewed tea from some eternally brewing urn. Yet after lunch the attraction one unhappiness has for another trapped them together, so that despite a generalized sense of guilt and sloth, Lingard sat defiantly on in the lounge, gloomily matching Leverson beer for beer. The room filled up with crustaceans—varnished hard-jawed mums and small-bit farmers all coated with the same malty staleness that made disgust palpable.
“They’ll think I’m a whisky priest,” he said. “Occasioning bad example.”
Leverson smiled. “Would you care to take your vices farther afield?”
“It might be better,” reflected Lingard, looking out of the window at the winter flies and the trail of dead ones cluttering the inner sill. The pale gradations of umber and fawn shivered away behind the war memorial and the Masonic hall. There was a time, he knew, when he had been more aware of the liturgical seasons and the changing colour of vestments than he was of actual summers or springs; the sonic modulations of the Latin Gospels troubled him more than July westerlies blowing from the gold-streaked, cold-blinkered skies, washing with wave and waft of cloud.
