by Thea Astley
Crosses melted into swastikas, symbols of light and dark, ball, crescent, winged like gannets that zoomed around a wartime sky that was as devoid now, he could see, of actual bird, of bird heart (which meant spirit) or bright-bird eye (that was perception) as he of grace-greeting or welcome at Lord’s table.
But he could not bring himself to confide in apparent grumble-heavy, comfy-confidence that faced him sympathetically across the table, yet was still a stranger who then drove him to drunken careering scenic outlooks, a vast number of loquacious grogs and a multitude of moral and technical arguments about marriage and the uninterest of God that brought neither closer to solution when they came, tipsy with a variety of things, back along the late western road.
Someone hailed them at the five-mile turn-off, and Bernard, kind to hikers, drew up to find a face familiar, though it could have been years away. There were skin-tight matadors and a slick shirt, a knowing eye and a skin prettier than paint and without any, a lot of confused and phoney thanks. She was wheeling a sick bicycle with a dreadfully limp tyre and Dali wheel-frame. No explanations were really needed, and with it hoisted into the back of the sedan she smirked and said, “Thank you, Mr Leverson”, to his appalled astonishment.
“Do I know you?” he asked. “There’s something familiar . . .”
“You examined me,” she said, inching her worldly thighs away from Father Lingard’s now pivoted upon the handbrake with his bony knees knocking the gear-stick.
“Did I? It must have been a long time ago.”
“Oh please,” she complained pertly, “not that long. I’m Eva Kastner. I was doing Associate.”
“Yes, of course,” said Bernard, remembering suddenly and acutely. She carried a climate of danger about with her. “I hope you are keeping your playing up?”
“Yes and no,” the dreadful girl said with unbearable archness.
Yet she was more taken in observing Father Lingard, his mournful profile stamped against the other’s ginger abstractedness. He smelt strongly of liquor and, fascinated, she watched while his head lolled and dropped forward on his chest so that he looked sawdust-filled and limp. Just like a rag doll, she thought. Just like. And giggled, recalling the nun dolls (Dress them yourself!) unbelievably for sale in the local toy-shop some years ago until Monsignor Connolly’s purple-faced protests had the shocking things withdrawn. Suddenly he collapsed against her and closed his eyes as she tried to prop him up.
“Heavens, Mr Leverson,” the little liar said, “is Father Lingard sick?”
Something slowed down within and the car followed suit.
“Yes, he is,” he said shortly, drawing in to the grassy edge of the road. “Would you mind climbing in the back with your bicycle, and I’ll try to make him comfortable in the corner?”
Lingard made lizard eyes.
“Feel ghastly,” he said. “But impenitent. Yet still ghastly.”
His one slowly expanding and contracting sponge could not keep pace with either the alcohol or the false excitement his behaviour had top-whipped and that his guilt insisted upon. Lazy legs in the back swung her limbs across the bicycle frame pert as she, nickel-plated and also built for speed. But her glossy smiles met with no reassurance, her conversational openings were blocked, and the pressure of her personality eased when she was dropped off at a side-street near the convent.
“I’m thinking of doing a higher grade one of these days,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you next year.”
“Perhaps,” Bernard said, tolerant now she was going, and added absent-mindedly, “Keep up your practice.”
“Ooh, I will” she said with such appalling innuendo and breathiness that Bernard was flabbergasted and could not bring himself to acknowledge her wave.
Outside the presbytery of St Scholastica’s the sprinklers rained through the brown evening, but not as the quality of mercy, for there was in the air a silent hullabaloo of doom, on which Lingard’s eyes opened but could not focus.
“Don’t move me,” he said. “I’ll be ill.”
“Will I fetch someone out?”
“Heavens, no! Just let me sit for a minute while I regain balance. Shouldn’t drink like that, you know. Not used to the stuff. Can’t cope with my bunged-up innards.”
He leant heavily against Leverson, almost falling as he struggled from the car, and like a couple of Mack Sennett comics they wobbled up the path to the veranda, where Monsignor Connolly was watering the staghorns that hung all along the railing between the pots of maidenhair and begonia. He was pretending not to notice while he watered yet watched from a crafty Irish eye. They reached the foot of the steps.
“What’s the matter, Father Lingard?” he asked, all formal, his brogue thickening in mysterious ratio with splenetic secretions.
Father Lingard looked hazily at the two monsignors glaring down like Moses from the top of the veranda.
“I’m drunk,” he said. “Let me past.”
“Oh, and that’s very obvious now. Good God, you ought to be ashamed to be seen at all, let alone announcing the fact to all and sundry at the top of yer disgraceful voice.” His anger swung round on Leverson’s distress. “And as fer you, now, are y’ responsible for this? Taking a man of God off on one of yer drunken orgies for the whole town to see?”
“I suppose in a way I am.”
Monsignor Connolly swung his watering can like a weapon. “Git out!” he ordered thickly. “Out with y’ or I’ll throw you out, God give me strength!”
Lingard flapped his hands like wings.
“Now,” he said, “not his fault at all. Leverson, dear fellow, forgive him. He knows not what etcetera.”
“Blasphemy, too, Father Lingard!” thundered the Mons.
“Profanity, I think,” Lingard corrected maddeningly. And swayed.
“Dear God, that I should live to hear it,” moaned Monsignor Connolly. “The Bishop will have to discipline you. I wash me hands of it. It’s beyond me, it is.” He squawked down the hall, “Father Vince!” and flapped excitedly and without direction. “Father Vince! Father Vince! Come here, will you?”
Father Lake hovered his discretion in a bedroom door and tried placatory devices.
“Now, now, Monsignor,” he said, “please no fuss. What’s a drink too many? Surely half the parish is guilty.”
“Half the parish!” screamed the Mons. “What’s half the blithering parish when it’s us that should be leading them to virtue?”
“That’s true,” soothed Lake discreetly. “True, true.” He came down the steps and levered Lingard up them. “Come on, feller. We’ll sleep this off.” In his room the priest flopped on his bed amid the failed prayers, like so many dead roses of twenty-five winters, not even the fragrance as reminder, but the thorns of failure, the dead twigs of pleas and pleas and pleas. Not until the others moved away could he begin to contemplate the nonsense that Connolly was going on with, the sanctimonious hubbub frozen all over the room like non-fail novenas or miraculous medals. But above a slow-burning Pascal candle the other handsome tragic face of the Christ figure, essentially human and sympathetic, moved in across confetti-leaved lawns of his pastures. Christ, the friend of pimps and prostitutes, he prayed with humble reverence, and sensed the drunken tears move from behind his shuttered eye.
“I’m sorry,” he could hear Leverson saying futilely behind the closed door.
“Sorry! It’s a bit late for that now indeed. And so y’ should be,” the Mons added rudely. “We’ve got the good name of the parish to think of. But that wouldn’t mean a thing to you, I suppose, with yer city ways and yer fleshpots and all.”
“Look,” Leverson began to explain desperately. “We were unhappy. Unhappy, do you understand? You should understand. I told him a little of my own problems and, believe me, I have them. But he said nothing of his. And I think he, too, is a desperately unhappy man. Can’t you overlook a silly little thing like this?”
“Don’t teach me me job now, Mr Leverson, please. I think I know what ought and ou
ght not be overlooked.”
“Ach, you stuffy provincial Irishman,” Leverson hissed, losing his temper. “I don’t think you do.”
“You—what?”
“I said I don’t think you do. You’re supposed to be a man of sympathy and understanding and all you offer to someone in need of kindness is a suburban sense of outraged propriety.”
“God give me strength!” Monsignor Connolly said. “Father Lake, will y’ remove this impertinent man from me consecrated house?”
“He doesn’t have to. I’m going. I can say no more than that I’m sorry. I think kindness might be more effective than censure.”
The sick white of a dying man spread over Connolly’s outraged face. Fence-sitting on a Sunday after ten o’clock Mass and greeting his flock, he would recapitulate by his presence the affirmation of doctrines, convince of the efficacy of prayer. There was a dogmatic assurance in his no-nonsense Irish brogue that was the speech medium of poetry and fantasy and every delicious deviation or tricksy reapplication of the truth. But he was flabbergasted now.
“Make me a pot of tea, Father Vince,” he commanded, speaking from the seat of the Fisherman, the leather smoking chair before the television set. “And make it strong for the love of God. I’ve never been spoken to like that at all before.”
Do you good, thought red-head, who had squirmed through countless sulphuric sermons. (“Yes, y’d rush rush quick as a flash now if y’ was told y’d won the lottery. But catch y’ rushin’ to Mass for fear y’ might be five minutes late! Oh, not at all. Not on yer life.”) Or in the litanied evenings, after Benediction was over, making a late consolatory call to a sick parishioner on a farm, as the car skittered round dirt roads at sixty. (“I just say a Hail Mary now. It’s me best insurance.”) The Mons, he thought. The Mons. Parish figurehead, death-pale, snow-white, inflexible, stubborn as a mule. His soul, doily-neat, had scalloped edges of predictable pattern, and forty years in the confessional had made no difference to his expectations of the conventional. Monthly he still lashed the Children of Mary on the viciousness of alcohol and cigarettes, and although he had inveighed for a long time against the Jezebels who flaunted their cosmetic-bright faces, sheer weight of behaviour had defeated him.
“Tell me now, girls,” he pleaded once, “tell me now, why is it a woman shouldn’t drink or smoke?”
“Please, Monsignor,” some wilful suffragette smart alec had said from the side of the room, “it reduces us to the level of men.”
He’d kept quiet for a long time after that.
Now he sulked in the front room, sucking his teeth and tugging unprayerfully at his rosary beads; but after a while the pull of the brave cowboys was too much and he was off with the cussing, drinking men, the Galahads of the saddle, with the volume turned up extra loud—for, while he was a good old man, he had a venial sinner’s simple belief in the virtue of punishment.
“Libera nos domine” Father Lake prayed, and went out to the kitchen solitude with his thriller.
Leverson went back to the Focus and the compressed cooking smells superimposed like transfers of the day before the day before—steak, cabbage-rolls, pie, mince, roast. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he took out the photo he always carried with him and inspected with some curiosity these stranger faces—a woman called Iris and a boy called Keith.
Quite beside himself with his hollow-sounding soul, Bernard could not refrain during the week from writing some sort of letter to Doug Lingard, a letter that contrived to be friendship without unction.
. . . this final balm [he wrote—rather too artily, he felt, but could not avoid] that you talk to me about, this solace one can expect at the end—I simply cannot believe in it. In any case it’s hardly for myself I’m concerned but you whom I seem so terribly to have embarrassed. Did you manage to smooth things over? Are you friends again (forgive my humour!)—if not with God, at least with the Mons?
I think my Protestant wilderness may be less frightening than yours. No saints turned raveners lurk in the coverts. No fleshed images have reverted to plaster. The incense hasn’t failed and there never were any candles to go out. There’s just this rolling dullness in human relationships and only myself in it, though I must confess that a few days ago some remnants of feeling did seem to return to me. I wanted badly to strike Keith, who has been pestering like a genius. Surely this is a sign of returning life! Could I suggest it to you as a pick-me-up or are personal relationships quite closed?
There should be a new page for mundanity, you understand. But I’ll be back in Condamine for two days at the end of the fortnight. We can mundate then.
Yours,
LEVERSON.
Three or four days later he opened Lingard’s reply with an excitement he could not decipher, it so hung streamers above his bare walls, coloured windmills out of place, out of time.
I admit myself flummoxed. Endure is the watchword [Lingard had written]. Perhaps when you’re here we’ll have a chance to discuss this further—unaided by spirits!—but I write now because you deserve some warning of a rather unpleasant series of happenings. Forgive me, my dear Leverson, for thus rushing it at you, but I must.
A week or so ago Connolly received a quite scandalous letter, unsigned of course, alleging that your conduct with the examinees was more interested than might be proper in the circumstances. Euphemism on euphemism, you understand. The Monsignor’s first reaction, of course, was to rush to the Convent where the nuns very properly were outraged and sceptical. Following upon this, he next decided to send a furious denunciation to the Board demanding an investigation, but we managed to calm him and reduce him to sense after the Sisters had assured him that no parent had ever made the slightest complaint. Finally he agreed that when you return next week you should be shown this appalling letter and be allowed to take whatever action you think fit. Unbelievable victory!
I can’t say how upset I am to have to write like this. Forgive me. I don’t have to assure you, do I, that I know it is nonsense.
Yours in Jesus Christ,
DOUGLAS LINGARD.
The seasonless country was barely changed by frost when Leverson returned at the end of the week.
In the deadly brown smoking-room of the Focus, Leverson watched Father Lingard cautiously. The room harboured the stale breaths and jokes and hopelessness of commercial travellers in wine and underwear, of spielers in farm machinery and irrigation, of overnight politicians who had to cadge special votes and out-of-town tract-bearers, of belchings and one-too-many and the terrible dreariness of forced good cheer.
Father Lingard might have been unrolling one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so carefully did he prise back the paper from its envenomed folds until the centre of its deadliness was exposed.
“It’s ridiculous,” Bernard said, having read. “And rather pathetic. One can only ignore it.”
“Yes, I thought it sounded like the petulant outburst of some failed candidate. Hardly the parents of one, do you think? Have you any enemies?”
“Oh my dear Lingard! What a question! Of course. But who knows them? My wife. My son. My wife’s lover.”
Lingard winced, but not from outrage.
“Please,” he said, “you cannot be so cynical.”
Then Leverson did laugh, for he was angry enough with this letter. His soul felt as if it might heat and vanish through the lattice of his bones. “How about you?” he asked too loudly. “How about you? You have the most wonderful enemy of all—God. Oh, I envy you that. Remember what Wilde said, ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’ And you have the most wonderful antagonist of all.”
He puffed and was red with the climax of irritation and popped two humbugs at once into his mouth for control. Lingard, however, understanding right to the marrow of the moment, held the greyness of his lips in tight check before he could spit out the protests and cries.
“I wish I could see that.”
“See what? What I say?”
“Yes. That mine is the m
ost—well, most wonderful.”
“Ah well,” Bernard said, calming down and sucking away, but not intending the patronage. “Be happy in my envy. My genuine envy.”
The convent door looked twice as thick and swung back like a chunk of stone when Sister Matthew opened it to him, letting both the man and the sunlight in.
“How are you?” he asked, observing some feverish shimmer of youth behind the skin. She was so small he might have blown her aside with one breath of annoyance. But she avoided his eye, which she remembered as being directly and disconcertingly blue. A forlornness enveloped the bird look of her. Had she read the letter or heard of its content? He hoped not, quite urgently, for some inexplicable reason.
Sister Beatrice bustled him away to the music block, where he examined the few pupils who had missed the examination the previous month. He was surprised when the same frightened child that he had failed before reappeared and sat desperate before the piano. She was even less capable of playing this time and her plaits hung more sadly than life, dangling on the keys. Bernard was about to pat her shoulder when he remembered the letter. He would, he imagined, be pricked by this over and over again in like situations. He withdrew his paternal hand.
“We could try again next year, couldn’t we?” he suggested. And some muffled voice agreed vaguely. Was Christine—it was Christine, wasn’t it?—he consulted his lists—a pupil at the convent? No. She was Miss Trumper’s. And did she like Miss Trumper? Only a bit? Well, never mind, he would be going to see Miss Trumper and he would see what could be seen.
Just as he was finishing packing his books away, Sister Matthew entered without knocking. Having closed the door and heard it click, she leant back, clutching her music and regarding him steadily.
