A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  ‘Oh, Father,’ I blurted out, ‘surely you don’t want to die with a toothache’—at which they both laughed heartily.

  Mrs Pring had her way and at 11 o’clock next morning Fr Duddleswell was in the torturer’s chair.

  ‘Well, what is the verdict, Tom?’ he said to the tall, thin, slightly cross-eyed dentist who had examined him. ‘Are you about to shove your road digging equipment down me throat, then?’

  Tom Read lowered his white mask, bit the inside of his lip and shook his head. ‘It’ll have to come out, Father.’

  ‘Never! ’Tis me best ivory by far. I think I had better get a second opinion.’

  The dentist turned to me. ‘Fr Boyd, would you care to take a look?’

  I gazed in at Fr Duddleswell’s cavernous mouth. A frightening prospect like the entrance to the chamber of horrors at a travelling fair. ‘The one on the left?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Father, on the right. The one that’s all black.’

  Fr Duddleswell jerked his head away. ‘Tom, I asked for a second opinion. Father Neil here is not even one hundredth of a second opinion.’

  ‘I’ll give you an injection for it, Father.’

  ‘May be so, Tom,’ said Fr Duddleswell, eyeing the long syringe on the glass table top, ‘but what will you give me for the injection?’

  As the young lady assistant prepared the instruments, Fr Duddleswell recounted briefly the course of his disintegration. Vertigo, being shaved by a woman, having to walk on his curate’s arm, or with the aid of a walking stick, and now the last worthwhile tooth in his head about to bite the dust.

  ‘What a change of days,’ he groaned. ‘Were a tile to fall off the roof this minute it would be sure to land on me bloody head.’

  I closed my eyes at the point where Fr Duddleswell seemed to be swallowing the dentist’s fist.

  On our return, Mrs Pring immediately noticed the blood on Fr Duddleswell’s lips. ‘’Tis nothing,’ he said with merciful speed. ‘I have only parted company till resurrection day with one of me teeth.’

  Mrs Pring’s rejoinder was instantaneous. ‘That’s one less for your Reverence to gnash in the Fire.’

  He sat down and screwed his tongue into the blood filled cavity before turning to me. ‘Father Neil, here am I, down on me luck like Job on his dunghill, and there is herself taunting me like Eliphaz the Temanite.’

  Mrs Pring offered him sixpence for the tooth. ‘If the mice don’t want it,’ she said, ‘I can always leave it to the diocese as a first-class relic.’

  Fr Duddleswell did not appear to mind the fact that his most valuable pair of scissors no longer matched. I think it was because he was so relieved the vertigo was disappearing. When he reclined in Tom Read’s chair he had expected his head to start whirling faster than a dentist’s drill. Instead, he felt no ill effects. ‘What is left of me,’ he prophesied, ‘is on the mend.’

  On the morning we returned to the Sussex Hospital to learn the results of his X-rays, Fr Duddleswell was in buoyant mood. He was sure he would be given a clean bill of health.

  A stunning Korean nurse ushered us into a cubicle where we were asked to wait for Mr Taylor.

  ‘Did you see that nurse, Father Neil?’ he whistled. ‘She is wearing black stockings in mourningful anticipation of me decease. Some of them have such sweet faces on ’em they would turn me head any day of the week.’

  He went on to joke about the kind of funeral he looked forward to. A hearse drawn by six black horses. A solemn sung Requiem with the Bishop preaching a panegyric packed with the most beauteous mendacities. Trembling hands lowering him gently into the narrow house. The clergy chanting In Paradisum, tongue-in-cheek, and after, while their tears rolled down their cheeks into their whiskey glasses, taking bets on who would be the next to go. And, of course, leading the procession in a black hair net, old Mrs Pring.

  That was when we became aware of Mr Taylor’s voice drifting in from an inner room. He was talking on the phone in a somewhat tired voice like a judge. At that distance, I could only pick up snatches of his conversation but I distinctly made out, ‘Nice old chap … Good job there’s not the complication of wife and kids … No doubt about it … X-rays … Tumour on the brain … Yep, quite inoperable … Should see Christmas through with a bit of luck … No pain, no … Shall I tell him or will you?… Thanks, Doctor … I’ll see you get all the …’

  All this time Fr Duddleswell’s grip was tightening on my arm. There flashed through my mind the memory of an old lady I had once met in hospital when I was a student. She was dying and she kept describing how her head was in a whirl and she felt as if she was falling, falling from great height.

  The specialist entered and peered over the top of his halfmoon spectacles. ‘The Reverend Charles Duddleswell?’ He was obviously surprised to see us sitting there.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  As the specialist picked up the X-ray photographs, Fr Duddleswell sighed heavily, ‘I heard your prognosis.’

  ‘Prognosis?’

  Fr Duddleswell said he didn’t particularly want to leave the discussing of such sorrowful topics to his old friend Dr Daley. Mr Taylor sat there stunned for a moment trying to fathom out the situation.

  He burst out with a laugh. ‘I was gassing with a colleague on the phone and it wasn’t about you, Mr Duddleswell. The worst you’ve got is a flea in the ear, so to speak.’ He went on to explain that virus was a word used by the medical profession to cover up its almost total ignorance of the causes of many maladies. We were not interested.

  A couple of minutes later, we shook hands with the doctor and went out, doing our best to support each other.

  ‘Father Neil,’ Fr Duddleswell said, while we waited for the taxi, ‘that gentleman did not seem to realize that in the space of sixty seconds he had condemned me to death and reprieved me. Did you not hear him laugh?’ And after a few moments of reflection, ‘’Tis strange how sadness and hilarity grow from the same stem like roses and thorns.’

  Mrs Pring was waiting on the doorstep to check up on the efficacy of her Mass stipend. Her first sight of us could hardly have increased her hopes. We were both looking white and shaken as we stepped out of the taxi.

  To Mrs Pring’s enquiry, Fr Duddleswell replied with his usual delayed humour, ‘’Tis bad news, I am afraid.’ Before he could conclude with, ‘I am going to live’, I was stooping down to pick the housekeeper off the floor. Fortunately, she had fallen without banging her head.

  As I carried her to Fr Duddleswell’s study, he was twittering anxiously. ‘How was I to know she would make a heap of herself on the floor? Women have no sense of humour, Father Neil. Have y’noticed how women laugh almost as rarely as men cry? Laughing is too serious a business for ’em, I suppose.’

  I settled Mrs Pring in a chair and ran to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I got back she was already regaining consciousness. She was saying, ‘O my head. Everything’s spinning round and round.’

  Fr Duddleswell said he knew how she felt.

  ‘I’ll look after you, Father dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  Fr Duddleswell tried to break it gently to her that she might have a long and arduous job ahead.

  ‘You are going to die, Father D?’ she asked suspiciously, and she would not be fobbed off with another sip of water which was all he offered her for an answer.

  I took the glass from him and stooped over Mrs Pring to make her drink but she was so outraged at his deception that she knocked me sideways. As I lifted my head, I cracked it on the stone mantelpiece right in the tender spot which had blacked the policeman’s eye. There was an explosion of white light inside my skull and I sank slowly down to the carpet. When I opened my eyes, there were the three of us in a circle, clasping our heads.

  Fr Duddleswell held out his hand to us guiltily. ‘Ring-a ring of roses?’

  Mrs Pring pushed his hand aside. ‘You are a fraud,’ she cried. ‘Do you hear me, Father D?’

  ‘Mrs P,’ he sai
d, breathing heavily through his nose, ‘I could hear you in me deafest ear. I only wished I was dead so I could at least get me two-minute silence.’

  ‘A fraud. A fraud.’

  ‘Be careful, woman,’ he said menacingly, ‘or I will raise these hands to you with the fingers hid.’

  I had made my exit and bathed my bump in the bathroom a long while before the argument downstairs had ceased.

  IV The November Blues

  The sermon began: ‘’Twas fifteen hundred long years ago when Edwin King of the Anglo Saxons was betwixt and between whether to receive the Christian missionaries into his kingdom.’

  The sermon was being delivered in my room. ‘At a banquet, one of the King’s nobles arose and said, “Sire, this life compared with the life to come reminds me of one of the winter feasts which you partake of with your generals and ministers of state.”’

  The sermon was being given to me alone. By Mrs Pring. ‘“Imagine my dear people,” says the nobleman to his King, “the snowy cold without, the blazing hearth within. Driven by the storm, a tiny threadbare sparrow enters at one door and flies in a flurry of delight around the great hall before making his way out the other.”’

  At this point, Mrs Pring’s congregation doubled. Fr Duddleswell entered silent as a bird, and stood beside her. ‘“No chill does that wee sparrow feel while he is with us, Sire. But short is his hour of warmth and contentment here. Then out flies he again into the raging tempest and the dreaded dark.”’

  Here Mrs Pring raised her sermon fingers solemnly, ‘“Brief is man’s life, Sire, as is the sparrow’s.”’

  In chorus with the preacher, Fr Duddleswell declaimed, ‘“We are as ignorant of the state which preded our life as of that which follows it.’”

  As Mrs Pring trailed off in surprise, Fr Duddleswell continued quietly, ‘“Therefore do I feel, Sire, that if this new faith can give us more certainty than we now have, it deserves to be believed.”’

  After a strange lull, Fr Duddleswell said, ‘’Tis a mighty fine sermon you preach, woman.’ There was not a trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  Mrs Pring had forewarned me that as Mary’s month of October was passing, Fr Duddleswell was due for his usual fit of the November blues. November is the month of prayer for the souls in Purgatory. The purple vestments, she maintained, darkened his soul like black frost on the window pane.

  ‘The trouble is, Father Neil,’ she explained, ‘when he’s like this, he tries to be good. Heaven knows when he’s bad he’s hard enough to live with but when he’s good he’s awful.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He’s even polite. As if he thinks the Pope is hiding in the cupboard, listening.’

  ‘’Twill be no ordinary November for me,’ Fr Duddleswell said out of her hearing. His recent experience at the hospital had, he swore, completely refashioned him. He had examined his conscience in so far as it would stand still long enough and learned a few home truths about himself.

  ‘Just being told you are going to die, Father Neil, is sufficient to kill you. And did I accept it? Indeed, I did not. No act of contrition. No In manus tuas, Domine. E contra, me faith flew into fragments and there stood I, knock-kneed and thrilled with fear. I could only picture meself stretched out like a sardine and carried on four black shoulders.’ He plucked three times at his breast like the strings of a double bass and sighed. ‘I always knew I was mortal, like, but not till that black day, that dies irae, did it so much as occur to me that I was going to die.’

  I sensed that as this was an oration it would be foolish of me to interrupt.

  ‘There is worse to come, Father Neil. When the specialist told me someone else is doomed to die instead of me, I rejoiced like a heretic when the faggots went out. And though this feller was all alone by himself with no kith and kin to assist him through his last days I did not think even to ask for his name and address.’ When I said nothing, he added, ‘Not that they would have given them to me, mind.’

  He slowly rose and crossed to the fire. There he sank down on his haunches and picked up a lump of coal and said:

  ‘I sat on me hunkers

  I looked through me peepers

  I saw the dead buryin’ the livin’’

  After which he dropped the coal on to the hungry flame. ‘In any case, Father Neil,’ he said, rising, ‘growing old is like driving backwards down a long, dark tunnel. You think you are seeing further when you are only seeing less.’

  I stammered something about not judging oneself too harshly and leaning on the forgiveness of Christ, but he had not quite finished. He had decided that his life was sodden with deviousness and uncharity. He apologized for his past misdeeds and assured me from his heart that he was about to turn over a new leaf.

  As October drew to its close, many other old leaves started to turn as they tumbled in golden showers to the ground. The weather was chilly and when I cycled on my early morning rounds to distribute Communion to the sick there was a mist sometimes high on the tower blocks and in the cul-de-sacs. Mrs Pring bustled about lighting fires before breakfast ‘to warm and content my two wee sparrows’.

  Fr Duddleswell kept his word. Whenever Mrs Pring tried to rile him, she found him lock-jawed. There he sat in a daunting silence. He who would normally have called down seven thousand curses on her for her insolence simply gritted and bared his teeth in a passable imitation of a grinning skeleton.

  ‘Ah, Father Neil,’ said Mrs Pring, ‘at least he died a happy death. Has his Reverence yet reached that driving-backwards-down-a-long-black-tunnel bit?’

  He saved his remarks for when she had left the room.

  ‘I am just about holding me pledge by the tail,’ he sighed.

  I grunted in mild sympathy.

  ‘Women have the advantage over us, you see, Father Neil. They have an inexhaustible fund of ignorance to draw on.’ He meant this not as an insult but as a plain statement of fact.

  One day, Fr Duddleswell was passing his time sweeping up leaves and setting fire to them in the garden.

  From my study, I could see Billy Buzzle, the Bookie who lived next door, come out raging. ‘What’re you doing, Fr Duddleswell?’

  ‘Ridding meself of surplus leaves, Mr Buzzle.’

  ‘Can’t you see the wind’s in the wrong direction? The smoke’s nigh suffocating my pigeons.’

  ‘I am deeply sorry,’ Fr Duddleswell said humbly. ‘I will extinguish the fire this minute.’

  Billy can’t have heard the apology due to the sound of his own fury. He made for his garden hose, turned the water on and directed the nozzle indiscriminately at the bonfire and Fr Duddleswell who was then crouching as he attempted to put out the flames.

  The force and unexpectedness of the jet in the pit of his back sent him sprawling in the mud. I waited for the massacre.

  Instead, Fr Duddleswell picked himself up and rubbed himself down without a word.

  When Billy was satisfied that the fire was dowsed, he turned off the water and advanced to the fence.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ he warned.

  ‘I was quite in the wrong, Mr Buzzle.’

  ‘Are you ill,’ growled Billy, ‘or are you just taking the micky?’

  ‘I am only trying to be neighbourly,’ said my unusually meek parish priest.

  But Billy was already half-tearing off his jacket. ‘I’ve told you many a time before that the Third World War’ll start over this bloody fence, haven’t I?’

  ‘If,’ said Fr Duddleswell, still keeping his distance, ‘we indulged in fisticuffs and I knocked you cold, what would that prove?’

  ‘That you can work miracles, that’s what.’

  Fr Duddleswell shook his head sadly. ‘Ah, Mr Buzzle, we are far too near the final couch to be quarrelling.’

  Billy must have thought this was his day. He cried, ‘Don’t you dare say I’m old just because you creak like an old gate.’

  ‘Take me hand,’ Fr Duddleswell said, approaching the fence and extending a drenched ar
m.

  ‘Can’t. I’ve not long had a bath.’

  ‘Then I will pray for your well-being, Mr Buzzle.’

  ‘And if you try and get even with me like that, you old hypocrite, I’ll singe your bloody bristles for you.’

  With that, Billy looked up and caught sight of me at the window. He gave me a knowing wink like a ham-actor playing to the gallery.

  When, seconds later, I ran into Fr Duddleswell dripping water in the hall, I congratulated him on his forbearance.

  ‘Just holding on by me thumb top, Father Neil.’ A wry smile. ‘But dear God in Heaven, how me tongue was straining within me like a greyhound.’

  I was the uncharitable one. I had cut back Mrs Rollings’ instructions to once a fortnight so that my wounds would have a chance to heal.

  That Wednesday she came clutching a copy of The Watchtower which a Jehovah’s Witness had put through her letterbox. My heart soared for a moment at the possibility of her embracing an alien faith and then crash-landed when she said she simply wanted me to answer all their accusations against the Catholics.

  The magazine had gone to town on Indulgences. I explained to my only convert—forced on me by Fr Duddleswell—that after forgiveness there remains the punishment due to sins. An Indulgence is a remission of the punishment which a holy soul in Purgatory would otherwise have to suffer.

  Where did this remission come from? From the infinite treasury of Christ’s merits and those of his saints. Yes, Mrs Rollings, that’s why the Pope grants so many Indulgences and, yes, Mrs Rollings, only Catholics out of all mankind are eligible for them. And the days in question, Mrs Rollings, refer to the days which the early Christians spent in harsh penitential exercises and which have been commuted in recent times to prayers and good works.

  ‘So all these lies are true, then,’ she said. I asked her to instance some of their calumnies so I might judge for myself.

  ‘The Watchtower says,’ she answered, ‘that for a single Mass in San Francisco there was once an Indulgence attached of 32,310 years 10 days and 6 hours.’ I blinked in disbelief at the sheer crudity of the fabricated figures.