Her mother takes a spartan sip of water. She places her knife and fork carefully on the plate, her food barely touched. ‘Your father’s death,’ she says. Dominic looks up, forgetting to chew. His mouth droops open and Mary can see the slimy mix of mince and potato resting on his tongue.
‘God’s will,’ their mother says, to no one in particular.
Mary kicks Dominic under the table. Close your mouth, she mimes to him.
Her mother leans forwards and holds Mary’s forearm tightly. ‘Are you listening? Nothing could’ve been done to prevent it.’ Her calloused fingers press deep, through skin and flesh to tender bone. Mary yanks her arm away.
‘So here we are,’ their mother says in a calmer voice, ‘and we have to make the best of it. There’ll be sacrifices along the way, but we’ll all be better off for the sacrifices that each one of us makes.’
None of it means anything. Mary’s heart turns hard. ‘What sacrifice are you making?’
Her mother rises from her chair, straight-backed and pale, wild-eyed as a witch. ‘You’re a wicked, wicked girl! Go to your room and pray for forgiveness.’
Forgiveness doesn’t emanate from God — or if it does, it’s always through the intermediary of Mary’s mother. In fits and starts they come to an arrangement: Mary will give the presbytery a trial. If after a month she feels unable to continue, her mother will be terribly disappointed. As Mary sees it, she has two dispiriting options: to remain as cleaner for the priest and avoid her mother’s disapproval, or to leave and thereby earn it.
The following week she drags her feet to the gloomy old presbytery on Ebden Street. Miss Doherty, the housekeeper, ushers her inside, then darts away to take a telephone call. Standing in the vestibule, Mary breathes in the sanctifying odour of mothballs and benediction. She takes another begrudging breath, and the stink of lard and brussels sprout coats her nose and mouth. Miss Doherty returns and takes her on a tour of duty. ‘Did you know that the presbytery was built in 1865?’ Mary counts quickly: eighty-three years. Could some of the air have been trapped inside since then? ‘It’s built on the site of the bluestone quarry that was dug to build St Mary’s. The quarry was ten feet deep, and the parishioners filled it using only shovels and wheelbarrows!’ Miss Doherty’s face turns wistful, as if remembering the scene. ‘Farmers mostly, working all hours. Such devotion.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier just to build the house somewhere else?’ Mary asks as they climb the stairs. The dark wood banister squeaks under her trailing fingers.
‘And leave a huge gaping hole right next to the church? That would never do. Mind that banister, Mary. It’ll be you who’ll be cleaning the fingerprints off, you know.’ Miss Doherty opens a door onto gleaming black and white tiles and a basin as grand as a baptismal font. An enamel bath perches on giant gryphon’s claws. ‘I must be able to see my face in these tiles, Mary. And the bath must be scrubbed every time you come. Father Clancy is most particular about the state of his bathroom. As is only to be expected.’
Miss Doherty has been the housekeeper for close to thirty years. She opens Father’s mail, answers the telephone, makes his appointments and supervises the many comings and goings in the house. ‘How old were you when you started here?’ Mary asks.
‘Now that would be telling,’ says Miss Doherty. ‘Suffice to say I was young. Very young.’ She studies Mary with unblinking brown eyes. Mary studies her back: pearly pink cheeks; a small head of bobbing, tight brown curls; and the narrow shoulders and hips of a girl. It’s only the blush of grey in her hair and the soft little pouches under her eyes that hint at what Mary knows her to be: a spinster, and a confirmed one at that, just like Miss Edna Poole, her old piano teacher. There are worse things, thinks Mary.
Miss Doherty leads Mary along the upstairs hall, bouncing on the toes of her brogues with each quick step she takes, the thick ring of keys jangling in her freckled hand. ‘Guest rooms,’ Miss Doherty says, pointing left and right across the hall. ‘For visiting priests. Occasionally we’re honoured with a visit from the bishop. You will give these rooms a dusting once a week. I’ll let you know when you need to change the linen.’
At the end of the hallway a large arched window looks out onto treetops and beyond, to Yaldwyn Street. Along the footpath a mother wheels her baby in a royal-blue pram. It might be Mrs Carroll, who lives next door to Miss Poole in Hutton Street. The sun breaks through a cloud, the pram glows like something precious, and in a topsy-turvy moment Mary pictures herself at the open window calling down to Mrs Carroll, ‘Take me with you, wherever you’re going.’ Mrs Carroll waves back, gesturing to Mary to join them. ‘We have tickets to the circus. Please come. You can sketch my baby riding the elephant.’
There’s one last door on the landing. Miss Doherty sifts through her bracelet of keys and opens it. ‘Father’s study,’ she says, ushering Mary inside. ‘This is where he writes his sermons. You will dust and vacuum under my supervision. The door will otherwise be locked.’
The room is really quite beautiful. Through the stained-glass window — decorated not with saints or apostles, but leaves and flowers — the light falls pink and green on a pretty oriental rug. A huge fireplace is artfully set, and two winged armchairs beckon. Mary imagines curling up on one of these while Miss Doherty lights the fire and brings her tea and cake.
‘Come now, Mary,’ says Miss Doherty with an invigorating jangle. ‘Let’s get you started in the kitchen.’
‘Where’s your room, Miss Doherty?’ Mary asks.
‘Downstairs, tucked away and always locked. I do my own cleaning, thank you.’
Mary knows Father Clancy from Mass and his visits to the school, but to see him in the presbytery is a different thing entirely. He wears trousers without a cassock, and he sometimes takes the stairs two at a time, despite his grey hair. ‘He spends hours in his study,’ she tells Dominic. ‘You’d be green with envy if you saw that room. There’s a desk twice as big as our kitchen table, and books everywhere.’
‘What does he read?’ Dominic asks.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Religious books, I s’pose. He plays music, too, on a gramophone.’ She’s heard it as she’s passed the study door — great sweeping symphonies with a lot of clashing cymbals. She wonders if it helps him with his sermons.
‘Find out what he reads,’ says Dominic.
She reports back to him triumphantly, three days later. ‘I couldn’t look properly because Miss Doherty always watches. But I saw something on his desk. It was half-covered with writing paper, but I could read the spine.’
‘Well?’
Mary waits, savouring power for a brief moment, but Dom strips it from her. ‘Don’t tell me then,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t care less.’
‘Sons and Lovers,’ she whispers. ‘Truly it was.’
Dom whistles under his breath. ‘Bloody hell.’
On the Friday afternoon of her third week at the presbytery, with just a few more banister rails to polish before the weekend begins, Miss Doherty appears at the top of the stairs. ‘Now, Mary,’ she says, ‘the bathroom.’ She beckons Mary to follow her. ‘I had a look in here after you left on Wednesday.’ Miss Doherty opens the bathroom door. ‘And I’m saddened to say that it wasn’t up to scratch.’
Mary protests. ‘I did everything you told me: the sink, the mirror —’
Miss Doherty puts a finger to her lips. ‘It’s not what you do, Mary. It’s how you do it that counts.’ She takes Mary by the hand and leads her to the bathtub. ‘Do you see any ring on that tub?’
Mary leans in. ‘No.’
‘That’s because I cleaned it myself after you left. I couldn’t have let Father use it as it was.’
‘Oh.’ Mary looks at the tiles on the floor. Was there really ever a bath ring? She supposes she’ll just have to believe in it, like God and the Holy Spirit and a million other things.
‘A little bit more vi
gour, Mary, a little bit more care. I’m sure you can do better.’
She returns to the bathroom at the end of her shift to find the door locked: Father Clancy must be inside. She slouches against the corridor wall, stifling a laugh when she hears his piss splashing the side of the bowl. So priests piss loudly, too. When the toilet flushes, she backs down the hall. The bathroom door opens. At first she thinks it’s someone else, someone angry and hunched, but as he raises his head and sees her there, he turns back into Father Clancy. ‘Ah, Mary,’ he says in a soft voice, ‘I’ve forgotten to wash my hands.’
Her bucket crooked over an elbow, she waits until he comes out again. He walks right up to her this time and puts his hands under her nose, palms up, thumbs splayed. They smell of ordinary Velvet soap.
‘All clean,’ he says. One hand drops to his side while the other brushes her breast on its way down, and lingers there for a moment. ‘All clean.’ He walks past her into his study and shuts the door.
‘Something happened at the presbytery today,’ she says to Dom that night. She’s been tossing up all evening whether to tell him, and now she thinks she won’t fall asleep until she does. ‘Father Clancy touched my breast.’ She’s never said that word to her brother before.
Dom groans in disgust. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘It’s true. I wouldn’t make it up.’
‘Yes, you would.’
He says nothing more. Still, she knows he’s not asleep.
‘It might have been an accident,’ she says, though she doesn’t for a minute believe it, but now that she’s told him she wants it to be over.
‘It must have been,’ Dom says after a while. ‘A priest wouldn’t do something like that on purpose.’
5
Two weeks have passed, and all Mary’s seen of Father Clancy is his black-clothed figure wandering in the presbytery garden, hands clasped behind his stooping back. At Sunday Mass she’s wriggled along the pew, ignoring her mother’s frown, until she’s out of his line of sight. ‘I want to stop going to the presbytery,’ she told her mother after the second Mass. ‘I hate it there.’
‘Stop complaining, Mary. And don’t say “hate”. As it is, you’ll only stay until Mrs Kennedy’s well enough to work again.’
On Thursday afternoon she’s vacuuming Father’s study when Miss Doherty taps her on the shoulder. ‘You’re all right here while I pop downstairs for a bit?’
Mary can’t quite hear. Miss Doherty frowns and points to the vacuum, and Mary switches it off. ‘I need to attend to something downstairs,’ Miss Doherty repeats. ‘A parishioner who can’t wait. You finish off here. Don’t touch anything you shouldn’t.’
Mary returns to work, humming the tune to ‘Buttons and Bows’ as the vacuum head glides over the lattice of light on the rug. Her back’s to the door, and she only realises someone has entered the room when the machine’s whine dies away and she looks up, expecting to see the plug fallen out of the socket, but instead there’s Father Clancy with the electric cord in his hand.
‘You gave me a fright, Father,’ she says, because it’s true.
‘Why, Mary,’ he says, ‘you’re shaking.’ He drops the cord and walks towards her; she hears the plug strike the skirting board as it falls. She smells the bland sweetness of shaving cream, the starch in his shirt and, as he draws closer, the stubborn undercurrent of the male body. She remembers the oily smell of her father’s scalp as she passed by his chair, and the sharp, sour odour that clings to the very walls of the bedroom, now that Dominic’s begun to grow. The priest takes her wrists between finger and thumb, and she sees him at the altar during the consecration, palms aloft, thumb and index fingers curled. It’s these consecration hands he now uses to lift hers from the vacuum cleaner. ‘There’s no need to be frightened,’ says Father Clancy.
His hands press around hers, as if in prayer. His palms are sponge-like against her knuckles, the short, thick fingers — he would never play the piano — sprouting coarse black hairs in two places. She tries to wriggle her own fingers free, but he resists her. ‘Come and sit with me,’ he says. He leads her to an armchair. ‘We can be friends, can’t we?’
He sits, and guides her down towards him so that she’s seated on his thighs, facing the window, her legs hanging over the arm of the chair. The light through the window now shines across the desk: Father Clancy’s gold pen glimmers in its holder, and the crystal paperweight casts a rainbow on the sheaf of white paper laid out for his sermon. ‘There,’ he says, as if something’s been settled. ‘Are you comfortable?’ His arms encircle her waist; his hands are laced so that the weave of his interlocking fingers pushes against her ribs. ‘You’re such a pretty girl, Mary,’ he says. ‘God has given you the gift of beauty because He wants you to share it with others.’ He unlocks his hands and begins to stroke her arm. ‘I’ve asked God for guidance — believe me, I have — and this is the answer He’s given me.’
Outside, on the maple, a fragment of yellow leaf is caught in a spiderweb and fluttering in the breeze. It looks like a moth, so winged and alive it seems.
His weight shifts beneath her and she tilts like a boat on a wave. As she rocks on his thighs, she tries to stretch her feet to the floor, but he stops moving and pulls hard at her arm so that she topples backwards. The small of her back is pressed to the other arm of the chair, and her backside now rests between his spread thighs. The belt of his trousers is undone. She looks up at his face, at the sag of his jaw, the dark hairs that grow from his nostrils. ‘Now, this is what you can do to please me, Mary.’ He grips her hand and pulls it towards him and she feels the fabric of his trousers, then something bodily and soft. She pulls back, but he takes her hand by the wrist and forces it downwards. ‘Keep it there,’ he commands her. ‘It’s not too much to ask. I pay you, don’t I? You don’t want to be ungrateful.’
She feels herself drifting, out of her recalcitrant body — pressed against the chair, a lifeless thing — away from her hand, senseless and heavy, as if severed at the wrist. She’s a wisp of air, floating towards the window, soon to escape into the sunlit afternoon. I’ll miss this room, she thinks. Her body is to endure but she, Mary Quinn, the essence of her, will never return to this place. Her hand moves now, back and forth, under the priest’s squat fingers; an automatic motion of muscles and bones, signifying nothing. Skin against skin means nothing. She closes her eyes, remembering the taste of chocolate cake, warm from the presbytery oven, and the hopeful feeling she’d get whenever Miss Doherty jangled open the study door and that pretty pink light bounced out at her, as if in play.
Her mother’s in the kitchen, folding the washing. ‘You’re home early,’ she says. ‘Is anything wrong?’
Mary fills a glass with water and downs it in one go. ‘I’m not going back.’
Her mother stops mid-fold. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It wasn’t my fault.’ She’d had to clean his grey hairs out of the bath. Those hairs had fallen from the place where her hand had just been. She hadn’t looked but, for an instant, before she’d again closed her eyes, she witnessed the violet flush of his cheeks, and the pitted, coarse skin of his nose, turned crimson with heat. Suddenly her stomach flips and squeezes. She runs to the yard, the kitchen flyscreen slamming behind her, but only makes it to the privy door before she heaves her lunch onto the grass.
‘What’s going on?’ her mother asks when she comes back inside. ‘Are you sick?’
‘No.’
‘Then why all this drama? Did you break something when you were cleaning?’ Her eyes narrow. ‘You didn’t steal, did you?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t want to keep guessing, Mary.’ She sounds put out. ‘Please just tell me the truth.’
‘The truth?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Father Clancy — I never wanted to go to that stinking presbytery but you made me.’
‘Is
it always my fault?’ her mother asks in that pained way she has. ‘You know we need the money. If your father were still alive —’
‘He wouldn’t have made me go. He would have let me paint and draw, all day if I wanted to.’
‘You would have still been at school, not frittering your time away.’
‘It’s not frittering. I’m going to be an artist.’
Her mother slams a folded sheet onto the table. ‘It’s time you lived in the real world, Mary. The Lord knows the rest of us have to.’
‘Is the presbytery the real world? Because that’s where Father Clancy … in his study —’
‘What are you talking about?’ Her mother raises a hand for silence. ‘Stop your nonsense this minute.’
An ugly word, talk. It catches in the throat. Talk, talk, talk, when what she wants to do is scream. Scream is a nicer word, smooth and open and silky, and silence too. She feels it coming, her last chance to speak. ‘Father Clancy hurt me. He grabbed me and made me … he put his dirty, filthy hand up my dress —’
‘Enough!’ Her mother’s face twists into that of a stranger, and Mary sees her in her very own fairytale, a hag with a wart on the end of her nose and a heart of blackest pitch. ‘You’re an out-and-out liar, Mary Quinn,’ she says. She crosses the room to take Mary by the shoulders and shakes her hard, once, twice. ‘What’s got into you? Father Clancy’s a priest. He’s been good to us.’
‘You asked for the truth!’ Mary shouts. Her back is aching terribly. ‘You never believe me. If I were Dom, you’d believe anything I said. You don’t love me; not like you love Dom.’
‘Lower your voice,’ her mother says. Her hands, still at Mary’s shoulders, relax their hold and for a moment they stand together, face to face. ‘Oh, Mary,’ she sighs. ‘Why must you be so difficult?’
The Science of Appearances Page 5
