I could think of nothing to reply.
‘That help?’ He inclined his big head towards me. I could see the hope in his eyes. The kindness.
‘Mmm.’ I remembered the sense I used to have of the gentle hand above my head and the wonderful feeling of lightness it had given, as if every part of me was truly alive and meant to be.
‘Is God lightness?’
He beamed. ‘Of course! Of course He is! Doesn’t John say so? “Light is come into the world.”’
He hadn’t understood what I’d meant. Despite the kindness he was like the others: I had a dull feeling that you could talk to them for a hundred years and they’d never understand you and you’d never understand them.
‘Okay?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Father. Thank you.’
‘What I’m here for.’ He held the ball up and smiled. ‘Good as new!’ he said, and then he tossed it high up into the air and shouted, ‘To the glory of God!’
As I left him and made my way towards the main building, twilight was falling, the bleak grey twilight of a winter’s day. Kids were trailing back in groups from the football and the handball courts; there was still no sign of Frankie. As I passed the teachers’ rooms a face loomed up suddenly in one of the windows, a hand beckoned me inside. It was Father James. Reluctantly, I went into his room and sat in the chair he offered. He told me—news travelled fast at St Finbar’s—that he’d heard I’d been refused permission to attend my cousin’s wedding.
‘Yes.’ I looked down at the floor. His words brought the disappointment rushing back at me: the whole happy day I’d be missing, the sun shining, Miri in her wedding dress and Chris beside her, bridesmaids, Mum and Dad and everyone—and as if she’d been right there next to me, I heard Miri’s laughing voice say, ‘See? Now if you hadn’t gone off to St Finbar’s, I’d have thrown you the bouquet!’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ murmured Father James. The Rector wasn’t mentioned, it was as if the refusal had nothing to do with St Finbar’s, had come drifting down, all by itself, out of a clear blue sky. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again and made a vague sifting gesture with his hands, adding with a little sigh, ‘But that’s our life in God.’
The same cold severity I’d felt when Father Stuckey had quoted the words of the gospel took hold of me. Why was it? I wanted to ask him. Why was it our life in God to miss a cousin’s wedding?
He was staring at me. ‘How are things otherwise?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I answered. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘That’s good to hear.’ He rubbed his hands together and I had a sense that there were lots of things he’d like to tell me only he didn’t dare, and that’s why we were sitting here with nothing much to say.
There was a book lying on the edge of the desk and I read its title: The Ministry of Fear. It made me think of the way we all held our breaths when someone dropped a fork at dinner and the vein in the Rector’s forehead began to throb; how people whispered about Etta having a thousand eyes, and how wherever you went at St Finbar’s you felt someone was watching; and how anything you said might somehow turn out to be wrong. The ministry of fear—that was us. Frankie was the only one who wasn’t afraid. And as if that thought had conjured him, outside the window Frankie appeared on the path beside the teachers’ garden. That severe last light which seemed to drain the colour out of everything else made his hair and sweater almost luminous.
Father James turned to see what I was looking at. ‘Ah, your friend,’ he said, and we both watched as Frankie crossed to the garden tap and bent to drink. Then he lifted his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sauntered slowly towards the library.
‘You know, when he came, your friend, I mean—’ he paused, glancing towards the window, seeming to wait for me to say something, and when I didn’t, he went on, ‘Yes, when he came we gave him that room next to yours because we thought you’d be a good influence.’ He smiled, inviting confidences, and again when I said nothing he went on. ‘A restraining influence, we thought. Perhaps even a force for change.’
Change. I thought of Frankie’s warmth and generosity, his delight in the loveliness of the world. I thought of him handing the oranges out in that cold little yard, singing to the kids in the dormitory—Hushabye, don’t you cry— It was true that he always broke the rules, yet I thought most of the things he did were good in a way that was larger than the world the rest of us inhabited: the world of that little green rule book we carried in our pockets.
‘You wouldn’t be able to,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You wouldn’t be able to change him. And—’ I tried to hold it back, but I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice. ‘And you shouldn’t.’
He looked at me in surprise.
‘If you knew what he was like, really, then you wouldn’t want to change him.’
He leaned forward across the desk. ‘What is he like, Tom?’
‘He’s a good person. He’s good.’
‘Ah.’ He picked up a pencil from the desk and studied it for a moment, then he put it down again and it rolled, and we both sat there watching it, silently. When it stopped, a finger’s breadth from the edge, he asked, ‘Do you know what St Thomas Aquinas says about the good?’
I shook my head.
He reached for the pencil again and rolled it between his palms. ‘St Thomas says, The good is what all things desire.’
I don’t think for a moment that he meant anything by it; I don’t think he meant to hint that I desired Frankie, that my feelings for him were sexual. We were all more innocent in those days, ignorant, perhaps. He meant only that this, literally, was the way Thomas Aquinas spoke about the good. And I don’t think I knew then, not consciously anyway, that what I felt for Frankie was desire, though the word itself sent a funny little shiver down my spine—the kind you get when you hear a certain bar of music, or a perfect line of poetry. All the same I made some excuse about being late for evening study and got up quickly from my chair. I didn’t want to sit there any longer talking about Frankie, it made me feel like a spy.
I went outside and stood for a moment in the porch. The wind had got up while I was inside, howling and rattling things about. That’s why Etta didn’t hear me. He was bent over the tap where Frankie had been drinking.
He must have been following him, following at a distance, quietly. He’d hidden himself when Frankie had gone to the tap and from his hiding place he’d watched him drinking, and when Frankie had gone he’d slipped out and drunk from the tap himself. Concealed in the shadows of the porch I watched him; in that deepening twilight, his close-shorn head and the way he was stooped over made him appear like an old man. His colourless lips covered the place where Frankie’s own lips had been. He straightened and I stepped back further into the shadows. I didn’t need to, he couldn’t see me, he might as well have been blind. His eyes were closed, his face turned upwards, giving him the look of some love-struck saint in ecstasy. He raised one of those neat little paws and pressed a finger against his lips, as if sealing something there; the gesture had reverence, as if what he sealed there was sacred. And again that shiver ran through me, as if my body took in something my mind couldn’t grasp, not yet.
A bell rang. I began to run towards the library. Halfway there I turned and looked back and in the deepening dusk I could just make out his small dark shape, one hand pressed to his mouth, still standing there.
16.
Hay Jarrell’s mum and dad came to see him. Theirs was a very different visit from that of Etta’s parents. The Jarrells were poor. They had no car and would have travelled almost eight hundred miles on trains and buses. They came walking up the hill, Mr Jarrell carrying a big string bag full of the picnic food they’d bought to eat with Hay at those wooden tables behind the old dairy. Later that afternoon Frankie and I were with a work party clearing young saplings from the high bank above the driveway and we saw the Jarrells leaving, walking down the drive towards the gates. Hay wa
s still with them and as they passed below us on the road he looked up and saw us and whispered something to his mum and dad. I suppose he’d told them about the lullabye and the time Frankie had torn off the piece of his shirt to make a hanky, because Mr Jarrell smiled and gave us a little wave and Mrs Jarrell blew Frankie a kiss. He was delighted. It was like that time the dentist’s nurse had kissed him; he touched the centre of his cheek, as if a real kiss had actually landed there.
But when they reached the gates Mrs Jarrell was crying. She held Hay close, his face pressed up against her blue woolly cardigan. She was small like him. Beside me Frankie was watching them, hungrily, as if he could never get enough of the way Mrs Jarrell’s thin arms curved close around Hay’s skinny body, and how one freckled hand stroked her son’s narrow back, up and down and up and down. And how Mr Jarrell, who didn’t look the least like them, who was tall and gawky with a big plain face, stood up close and his huge farmer’s hand rested on top of Hay’s head and covered all of it. Frankie took it all in and I noticed how the longing on his face was different from the longing I’d seen that time up on the hillside when he was staring down at Bella in the St Brigid’s garden. There’d been a kind of happy confidence then, like he knew in his heart that if he’d been out in the ordinary world, Bella would have wanted him. When he looked at the Jarrells with Hay there was none of that confidence, only a sort of sadness, so you guessed he’d wanted that kind of love when he was little, and he hadn’t got it and now it was too late. The bell rang and we picked up our tools and went back to the garden sheds, and all the way Frankie walked beside me quietly, his head down.
*
Later we heard that when Hay’s mum and dad walked away down the hill, Hay had stayed by the gates and they’d kept turning round to wave. Long after they were out of sight he was standing there watching the empty road as if he had a hope they might come back. He stood there all through the afternoon until it started to get dark, and then John Rushall came and led him gently away. I don’t know who saw all this—that was the way of things at St Finbar’s: word got round and you never knew quite where it came from or whether it was true or not—but from what we saw that afternoon on the bank above the driveway, I’m sure that particular story was true.
‘Did you see how they loved him?’ Frankie asked me that night. ‘Hay’s mum and dad? Did you see?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, and he fell asleep at once and I fell asleep too. I dreamed of St Thomas Aquinas. I dreamed he was sitting on my bed. In all the years since I’ve never had a dream so real: my room exactly as it was when I’d closed my eyes, right down to the single sock lying in the middle of the floor, only now there was the peculiar warm heaviness of another person sitting close to me, beside my legs. He wore a long gold robe which was pleated at the top and seemed to be made of silk. His face, so bland and chubby in the portrait which hung in our library, now looked old and sad and I thought he was going to say that thing Father James had told us the night Frankie had kissed the portrait of the Archbishop: how after his vision, everything he’d written seemed like straw in the wind. Instead he spoke those other words Father James had quoted to me: ‘The good is what all things desire,’ and again the very sound of that word—desire—sent the strange, sweet shiver right through me. ‘Why?’ I asked St Thomas. ‘Why do I feel like that?’ and he held out his long narrow hand and then I woke and he was gone. The dream had been so real that it took me a while to realise that’s all it had been, that I was awake now and nothing had happened and I was lying in my bed the same as any ordinary night with Frankie asleep on the other side of the partition.
Only it wasn’t the same. Instead of Frankie’s soft breathing I could hear a strange sound coming from his room: a regular rhythmic sound, a little snick and then a long smooth shirrr, like scissors running through a length of cloth. Then a long silence, so long I thought the noise had stopped and whatever was making it had gone, only then it began again: Snick! Shirrr—
I went out into the corridor and stood close to Frankie’s door. It was much thicker than the partition between our rooms and I couldn’t hear anything. ‘Frankie?’ I whispered. There was no reply. I grasped the doorknob and turned it slowly.
I don’t know what I thought I would find in there. The strange sound had unnerved me, and remnants of my dream still hung about: St Thomas’s sad face, his long white hand stretched out to me, those words which seemed so mysterious: The good is what all things desire. Out in the corridor the silence was so intense that for once I’d have been glad to hear one of the kids upstairs cry out—at least that sound was familiar and human, it wasn’t part of a dream about a man who’d died almost seven hundred years ago. I stood outside that door and I thought how anything might be behind it. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Etta sitting on Frankie’s bed, his face raised in a sly, knowing stare. I pushed the door open.
It’s well over fifty years now, yet I only have to close my eyes and I can see that room: the dark night pressing against the high slit of window, the big shadows from Frankie’s torch looming on the walls. His bed was empty, the blanket thrown back, a pair of scissors lay on the sheet and the empty covers of two of the rough workbooks we used at St Finbar’s. Frankie was sitting at the desk, his back to me, writing. He’d taken the pages from the workbooks and then cut them into smaller squares—Snick! Shirrrr—that was the sound I’d heard. A neat stack of them lay on the desk beside him.
I closed the door softly. ‘Frankie?’
He looked round.
‘What are you doing?’
In answer he pointed to the stack of small sheets on the desk. I picked the top one up. Written in the centre were the words: Bella—my beautiful, beautiful Bella, I love you. Frankie Maguire. The word ‘love’ seemed bigger than the others, though I knew this might have been an illusion—it simply struck harder. I leafed through the rest of the little sheets—the message was the same on every one.
‘I was dreaming of her,’ he said, ‘and then I woke up and—oh, I don’t know—I wanted to write down how I felt. Only I’m not very good at writing things, so there’s only that.’ He ran a hand though his hair. The soft buttery strands seemed to pour through his fingers. ‘They’re love letters, sort of—little ones. I guess they say the most important thing.’
‘There’s so many.’
‘Yes, I know. Once I started I couldn’t stop.’
I put the love letters back on the desk. ‘What’re you going to do with them?’
‘Just keep them with me. To look at, I suppose, every now and then.’
He saw my bewildered expression. ‘Well, you’ve got to have something.’
I hated it when he said that. His cassock was hanging on the back of the chair and he picked up the love letters, divided them into two and tucked them into the long pockets on either side. The torchlight caught his face and I noticed how it had become thinner, the cheekbones more prominent. Above them his eyes seemed more beautiful than ever, luminous in the half dark. I wished he could have had parents like Hay’s, or mine. His father thought he was scum. His mother—he hardly ever spoke of her, there was only that one time when she’d found out about Manda Sutton and said she was too ashamed to say her prayers. That didn’t mean she didn’t love him; perhaps she was the one who’d taught him the lullabye. ‘You know that lullabye you sang for the kids upstairs? Did your mother use to sing that to you?’
‘What?’
‘The lullabye. Did your mother sing it?’
‘Mum didn’t sing.’
Something terrible happened then. He looked straight at me, though there was a kind of blindness, a glaze in his stare. And when he spoke his voice was changed, it was tense and full of hisses, it seemed to fizz. I could hardly take in what I heard. ‘Get away from me,’ he spat. ‘Get away, I’m sick of the sight of you!’
I’d been standing right next to the desk and I jumped back, stricken.
‘Oh!’ he gasped, jumping up from the chair. The awful voice had gone. ‘
Not you, Tom, I didn’t mean you! How could you ever think I meant you?’
I shook my head and sat down on the bed. I was shaking.
He came and sat beside me. ‘It was my mum,’ he said. ‘That’s who I meant. That’s how she used to go when we were all hanging round her and she was trying to get the tea.’
‘It sounds horrible,’ I whispered, and he looked at me in surprise.
‘She didn’t mean it; we got on her nerves sometimes.’
He crawled in under the blanket and lay down, his arms behind his head. I could feel his long legs against my back, and I kept thinking of what his mum said and how it must have hurt when he was little, even if she didn’t mean it. ‘It isn’t fair!’ I wanted to shout. I learned a lot about love in those few months I spent with Frankie at St Finbar’s, and that’s what love is, I think: feeling another’s pain and sorrow as if it was your own.
‘There were too many of us, that’s all,’ Frankie sighed, excusing her. ‘She got really tired sometimes.’ He took his arms from beneath his head and slid them down under the blankets. His eyes closed. ‘Anyway, all that stuff back home, it doesn’t matter now.’
‘Why doesn’t it?’
‘Because I’ve got Bella now.’
There was something queerly exalted in the way he said this. It was weird, and instead of feeling jealous like I often did when he talked about Bella, I felt uncomfortable, even a little scared. I must have been staring because he said, ‘No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not crazy, honest. I’m not going to do anything, I haven’t been doing anything. I’m not going down there and asking her out, honest I’m not. Fat chance!’ He studied me silently for a moment. ‘You thought I was, didn’t you?’
‘No, no, I didn’t,’ I mumbled, my face turning red.
‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘I promised, didn’t I?’
I didn’t answer, and he repeated, ‘Didn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘All I mean is: I’ve got her to think about. It helps.’ He flung himself back on the pillow and said that thing I hated again. ‘You’ve got to have something,’ and I wanted to say, ‘You’ve got me,’ only I didn’t, of course. Instead I said, ‘Goodnight, Frankie,’ and my voice went low and soft on his name, like a lullabye, and then I got up and went back to my room.
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