STARTLING AND BODILESS the bald white head of Brother Ignatius floated out from the gloom, hung above his breviary and its fading tassels, bored gleaming out of the darkness of the cloister. The rain, falling through the afternoon, soaked into the new-mown grass of the lawn so that he walked in the lifting smell of penny-royal and damp earth. He came steadily to the end of the paved walk and faced the path and the rain. Two students in the uniform of the college ran past towards the gate. Still praying, Brother Ignatius watched them go, boys from his own dormitory, and heard their footfalls scuffle and fade, and turned, wading firmly back into the shadow. The college grounds were empty.
Out on the playing fields the white goalposts stood in the rain: the rain made rivulets through the gravel of the path. The grey mournful light, obscured by the creeper twined on the pillars, scarcely lit the page as he read. Pacing, turning, pacing, he supplicated in his simple faith a God whom he pictured, without irreverence, as bent benignly and at not too great a distance above the cloister where he walked. The passing students had disturbed him less than the failing light and falling rain, less than the birds flying up to the eaves. Brother Ignatius forged inwards again, murmuring, and was lost. On the path, cuddled into a cold rock shrine, the white figure of the Virgin stared sorrowing from behind a curtain of rain. The nicking echo of a ping-pong game ticked through the heavy light, falling with the shouts of the players into the empty quadrangle. The heavy gate centred with the college crest and the stern motto creaked forward on its hinges. The window of the common room slammed down and the afternoon, claimed by silence, was left to the devotion of Brother Ignatius; to the rain; to the Virgin’s stone moist stare sorrowing for what no one would know.
The tram swayed in through the suburbs: Terry and Harry watched the few people shouldering through the rain. The fronts of the bungalows looked out on the traffic from under the half-raised lids of scalloped blinds. The conductor stood on the bucking platform, sneaking a cigarette. Inside the tram bright advertisements enjoined them to take a scenic holiday: the rain made mock. The trundling street went slowly by.
‘We’ve hours to fill in till Benediction,’ Harry said.
‘End of the line,’ the conductor shouted. He walked through the tram banging the reversible seats into position for the return journey. ‘As far as we go,’ he said.
The tram had stopped almost on the quay. Behind the corrugated iron sheds the spars and masts went up tangling in the light sea mist. The wharves were empty and the gates were locked: a policeman in a black waterproof walked up and down. The beaked cranes hung over the rigging: the tarpaulins had pulled tight over the hatches: a clock rang the half-hour through the leaking afternoon.
‘Let’s turn back,’ Terry said, and they walked back up the rising street.
The street was a canyon, glass cliffed, its unassailable walls pierced with caverns where, through the rain, here and there a light shone out. The tram tracks, except in their precise parallels, might have been the shining spoor of some giant slug. The rain blew in gusts out of the side streets flurried and cold and water from the overhanging verandahs fell to the pavement. As on some drear pilgrimage they silently climbed, bored with each other; bored with the afternoon.
In the milk-bar a juke box was playing. Two girls, their damp hair draggling, leaned over it, chewing gum, beating time each with a hand where, on the fingertips, lacquer shone like blood. Terry and Harry squeezed past, smelling eau-de-Cologne and rain.
‘Excuse us,’ Terry said.
The tragic empty eyes, reflecting nothing, caught at them and slipped away; the jaws, bitterly merciless, champed on. Terry and Harry dragged the chrome and red-leather stools up to the counter. Terry poured his lime green drink into a glass.
‘Bay rum,’ Terry said. ‘The secret drink, I’ve heard it said, of old Ignatz, back at the barracks.’
‘He was saying his office as we left,’ Harry said.
‘How better than Canon Law art thou,’ Terry said, rolling a slack eye towards the girls.
‘Come off it,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t act the goat. You’ll only get us into trouble.’
‘Or them,’ Terry said. ‘Still, have it your way.’
They sat over their drinks in the aquarium light, in the yelling vibrations of the juke box, the trembling of the automatic machines, and Harry felt miserably out of place, wrongly dressed, painfully unpractised; the merest visitor in an alien quarter of this shack sprawling town. But, wondering about Terry, he looked at him and thought that Terry had probably never felt out of place anywhere: Terry suggested that he took his world with him wherever he went, and didn’t take it seriously. Terry looked out on this world of languor, of a bored adolescence which seemed so to mock their own, to make them, in their dark students’ uniform, seem queer fish indeed, dowdy and odd and conspicuous and timid, and tapped his finger on the counter in time with the music. Chrome and noisy as it was it yet had about it an air of the exotic, of the violent, of colour and life retrieved from the Sunday rain: at least as Harry thought of it, watching the rapping finger. Or it took on that air when he thought of what they might oppose to it: the big empty cold common room that the fire would never warm; the ping-pong table with the sagging net; the cups of luke-warm cocoa with skin on top. He looked about him, afraid to look too long, wondering was it only subterfuge that gave to these faces the look of so much weary despair. He imagined those eyes turned in on an exhausted soul. Terry’s finger pranced in time with the juke box, ridiculing this solemn interpretation.
Their straws sucked greedily at the sweet few drops left in their glasses: they climbed off their high stools and walked to the door where the girls had not moved. Outside, the humid afternoon blustered at them and the professional wail of the juke box tracked them up the street.
They went on: at the top of the rising street a cross on a church steeple stood out against the sky. They stopped before a window of photographs; a bridal party transfixed before the camera’s gunning eye; yachts, in this rain, all stiff and festive, heeled over to summer on the celluloid sea; the mild maniac stare of beloved babies; grandpapa looking out on his senile centenary; the grim parent in his secret society regalia giving away a stern nothing to the curious eye. And next door but one in a world that might have been only something to stare at, not yet their world, was a window filled with basted chickens, trussed and sacrificed Sebastians of the poultry yard arrowed with the shafts of feathers.
They were almost at the top of the hill.
‘Let’s stop a minute,’ Terry said. ‘I’m blown.’
They leaned against the wall, hot and tired, sallow in novitiate black. Terry wiped his forehead with a great square handkerchief. Two soldiers passed them, descending the hill.
‘Cheer up,’ one of them said. ‘It mightn’t be true.’
‘Yair, cheer up,’ the other one said. ‘Where’s the funeral?’
They laughed profoundly and went on down. Went on where, Harry wondered. The afternoon seemed to grow darker. They crossed the street, peering into the closed shops: they had the street to themselves.
‘Take a look at this,’ Terry said.
They stared in on a display of brassieres, shining conical breastplates stuffed with cotton wool, in vulgarest pink, small and pointed, deep and full, ranged tier on tier. Papiermâché women gripped in pink corsets, with bare hard shining breasts without nipples, with long waxen limbs and imperturbable faces advancing on the cold glass.
‘They might almost be alive,’ Terry said; but he was talking to himself. Harry wouldn’t look.
Terry hurried to catch him up: they walked together to the top of the street. The street opened out into a square where, martial through the rain, the iron horse of a monument galloped silently.
‘Was it that you wouldn’t look?’ Terry said. ‘Or was it that you wouldn’t be seen looking?’
But he seemed, again, to be talking only to himself.
Slowly, close together, they descended the dark stairs, feeling their way each with a hand on the damp wall. The concrete steps spiralled down, circling a stem of blackness: they could barely see one another. The wall was cold under their hands. At the last turning of the stair, they stepped down and round into a bare white room.
Their eyes winced from the glare of the whitewashed walls and the naked bulbs. They stood, surprised, bareheaded, at the edge of the room.
‘Now, indeed, welcome,’ a voice said. ‘Welcome. Come forward: come along in.’
The voice seemed sourceless: they stared about. Near the doorway in which they stood a table held a copper urn, twenty or thirty heavy cups set out in rows, and a glass cabinet with trays of buns. A narrow bench ran along either side of the room. Opposite them, under a huge smarting bulb, a low dais supported a silent harmonium. A woman was bent over the still keys.
‘There’s the jailer,’ Terry said.
He wore a dark suit and a shirt without a collar. He stepped down from the dais and limped towards them over the flagged floor.
‘Oh, Lord,’ Harry said. ‘He’s got a gammy foot, or something.’
‘The cloven hoof, more likely,’ Terry said. ‘Pinching in his shoe.’
‘You’ve got us into something this time,’ Harry said. ‘Let’s make a bolt for it.’
‘And miss the buns?’ Terry said. ‘Yesterday’s too, by the look of it.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Harry said.
‘It’s nonconformist,’ Terry said. ‘You can’t be critical.’
Over the floor, sidling like a stalking beetle, the evangelist limped towards them and as the distance closed they discovered his welcoming grimace. He fell upon them, pulling them towards the dais.
‘We are not denied the young in hope,’ he said to the woman at the harmonium.
A propped placard read: The Lord is coming in the air: Will you be caught up or left for Judgement? The bulbs glared out, bright merciless suns; patches of damp spread on the walls. The woman stayed bent over the keys; her hands furtive white hairless animals, lay as if abandoned under the light, tricked by there being no shadow to which they might flee, breathing, basking, stricken in the glare.
‘Come,’ the evangelist said.
His saving talons, salving sin, pulling them on until they stood with their toes against the boards of the dais. Their eyes sought some relief from the glare. There was a smell of something other than damp that worried Harry. Terry, close enough to have touched the woman’s hands, tried to spear a look at her face.
‘You find it strange?’ the evangelist said. ‘You find it odd that in an age of faith we have to preach the Word of God in cellars?’
His voice was easy, practised and impassioned: impassioned with the fervour not of religion but of elocution; thundering and whispering.
‘You won’t find the defilers of the Temple down here,’ he declaimed. ‘They are in the offices of luxury, above. But they have not the Holy Word. They will be as low as this when their time comes. And they will have no light for comfort, under the earth.’
He looked around. He must have seen it all, have said it all hundreds of times, Harry thought. You could sense him listening for the effects as the damp walls gave back an echo. But he wants us, Harry thought, to see it as all new, all wonderful, all brave.
‘Christ,’ the evangelist said, scaling his voice down; ‘Christ was buried in a place not unlike this. It is our consolation that His faith would light us here if these lights failed.’
But the lights glared back, unaffronted: his voice beat loudly on against the walls. And it was strange. Old Ignatz, Harry thought, wouldn’t have dared as much, either in eloquence or in gesture. It was somehow unbecoming and excessive. Love and peace, the evangelist proclaimed, but suggested neither in his tiptoed caperings; only something bitterly malign. His hands fell to their shoulders, caressing, tender, pressing into the cloth. His voice softened, fluttering with his hands.
‘There’s down on your cheeks, and lust in your souls,’ the evangelist surprisingly said, and the boys looked up. ‘But God is merciful. The ways of salvation are many. He will forgive. The Word is Purity. The Word is Love.’
It had grown comic; nothing could have suggested less of purity than the caressing voice. The woman at the harmonium looked up. The whispering voice, starting fresh echoes, was sharp in the clammy air. The urn of water bubbled at the table.
‘Turn the water down,’ the evangelist said in the same dramatic voice. ‘There’s no need to waste power.’
A girl stood at the table: she was dressed in black. About their own age, she leaned against the wall and returned their stares, reaching a hand to the switch on the urn.
‘Lust in your souls,’ the evangelist said. And as if his fingers were hooking them into heaven, or into hell, he dug at their flesh.
The girl put her hands behind her back and relapsed against the wall: her dress, catching on the rough plaster, pulled tight. Looking to the evangelist and the woman at the harmonium she put out her tongue to the boys’ long look, and in secrecy and derision crossed her legs; crossed one over the other her slow thighs. She smiled.
‘Speak out,’ the evangelist all but roared. ‘We are all God’s creatures here.’
The gripping fingers made Harry’s shoulder numb. He glared at Terry for getting him into this. The dampness smelled like something rotting. He forgot the girl and stared at the evangelist’s built-up shoe.
Catechetical hours; the histories of the martyrs and saints of the one true Church; precept and command; what use were they now? It had ceased to be amusing. In a different order of things the evangelist might have been of that band, militant and severe, and been happy. His fingers, on Harry’s flesh, made him feel both foolish and afraid. It had been Terry who had taken up the offer, on a board in the street, of tea and buns and salvation, all offered in the same size of type. But this was something they neither of them had foreseen. Harry looked to the woman at the harmonium.
Her face was intent and blind. Terry seemed far away, kneeling easily and cynically under the evangelist’s hand, peering at the girl by the steaming urn. Harry felt the gripping fingers relax; they intruded softly, moistly, under his gaping collar.
‘Do you belong to some faith?’ the evangelist said.
‘None,’ Harry said, plunging promptly into damnation, listening almost for the crowing cock.
The evangelist let his breath out in a fierce delighting sigh. Coarsened as with shouting, savage and sly, his voice breathed out.
‘You did well to come,’ he said.
Terry winked at the girl. Harry went down like a diver into his misery; his shame, not for the sin but for its consequence, confession and eager penitence. Would he have to call it bearing false witness; done out of boredom on a wet Sunday afternoon? The dark tide of his small sins for a moment overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and in the darkness and relief from the glare he heard Terry say, mockingly, in a mimicking Irish voice:
‘Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church,’ Terry said. ‘Not forgetting the tea and buns.’
It was cheeky, but it seemed to Harry brave enough. Did the evangelist for a moment snigger? Harry looked up. The dark face drew on a cadaverous look: it was the face not of a benign eccentric but of an angry man.
‘Is that what you came for?’ the evangelist said. ‘For the food, and to mock?’
‘For the tea and buns,’ Terry said, his foolery gone. It’s what your notice said.’
They waited a long time, kneeling in silence.
‘We are all creatures of God,’ the evangelist said, preparing to make another beginning, his hand worming on their close shoulders. ‘You won’t refuse a prayer.’
His fervid voice rolled out. It promised them now a paradise which, larger and colder and emptier than this cellar, repelled them both. It promised a harsh heaven, an eternity of dis-ease, more sterile than the white walls, more remote than the death which must precede it—death and testifying.
The evangelist had forgiven them: his dignity, his dramatic instinct would not be foundered on these doubtful souls. His vision was of something larger, something more improbable; a missionary fame or fate. He looked down on the naked sacrificial necks bent away from the loose collars and saw, troubled, the vertebrae pushing against the white downed flesh. His prayer was rote.
How long ago it seemed to them since they had run through the rain to the college gates, past the mild Ignatius eye and the rained-on Virgin. Time had abandoned them. Their thoughts circled away as he prayed; and their knees hurt. Harry looked to the woman at the harmonium. Inoffensive, she had witnessed his fall, had somehow seemed to conspire in it, and seemed now, without sign or sound, to exult in his defeat, knowing it for what it was. What did it matter that she could not know? The evangelist’s fingers lay on his neck like an executing blade. The woman at the harmonium raised her head as the voice rolled to a stop: and what Harry met in that look was his relief. Her face, older and yet alike, held only the practised counterpart of the seduction, the petulant and slumbering desire, the languorous yielding, offered in the face of the young girl at the urn. Her whole face speculated as she looked at him; she looked away.
‘We’ll give you something to eat, then,’ the evangelist said. ‘After that it would be better if you were to go.’
His voice was not friendly. The woman at the harmonium began at his sign to play a hymn that was foreign to both boys. Pumped and pedalled the notes squeezed out, unclear and forlorn. Terry grinned. The evangelist walked them towards the table where the urn had begun to tremble in its boiling. The young girl, impassive, watched them come, dark against the white walls, all.
‘Maggie,’ the evangelist said, ‘we must give the young men tea; and then they are to go.’ He leaned forward and with more strength than tenderness squeezed her opulent arm. His laugh was short: under his rippling stallion’s lips his teeth were broken as if from a blow. The stubble of his beard was grey.
‘Help yourself,’ Maggie said.
The evangelist left them. Harry would have liked to refuse the grey tea that tasted of condensed milk; but he dared not. Terry emptied his cup and offered it again to the girl, bringing the whole length of his arm slowly across her breast, and smiled as if it had been intentional. The girl’s expression did not change. The stairs ascending by the door fled, dark hope, to the air.
‘What’s Maggie short for?’ Terry said.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Maggie said.
‘Is it Margaret?’ Terry said.
‘Have another guess,’ Maggie said.
‘Is she your mother, then?’ Terry said, nodding back to the woman at the harmonium.
‘What a nose you’ve got,’ Maggie said. ‘But you’re wrong.’
‘You look a bit alike,’ Terry said.
‘That’ll be the day,’ the girl said. ‘Give me time.’
‘What would you do if we came next Sunday?’ Terry said.
‘What I’m doing this Sunday,’ the girl said. ‘Is next Sunday going to be different?’
It might be,’ Terry said. It could be.’
‘Go on,’ the girl said. ‘Your boy friend doesn’t like me.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Terry said. ‘He’ll come round, soon enough.’
The light was making them all screw up their eyes.
What, Harry mused, holding the empty cup, did it amount to anyway? He hadn’t been expecting the evangelist to ask and he’d said the first thing that came into his head. That was all. But was it? Why was the first thing that occurred to him a denial? Well, because he was a bit scared of him, that was why. And was that all? What questions would his confessor ask? He shrugged and shuddered in the damp air. He put down his cup and ran up the stairs, slipping and bounding.
‘Have another guess,’ the girl said as Harry pushed past. ‘Have another shot.’
The wet horse ran still in its iron gallop, silently: the light had weakened and closed in and on the church the cross was lost. Harry walked from the stair head, past the hamburger bar and the smell of fat, hoping that no one would notice him. He bent to read the evangelist’s notice as though he had but that moment come to it, out of curiosity. He had a sense of being watched. He walked on a short distance and leaned against a shop window to wait for Terry. Behind him a small bookend shaped like a skull held upright a row of pamphlets. Terry came out of the doorway and walked towards him.
‘What an odd fish you are,’ Terry said. ‘I was just making some headway. She’d just got to the point of telling me her name: she has a meal at the hamburger-place there when they close up shop.’
‘I don’t want to know her name,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t want to know anything about them.’
‘What’s eating you?’ Terry said. ‘It’ll make a story for old Ignatz; when he’s in the right mood.’
‘I don’t think,’ Harry said. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell him that I denied being a Catholic?’
‘I thought of saying C of E,’ Terry said. ‘That doesn’t commit you to anything.’
‘You didn’t though,’ Harry said. ‘You’re all right.’
He said it gloomily but with an undertone as if the knowledge that he himself was far from all right was of some satisfaction.
‘It was a mortal sin,’ Harry said, and had a moment’s vision of a white soul, like a white plate, obscured with a great splash that might have been ink.
‘Don’t take on, son,’ Terry said. ‘He was an old crank. We had tea with him, that’s all. His prayers don’t touch us.’
‘You know better than that,’ Harry said. It gave me the willies, even his crazy sermons.’
‘He had them pat,’ Terry said. ‘Mugs them up from some book, most likely.’
‘It wasn’t real,’ Harry said. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Maggie was real,’ Terry grinned. ‘I could tell. And you’ve brought a souvenir.’
Harry looked down at his hands. He must have been holding it all this time; one of the buns from the glass cabinet, meagrely splashed with treacle. He looked at it with astonishment and distaste: he walked out to the edge of the footpath and dropped it in the gutter: it stuck a moment, ducked in a falling spout, and swirled away towards the drain. Was that the last of it all, he wondered?
‘We’ll miss Benediction,’ Terry said.
They crossed the road and walked through the rain. Harry had the feeling, while Terry talked, that the trigger had, after all, been pulled and that what he was left with was the small shot and the echoes, comforting in a way, of the explosion. Terry had arranged to meet the girl next Sunday when the cellar closed. He was cocksure and nervous: he had forgotten the ludicrous prayers. That was his religion: what he could forget would be forgiven him: expediency and good temper and intelligence counted for something. His face, shining in the rain, was innocent of all but impetuosity.
They came in sight of the ugly wrought steeple of the cathedral: it too shone in the rain. In the porch students from the college stood about in groups.
‘You go off,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll come later.’
And the way Terry went off, jovial and eager, the story like saliva bubbling at his lip, did not comfort Harry. He went up and waited near the main doors; waiting for the organ to start. After a long time he pushed open the doors and went in.
He walked into the familiar smell: he turned across the back of the church behind the pews, by the table of twopenny pamphlets and the padlocked collection box, and went down the side aisle in the dim light, past the painted Stations of the Cross—agony by agony—as into a world deserved; its incense and flowers and tier on tier of burning candles returning to his gaze their familiar comfort, their suggestion of lavish adoration. He stared feasting at the rich colours, the gleaming candlesticks, the warm falling yellow light through which the sanctuary lamp gleamed permanent and dark and ruby as blood. In the Garden of Gethsemane the unceasing tears of pale paint washed scars in the face of a Christ weeping for the round and wicked world. It was a bad painting, he knew.
He walked down the aisle relishing a new conception of himself in a dark and sinful role, passionately apart. Out of the Catechism he had made a sad romance; out of evil a pale sadness; out of adolescence a drama in which he stole the show. He squeezed into an empty place in a pew.
De profundis… the tuneless choir rang.
The ageing bishop, mounting lean and light from the foot of the shadowed stairs, climbed breathless into the high pulpit. His bespectacled eyes, bland yellow discs, reflected with complacence the rich interior. The ring on his unused hand glittered as he blessed the congregation.
In the Name of the Father …
What was it to remind him of, that smooth white hand? The strangeness of the chastely clad girl bearing no suggestion of innocence or restraint? The cellar, baited with this fresh yet corrupt virginity: plumbing fruit ripening in the glaring light? Could you believe the bishop was talking of the same thing, the same sins or the same salvation?
The soul, the bishop gave out, is immortal: and Harry started. You had to believe that. Yes, you had to. He relapsed into a cottonwool doze. The air smelled of damp clothes, the sourness obscured by the wreathing incense. Handkerchiefs were spread along the kneeling rails. Harry looked into his clasped fingers. He thought of that cynical suggestion of virtue, in the women, and in the man. He thought of it with excitement. He wished now that he and not Terry had made the appointment with the girl. What was Maggie short for if not Margaret? His stomach rumbled emptily and he glanced sideways at his neighbour to see if he had heard: the man was asleep.
The bishop climbed down. Harry stepped quickly into the aisle and genuflected very slowly, like an old dramatic actor, and rose and walked back, against the current of curious faces, past the plaque where Christ offered his crowned head from St Veronica’s picturing shawl. He went towards the doors. The hand of the evangelist seemed to burn still on his flesh, under his collar. He looked gloomily, self-consciously into the faces that watched him.
The door swung behind him. He crossed the porch, pausing before the collection plates piled with treacherous silver, and walked down the steps. Once outside, and alone, it seemed no use to pretend to anything: he knew how hard he had worked to make huge the merely venial, to build the dark false picture of his humourless self.
Only the noise of the rain accompanied him now, rushing down the steepled slopes. The lights of a turning car washed over him and raked away. He began to walk back towards the town. It was no use pretending to anything: he wouldn’t be other than what he was. He counted his steps. Showering from the evergreen foliage invisible rain pelted sharply, briefly, on his shoulders and neck.
It was no use pretending. And he was hungry: he felt the pangs catch him and smiled with a wry, pretended surprise.
And the thought of food made him quicken his steps.