A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  I read the Narnia sequence, which was well received by the priests, for they said that it was a spiritual work although I struggled to see it myself; I thought it was just about a lion, a witch and a wardrobe. A lad from Howth had a full collection of James Bond novels hidden beneath his bed and these were passed around surreptitiously between us; there would have been murder if they’d been discovered, but they never were. Jack Hannigan from Sheriff Street got into terrible trouble when he was caught with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint, which Rudolph said was a filthy book and shouldn’t be allowed in a Catholic country. He was sent to the Spiritual Director every day for a month until he saw the error of his ways.

  A few boys, gathered together in the half-hour free time before dinner, might occasionally discuss the Church itself, although you were seen as a suck if you brought it up first. It had been almost a decade now since the Second Vatican Council had come to an end and there had been great expectations about modern changes in the Church, discussions about celibacy and marriage, all the things which might have made it more attractive to the young and more in touch with the contemporary world. But John XXIII had died before it could be fully implemented and Paul VI showed no signs of wanting to pursue any path towards secularity, although in retrospect he looks like the Great Modernizer in comparison with the Polish and German popes who were to come in the decades ahead and who would do everything in their power to curtail the implementation of the proposals. How different things might have been if they had.

  Towards the end of the day, the Canon would give us a homily and sometimes we would practise our Gregorian chant. The Rosary followed, perhaps a Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a light supper, and then shortly before nine we would gather one last time in the chapel for the Office of Compline, to thank God for the blessings of the day and to pray for His continued benevolence towards us.

  After that we were sent to our cells and the Grand Silence began. No one could speak from then until when we woke the following morning and there could be no noise at all; running water was an offence and any boy who had not used the lavatory before arriving in his cell was in serious difficulties for the next nine hours if he had a weak bladder.

  In reality, we boys did not always observe the Grand Silence as strictly as we should. Most pairs would whisper to each other before sleep fell upon them, talking about their lives back home, the families and friends we missed, our worries about our futures, the things we liked and didn’t like about seminary life. Only Kevin Samuels from Pearse Street, who we had christened ‘The Pope’ on account of how seriously he took every instruction, fully obeyed the Grand Silence, and his cell-mate, young Michael Trotter from Dundrum, would complain that it was like bunking next to a brick wall and that he’d do anything to get a switch, even if it meant sharing with George Dunne, who might have looked like a movie star but barely washed from one end of the week to the other.

  It was hard; of course it was. It was regimented. It was like being in the army at times, or what I imagined being in the army would have been like. Perhaps Father Dementyev would have set me straight on that comparison. But it suited me. It suited me very well indeed. However, it didn’t suit Tom Cardle. Poor lad, he hated every minute of it.

  The confrontation happened on February the fourteenth. I remember the date well, for not only was it my birthday, but there’d been a bit of scandal earlier in the day when one of the boys two years ahead of us received three Valentine’s cards in the post. To receive one was astonishing, to receive two was unheard of, but to receive three? No one could quite believe it. He wasn’t even much to look at, and had no life outside the seminary as far as any of us knew. There was talk that his sister had got her friends to send them as a joke, but the poor lad had been mortified by the attention and he got called Casanova for the next few weeks, until the joke wore thin and we found better things to gossip about.

  Tom had been in a bad mood since waking. He’d still been in bed when I came back from my bath at a quarter past six and only shifted himself when I told him that he’d be late for Morning Office if he didn’t get up and dressed. I could see dark patches under his eyes; he probably hadn’t fallen asleep until very late, and he barely acknowledged me as he looked for his trousers and shirt. Although we were friends and had got along well since the first day that we were put together, I knew it was best to stay out of his way when he was in a mood like this. The curtain had been pulled between us the night before and he’d been playing with himself without an ounce of shame; I could hear every turn he made, every groan of pain or ecstasy, the tears that had followed, and he didn’t even look at me as he picked up a handful of tissues that had fallen to the floor by his bed before he had finally fallen asleep.

  ‘Are you all right, Tom?’ I asked, opening the window, dreading to think what one of the priests would say if he walked in here now and picked up the stale stench in the room.

  ‘Go on up, Odran,’ he replied, waving me away. ‘I’ll follow in a few minutes.’

  I didn’t see him at Morning Office, although there he was, marching in line with everyone else for communion at the quarter-past-seven Mass. He sat on his own over breakfast, his head bowed low over his porridge, shovelling spoonfuls into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten for a month. We were not due at UCD that day and a retreat of sorts had been planned among the seminarians where our year would gather with one of the priests and discussions on any topic, within reason, could take place. When we walked into the classroom I had a sense from the expression on Tom’s face that something unpleasant might be about to happen and my stomach contorted with apprehension. I don’t know why exactly, but I felt a sense of obligation to him; we were cell-mates and should never let each other down. That was my belief anyway, even if it wasn’t his.

  Our instructor that day was a mild-mannered priest from Laois named Father Slevin. A discussion was taking place about the role of women in the Church – as far as I could tell this seemed to be restricted at the time to arranging flowers on the altar, cleaning the sacristy and laundering the priests’ robes – and one of the lads, I think it was Michael Trotter, put his hand up and asked Father Slevin whether he thought the day would ever come when a priest might be allowed to marry. A great stirring went around us all and we jeered at Michael. To suggest an interest in the opposite sex was to leave yourself open to ridicule, but he was a tough enough lad and simply grinned at us and told us to behave or he’d put manners on us in the cloister walk later. Father Slevin saw no harm in the question though and began a discussion on theology and the place of women in Church history, how important they had been from the Virgin Mary on down. He made what I think was supposed to be a joke about the fact that there had never been a priest in the history of the Catholic Church who did not have a woman for a mother, but no, he told us, priests would never be allowed to marry, for they were already married to their vocation and sure wasn’t that good enough for all of us.

  Michael seemed happy enough with the answer – he hadn’t been trying to act the guffaw, it had just been a question – but then Tom raised his hand and I looked across in surprise, for there was generally more chance of my cell-mate joining Seamus Wells for two hundred laps around the yard at five thirty in the morning than there was of him raising his hand in class.

  ‘The honourable gentleman from Wexford,’ said Father Slevin, probably pleased to see Tom participate at last. ‘You have a question?’

  ‘I do, Father,’ said Tom. ‘I have a question about St Peter.’

  Father Slevin frowned; we hadn’t been talking about St Peter. What had St Peter to do with the discussion of the day?

  ‘Was not St Peter married?’ asked Tom, and now Father Slevin smiled, as if this was not the first time that this question had been raised to him.

  ‘Ah that old chestnut,’ he said. ‘Yes, Tom, you’re right, St Peter was a married man.’

  ‘And he was the first Pope?’

  ‘Yes, but what you must remember is that St Peter wa
s already married before Jesus chose him as a disciple. And long before our Lord was crucified and declared that Peter was the rock upon which he would build his church. Many of the apostles were married, in fact. They were not told to renounce their wives. Sure that wouldn’t have been fair at all.’

  ‘But still and all,’ insisted Tom, ‘he was married.’

  ‘He was, yes. We read in Luke, chapter 4, how Simon’s mother-in-law was affected with a severe fever and they interceded with him – meaning Jesus – about her. He stood over her, rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up immediately and waited upon them.’

  ‘Of course she did,’ said Tom, sneering for all his worth. ‘Sure what else would she do but make a few sandwiches and brew a pot of tea, and her only lifted from her deathbed? But there were others too, weren’t there?’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Popes who were married, for example?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Father Slevin.

  ‘Ah there were now, come on,’ insisted Tom. ‘I read about it. It’s in the Encyclopaedia Britannica so it can’t be wrong. There was a lad in the sixth century, Hormisdas was his name, and he was married.’

  ‘Pope St Hormisdas was a widower when he took holy orders,’ replied Father Slevin warily. ‘There are no rules against that. Father Dementyev, as you probably know, was a widower when he entered the seminary.’

  I didn’t know that at all and I wondered what had happened to his wife; had she been killed during the war?

  ‘And a good job too, since his son became Pope a few years after him,’ continued Tom. ‘And what of Pope Adrian in the ninth century? I read that he took his wife and kids to live with him in the Vatican.’

  ‘There was no Vatican in the ninth century, Tom,’ said Father Slevin patiently. ‘It wasn’t fully completed until the sixteenth.’

  ‘Aren’t you missing the point a little?’

  ‘I don’t know much about Pope Adrian,’ said Father Slevin. ‘And I don’t suppose you do either, except for whatever you’ve dug up out of a provocative book.’

  ‘And there’s lots of other examples,’ continued Tom. ‘A few other wives along the way. Not to mention all the lovers they had.’

  ‘Now Tom—’

  ‘Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, he was the father of Lucrezia Borgia, wasn’t he? And we all know what she was like. Most of the popes in the Middle Ages were having it away with whoever took their fancy. And did I read that Julius III and the Venetian ambassador – a man, mind you – used to share a bed? So if all these popes could get away with it, why not the priests?’

  Father Slevin smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s very easy to pick names out of antiquity, Tom, when times were very different to how they are today, and bandy them around as if they prove your point. But if you were a little better versed in ecclesiastical history and not just mouthing names and stories that you’ve read somewhere, then you would know that none of the popes you mention were particularly effective in their role. Yes, Pope Innocent was the father of Lucrezia Borgia. But doesn’t that rather prove my point? Would we not prefer a celibate pope to one who produces offspring like that? Sure she was a terrible piece, by all accounts.’

  Tom sat back and folded his arms. I turned to look at him; he’d made his point well but had been bested.

  ‘Well what about the housekeepers?’ he asked after a few moments, when Father Slevin had already turned back to the board and was using the duster to clear a section for something new.

  ‘The what?’ he replied, turning around.

  ‘The housekeepers,’ repeated Tom. ‘Sure they’re up and down the length of the country, aren’t they? Sharing the houses with the parish priests, cooking their dinners, baking their cakes, picking up their socks and underpants and throwing them in the wash.’

  ‘Ah now, Tom,’ said Father Slevin, putting his duster down on the desk, perhaps to spare himself the temptation of flinging it at the boy’s head. ‘That’s enough of that.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s a little something going on between the parish priests and their housekeepers, do you? The pair of them alone at night, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea, a slice of Eccles cake and Coronation Street on the telly? You don’t think that occasionally one thing leads to another and—’

  ‘Tom!’ roared Father Slevin, his face puce now with anger. ‘You will stop this talk right now!’

  ‘It’s a legitimate question.’

  ‘It is not. You’re being deliberately provocative and deliberately obscene.’

  ‘Do you have a housekeeper yourself, Father?’

  ‘Of course not. Sure don’t I live here with you boys.’

  ‘But you did parish work at some point?’

  ‘I did,’ he replied, looking flustered now. ‘When I was newly ordained. But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘And did you have a housekeeper then?’

  ‘Yes, Tom,’ he said quickly. ‘If memory serves, I did. But it is standard practice and—’

  ‘Just one other question then, Father,’ said Tom quietly, ‘and then I’ll let it go.’

  Father Slevin closed his eyes for a moment and from my seat I could hear him exhaling carefully. His cheeks were red and his hands were trembling slightly; he wasn’t accustomed to this kind of thing and didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t like it either. I wished Tom would just go back to sleep like he usually did in class.

  ‘All right then, Tom,’ said Father Slevin. ‘One more question and then we move on. What’s your question?’

  ‘Your housekeeper,’ replied Tom, a smirk appearing on his face as he looked around the room to make sure that everyone was listening to him. ‘Did you ever fuck her?’

  After that, he went missing. He simply vanished. He disappeared for a full week. He had been confined to our cell while the Canon decided what to do with him. On the night of the confrontation, I broke the Grand Silence to ask Tom what he had been thinking.

  ‘Just because you’re happy here, Odran,’ he said after such a long pause that I wondered whether he was asleep, ‘doesn’t mean that everyone else is.’

  ‘But there are no gates in this college,’ I told him, ‘either inside or out. Do you not remember the Canon telling us that when we arrived? You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.’

  He sat up in bed and stared across at me, tilting his head a little to the side as if he was trying to understand how I could be so naive. ‘God love you, Odran,’ he said. ‘You’re a pure innocent, aren’t you?’

  And when I woke up the next day, he was gone. He must have packed a bag without disturbing me, then made an escape from the seminary through the side door off the cloister walk that was often left unlocked, and what happened to him after that I did not know for many years.

  The priests were in a distraction when he didn’t show up for breakfast the following morning – his absence hadn’t been noticed at either Morning Office or Mass – and I think they were at a loss for how to explain it. A confrontation such as the one that had taken place between Tom and Father Slevin the previous day was practically unheard of. We were respectful boys, quiet lads, we didn’t argue, we didn’t put up a fight. I look back and am not sure why that was the case; after all, we were also teenage boys. Did we have no life or spirit to us at all?

  Canon Robson took me into his office and closed the door behind us.

  ‘Did Tom Cardle tell you that he was planning a flit?’ he asked me and I shook my head.

  ‘He didn’t say a word,’ I told him, nervous now, for I had never been inside this room before and didn’t like it.

  ‘He never expressed any … dissatisfaction?’ he asked, opening his hands wide and smiling at me. He had a face that a smile didn’t take to easily. I was uncertain how to answer; I didn’t want to betray any of Tom’s confidences, but then he hadn’t presented them to me as such.

  ‘I think he misses his home,’ I said. ‘I think he misses Wexford.’

  ‘And which of us do not
?’ he asked. ‘Did you know I’m a Wexford man myself?’

  ‘I didn’t, Canon,’ I said.

  ‘Born and bred. Did you ever get down to that part of the country, Odran?’

  I shook my head; I said nothing.

  ‘You’ve never been to Wexford?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes at me and frowning. How much did he know about my past, I wondered. How much had Mam told him?

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, hedging my bets.

  ‘You’re not sure,’ he repeated, smiling. ‘Right so. But you’ll promise me that you have no idea where Tom Cardle has gone?’

  ‘None, Canon.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you at your word.’ He sat back in his chair, crossing his hands over his substantial stomach. ‘It’s not easy, sure I know that,’ he said after a moment. ‘Coming to a place like this, leaving your friends and your family behind. You’re all just young lads. Too young, I think sometimes. I often wonder whether it would not be better to join a seminary at twenty-five instead of seventeen. What do you think of that, Odran?’

  ‘I don’t know, Canon.’

  ‘You don’t know, Canon,’ he said with a sigh, as if he’d give anything for a straight answer. ‘And he never spoke to his Spiritual Director about his concerns?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Canon.’

  ‘You know that’s what he’s there for, don’t you? For any of you that might question your place here?’