The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Toibin

  ‘My father’s system of logic didn’t mean much that night. I went home and I was already in bed when François came in. “Those boys are not your friends,” he said. He tried to explain that he didn’t understand what the question was, but I knew that anyway, and I told him so. He turned the light off and got into his bed. I started to cry and he came over and sat on my bed and tried to comfort me and then he lay down beside me and he said that he was my friend and we wouldn’t go to the club any more. Anyway, slowly, as he lay against me, I realised that he had an erection. He put his hand inside my pyjama-top and touched my shoulder. But I’d had enough of boys with erections, so that even when he kissed me I lay there frozen. Nothing happened and he didn’t do anything more. After a while he went back to his own bed.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ Helen asked.

  ‘We became very close, especially when I went for a month to his house in France. His parents were young and he was an only child and they treated us like adults. They had a lot of time for us and they were so polite. François thought my father didn’t like him because he used to banter with him all the time. But François’ father always said what he meant and normally that was something quite gende and straightforward. I loved how straightforward they all were. And François was like that too, he was loyal and serious and polite. Sometimes he was also very funny, he wasn’t a drip. I loved how clear he was, and how careful about everything he did and said. And I knew he liked me as well and that was amazing. His parents rented a house by the sea in Normandy and we swam and played tennis. We never touched each other, but we did things in France that we didn’t do in Ireland, like we stripped off in front of each other, rather more perhaps than was necessary.’

  ‘It sounds like true love,’ Helen said.

  ‘It was a sort of pure happiness, yeah it was,’ Paul said. He stared out to sea and closed his eyes.

  Helen wanted to ask him what happened next, but felt that a single question, phrased badly, could stop him now, and she desperately wanted him to go on. When he did not speak, she decided not to prompt him. Then he began again:

  ‘François came back to Ireland when I was going into my third year in Trinity. He had changed a lot, he was taller and stockier. His face was thinner. He had new gestures and was funnier. We had corresponded over the years, but less as time went on. I had a bedsit in Dun Laoghaire but he had rooms in Trinity for the month of September, and the first night we met we found ourselves in the city with the last bus gone. I took up his offer to use the other bed in his room. It was like the old days except we were both nearly twenty. I knew that I was gay, but I had done nothing about it, except wank myself to death, if you’ll excuse the language. He’d been with a guy, but only once. Anyway, that night in Trinity, we were half drunk and we made a big play of stripping off and wandering around the room. Someone had to make the first move, but it wasn’t going to be me. After we’d been in bed for a while there was a silence, and then he asked me in French if he could come to my bed. I still remember the words and we often laugh at them. But I was too nervous. It was too much, I wanted him too badly, and it was all too real. I said no, but he could tomorrow. I made sure he understood that I meant yes, that I wasn’t just putting him off. He stretched his arm out towards me in the dark and we held hands for a while between the two beds. And then the next night we went to bed together for the first time.’

  ‘And have you been together ever since?’

  ‘Well, for the next two years we saw one another as often as we could, and then when I graduated I went to Paris for a year, and then we both came back here for a year. So we’ve been together for the past eight or nine years but the last two years have been very difficult.’

  They stood up and brushed the sand off themselves and began to walk back towards Cush.

  ‘How have they been difficult?’

  ‘When we got together,’ Paul went on, ‘François’ parents were just unbelievable. They bought a big double bed for us and put it in François’ room. I don’t think he had a single moment’s problem with them about being gay. We saw them often. We usually stayed with them on a Saturday night, or saw them on Sunday. They were our best friends. And they were both killed in a car crash, killed instantly, almost two years ago, they were still in their forties. They were driving out from a side road, the car behind them crashed into them and pushed them out into the path of a lorry. And then our world fell apart. There were no close relatives as both of them were only children; there were no cousins or aunts. Francois was alone except for me, but after a while I was no help to him because he couldn’t handle the idea that I might abandon him.

  ‘I said I wouldn’t. I tried to reassure him and I thought that soon he would be all right. He had taken time off from work, and I thought that when he went back he’d be better, but he wasn’t better, and he couldn’t manage – he’s a civil servant – so he had to take extended leave. He believed I was going to desert him and after a while no reassurance was any use. The phone would ring at work, and the person on the other end would hang up, but I’d know that it was him checking on me. He was falling apart; he went to a counsellor and a therapist but it made no difference.

  ‘Then I had to go to a conference in Paris. I told him way in advance that I was going, it was a job I couldn’t get out of. It was a three-day conference on fisheries. I was in the translators’ box on the last day and I suddenly saw François walking into the hall. He looked lost and strange, he was like someone who had gone out of his mind. All I felt was anger. I ran down and grabbed him and brought him up with me and kept him there. I was really pissed off with him, and I realised that I couldn’t handle much more. Back in the hotel, I’m afraid I let a few roars at him, which I don’t think I’d ever done at anyone before, and I told him he would have to pull himself together. I remember that we went to bed without speaking. We got the train back to Brussels without speaking and I realised we’d lost it.

  ‘I thought that maybe we’d split up for a trial period and I went around with this in my head for a few days, but it was a stupid plan. I was just letting him down, I wasn’t helping him, and I knew that if we split up now we’d never get back together again. So I remember one night when things were at their very worst asking him if he loved me and he said that he did. I said that I loved him as well, and I knew he was afraid of being alone, and I told him I would do anything to prove to him that I would stay with him. I told him I would show I meant it. And I did mean it.’ Paul stopped and wiped his eyes with his hands. He stood and looked at Helen.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asked.

  They sat down on the hard sand under the cliff at Cush and watched the waves breaking softly and the haze on the horizon and the mild sky.

  ‘I did two things. I brought him home and reintroduced him to all my family, including my brothers, as my partner and my lover. Only my sister knew I was gay before that, and it was all difficult and emotional. It was OK in the end, mainly because of my father, oddly enough. That was the first thing I did.’

  ‘And what was the second?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Maybe I’m boring you with this. I’m worse than Larry.’

  ‘No, tell me,’ she said.

  ‘So, we went back to Brussels, and every time François talked about me leaving, I just said the same thing: “I’ll do anything to show you that it’s not true.” He still hadn’t gone back to work and he was depressed, and I’d come home from the Commission and he would have been in bed all day, and he was on all sorts of pills, but I kept saying to myself that I had to try and help him. We had a photograph of his parents enlarged and framed. We selected a gravestone. We went through all their things. I just said to him all the time like a mantra: “I’ll do anything to show you that it’s not true. I’m not going to leave.”

  ‘Both of us were part of a group of Catholic gay men in Brussels who met on a Wednesday night. Declan used to fall about laughing at the idea, and even more when I told him some of the things that were sa
id. He used to call it Cruising for Christ. He just couldn’t believe that we went there. But anyway, we did, and we made good friends there, and I asked a few of them – I had to do this very discreedy because there were some activists in the group who were angry with the Church – I asked a few of them if there was a priest in Brussels or anywhere who would bless us. One of them was an ex-priest himself, and he told me he knew someone, and would call on him and find out and come back and tell us. He came back and said that the priest he knew was worried about being set up for a publicity stunt, so I should go and see him and tell him that this wasn’t about politics or publicity.

  ‘The priest in question was a grumpy little old man, badly shaved, with dandruff everywhere and huge bushy eyebrows. He lived in a big shabby house in a part of Brussels I’d never been in before. He was hostile, but I knew that I hadn’t been sent to him for nothing. He asked me things like when was the last time I had been to Confession. I said it was years. And Communion? I said it was a long time. He let a big shout at me that I just wanted to use the Church. I had no intention of arguing with him. He said he would phone me and he husded me out.

  ‘A few nights later he phoned and said that he wanted to meet us in our apartment. He came and sat there and looked at the two of us. He never smiled once or was in any way friendly. He asked us questions in a really abrupt tone. And then he stood up and said he would do it on three conditions – one, that we made good confessions before the ceremony; two, that we went to Mass and Communion every Sunday for a year; and three, that we told no one. We said to him that the third was impossible, we would have to tell two people, but we would guarantee that they would tell no one – and, in fact, within a few days, we had told Declan and my sister. He mumbled something and left, and a few days later he phoned with a date and a time.

  ‘He came to see us once more and informed us that he had something very important to say. He spelt it out carefully: he was prepared to marry us rather than conduct a blessing. He said, “I am willing to perform the sacrament of matrimony, if that is what you want.” And we said that was what we wanted but we didn’t think it could be done. “It can be done,” he said, “but it is a grave step, and you must let me know if you have any doubts.” We assured him that we wanted this. One day he rang and asked us if we were going on a honeymoon and we said that we had thought of it. “Leave a few hours free after the ceremony,” he said. We booked a flight to Barcelona for later that day, which was a Saturday, and booked a posh hotel for a week. We bought suits and had haircuts. The only things missing were the photographer, the organist and the wedding guests. That morning we packed our bags and we got a taxi out to the priest’s house. François couldn’t stop giggling when we were waiting at the door. It was the first time he had giggled like that since his parents died and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  ‘The priest heard our confessions separately, and then he brought us together and asked us again if we were sure. We told him we were sure. He brought us into a small church by a side door which he then locked. The church was done in gold and when he turned on all the lights it was all rich and glittering. He changed into his vestments and said Mass and gave us Communion and then he married us. He used the word “spouse” instead of husband and wife. He had it all prepared. He was very solemn and serious. And we felt the light of the Holy Spirit on us, even though Declan thought this was the maddest thing he’d ever heard and I suppose you do too.’

  ‘I don’t think that at all,’ Helen said.

  ‘We felt that we had been singled out to receive a very special grace. All three of us knelt and prayed for a long time.’

  ‘Why did the priest do it? What was his history?’

  ‘We never asked and we never found out. He had a housekeeper who was nearly more dishevelled than him and just as unfriendly, but that didn’t bother us after the ceremony because we were so happy. Anyway, the padre asked us to eat with him, and it was straight out of Babette’s Feast. Have you seen that?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a film where the most sumptuous meal is made for the most unlikely people. This housekeeper brought plate after plate of pâté and lobster and prawns and stuffed everything, and then meringues and amazing cheese and a wine that the padre had removed the label from – we knew it must have cost a fortune – and champagne. Our priest barely touched it, he sat back with his hands over his little paunch like an old Christian Brother, and almost smiled. We ate what we could. He loved us cooing every time more food came, although the housekeeper who had cooked it didn’t look at us once. At the end he raised his glass and said something extraordinary. He said: “Welcome to the Catholic Church.” And we proposed a toast to him and his housekeeper, but he said the person to thank was not them, the person to thank was Jesus Christ. But we didn’t think we could propose a toast to Jesus Christ, we felt we had pushed our luck far enough, so we nodded in agreement, and we went to the airport soon after that. When we got into bed in the hotel that night, I said, “This is our first night as man and wife,” and François asked who was the man and who was the wife. “Turn off the light,” I said, “and I’ll show you.” We laughed until we shook, and that was the beginning of a new life for us. Although François still has his bad moments, it was a turning point and we’re very close now. He hates me being away like this, but he loves Declan and he understands.’

  They scrambled up the cliff at Mike Redmond’s and sat on the edge with the sea wide and calm and blue beneath them.

  ‘Did you see much of Declan during all that time?’ Helen asked.

  ‘He didn’t come to Brussels over the past two years, because he knew we had problems and because he wasn’t well, but before that he was a regular visitor. He would come for long weekends and he’d make us hang out in bars and clubs with him, and he’d usually abandon us at a certain time and then come back home in the early hours like a half-drowned dog. My best memory of him was in the morning; he would crawl in the bottom of our bed. He was like a small boy, and he’d talk and doze and play with our feet. François always joked about adopting him; he even bought a child’s pyjamas for him as a joke and folded them on his bed. François loved his visits. Usually, by Saturday afternoon, the phone would ring and someone from Friday night, or Thursday night if Declan had come earlier, would be eager to talk to him and Declan wouldn’t be interested. He checked out all our friends from the Catholic gay organisation and a few of them really fell for him – everybody fell for him – and he would bounce up and down with them for maybe two weekends, and then he’d arrive again and we’d know by something he did or said that he hadn’t been returning So-and-so’s calls, so we learned never to tell anyone he was coming. And then the whole routine would start again; he’d laugh about it himself. François used to say that once he went to school and met all the other toddlers he’d be all right, and Declan loved being fed and looked after and listened to and protected from his former lovers by us. He was fascinated by how we never had it off with anybody else. He was always listing out the names of actors and asking us if we’d sleep with them. He’d go “OK, Paul Newman in Hud,” and we’d shake our heads; “Marlon Brando in Streetcar,” and we’d still shake our heads; “Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and we’d still shake our heads. And then he’d get fed up – he got fed up very easily – and he’d call out other names like Albert Reynolds or Le Pen or Helmut Kohl.’

  When Paul and Helen got back to the house, they saw that Larry’s car had gone and her mother’s car was not there either. When they opened the kitchen door the two cats scrambled back to their vantage point. There was no one in the house.

  ‘Do you think Declan is sick?’ she asked. ‘Do you think they had to take him to hospital?’

  ‘I’ll be able to tell you instantly,’ he said.

  He went to Declan’s bedroom and looked into the locker beside the bed.

  ‘No, all his drugs are here. He wouldn’t have gone anywhere without them.’

&nbs
p; ‘Maybe they’ve gone shopping,’ Helen said.

  She heated the soup that her grandmother had left in a saucepan beside the range and made toast and tea. She put two bowls on the table and went back to the range.

  ‘You know that priest in Brussels?’ She turned to Paul, who was sitting at the table.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Does the Pope know much about him?’

  He narrowed his eyes and pointed at her. ‘That is exactly the sort of thing Declan says, and he uses exactly the same tone of voice, as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’

  ‘I was just wondering,’ she said.

  ‘And I have no intention of allowing another member of your family to start. I’m sorry I told you the whole story now. It’s amazing that people like you are let bring up children.’ He smiled ruefully.

  ‘Ah no, Paul, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘That’s why I left this country, remarks like that. French people, even Belgian people, never talk like that.’

  ‘You really are a sensitive boy,’ she said.

  ‘You’re starting again.’

  ‘But all the same, can you imagine if the Pope got to hear about it?’