‘The Devil is still evangelising the world. Only ten per cent in Belgium and fourteen per cent in France still follow their religious duties …’
France. Morna wondered how her daughter was, whether Madame was dragging her off to church. Had she deprived her only child by not including a religion along with all the other goodies—the private school, Seiko watch, ten-speed racing bike? Chris felt very far away, further than Les Lecques, almost as far as Neil in California. She would be eighteen next birthday, official adulthood—seemed far too young for it; tall, but undeveloped still, like a lanky plant which needed fertiliser. Yet she would leave next year for university; home only in vacations (or bits and pieces of them) until she married, disappeared for ever. Morna hated the thought of that. Yet she couldn’t cling, couldn’t even say ‘I love you, darling’ without her daughter squirming away embarrassed. Chris could be cool at times—a coolness which hid blame, perhaps. ‘Would my father have left a different sort of woman?’
Morna didn’t care to answer that, sometimes also wondered if Neil would have left a son. He had always wanted a boy, prematurely christened his daughter Christopher, shortened it to Chris when she was still two months off full-term. She had hardly bothered with a name herself. The baby wasn’t real. She was too young to have a baby, didn’t want one yet. She blamed Neil’s constant itch, transferred some of the resentment from his bulge to her own. When it turned out female, Neil refused to change the name. He hated being wrong. He had already lost a tenner on a wager with his friends—something to do with his virility again. Men produced men.
‘All right,’ he had said, picking up the sallow screaming scrap. ‘Christine.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Well, Christabel. That’s nice.’
‘No, dear.’ It was Bea this time who shook her head. Christabel was fancy and therefore vulgar; too close to what Bea called plumber’s children’s names—Jason and Samantha. Even Morna was a little too unusual for her taste, and only Edward’s death had won him his own way. Something plain and dignified like Jane, she urged. Morna felt too tired to argue. The labour had been long and painful and she was always tense when her husband and her mother were thrown together.
‘Decided on a name yet?’ asked the nurse, who appeared at dawn with the protesting baby and a tepid cup of tea
‘Yes,’ said Morna. ‘Christine Jane.’
‘Pretty,’ said the nurse, passing over the wailing ugly child.
‘Hi, Chris!’ said her father, when he blazoned in that evening scattering dolls, rattles, chocolates, and brandishing a sheath of flowers so tall they had to be cut down before they would fit any of the standard hospital vases. And Chris she remained.
Neil had a son now, not Christopher, but Dean. Four and a half and beautiful.
Morna jumped as the woman beside her pushed her chair back. The lecture had finished and she was still in the maternity ward. She tried to look alert, as if she had absorbed every word and was now spiritually nourished. There was another talk straight afterwards, so no chatting was allowed, but people were clearing throats and stretching legs, smiles switched on again.
‘How’s your mother?’ someone whispered to her.
‘Not too bright today,’ Morna whispered back. It felt ludicrous conversing sotto voce as if they were conspirators. The setting was all wrong for that cloak-and-dagger stuff—a chintzy room with rose-sprigged wallpaper, bright sun streaming in.
‘She’s resting at the moment. I think she overdid it yesterday, so I persuaded her to spend the day in bed.’
‘Very wise. Let her know we’re praying for her, won’t you?’
Morna nodded, tried to match the golden-syrup smile. She felt exposed without her mother. Bea was a buffer, a guarantee of her own religious pedigree, and even with Bea in bed, she couldn’t miss the talks. Her mother had requested a complete résumé of the day’s proceedings.
Father John was next. He was what was styled progressive, but she knew already it would be only the outward wrappings that were different. It depressed her really, the way she was hearing the same old arguments which had been trotted out at school. Twenty years had passed, years of so-called progress, yet everything the same. Women fawning on their priests, arguing over petty points of ritual when the huge central questions were still shouting out for total reappraisal. She glanced up and down the rows of eager faces, simple children settling back on their hard school chairs to wait for Teacher—or still sitting on their Father’s knee, open-mouthed and credulous, making sense of the senseless, adding up the infinite. Or maybe she was wrong? Not only arrogant, uncharitable, but still stuck in religious adolescence, searching for a Meaning to Life when most of her acquaintances left that to Monty Python or Woody Allen. Neil had tried to teach her that only cranks or bores brought God to the dinner table. There were more important things—whether unit trusts were superior to equities, or German Brie to French. Even her own woman friends regarded religion as irrelevant. Some had beliefs, even passionate beliefs, but more in feminism or unilateralism than in any Higher Being. Yet, at university everyone had agonised about meaning and morality, the purpose of life, the fact of death. Why should such questions have any less urgency when they were all now twenty years closer to that death?
Father John strode in. He had a long untidy beard, a denim jacket. She knew the type. He believed in a God-in-jeans who had failed his CSEs and called him Johnny—but he still believed. She was the only one whose heaven was empty. The talk was on love—Agape rather than Eros, though she guessed he would use words loosely, as the other speakers had done. As a translator, she was pained by their mishandling of the language, the way they shelled out words like pretty-coloured pills without realising their more serious side-effects.
‘Love is metaphysical gravity,’ Father John began.
Morna winced at the lax analogy which followed, made with no respect for either physics or metaphysics. In Johnny’s world, both love and gravity held things together or moved one object or person towards another.
She raised her hand. The priest had said he welcomed interruptions. ‘I don’t think that’s quite exact,’ she said. ‘Surely gravity is a law—something which must happen and always does. Gravity can’t fade or die or turn to its opposite, as love can.’
The priest laughed, as if to prove how lightweight her objection. ‘Love is a law as well,’ he insisted, beaming still. ‘A universal law—Christ’s law. Listen, my friend, let me try and …’
Morna didn’t listen, banged back in her seat. She wasn’t Johnny’s friend. That, too, was sloppy language. Friend signified relationship, prior knowledge, and she had never set eyes on this priest before, never would again, if she were lucky. She wasn’t friend to any of these worthy pious people who only needed God because they were too plain or plain simplistic to find other satisfactions. She let the talk drone on, hardly listening, slipped out before the questions at the end. At least she had an alibi. They would all assume she was checking on her mother. She trudged along the passage, stopped at what was called the bookshop. God-shop was more accurate. The only books on sale were holy ones—books on the sacraments, the Gospels, Christian marriage, death; ‘God’s Creatures’ greetings cards in excruciating taste. She picked up a card with a cutesy bunny on it, sitting on its haunches with its front paws cocked to heaven. ‘I tried God and He works’ the rabbit was saying, with the same simpering smile she had seen all week. She slotted it back, caught her elbow on the stand as she stalked away, watched in horror as a shower of pious puppies and crusading chimpanzees cascaded to the floor. ‘Damn!’ she said, falling on her knees to pick them up. ‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn …’
‘May I help?’
Morna started, glanced up at the tall lean man standing over her. God! Not a priest! Not with her swearing, crawling on hands and knees around the floor. He was one of the semi-progressive types who left off their dog-collars but still dressed all in black, and one who believed in priestly poverty judging by his bald
ing corduroys. His shirt was deeper black, open at the neck, revealing dark tangled chest hair. The hair on the head was grey, surprisingly, since the face beneath it was younger than her own. She scrambled to her feet. Any priest under forty with even reasonably good looks was rare at Hilden Cross.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Extraordinary how priests made you guilty—instantly, invariably. ‘I’ll say three Our Fathers, shall I?’ She had meant it as a joke, but it came out petulant. The priest said nothing, was on his knees as well now, helping her retrieve the cards.
She pounced on a poodle with a tartan lead saying ‘All roads lead to God’, suddenly started to laugh. He didn’t join in. She could feel new spasms of laughter hurting in her chest, threatening to burst out; fought to get control. She was behaving like the worst of her daughter’s friends—scatty adolescents who got the giggles in class or even school assembly. It must be a reaction to all those hours and hours of silence, sitting still, forcing down heretical thoughts, playing the role of devout retreatant. She had blown it now, though. The priest was looking pained, trying to cover his embarrassment by sorting through the fauna.
She glanced past his shoulder at a leggy giraffe—‘I’m sticking my neck out for God’—struggled to suppress another squall of laughter, tried to find her voice again, keep it steady, serious.
‘I … I assume you’re one of the sp … speakers?’
He nodded.
‘What’s your s … subject?’
‘Miracles.’
He was obviously not as progressive as he looked. You could never tell these days. Father Fenton had been the most genuinely revolutionary and he had worn both dog collar and cassock.
The priest stood up, brushing down his trousers. ‘Or let’s say the miraculous.’
Morna doubted if it would make a lot of difference. Simple faith required again, seeing God’s finger in what Neil and Co. could explain by natural means.
‘Do we get a demonstration—maybe water into wine? That would cheer up supper.’ Facetious again. Her mother would be shocked. She tried to make amends, play the pious Catholic daughter role.
‘Look, I’m sorry. Let me introduce myself. I’m one of the retreatants—Morna Gordon.’
He smiled for the first time, shook her outstretched hand. ‘You must be from over the border with two Highland names like that.’
‘No, I’m an out-and-out Sassenach.’
‘Really?’
‘Mm. My maiden name was Conyers.’
‘So your husband’s the Scot, then?’
‘No—well, maybe way way back, but his family have lived in southeast London as far as anyone remembers.’ She tried to dodge away from Neil. Divorce was still a red rag to Catholic priests. ‘The Morna bit was chosen by my thoroughly southern English father. He liked it because it means beloved.’
The priest shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think that’s quite right.’
‘Morna,’ he repeated slowly, as if he were weighing up the name. ‘The Gaelic mùirn means joy or cheerfulness, or natural affection or regard. I presume Morna must be a sort of anglicised post-medieval invention from the corresponding adjective mùirneach, or maybe from one of the female diminutive forms like …’
Morna stared at him, annoyed as well as fascinated. Most people said ‘What?’ when they heard the name and then went on to call her Lorna. Yet what right had he to demote her, turn her father’s choice of name into that of her mother’s dog? She had been beloved for forty years—trust a priest to spoil that.
‘Hold on! My father found it in a book of Christian names—quite a reputable one—something like The Oxford Book of …’
‘They’re often very lax, those books. It was a brave try, I suppose, but …’ He shrugged. ‘I assume they were trying to imply that muirne is a past participle. But it’s not, you see. It’s not even a correct form. The accent on mùirn is important because …’
She was impressed by his scholarship—few priests at Hilden Cross ventured far beyond their own narrow field of theology and morals—yet she also felt an irrational resentment that he was doing her father down. She had always been sensitive about the stranger in the locket, ever since her schooldays—the only one in her class without a father, though it had seemed worse at times not to have a pony. The two were linked. Fathers bought you ponies and party frocks, unless they were unfeeling enough to fall out of the sky before they had ever seen you. Mothers on their own couldn’t afford ponies, only school fees. She had wondered as a child if her father had ridden horses as well as piloted planes. Planes and death and party frocks had all been mixed up with something called The War, which meant that sweets were scarce and people made you dresses out of musty velvet curtains because they couldn’t get new material.
The priest was still expatiating. Her name appeared to have brought him to life. He was gesturing with both hands, brow creased in concentration as he explained the complexities of Gaelic grammar. She wished she could contribute something to the conversation.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked at last, and lamely.
‘David Anthony.’
Not a lot she could do to demolish that. ‘With a hyphen?’ she inquired.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean is Anthony your second first name?’
‘No, surname. David Francis Anthony.’
Almost as correct as Anne. English, Christian and conventional. Morna felt vaguely disappointed. He looked foreign, even Jewish, a victim of the pogrom or the ghetto. It was something about his eyes—deep-set and suffering. She glanced up at him again. If you talked about flesh and bone, it was the bone you noticed, not the flesh—cheekbones prominent, lips thin, brow high and proud, eyes restless dark. She had expected an exotic name with fire in it, or pain.
‘How come you know Gaelic?’
‘I’ve been spending some time on a tiny Scottish island. They’re all Gaelic-speakers there. And since I’d already learnt Old Irish—for my work—at least I started out knowing what sort of language Gaelic is, and how it’s organised.’
‘What is your work?’ Morna asked. Most of the other lecturers had been run-of-the-mill parish priests or members of some teaching order who spent their days indoctrinating small boys.
‘I’m working on the life of a seventh-century Celtic saint, St Abban.’
‘Oh yes?’ Morna had never heard of him, wondered if she should have done. This man seemed to be showing up her ignorance on several different fronts. ‘I’m afraid he’s new to me. I don’t even know the name.’
‘There were three or four St Abbans, actually, but there’s a lot of confusion about them because one or two were very shadowy figures. The first one—Abban of Cell-Abbáin—died at the end of the fifth century and is said to have known St Patrick. The medieval hagiographers muddled him with St Abban of Mag-Arnaide who died a century later and posited just the one St Abban who was supposed to have lived three hundred years. Actually, there were some similarities. I mean both were members of the Irish royal family of Leinster and … Then there was a third Abban who lived in England—in fact, some books say he gave his name to Abingdon in Berkshire, but that’s not true. The name means …’
‘And he’s yours?’ Morna interrupted. She was getting confused herself now.
‘No, no. He’s very tenuous. I’m far luckier with mine. He was the latest of them all—didn’t die till the 690s and is comparatively well documented. He was born in the south of Ireland but went off to the Hebrides and then to France. He eventually returned to Ireland, but only for a year or two. These Celtic saints were tremendous travellers, you know—and all before the days of Thomas Cook. He set out for the Scottish coast again in his potty little boat and sailed from island to island until he eventually decided that God had called him to found a monastery on the one we call St Abban’s now, and there he stayed until the last six months of his life when he moved to a tiny rockstack and lived as a hermit cut off from everyone.’
David paused a moment, but
only to return his pile of cards to the rack. Shy and almost taciturn at first, he was now warming to his theme. A true scholar, Morna suspected, with no time for small-talk, but who could elaborate for ever on his work. She wished it were a subject she knew more about. She had never heard of St Abban’s island either.
‘Is the … er … island very remote?’ she asked.
‘Not so much remote as inaccessible. The coast’s so treacherous, it’s difficult to land there. That’s why it’s hardly known, except to a handful of archeologists or crazy scholars like myself. Yet in St Abban’s day, it was quite a famous monastery. Pilgrims came to visit it from as far away as northern Italy—or so the legends say.’
‘And you’re writing his Life? It sounds as if it’ll run into several volumes!’
‘I wish it would. Two hundred pages, if I’m lucky, and a lot of those sheer speculation. You can’t really write the life of any early saint. One just doesn’t have the evidence and what you do have is often very slanted. I suppose all I’m doing is trying to put together a jig-saw puzzle which has half its pieces missing and no picture on the box.’
‘Did the saint write his own Life?’
‘No, unfortunately. He was said to have written a few prayers and sermons and even verses, but not a single word’s come down to us. The first biography, if you can call it that, is a ninth-century Life in Latin by one of Abban’s succesors, Abbot Dubhgall.’
‘So why the Old Irish, then?’
‘Well, a lot of the place names and proper names appear in Old Irish—or a sort of Latinised version of it. And it was Dubhgall’s own first language, so I really need to know it to get into his mind—if you know what I mean.’
Morna nodded. That she did know.
‘There seem to be some other names—Pictish or North-British—which can cause a few problems. In fact, there are problems all the way.’ He smiled, turned the smile to frown, as if smiles required more effort. ‘You see, the Life was copied several different times in later centuries, but with bits left out or new chunks written in, or corrections added in another hand or notes written in the margins which seem to refer to another saint entirely. You have to be a sort of Sherlock Holmes to see through the myths and propaganda. And then there’s the confusion over spelling which … I’m sorry—’ He broke off. ‘I’m boring you.’
The Stillness the Dancing Page 4