Francis didn’t want to drink any more. He hadn’t wanted the whisky his brother had ordered him earlier, nor the one the Americans had ordered for him. He didn’t want the one that the barman now brought. He thought he’d just leave it there, hoping his brother wouldn’t see it. He lifted the glass to his lips, but he managed not to drink any.
‘A bad thing has happened,’ Father Paul said.
‘Bad? How d’you mean, Paul?’
‘Are you ready for it?’ He paused. Then he said, ‘She died.’
Francis didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t know who was meant to be dead, or why his brother was behaving in an odd manner. He didn’t like to think it but he had to: his brother wasn’t fully sober.
‘Our mother died,’ Father Paul said. ‘I’m after getting a telegram.’
The huge area that was the lounge of the Plaza Hotel, the endless tables and people sitting at them, the swiftly moving waiters and barmen, seemed suddenly a dream. Francis had a feeling that he was not where he appeared to be, that he wasn’t sitting with his brother, who was wiping his lips with a handkerchief. For a moment he appeared in his confusion to be struggling his way up the Via Dolorosa again, and then in the Nativity Boutique.
‘Take it easy, boy,’ his brother was saying. ‘Take a mouthful of whisky.’
Francis didn’t obey that injunction. He asked his brother to repeat what he had said, and Father Paul repeated that their mother had died.
Francis closed his eyes and tried as well to shut away the sounds around them. He prayed for the salvation of his mother’s soul. ‘Blessed Virgin, intercede,’ his own voice said in his mind. ‘Dear Mary, let her few small sins be forgiven.’
Having rid himself of his secret, Father Paul felt instant relief. With the best of intentions, it had been a foolish idea to think he could maintain the secret until they arrived in a place that was perhaps the most suitable in the world to hear about the death of a person who’d been close to you. He took a gulp of his whisky and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief again. He watched his brother, waiting for his eyes to open.
‘When did it happen?’ Francis asked eventually.
‘Yesterday.’
‘And the telegram only came –’
‘It came last night, Francis. I wanted to save you the pain.’
‘Save me? How could you save me? I sent her a postcard, Paul.’
‘Listen to me, Francis –’
‘How could you save me the pain?’
‘I wanted to tell you when we got up to Galilee.’
Again Francis felt he was caught in the middle of a dream. He couldn’t understand his brother: he couldn’t understand what he meant by saying a telegram had come last night, why at a moment like this he was talking about Galilee. He didn’t know why he was sitting in this noisy place when he should be back in Ireland.
‘I fixed the funeral for Monday,’ Father Paul said.
Francis nodded, not grasping the significance of this arrangement. ‘We’ll be back there this time tomorrow,’ he said.
‘No need for that, Francis, Sunday morning’s time enough.’
‘But she’s dead –’
‘We’ll be there in time for the funeral.’
‘We can’t stay here if she’s dead.’
It was this, Father Paul realized, he’d been afraid of when he’d argued with himself and made his plan. If he had knocked on Francis’s door the night before, Francis would have wanted to return immediately without seeing a single stone of the land he had come so far to be moved by.
‘We could go straight up to Galilee in the morning,’ Father Paul said quietly. ‘You’ll find comfort in Galilee, Francis.’
But Francis shook his head. ‘I want to be with her,’ he said.
Father Paul lit another cigarette. He nodded at a hovering waiter, indicating his need of another drink. He said to himself that he must keep his cool, an expression he was fond of.
‘Take it easy, Francis,’ he said.
‘Is there a plane out in the morning? Can we make arrangements now?’ He looked about him as if for a member of the hotel staff who might be helpful.
‘No good’ll be done by tearing off home, Francis. What’s wrong with Sunday?’
‘I want to be with her.’
Anger swelled within Father Paul. If he began to argue his words would become slurred: he knew that from experience. He must keep his cool and speak slowly and clearly, making a few simple points. It was typical of her, he thought, to die inconveniently.
‘You’ve come all this way,’ he said as slowly as he could without sounding peculiar. ‘Why cut it any shorter than we need? We’ll be losing a week anyway. She wouldn’t want us to go back.’
‘I think she would.’
He was right in that. Her possessiveness in her lifetime would have reached out across a dozen continents for Francis. She’d known what she was doing by dying when she had.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ Francis said. ‘She didn’t want me to come.’
‘You’re thirty-seven years of age, Francis.’
‘I did wrong to come.’
‘You did no such thing.’
The time he’d taken her to Rome she’d been difficult for the whole week, complaining about the food, saying everywhere was dirty. Whenever he’d spent anything she’d disapproved. All his life, Father Paul felt, he’d done his best for her. He had told her before anyone else when he’d decided to enter the priesthood, certain that she’d be pleased. ‘I thought you’d take over the shop,’ she’d said instead.
‘What difference could it make to wait, Francis?’
‘There’s nothing to wait for.’
As long as he lived Francis knew he would never forgive himself. As long as he lived he would say to himself that he hadn’t been able to wait a few years, until she’d passed quietly on. He might even have been in the room with her when it happened.
‘It was a terrible thing not to tell me,’ he said. ‘I sat down and wrote her a postcard, Paul. I bought her a plate.’
‘So you said.’
‘You’re drinking too much of that whisky.’
‘Now, Francis, don’t be silly.’
‘You’re half drunk and she’s lying there.’
‘She can’t be brought back no matter what we do.’
‘She never hurt anyone,’ Francis said.
Father Paul didn’t deny that, although it wasn’t true. She had hurt their sister Kitty, constantly reproaching her for marrying the man she had, long after Kitty was aware she’d made a mistake. She’d driven Edna to Canada after Edna, still unmarried, had had a miscarriage that only the family knew about. She had made a shadow out of Francis although Francis didn’t know it. Failing to hold on to her other children, she had grasped her youngest to her, as if she had borne him to destroy him.
‘It’ll be you who’ll say a Mass for her?’ Francis said.
‘Yes, of course it will.’
‘You should have told me.’
Francis realized why, all day, he’d been disappointed. From the moment when the hired car had pulled into the lay-by and his brother had pointed across the valley at the Garden of Gethsemane he’d been disappointed and had not admitted it. He’d been disappointed in the Via Dolorosa and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in Bethlehem. He remembered the bespectacled man who’d kept saying that you couldn’t be sure about anything. All the people with cameras made it impossible to think, all the jostling and pushing was distracting. When he’d said there’d been too much to take in he’d meant something different.
‘Her death got in the way,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean, Francis?’
‘It didn’t feel like Jerusalem, it didn’t feel like Bethlehem.’
‘But it is, Francis, it is.’
‘There are soldiers with guns all over the place. And a girl came up to me on the street. There was that man with a bit of the Cross. There’s you, drinking and smoking in thi
s place –’
‘Now, listen to me, Francis –’
‘Nazareth would be a disappointment. And the Sea of Galilee. And the Church of the Loaves and Fishes.’ His voice had risen. He lowered it again. ‘I couldn’t believe in the Stations this morning. I couldn’t see it happening the way I do at home.’
‘That’s nothing to do with her death, Francis. You’ve got a bit of jet-lag, you’ll settle yourself up in Galilee. There’s an atmosphere in Galilee that nobody misses.’
‘I’m not going near Galilee.’ He struck the surface of the table, and Father Paul told him to contain himself. People turned their heads, aware that anger had erupted in the pale-faced man with the priest.
‘Quieten up,’ Father Paul commanded sharply, but Francis didn’t.
‘She knew I’d be better at home,’ he shouted, his voice shrill and reedy. ‘She knew I was making a fool of myself, a man out of a shop trying to be big –’
‘Will you keep your voice down? Of course you’re not making a fool of yourself.’
‘Will you find out about planes tomorrow morning?’
Father Paul sat for a moment longer, not saying anything, hoping his brother would say he was sorry. Naturally it was a shock, naturally he’d be emotional and feel guilty, in a moment it would be better. But it wasn’t, and Francis didn’t say he was sorry. Instead he began to weep.
‘Let’s go up to your room,’ Father Paul said, ‘and I’ll fix about the plane.’
Francis nodded but did not move. His sobbing ceased, and then he said, ‘I’ll always hate the Holy Land now.’
‘No need for that, Francis.’
But Francis felt there was and he felt he would hate, as well, the brother he had admired for as long as he could remember. In the lounge of the Plaza Hotel he felt mockery surfacing everywhere. His brother’s deceit, and the endless whisky in his brother’s glass, and his casualness after a death seemed like the scorning of a Church which honoured so steadfastly the mother of its founder. Vivid in his mind, his own mother’s eyes reminded him that they’d told him he was making a mistake, and upbraided him for not heeding her. Of course there was mockery everywhere, in the splinter of wood beneath plastic, and in the soldiers with guns that were not toys, and the writhing nakedness in the Holy City. He’d become part of it himself, sending postcards to the dead. Not speaking again to his brother, he went to his room to pray.
‘Eight a.m., sir,’ the girl at the reception desk said, and Father Paul asked that arrangements should be made to book two seats on the plane, explaining that it was an emergency, that a death had occurred. ‘It will be all right, sir,’ the girl promised.
He went slowly downstairs to the bar. He sat in a corner and lit a cigarette and ordered two whiskys and ice, as if expecting a companion. He drank them both himself and ordered more. Francis would return to Co. Tipperary and after the funeral he would take up again the life she had ordained for him. In his brown cotton coat he would serve customers with nails and hinges and wire. He would regularly go to Mass and to Confession and to Men’s Confraternity. He would sit alone in the lacecurtained sitting-room, lonely for the woman who had made him what he was, married forever to her memory.
Father Paul lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one. He continued to order whisky in two glasses. Already he could sense the hatred that Francis had earlier felt taking root in himself. He wondered if he would ever again return in July to Co. Tipperary, and imagined he would not.
At midnight he rose to make the journey to bed and found himself unsteady on his feet. People looked at him, thinking it disgraceful for a priest to be drunk in Jerusalem, with cigarette ash all over his clerical clothes.
Lovers of Their Time
Looking back on it, it seemed to have to do with that particular decade in London. Could it have happened, he wondered, at any other time except the 1960s? That feeling was intensified, perhaps, because the whole thing had begun on New Year’s Day, 1963, long before that day became a bank holiday in England. ‘That’ll be two and nine,’ she’d said, smiling at him across her counter, handing him toothpaste and emery boards in a bag. ‘Colgate’s, remember,’ his wife had called out as he was leaving the flat. ‘The last stuff we had tasted awful.’
His name was Norman Britt. It said so on a small plastic name-plate in front of his position in the travel agency where he worked, Travel-Wide as it was called. Marie a badge on her light-blue shop-coat announced. His wife, who worked at home, assembling jewellery for a firm that paid her on a production basis, was called Hilda.
Green’s the Chemist’s and Travel-Wide were in Vincent Street, a street that was equidistant from Paddington Station and Edgware Road. The flat where Hilda worked all day was in Putney. Marie lived in Reading with her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, both of them widows. She caught the 8.05 every morning to Paddington and usually the 6.30 back.
He was forty in 1963, as Hilda was; Marie was twenty-eight. He was tall and thin, with a David Niven moustache. Hilda was thin also, her dark hair beginning to grey, her sharply featured face pale. Marie was well-covered, carefully made up, her hair dyed blonde. She smiled a lot, a slack, half-crooked smile that made her eyes screw up and twinkle; she exuded laziness and generosity. She and her friend Mavis went dancing a lot in Reading and had a sizeable collection of men friends. ‘Fellas’ they called them.
Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her coral-coloured lips, like two tiny sausages, only softer, pressed upon his moustache and his abbreviated mouth. He imagined the warmth of her hand in his. For all that, she was a little outside reality: she was there to desire, to glow erotically in the heady atmosphere of the Drummer Boy, to light cigarettes for in a fantasy.
‘Isn’t it cold?’ he said as she handed him the emery boards and the toothpaste.
‘Shocking,’ she agreed, and hesitated, clearly wanting to say something else. ‘You’re in that Travel-Wide,’ she added in the end. ‘Me and my friend want to go to Spain this year.’
‘It’s very popular. The Costa Brava?’
‘That’s right.’ She handed him threepence change. ‘In May.’
‘Not too hot on the Costa in May. If you need any help –’
‘Just the bookings.’
‘I’d be happy to make them for you. Look in any time. Britt the name is. I’m on the counter.’
‘If I may, Mr Britt. I could slip out maybe at four, or roundabout.’
‘Today, you mean?’
‘We want to fix it up.’
‘Naturally. I’ll keep an eye out for you.’
It was hard not to call her madam or miss, the way he’d normally do. He had heard himself saying that he’d be happy to make the bookings for her, knowing that that was business jargon, knowing that the unfussy voice he’d used was a business one also. Her friend was a man, he supposed, some snazzy tough in a car. ‘See you later then,’ he said, but already she was serving another customer, advising about lipstick refills.
She didn’t appear in Travel-Wide at four o’clock; she hadn’t come when the doors closed at five-thirty. He was aware of a sense of disappointment, combined with one of anticipation: for if she’d come at four, he reflected as he left the travel agency, their bit of business would be in the past rather than the future. She’d look in some other time and he’d just have to trust to luck that if he happened to be busy with another customer she’d be able to wait. There’d be a further occasion, when she called to collect the tickets themselves.
‘Ever so sorry,’ she said on the street, her voice coming from behind him. ‘Couldn’t get away, Mr Britt.’
He turned and smiled at her, feeling the movement of his moustache as he parted his lips. He knew only too well, he said. ‘Some other time then?’
‘I’m off myself from twelve to one. Look, you wouldn’t fancy a drink? I could advise you just as easily over a drink.’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t have the time. No, I mustn’t take advantage –’
‘You’re not at all. If you’ve got ten minutes?’
‘Well, it’s awfully good of you, Mr Britt. But I really feel I’m taking advantage, I really do.’
‘A New Year’s drink.’
He pushed open the doors of the saloon bar of the Drummer Boy, a place he didn’t often enter except for office drinks at Christmas or when someone leaving the agency was being given a send-off. Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe were usually there in the evenings: he hoped they’d be there now to see him in the company of the girl from Green’s the Chemist’s. ‘What would you like?’ he asked her.
‘Gin and peppermint’s my poison, only honestly I should pay. No, let me ask you –’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it. We can sit over there, look.’
The Drummer Boy, so early in the evening, wasn’t full. By six o’clock the advertising executives from the firm of Dalton, Dure and Higgins, just round the corner, would have arrived, and the architects from Frine and Knight. Now there was only Mrs Gregan, old and alcoholic, known to everyone, and a man called Bert, with his poodle, Jimmy. It was disappointing that Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe weren’t there.
‘You were here lunchtime Christmas Eve,’ she said.
‘Yes, I was.’ He paused, placing her gin and peppermint on a cardboard mat that advertised Guinness. ‘I saw you too.’
He drank some of his Double Diamond and carefully wiped the traces of foam from his moustache. He realized now that it would, of course, be quite impossible to give her a hug on the street outside. That had been just imagination, wishful thinking as his mother would have said. And yet he knew that when he arrived home twenty-five or so minutes late he would not tell Hilda that he’d been advising an assistant from Green’s the Chemist’s about a holiday on the Costa Brava. He wouldn’t even say he’d been in the Drummer Boy. He’d say Blackstaffe had kept everyone late, going through the new package that Eurotours were offering in Germany and Luxembourg this summer. Hilda wouldn’t in a million years suspect that he’d been sitting in a public house with a younger woman who was quite an eyeful. As a kind of joke, she quite regularly suggested that his sexual drive left something to be desired.
The Collected Stories Page 85