by William King
‘Certainly not.’
One of the bishops is coming towards us, and, like a teenager caught red-handed, I lower my voice: ‘Are you there tonight?’
With a playful grin, she falls in with my tone of secrecy: ‘Will the long-winded monsignors delay you?’
‘I’ll make sure they don’t.’
‘Right, Lucy.’ I return to my normal pitch and squeeze her hand: ‘We’ll talk about the music soon. Nice to see you again.’
‘Nice to see you too, Father Galvin.’
During those weeks when the country is gearing up for the most famous visitor since JFK, we are on a merry-go-round, and neither of us wants to get off the carousel. With the final touches being put to the plans for the Pope, my work on the committee is coming to an end, and also my reason for visiting Maynooth. And despite the way Lucy Campion sidles into my daytime thoughts and invades my dreams, I cling to the self-deception about friendship and the spiritual writers, and I’ll be a better man – more rounded. The inescapable truth, however, shows through weak spots in the screen of my wishful thinking: early in the morning, or at odd times when I’m having a drink with a few classmates after golf, and I’d much sooner be with her.
But the discovery is not able to curb the energy now being released. That night in Maynooth, a stranger woke from a fitful sleep: the same one who spent two days in the rain outside Smith’s, the clock manufacturers, in Cricklewood, searching the skittish throng for Maureen from Claremorris, and who mooched around the Piazza Navona for a couple of nights after Simona had flown back to her parents in Long Island.
I ask Lucy to meet me some evening. And to ensure that our meeting place is well outside the diocese, I suggest Howth. ‘It’s nice out there,’ I say and, fearing a rejection, rush in with: ‘You’re probably too busy.’
‘No, I’m not too busy. And did it ever occur to you that I might have been waiting for your invitation?’
‘And then we can have something in the Marine Hotel up the road.’
We walk in the chill of autumn around Howth village: smell of fish on the west pier where seagulls plunge onto the fishing boats and argue over scraps. Perfectly all right for us to walk out together: this is a friendship – nothing more. She nods. The following week we repeat the same assurances.
‘It’s good that we can be so relaxed with each other,’ I probe.
‘Great,’ she says and looks away towards the rippling sea.
The evening before the Pope’s visit, at a final briefing beneath the high altar in the Phoenix Park, I represent Boylan, who is working up towards a show of sobriety for the following day. In a familiar gesture, Lucy inclines her head and signals her interest in going along, and when my meeting is over we could stroll around the park. Despite my intense wish to be with her, I hedge. ‘I’d love you to be there, but the security boyos are getting edgy, and anyway, I’ll be down in that dungeon, beneath the high altar, and it wouldn’t be any fun for you waiting round. Let’s meet in The Gresham and take a stroll down O’Connell Street, have something in a restaurant.’ In fact, the briefing lasts for only ten minutes, then a reception for the inner circle, but I will not run the risk of being seen with her afterwards by bishops and senior clerics who have clout.
Apart from last-minute preparations, all the work has been done: behind the high altar, like guardsmen, tall strips of white cloth with the papal coat of arms fastened to flagpoles at both ends swell and then go slack in the breeze. Plain-clothes detectives are chatting with a superintendent in uniform. Men in dungarees are unloading bouquets of flowers from the backs of lorries, others are checking the canopy where the Pope will celebrate Mass. Priests are having a great time taking photographs of each other sitting on the papal chair beneath the high cross; a bishop is giving instructions to the sound engineers. He waves – ‘Good work, Tom. See you in the morning’ – and continues his instructions. A bunch of seminarians in soutanes, skittish as schoolgirls at their debs ball, are rushing around after monsignors, surveying the altar and testing microphones: a constant purr of generators in the background.
The city, festooned with saffron and white, is high on John Paul II. Street traders line O’Connell Bridge and playfully wave flags in front of our faces. Television sets in shop windows show the Pope wearing a sombrero and smiling to a million heads in Mexico; in Grafton Street, we stand close together and watch a documentary on his life. In the black soutane of a priest, he is raising his hand in blessing over a huddle of old peasant women, traces of snow on the steps of a church behind them. In another clip he is shaving on a mountain slope. And here, under the glare of Father Karol Wojtyla’s penetrating look, I secretly take her hand for the first time.
Later, back in The Gresham, growing used to each other, we paint in more of the uncoloured spaces: how her father, who worked for the National Bank, was transferred every few years – Ennis, Bundoran and other towns – until he became a manager; then they acquired the three-storey limestone at the corner of The Square. Her mother – Cork city middle-class, forever moaning about backwaters that didn’t have an opera society – made sure the right sort of boy was invited for lemonade and ice-cream and to play tennis in the back garden. Lucy and her two sisters had been packed off to a boarding school when she was only eleven; there she had mooched around the grounds until a nun discovered her singing voice and nurtured her love of music. The shouting of her parents late at night when they returned from the golf club. Her mother’s high-pitched tone: ‘I should have married Doctor Crowley, instead of a teller. Fecking moneylenders.’ Her father shouting back: ‘You’re nothing but a drunken old bitch.’ The youngest brother, a sleepwalker, who, a few years before, had been jailed for embezzling thousands from the bank where he worked. Her five years of therapy and her wedding plans for the following spring.
‘Your wedding?’ I stare at her bowed head. Life begins to drain from my evening.
She looks up.
‘Lucy, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What?’
‘You’re getting married.’
‘Oh, no, it’s all off.’ She reddens and her hand brushes my arm. ‘Oh no. I broke off the engagement two months ago.’ She couldn’t go through with it. A marriage of two families – that’s all it would ever have been. ‘Philip’s dad was the local GP – it’s what Mother wanted.’ The two families used go to Kilkee or Ballybunion together every Easter.
‘You gave me a start.’ I have to stop myself from reaching out and taking her hand. ‘I wouldn’t have it on my conscience, if you were … you know, engaged.’
‘Is that the only reason?’ She looks up at me and waits for an answer.
‘But, of course,’ I tease her. ‘I’m not in the habit of playing footsie with a woman who is spoken for.’
‘You didn’t play footsie.’
‘No, just handsie.’
Her smile fades. ‘This … this friendship – who’re we kidding?’
‘Ourselves, but let’s not discuss it tonight.’
‘I agree. Not tonight, Josephine. My Dad used to say that.’
‘Napoleon.’
‘OK. Not tonight, Napoleon.’
Only a couple of hours after I have joined in the celebration of the papal Mass in Galway, I fondle her for the first time. Earlier that day, in the fog-enveloped racecourse, a million screaming youngsters fell in love with the Pope after his ‘Young people of Ireland, I love you’ speech. Now we stand looking out through the window of her room at the Great Southern Hotel: the young people of Ireland are still high, leaping and waving flags in Eyre Square, going into pubs, and appearing again with pints of beer. With the drizzle coming down, clusters of girls in bell-bottomed jeans, their hair matted, are draped around each other and making giddy promises to visit him next year in Rome, and calling up to the sky: ‘John Paul, we love you. John Paul, please come back.’
Sitting side by side, we watch a recording of the Mass on television: first, the antics of the warm-up men, Bishop Casey and Father
Cleary – one letting on that he is trying to wrest an umbrella from the other; two high-spirited friends adding to the merriment. But they are forgotten when the crowd spots the Pope’s red cape and a hand blessing or waving from a helicopter flying overhead. At the end, when the credits are rolling, I turn to her, and, as if under a spell, begin to stroke her long hair still damp from the rain. I do a John Paul put-on: ‘Young harpist of Dublin, I love you.’
She falls in with my good-humour: ‘Priest of Maynooth nights, going grey at the edges, I love you too.’ This is only joking, so we can both laugh.
We talk on the phone, but with caution lest Eamon, the operator at All Saints, may be tempted to listen in. And on the off-chance of that happening, like teenagers we devise a coding system that sprinkles our ordered conversation about motets and hymns for the college chapel. The figure 8 stands for I love you; a walk in the Guinness estate at Luggala the following Sunday becomes Kestrel, recalling for us the evening in late spring when we were having a row.
‘Look, Lucy,’ I say, pointing to the sky, in an effort to soften her mood.
We watch a bird, a great elegant creature, drifting smoothly above us: it flaps its reddish-brown wings that glisten in the sun, then it glides smoothly. For a few moments, it stops and hovers as if suspended from an invisible thread, then suddenly it dives upon a small bird. The bird makes a futile attempt to free itself from the fierce talons; a shrill cry fills the valley, feathers drop from the sky and the predator disappears with its prey into the woods on the other side.
‘That’s a kestrel, Lucy.’ I walk on. ‘The survival of the fittest.’
Tears are streaming down her face when I turn around. ‘Lucy. What?’ I go back and put my arms round her.
‘So beautiful and so violent.’
‘It’s OK, love.’
She looks away. ‘My fear is that you and I are going to destroy what’s between us. I know the quarrels we have aren’t serious, but still, I’m afraid.’
‘No we won’t, Lucy love. No we won’t.’ Despite my brave reassurances, I am now crying with her. After a while, we grow silent, just holding each other. Then we kiss. By the time we reach the lake, her gloom has lifted and we can both laugh at our ridiculous fears of ever parting.
And like children, we play. ‘Of course, you’re the kestrel,’ she says.
‘No, you’re the kestrel.’
In an effort to remove any suspicion Eamon might have, I saunter into his cubby hole near the main door one day, and in casual conversation, drop a remark about Lucy, who is doing a lunchtime concert at the Bank of Ireland. ‘She’s a great help with Church music, and very obliging if we need anyone at short notice,’ I tell him, while fanning the pages of a telephone book on his table.
‘That’s good, Dr Galvin.’ He nods. ‘Very good.’
The ex-guard’s face gives away nothing. We talk football until another call comes in; he reaches for the phone, and I turn to go, raising my hand in understanding. ‘See you, Eamon.’
20
LUCY AND I are now meeting nearly every Sunday: the idle day in the seminary. Ever since the students had been given the freedom to catch a bus for Dublin, or go to a film in Drogheda, the afternoons are drained of life until nightfall. Some of the teaching staff drive off down the avenue in their cars, others pull down the blinds for a siesta, a ritual they have kept up since their Rome days. Boylan too, unless he is three sheets to the wind, visits his friend, a professor in Maynooth. There they have dinner with the rest of the staff, recalling the great brains who once taught in the college. Afterwards, they saunter around the grounds and exchange the latest Church gossip.
Sunday dinner in the long refectory becomes tedious. Along with the other professors, I take my place at the top table; the president occupies the carver at the centre, and, in two rows that stretch all the way to the far wall, the students, wearing soutanes and birettas, face each other in front of us. The conversation about diocesan appointments is leaden; now and again the president breaks off to give some instruction to Quirke: ‘Tell the student down there to get his hair cut, and who is the comedian that has them all laughing?’
‘He’s a mimic.’
‘I see. Remind him tomorrow morning that he lacks the proper disposition, and threaten that he may not receive minor orders this year. That will wipe the smile off his face.’
At long last, the president rings a bell and we stand for the Latin prayer of thanks. After that, I serve my time at the customary coffee session in the priests’ parlour, and while faking an interest in the debate about Garret FitzGerald, and how he’ll never win against the bishops, but Haughey’s heart is in the right place, I curse them for keeping me from being with her.
Unless the weather is very bad or she is playing chamber music with the Carolan Quartet, we climb to Howth Summit, or do the headland at Skerries, where the gulls, tossing in sea squalls, screech and swoop all round us, and I discreetly hold her hand while pointing out the Cooley Mountains. Elderly women, in head scarves and sporting Pioneer pins, trundle by, deep in conversation about a bishop they know. Yes, lovely man. And so young. He did the confirmations up in Gormanston. Sure, he only looks like a boy. And he’s twenty-five years a bishop this year. God bless him. Is he, faith? He is.
Our favourite walk becomes the Guinness estate in the Wicklow Mountains: over a stile at one of the farmhouses, along by a stone fence and then through dark green ferns that brush clean our boots. Sometimes, dripping wet, but deliciously jaded, we end up at the bar of the Roundwood Inn for chicken-in-the-rough, or down the connecting corridor to the restaurant for a celebration – our birthdays, Christmas, the anniversary of the Pope’s visit. Any excuse.
One January evening, we have dinner in Leeson Street, and later, while the snow is falling in the front garden of her Haddington Road flat, we make love. The drapes of the high windows have been left open and the street lights throw a perfect shadow of her harp on the far wall.
That day I had said the Requiem Mass for a young woman who used to work as the college secretary; her distinctive perfume lingered each morning in the corridor after she had arrived. Vinny Lynch, whom Boylan had brought into the secretariat, claimed it triggered off his sinus attacks, and asked to have his desk moved to another part of the house.
I had been visiting the young woman for weeks in the Mater Hospital: on her locker were flowers and Mass cards beside a silver-framed photograph of herself. A tiara on her head and a sash over her summer frock, she is being driven through the main street of Celbridge on the back of a lorry. Wearing long white gloves, she waves to the smiling crowd. Now the jaundiced face on the pillow, though worn out by cancer, still bears the lineaments of the carnival beauty.
She catches me looking, and reaches out her frail hand for me to hold. ‘Tommy, we’re like the cherry blossom. Gone. Gone with the first strong wind. Don’t waste your life.’
I recite the Prayers for the Dead at Sutton cemetery, while hailstones dance off the page of the Roman Ritual. The mourners – a huddle of black – enfold the dead woman’s mother as the coffin is lowered into the grave. Afterwards, as I pick my steps over mud and wet grass, a sudden squall from Dublin Bay rushes through a row of cypress trees and sends a pile of snow crashing to the ground. People are standing around another grave; every now and again they raise their heads and look towards the main gate. A man calls me. ‘Father. A word?’
‘Sure.’
‘Would you mind saying the prayers? The priest hasn’t turned up and there are a few elderly people here.’ He shakes himself. ‘They’re freezing.’
‘Glad to.’
‘The poor man is a bit gone in the head, if you ask me.’
‘Right.’
The windscreen wipers are busy, clearing the glass of sleet as I make my way to the city. Dark clouds hang over the Pigeon House. My mind too is going helter-skelter. Don’t waste your life. Her frail arm reaching out. The carnival queen in her summer glory. No priest. Gone in the head, Father.
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br /> Up until then, Lucy and I had managed, somehow, to satisfy our longing with kisses and holding hands in the glorious isolation of Wicklow. And with trying to convince ourselves that ‘it would ruin everything’, although on a couple of occasions we had crossed the boundary with fondling and probing against the door of her living-room, or on the couch before the forgotten newsreader. Once when I stopped, she grew silent, freed herself from my embrace and moved away. Staring at the television, she smoothed down her dress, then folded her arms. ‘Why start something that you can’t finish?’
‘It would be the end of our friendship, Lucy.’
She lets fly: ‘Make up your mind, because I’m not hanging around for ever.’
‘It would destroy what’s between us. I’ve seen that happen.’
‘Friendship. Is it friendship when you have me jammed up against the wall?’
‘I don’t feel I’ve the right to go the full way, in deference to what I’ve taken on. We did agree that we would try to keep the feelings in check, if we could.’
‘That was then, Tommy. I’ve been faithful to you for a long time now. And at the end of it all, who would be the loser? Not you. You’d have lost nothing, because I think you’ve no intention of leaving the priesthood, even though you say you are giving it consideration.’
Now fully clothed, we stand in the dark, inside one of the windows. The snow is still coming down; pools of amber from the streetlights rest on the clean blanket of the garden below us.
‘Where are you?’ Her voice is tender as she nestles closer. ‘What’s the deep sigh about? Was it not good?’
I stroke her hair. ‘Of course, love. Of course, it was,’ I lie, and kiss the crown of her head.
‘Why the serious face then?’
The drop leaf of a door nearby breaks the silence with a clatter. A group of nurses from St Vincent’s, who had invited us to their barbecue the previous summer, are talking loudly about drinks in Searson’s as they trip down the steps; they pitch snowballs at each other until they reach the garden gate.