A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  She began to twirl her diamond engagement ring round her finger in front of me. Blind fool, I hadn’t noticed it till then. It hurt me more than my appendix had.

  ‘I shouldn’t be wearing it really while I’m on duty, Father, but it’s still such a novelty.’

  ‘Congratulations, Nurse,’ I said, half commiserating with myself. ‘I’ll buy you … and Dr Spinks a pound box of chocolates. Black Magic?’

  ‘My favourites,’ she said. ‘Father, I was wondering if you could possibly help me’—oh, yes—‘help us’—oh, no. ‘Jeremy and I are planning to marry next spring.’

  ‘Why not come and see me as soon as I’m discharged, Nurse?’

  She had taken me at my word. She was a woman in love. Though not with me.

  I was hurt. I was humiliated. I was angry. At first I wondered why, if she was in love with someone else, she had gone out of her way to be so nice to me. What made her think she could be nice to me? Soon I realized I was being stupid. Why should Nurse Owen single me out for an uncharacteristic attack of nastiness?

  Guilt waxed in me as anger waned. I started to blame myself. I knew that if I wasn’t careful I’d blame myself too much and accuse myself of impure thoughts and desires. If that happened, I would find myself in the altogether murkier realm of mortal sin which, as I had told Mrs Rollings, required confession—number and species. It was wiser to forget the whole affair.

  But my conscience gave me no peace. What if I was no longer in a state of grace and making things worse by celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments when I needed absolution myself?

  I had to get it off my chest. I did not want to trouble my normal confessor at the Cathedral who knew me for my laziness, exaggerations and impatience. I chose to pop along instead to a nearby Jesuit House of Studies and confess to a priest who did not know me from Adam.

  One morning at ten o’clock, I plucked up courage and rang the bell. A Brother with a club foot opened the door.

  ‘Come for confession, Father?’ Was guilt written so large on my face that a total stranger could read it at once? ‘No one here at the moment, save Fr Strood. An American, Father. But I dare say if you’re in a hurry.’

  I said I was.

  ‘Second Floor, Room 12, then. There’s no phone in his room so you’ll just have to go on up.’

  I knocked on Room 12 and was greeted by a loud, drawling, ‘Come in, please.’ The voice was Jimmy Cagney in a friendly mood.

  I opened the door only to recoil in horror. There in the middle of the room was a crew-cut, middle-aged gentleman clad only in the briefest of blue underpants. He was holding a towel but not for protection.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I said.

  ‘What makes you think you’re disturbing me? I was about to freshen up, that’s all.’ Sensing my embarrassment, he added, ‘I am wearing my fig leaf.’

  ‘I was looking for a priest,’ I stammered, ‘for confession.’

  ‘That’s okay, Father, you’ve found one. Only too glad to oblige.’ He promptly collapsed on to a chair, put the towel round his neck like a stole and motioned to me to kneel beside him. ‘Ready?’ he said. ‘Shoot.’

  I told him it was four days since my last confession. ‘Great, Father,’ he smiled, ‘glad to know you frequent the sacrament. Now, what’s on your mind?’

  I explained as best I could my feelings towards the Nurse who had looked after me, first of tenderness and lately of bitterness.

  ‘Gee,’ he said, tugging on the ends of his towel and then scratching his hairy chest. ‘I’ve been hospitalized three times in seven years and I’ve fallen in love with my nurse every time, can you imagine? Different ones at that. I guess I’m just promiscuous.’ He paused as if contemplating the pretty faces of all the nurses whose hands he had been through. ‘Plan to see her again, Father?’

  I answered that I was bound to see her on my rounds but she had become engaged to a doctor. ‘That’s probably what made me so sore,’ I admitted.

  ‘I read you, Father. Anything else?’ I hadn’t prepared anything else. ‘Okay, Father, tell the good Lord you’re sorry for all the sins of your past life. For your penance, I want you to pray that your nurse friend will be very happy.’ Through two or three camel-like yawns, he gave me absolution.

  As I stood up, he grabbed me by the hand and squeezed it till it hurt. ‘Frank Strood from Jersey City,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear. ‘And you, do you have a name, too?’ I wasn’t used to shaking hands with underpanted Jesuits but I told him who I was. ‘Great to meet you, Neil. See you again, I hope.’

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ I said, retreating to the door. I was afraid that if I didn’t get out in a hurry he might want to confess his promiscuities to me. ‘You’ve been extremely helpful, Father.’

  He waved the towel after me like a handkerchief. ‘Think nothing of it. Bye, now, Neil. Bye.’

  ‘Here are the chocolates, Nurse. Sorry I didn’t remember them before.’ Lies. I had thought of nothing but her and her chocolates for days.

  She thanked me, adding out of politeness, ‘I’d forgotten all about them, Father.’

  With a bitterness that surprised me, I thought, ‘I bet you did.’

  To prove to her and myself that I had no designs on her I had bought her a small box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. She seemed pleased all the same as she clutched them to her breast.

  ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I told Jeremy he has to have three or four instructions before marriage.’

  ‘That’s normal since he’s not a Catholic, is he?’

  ‘Jeremy’s not anything.’

  It staggered me that a beautiful, devout, apparently intelligent Catholic should contemplate giving herself away to a self-confessed pagan.

  ‘It helps, doesn’t it, Father,’ she asked eagerly, ‘him not believing in anything?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I replied. ‘It means he won’t object to the children being Catholics.’

  Her rose-like face rushed into full bloom at the mention of children. I explained that non-Catholics had to sign in advance a promise that all children born of the union will be baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith. This seemed to upset her.

  ‘Look, Nurse, he’s not likely to raise any objections, is he? You made the point yourself he hasn’t any faith.’

  ‘No, Father, but he does have very strong convictions.’

  Blind prejudice, I thought, and nothing more. I said, ‘Presumably, he’ll want you to follow your conscience?’

  ‘What about his conscience? What if he wants … any children born of the union … to decide for themselves when they’re old enough?’

  ‘Awkward,’ I said unsympathetically.

  Nurse Owen looked irresistible as she clutched her small box of chocolates to her heaving bosom. ‘That’s why I was looking to you for help, Father. Could you have a meal with us?’

  This was rubbing salt in the wound. ‘When’s best for you, Nurse?’ She mentioned Friday evening at 8. My diary was blank on that day but a streak of perversity made me say, ‘Sorry I can’t make that evening. The Friday after is all right.’

  She was so grateful and so quintessentially nice that if I’d had the talent I would have kicked my own backside. By eating at her place I would at least be spared having to share the bill. I was beginning to think that curates don’t get paid nearly enough for all they have to suffer.

  ‘Flat 6A, Flood Court,’ she said. ‘I share with a secretary. She goes out Friday evenings, so we can have a quiet meal, just the three of us.’

  The prospect of instructing Dr Spinks on the rights and duties of marriage made me nervous. He had seen sex in the raw, I had only met it in Brown’s four volumes of Moral Theology. There all the spicy bits had been put into Latin, presumably so that inquisitive lay folk could not read it. Unfortunately, I was never very good at Latin.

  Apart from Brown, there were only two ways we seminarists had been formally instructed on sex.

  One was when Canon Flynn, ou
r Professor, called us up two by two to his dais in the lecture room. This was in our fifth year. Spread out on his desk was a battered old tome with two sectional drawings, suitably distanced, of the ‘Respective Anatomies’. The text was in French, the parts were listed in Latin. To cap it all, sectional drawings, even of cars and aeroplanes, never meant anything to me.

  The Canon darted here and there with his long pencil, taking care not to touch the page. He hurriedly gave the names and functions of various arcane organs which Brown had referred to in a lump as membra minus honesta.

  ‘Any questions?’

  There were never any questions. The chief point of seminary training was that you should know all the answers and none of the questions. It was all over in forty-five seconds.

  In our sixth and final year, any gaps in our knowledge of sex and procreation were to be filled by Father Head, a Scottish priest who had been a surgeon before his ordination.

  He turned out to be the leanest, most highly strung individual I have ever seen. He stood at the blackboard, from which were hung enormous charts, red-faced and quivering, and proceeded to describe the act of intercourse as if it were a torrid, North African tank battle between Rommel and Montgomery.

  I remember Jimmy Farrelly, the wag of the year, declaring afterwards, ‘Jesus! I still can’t figure out who won.’

  I was in dire need of help when I went to Fr Duddleswell’s study. He was engrossed in a tabloid newspaper which he bought regularly for Mrs Pring. He looked up at me and tutted: ‘Father Neil, newspapers these days. ’Tis all bosoms and etceteras. Cast your eye over this.’

  The picture in the centre spread was of a pretty girl in a nothing dress. The caption was Thigh Priestess. He was at a loss to know why the media chose to advertize those parts of the human person so devoid of interest that previous generations had refrained from showing them at all.

  ‘Seen one, seen ’em all,’ he said. ‘Like elbows. D’you not think, Father Neil, that sex is a bit like the aroma of coffee? It promises far more than it can possibly deliver.’

  I decided to take his word for it and nodded agreement.

  He asked, ‘Be honest, now, can you imagine any sane individual getting titillation from the likes of this?’

  ‘No, Father,’ I gulped, amazed at what age does to a man. I told him I had a mixed marriage arranged for the new year and wanted to know how to go about it.

  He went across to his filing cabinet for the forms. The most important was the dispensation form for disparity of cult. The non-Catholic had to sign promising never to interfere with the faith of the Catholic partner and to allow the children to be brought up in the true faith.

  I told him, without specifying, that the bride was a nurse and the groom a non-Catholic doctor from the K.G. ‘Well, Father Neil,’ he said, ‘be sure to put him right about birth-control, divorce, abortion and things of that sort.’ I was particularly to stress the Church’s teaching on contraception. Sex is not just a plaything. It is a most marvellous mechanism for the manufacture of children. In this, he continued to inform me, men as far apart as Gandhi and Bernard Shaw were in agreement with the Church. Birth-control usually meant no birth and no control.

  I asked whether the dispensation was granted easily. ‘No trouble these days,’ he replied, ‘provided there is a reason for the marriage. Is the girl pregnant, for instance?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said, biting my lip to hide my indignation.

  ‘Better check, Father Neil. Pregnancy is by far the most acceptable of the canonical reasons. Then there is firmum propositum nubendi, a firm determination to marry.’

  I acknowledged grudgingly that she had that. ‘What I mean is,’ he explained, ‘would she marry in the Register Office if the Church refused her a dispensation?’ I said I guessed not because she’s a pious Catholic. ‘If we are not careful,’ he winked mischievously, ‘she will prove to be too pious and we will find no canonical pretext for marrying her off. Is she super-adulta, now?’

  ‘What is over-age, Father?’

  ‘Twenty-four. Any girl above that is reckoned to have distinctly reduced chances of marrying. That is why the Church allows a dispensation, especially if she has a face like an old boot into the bargain.’

  Seeing I was stunned at what constituted advanced years in a woman, he explained that the law was made with Latin ladies, fed on a diet of spaghetti Bolognese, in mind. ‘They are mostly blown like autumn roses before our own women are in bud, you follow? But if canon law works to our advantage in this instance, why complain?’

  I said that the girl in question couldn’t be more than twenty-two and was not really ugly, so I supposed, almost joyfully, that was the end of it.

  ‘Nothing of the sort, Father Neil,’ he came back, dashing my last hope. ‘The matter is exceedingly simple. Do not forward the application for a dispensation till the last minute and plead omnia parata. You tell the Chancellor of the diocese that everything is ready for the wedding and it would cause a ripe shemozzle if at this late hour ‘twere to be called off.’

  I put it to him that canon lawyers would find a loophole to let Satan have a holiday from Hell.

  ‘Father Neil, the Church has all the loving deviousness of a mother, if you are still with me.’ I had to make sure the forms were filled in but not dated. If I reminded him to countersign them four days before the wedding, he would pass them on to the Chancellor himself. ‘And warn that young medic, mind, I want no hanky-panky over birth-control.’

  With polished shoes and brushed suit I rat-tatted on the door of Flat 6A. Nurse Owen, her long red hair cascading on to her shoulders, answered my knock clad in a long cherry-coloured dress. I admired the propriety of its high neckline.

  Spinks was a mess in sandals, jeans and open-necked shirt. The only bosom on show was his.

  ‘Jerry it is,’ he said in a friendly tone. Since he already knew my name I shook his hand in silence. ‘Glad Sarah could persuade you to come.’

  Sarah. Sarah Owen. What a lovely name.

  ‘Our paths have hardly crossed,’ Dr Spinks went on, ‘since you cured that chap from the Gold Coast.’

  He actually had a small bald patch on top, the size of a florin. What was Sarah up to, hitching herself to a prematurely balding pagan? The Church really shouldn’t be so liberal with her dispensations.

  ‘Talk to Father, Jeremy,’ urged Sarah, ‘while I put the finishing touches to the meal.’

  When she went to the kitchen, Dr Spinks said, ‘Beer?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Sherry?’ I shook my head. ‘You will have a glass of wine with your meal?’

  ‘Please.’

  He looked relieved that I had some weaknesses. ‘Tricky business, Fr Boyd, putting down the anchor.’

  It was in his favour that he had addressed me correctly. ‘I’m sure,’ I said.

  A black hole yawned in the conversation. Then he asked me if I would like a disc put on. I tried to shake myself out of my boorish mood and failed. ‘Not particularly.’

  Sarah must have had her ear pinned to the door. She returned and thrust a plate in front of me. ‘Have a crisp, Father. And here’s the cheese dip.’ One glance at Dr Spinks told him, no discs tonight.

  ‘Marriage is a sacrament, isn’t it, Father?’ she said. ‘Jeremy is ever so keen to know what that means, aren’t you, Jeremy?’

  I was happy to be on home ground. I replied that it is a sacrament provided both partners are baptized.

  ‘You have been baptized, haven’t you, Jeremy?’

  Dr Spinks said ‘yes, love’ but he had repudiated all that when he was twelve. I insisted that if he had been baptized, he was in some marginal sense a Christian, and if he married another Christian it would be a sacrament.

  ‘Whether I like it or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said aloud, and inwardly, whether you damn well like it or not. He asked what follows from that. ‘To begin with,’ I answered, ‘when the marriage has been consummated, there’s no possibilit
y of a divorce.’

  ‘Consummated?’ He spoke it plainly as a four syllable word. ‘Just once?’ I nodded. ‘Bloody hell,’ he laughed, winking at Sarah, ‘only once after we’re married and it’s till death us do part.’

  Sarah turned the colour of her dress and retreated into the kitchen. Was he such a swine as to cast aspersions on his fiancee’s honour?

  Through avocado pear, plaice and chips, and apple pie it was sex and marriage. Dr Spinks was against everything the Church stood for on moral issues. He argued the reasonableness of abortion if the prognosis is that the baby’s likely to be born deformed or the mother’s life is in danger. Likewise in cases of rape.

  I did not care to pursue this topic over fish and chips but I made my position clear. God infuses the soul at conception and so the child in the womb has all the rights of a human being.

  For him, talk about murdering embryos was mere rhetoric. The Church’s teaching on birth-control was plain daft. ‘I’ve been researching into women’s periods,’ he announced to Sarah’s discomfort. ‘I’ve had the nurses at the K.G. and half the girls from the Teachers’ Training College keeping charts and thermometer checks.’

  Sarah stood up to remove the dirty dishes. ‘Cheese and biscuits to follow.’

  ‘I even asked Norah if she’d care to take part,’ Dr Spinks went on. ‘Just to flatter her, of course.’

  The conclusion of his survey was that women are about as reliable as the English weather. My experience of Sarah had taught me that already.

  ‘Did you know, Father,’ he confided in a boozy stage whisper, ‘Sarah is one of my menstrual girls?’ He roared with laughter and overturned his glass of Beaujolais. ‘Her cycles are so irregular, I call her Penny-Farthing. One is thirty-three days, the next is eighteen.’ My right hand was volunteering to punch his nose.

  He started dabbing up the wine with his table napkin. ‘Just my luck to be marrying the most inconsistent girl in the whole bloody troupe. Her only safe period will be from fifty-five to ninety.’ He chuckled at his own joke. ‘I tell you this in strictest confidence. If, as your Church seems to want, I’m limited to every inconceivable opportunity, I might as well become one of the castrati in the heavenly choir.’ He dug me in the ribs. ‘Like you, old pal.’