by Brian Moore
Mrs Henry Rice raised her eyebrows. ‘You feel sick with it? Some do. I used to get awful headaches myself, every thirty-three days, regular as clockwork.’
‘I know,’ Miss Hearne said. ‘Headaches are even worse than being sick. Still, I do feel rotten.’
But her lie had not taken. Mrs Henry Rice had opened a trap for her victim. She closed it now, with a smile of full-bloated malice. ‘Well, it seems to affect you pretty merrily. Why, you were singing away all afternoon.’
‘. . . No — I mean . . .’
‘Yes, singing and talking away to yourself as happy as a lark. It’s a wonder nobody complained, you were louder than the wireless.’
‘I — I used to sing a lot. I was — practising. I give music lessons, you know. I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t realise I was disturbing anyone. I — I suppose the walls are thinner than I expected.’
‘The walls in this house are not thin, they’re old walls, very thick, as a matter of fact. You’d have to shout at the top of your voice to be heard.’
‘Well, a person singing — you know the singing voice carries. The tones penetrate. I’m awfully sorry if I disturbed you.’
‘O, singing’s loud, I know that. Why, there was a drunk man in the street last week, you could hear him a mile away. It’s terrible the noise a drunk man makes.’
She knows. The bad, black-hearted slimy voice of her. O, I could kill her. ‘Well, I must hurry on out now, Mrs Rice, if you don’t mind. I have an engagement.’
‘It’s a pity you weren’t up and about sooner. My brother was asking for you, but he’s gone downtown now.’
‘O, indeed? Well, I must be on my way. Good night, Mrs Rice.’
‘Good night, Miss Hearne. And — Miss Hearne?’
‘Yes?’
‘You will be careful, won’t you? About singing. I wouldn’t like people to get the wrong impression.’
‘What do you mean, the wrong impression?’
‘Well, people are funny. Even Jim, my brother, he got the wrong idea about it. Why he said to me this afternoon that it sounded as if you were having a party in your room. I said no, that was silly, you were just singing to yourself.’
‘Good night, Mrs Rice.’
‘Good night.’
The night air helped. It tasted clean and fresh and she breathed deeply as she walked, trying to stop the trembling which had now become a sort of shivering as the cold crept into her bones. She felt nauseated. Singing, talking to herself, awful, it was awful. And in front of other people. In front of him, what could he think of her? He had waited to see her, his horrid sister had rubbed that in, the sly one.
The Bon-Bon teashop was still open, thank heavens. She picked a table near the radiator. A slow, shuffling waitress took her order and served a pot of tea and an egg sandwich. With her eyes on the slightly soiled tablecloth, Miss Hearne forced herself to get the food down. She drank the tea and when the pot was empty, she asked for more hot water. But the waitress had seen her before and knew that she never tipped. The kitchen was closed, she said, she was sorry, but the teashop closed in five minutes, at nine o’clock.
She paid and went out. The thought of going back to her room was hateful. It was too late to go anywhere else, the pictures, for instance, and besides, even the pictures couldn’t stop the shaking. There was only one other place to go, and perhaps an hour there, an hour of quiet prayer, would give her strength to resist the temptation that was coming fast upon her.
It was shameful, shameful. Singing like a crazy woman, lying on the floor of her room, drunken, dirty, sinning, while God in His Heaven looked down at her. And then being forced to humiliate herself in front of a person like Mrs Rice, telling that lie about monthlies and being caught in it. Could anybody blame her if she despised me? I deserve it. I’m rotten, rotten, just a useless woman, all alone.
But there in front of her was Saint Finbar’s, its Gothic spire uplifted like two praying hands, a grey religious place, the house of God in the peace of night. She went in, dipping her hand in the dirty Holy Water font, making the Sign of the Cross as she pushed open the door leading from the vestibule to the nave.
The church was dark: here and there, a small lamp or a cluster of candles burned in lonely devotion before a picture, beneath an altar. The church was empty: cleared of its stock of rituals, invocations, prayers, a deserted spiritual warehouse waiting new consignments. One old woman kept watch for the community, sitting in the darkness with her back to a radiator. Was she praying as she watched the altar, or had she come in to keep warm?
This quiet, this gloom, this immense repose, soothed Miss Hearne as she stood in the deep shadows at the back of the church. She walked up the highway of the centre aisle, past the side aisles tormented by the Stations of the Cross, up to the great golden and white sweep of the main altar. She genuflected, and sat down in the front bench, feeling faint, weary, but at peace.
O Sacred Heart forgive me, she prayed, her eyes on the small golden door of the tabernacle. God sat behind that door, God in the form of bread by the sacrifice of the Mass, God sat alone behind that door in His empty church. Deserted God, she thought, You wait alone each night while men forget You.
The tabernacle glowed red-gold from the small light of the hanging sacristy lamp. She remembered that when the lamp is lit, God is in the tabernacle. When it is put out on Good Friday, He is absent.
The sacristy lamp winked. In the shadows the old woman stood up, genuflected, and turned her back on God. Miss Hearne watched the tabernacle, heard the dragging footsteps, the muffled slap of the swinging door, as the old woman went out into the streets. Alone in the immensity of His house, she gazed at the unseen Presence behind the little golden door. Alone with her God, she knelt down and begged Him.
O Sacred Heart, please, I need Your strength, Your help. Why should life be so hard for me, why am I alone, why did I yield to the temptation of drink, why, why has it all happened like this? O Sacred Heart, lighten my cross, You know it was hard, aunt dying after all those years of caring for her and You, only You, know the things I wanted, the home, children to raise up to honour and reverence You. O Sweet Jesus, You have shared my suffering, You know that I love You, please dear Lord, give me a sign, give me strength.
Tears wet her eyes. She raised her head. But the tabernacle was silent. Behind the door, God watched. He gave no sign. And around her the statues, unlit and unlovely, stared coldly across the church, unhearing, uncaring. Our Lady, her eyes and hands uplifted in her own private prayer; Saint Patrick, a gaunt old man in a green chasuble and a golden mitre, his right hand gripping a staff, unmindful of the snakes which coiled around its base; Saint Joseph, his meek eyes downcast, a good grey-beard few people prayed to. Plaster saints, no entreaty could move them. Alone, rejected, Miss Hearne looked again at the tabernacle, behind whose tiny door bread made into the Body of God lay hidden. The Holy of Holies.
Behind the altar an old sacristan appeared, a minor mummer on God’s stage. Perfunctorily, he paused, genuflected in front of the tabernacle, then mounted the altar steps. His old eyes sought the tabernacle, dismissed it and he went wearily around the back of the altar. She heard him fumble with a switch and the lights in the side aisles went out. Then he came around the front again, walked down the steps and opened the little gate at the Communion rail. He did not genuflect but walked straight down the main aisle.
‘Closing now, closing,’ he said in an angry voice as he passed her bench.
But she sat stiffly, terrified by the thing she had felt. For when the lights went out, it seemed as though the tabernacle were empty, a little golden house, set in the middle of a huge mantelpiece. It was as though the old sacristan, keeper of secrets, knew he had no need to genuflect again. The lights were out, the people had gone home, the church was closing. In the tabernacle there was no God. Only round wafers of unleavened bread. She had prayed to bread. The great ceremonial of the Mass, the singing, the incense, the benedictions, what if it was show, all useless sho
w? What if it meant nothing, nothing?
O God, God forgive me! she cried, falling on her knees. Forgive me, O Sacred Heart, for the terrible doubt the devil put in my head. O my guardian angel, shield me, protect me. Forgive me, O God, for I have sinned. I have blasphemed.
The footsteps returned. ‘You’ll have to leave now, missis,’ the old sacristan said. His soutane was unbuttoned, showing a dirty brown pullover underneath. She looked into his old discoloured eyes, searching for secrets. But saw only that he was tired, that he wanted to close the church, that he wanted her to go.
She sat up then and watched as the old man banged the Communion gate shut, all pretence at devotion gone, as he went to close the side door without bending a knee to his immortal God.
She stood up, bowed her head to the tabernacle, genuflected and went quickly down the aisle to the door. She made the Sign of the Cross in dirty Holy Water (if it is only ordinary water and the priest is wrong . . .?) and went out of the church, hearing the swinging door slap shut.
Outside the church gates, people passed. People busy with the immediate things of life. People making a living, bringing up children, planning, talking, sharing each other. Alone, Miss Hearne looked back at the church, an unhaunted house of God, an empty place, stripped of the singing, the ritual, stripped of men; men who brought it to sudden glorious life.
Empty. And above her, the night sky, curved and vast. An empty sky, nothing beyond it but the stars, the planets, with the earth spinning among them. Surely some great design kept it all moving, some Presence made it meaningful. But what if the godless were right, what if it all started back æons ago with fish crawling out of the sea to become men and women? What if not Adam and Eve, but apes, great monkeys, were our ancestors? In that world, what place had a God who cared for suffering?
She began to walk. Supposing, just supposing, her heart cried, supposing nobody has listened to me in all these years of prayers. Nobody at all up above me, watching over me. Then nothing is sinful. There is no sin. And I have been cheated, the crimson nights in that terrible book from Paris, the sin, permissible then. Nobody above. Nobody to care. Whiteness hers, he seized, revelled in. Virile he, his dark flashing eyes, they lifted beakers of wine and quaffed them, losing themselves in the intoxication of love, homage to Bacchus, lusts of the flesh. That handsome boy bathing that day at Greystones, standing up in his tight bathing trunks, his bump of virility sticking out, he would enfold me, he would run gracefully with me up the strand to the dunes. No sin in it. It would be passion, sublime freedom. And my breasts bare, that day in Doctor Bowe’s surgery, his assistant, McNamara his name, me lying on the examination couch, my arms hanging over the edge, and he came close, yes, close, his stethoscope cold on my chest, he bent over and against the back of my hand his trousers pressed, I felt it, his thing, swelling there soft, he didn’t notice, an accident, but behind the material it was there, soft, swelling, the hot flushes I had, daren’t move my hand for fear he’d notice, felt it against the back of my hand, soft, hard, warm, supposing he had noticed, it swelled, all caution gone, he had turned, the rough beast, tearing his clothes off, black hair all over him, lusting after my whiteness, yes, I could too, give myself, gipsy girl, hair about my shoulders, my breasts bare, rolling on the greensward, Romany marriage, blood mixing blood, while he, his male blackness enfolds me. It would be nature, not sin. For remember the night old John Healy said to aunt that if he weren’t a Catholic and did not believe, then what would there be to prevent him living as a profligate, cheating his neighbours, owning slaves, living like a great Roman in the golden days of Rome. Rome, Samson and Delilah, his great powerful half-naked body in the picture. What would prevent him, what indeed? No hell, no purgatory, no responsibility to God. If all the priests were wrong and you died and slept into nothingness, what point, then, in all of that? The community, it can go hang, what did the community ever do for me that I should help my fellow man?
No god. But the Protestants would never be saved and still they went on making laws stopping people from doing sinful things, canting about sin and corruption. And if we Catholics were wrong too? she thought. Then we’d be no better off than godless Russia, free love, no morals, rape in the streets, men killing, strangling, defiling women like the sex maniacs in the News of the World. Who’d stop them? What use in courts if there was no moral code, no bible to swear on? A woman like me, defenceless against the beast in men, what would I do? No, no, there has to be a god and if there was no god, men would make one. Idols, like that great idol, in the picture, the Temple of Dagon, Victor Mature pulled it down, a god of clay. And those people back in ancient times, superstitious they were, afraid of the sun, of snakes, of things of clay. Omens and portents. And us? The golden door, the circle of bread in the monstrance. What if . . .? O forgive me Sacred Heart, the devil’s thoughts, forgive me. But — tearing at my dress, ripping it away, his toga thrown aside, his huge hands feel me, press me close, his body, muscled, hard. And drunken, that wonderful cheerfulness, gay laughter, quaffing the wine, forgetfulness. Sweet oblivion. O Thou. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and Thou beside me in the wilderness. Paradise enow.
A car, headlights like yellow angry eyes, brakes screeching in rage. She stumbled, drew back, fell. Strong hands lifted her.
‘Are you all right, Miss? You nearly got kilt.’
And a man’s head from the car window. ‘The lights were against her. She just walked out, not looking. Get herself killed.’
Then the noise of engines backing up, moving again. The passers-by stared, resumed their progress. The man who had lifted her, touched his hat. ‘Sure you’re all right? Are you ill?’
‘No, no, thank you. Thank you very much.’
Nearly killed, not looking. I was nearly killed. Called to meet my Maker. And in mortal sin, sinful evil thoughts, sins of intent. Denying God.
She stood there shaking, saying an act of contrition. Struck down in the midst of my sinfulness, O Sacred Heart, forgive me. You gave a sign, a warning. Your patience will not last for ever. O dear Jesus, the drink, the sin that led to another sin. Hallucinations I had, and shaking like this. O my God, I am heartily sorry. I thank Thee.
Her eyes sought the night sky and she gave thanks. Then she crossed carefully when the lights showed green and continued home to Camden Street. She said a whole rosary on the way. A rosary in honour of the Sacred Heart. He had warned: Repent. Once again He had been merciful, He had shown the way.
CHAPTER XI
NEXT morning, when Miss Hearne appeared for breakfast, her earthly penance began. All eyes watched her as she came in and sat down.
Mr Lenehan opened the attack. ‘Feeling better now, Miss Hearne?’
‘O, yes, thank you.’
‘Well, that’s good news now. I’m sure we’re all glad to hear that.’ He smiled deceitfully at the others. ‘It’s a terrible thing, sickness in a house.’
Miss Friel shut her book with a snap. ‘Some people have no consideration at all,’ she said loudly. ‘No consideration at all. Sickness indeed! Singing and carrying on at all hours.’
Mrs Henry Rice poured tea. ‘Now, it won’t happen again, I’m sure.’
‘Disgraceful, I call it,’ Miss Friel said. ‘A nice thing for a Catholic house.’
Miss Hearne, her face burning, hardly listened to these words. She was watching Mr Madden. But he only opened his mouth to put toast in it.
‘I like a bit of a song myself,’ Mr Lenehan said, grinning at Miss Hearne. ‘You have a fine voice there. A fine carrying voice.’
Mary came in with fresh toast and put it in front of Miss Hearne. She fumbled with the toast-rack and one of the slices fell beside Mr Madden’s cup. Miss Hearne saw Mr Madden look at the girl and the girl blushed red. He kept on looking, all the time the girl was in the room. Anything, so’s he won’t have to look at me, Miss Hearne thought. O, I don’t blame him. He’s shocked, and no wonder.
But there was no time to think about it: Miss Friel still wanted satisfactio
n. ‘I can hardly keep my eyes open,’ she told the table. ‘I’m dead tired, so I am, after yesterday. Singing and carrying on, you could hear it all over the house. It’s all very well for the rest of you, but I have to keep my wits about me, teaching.’
‘O, we all make noises, now and then,’ Mrs Henry Rice said. ‘I know I often disturb Bernie at his work when I put the vacuum cleaner on.’
‘Vacuum cleaner? I wouldn’t mind that. But caterwauling, no, it would drive you mad,’ Miss Friel said, glaring down the table at Miss Hearne.
O, the mortification of it. But she couldn’t let that pass.
‘Is it me you’re referring to?’ she asked Miss Friel.
‘And who else?’
‘And is it any business of yours what I do, I’d like to know?’
‘It’s a matter of common comfort to the people who are living in this house. Singing and shouting away half the blessed night, and yesterday afternoon, I was correcting exercises, I could hardly hear my ears. I hammered away on your wall, but not a bit of heed you paid. You’d think you were . . .’
(O, no, not that! Not said out in public!) ‘I’m very sorry,’ Miss Hearne said, cutting her short. ‘I promise you it won’t occur again.’ She looked at Mr Madden. ‘I must apologise to all of you. I didn’t realise the singing voice carried so much.’
But Mr Madden kept his head down. He looks upset, poor man, she thought, how embarrassing it must be for him.
‘I see,’ Miss Friel said, standing up. ‘Well, I should hope not indeed.’ Her victory won, she tucked her book under her arm and marched out of the room.
‘Ah, never mind her,’ Mr Lenehan chuckled, nodding towards the door. ‘Sure, there’s nobody doesn’t have a bit of a jig now and then. Except for the likes of her, never had a night’s fun in her life.’