“That’s right,” interrupted Michael. A slight rustle accompanied the unison swivel of enthralled heads. “It was some time after Mrs. Smythe left Migwani, where this strange old man lived. But on the day of the accident, I was in town, Kitui, the district centre, thirty miles from Migwani, and somehow, he was there as well. God knows how he got there. I was parked by the side of the road, sitting in the car and reading a letter. In fact - what did I say about being able to remember every detail? – It was a letter from Mrs. Smythe that I was reading…”
“Was it a love letter?”
“Janice, be quiet!” shouted Mo Thomas.
Michael merely continued. “Well he was there. I didn’t see him. He must have laid down in front of the car, under the wheels, just like he did with the buses. I couldn’t see him. I started the car, set off and ran over him. I killed him. It was an accident.” Michael paused here to scan the sea of faces. They all believed him. “There was an inquest. I testified along with all the witnesses and the verdict was accidental death. But I couldn’t stay on as a priest in that area with the label of the white man who killed Munyasya… So I took leave of absence for a while to rethink what I really wanted to do and where best I could serve the poor, because that’s why I wanted to be a missionary in the first place. I came to London, where I had some friends. It took me a couple of years to refocus my thoughts while I did stand-in parish work, relief work and the like, and eventually I decided to re-commit my life to the achievement of slightly different ends. I have no regrets. And now it’s been twenty-five years in the parks department and, because I chose to be a worker-priest, a worker like any other, I have to retire. I can’t ask for any special treatment.”
There was another short silence. Mo Thomas rose slowly to her feet and faced the assembled girls before she spoke. “It’s just about time for the bell. Let’s stop there. Thank you Father Michael Doherty for sharing your thoughts, your experiences and your faith with us. And thank you, students, for being such an interested and appreciative audience.” As she prompted the start of the applause, the school’s end of day bell rang, quelling the rising sound so that it took on a rather perfunctory air, but all present knew that the session had gone well. Without waiting to be told, but in an orderly and civilised way, the girls made their way towards the doors, clutching their plastic bags, their heavyweight rucksacks and admixture of hockey sticks, lacrosse racquets and all the other paraphernalia associated with schooling. They were noisy and they pushed and jostled a little, but they also displayed a communal internal discipline and all one hundred and fifty or so had soon filed through the inadequate door with a minimum of fuss.
Michael, Janet and Mo Thomas were left alone in the large echoing room.
“Oh Jaysus, what about all the chairs?” Michael asked.
“The school keepers will stack them,” replied Janet. “Well, Mo, that went very well again.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Smythe. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to dash, so let me just say another thank you, Michael. It was great.”
And so together and alone for the first time in thirty years, Janet stood in complete awkward silence for a minute or more. “I’ve been coming in and out of this school every day since September 1976,” she said at last. “And for twenty-five years I have been walking across that common past you without ever realising it…” Michael did not speak. “I can’t believe it.”
“What did I say about certain people never being noticed, not even seen?” he replied.
“But…”
“I’ve seen you.” A look of aghast surprise hollowed Janet’s face. “I’ve watched you almost every day come out of Clapham South Station in the morning and walk to work… And then back in the evening.” Though she said nothing, Michael correctly read the question “Why?” from her visible astonishment. “You knew I was a priest. I couldn’t even talk to you. You might have blown my cover,” he said, laughing.
“Incredible… I… Oh, my God! Look at the time! Look, Michael, I can’t talk now I’m due at a meeting at the town hall in half an hour. What’s today… Wednesday… Are you free on Friday evening? Can you come to dinner? Please do.” She fumbled in the small bag she habitually carried for a slim black wallet, extracted one of her business cards and pushed it into Michael’s hand. “Come at seven. Please come.” And with that she turned and almost ran out of the room. She had to make that meeting on time since, unusually, she was asking someone else for something, less than a favour, but much more than routine. Competent head teachers in their mid-fifties were generally no longer even considered for early retirement.
And so Michael was left alone, a visitor, a stranger unguarded and unescorted amidst a thousand teenage girls. He knew the way out, but he also knew that this should not happen. Something special had caused Janet to overlook protocol and forget her duty to see him off the premises. His thoughts drifted to a particular morning a few weeks past. As usual, he had watched Janet emerge from the station but on that morning she had not taken her usual route, itself something of a detour, so that she could walk through a copse of trees on her way to work. But on that morning she had made for the nearest bench, sat down and lit up a cigarette. She had smoked in Kenya, but he had not seen her touch a cigarette for over twenty years, and then suddenly, that day, she did something out of character. He almost decided to approach her that day and surprise her, but he didn’t. There was a problem. He looked down at the card and read aloud, “Janet Smythe BA, PGCE, MA: Head teacher, St Mary’s Roman Catholic Girls’ School.” The home address, beneath that of the school, was in Canonbury, London N1.
***
With the noisy and flustered arrival of Janet’s daughter, Marie, her husband, Karl, and their two children, Paul, three, and Carla, two, the group was complete. Fathers Michael Doherty and Bernard O’Kane were still chatting, as they had been when Janet opened the door to them twenty minutes earlier. They had met by chance outside, having approached from different directions along Canonbury Grove and arrived at the gate of the Smythe residence at precisely the same time. Bernard had taken the Northern Line via Bank from Clapham South and had walked from Angel, along Upper Street and Essex Road, but privately relishing the experience of the cut through offered by Camden Passage, one of his favourite little bits of London. As he dawdled along, with time in hand, the late rushers from work sped past at a gallop. Michael, on the other hand, had been in the area for more than an hour, having decided, after knocking off from work and having realised exactly where Janet’s house was, to treat himself to a pint of Young’s in the Marquess. These middle classes would surely ply him with g’n’ts and wine, so it would be good to get a lining in the stomach.
Douglas, Janet’s son, was chatting with his father, his affected voice always slightly louder than the rest. He was tall, just taller than his father, whose slightly un-made appearance contrasted sharply with Douglas’s prim, if over-stated, colourful neatness. Where the father suggested dandruff, an odd spill here and there, down a lightly creased shirtfront across the noticeable but not large belly, alongside a tendency to cough a little to clear his throat after a phrase, Douglas was neat, finely cut, precise and colour coordinated. He looked, if branded by his father seeing him as a stranger, rather ‘arty-farty’ or ‘queenish’. This, in fact, was an exact description of Douglas that, in other circumstances, he often applied to himself. He had declared his homosexuality to his parents while in his first year of his Contemporary Cinema degree and, three years later, the family tended not to make further references to it. Now independent, earning his own keep as a part-time lecturer in the genre of science fiction film while he spent most of his time preparing a PhD in the same area, his parents were merely grateful that he still wanted to keep in touch and that he always turned up for the Friday evening family meal, a family focal point for both David and Janet and an activity that automatically occupied a Friday evening, no matter what else was on offer. Though his father overtly supported
his choice of discipline, Douglas was always conscious of the disapproving tone that was never quite absent from David’s voice whenever his vocation was raised in conversation. Something more ‘down to earth’ (no pun intended), something more professional, more respectable and, it had to be said, more likely to earn a packet would have been preferable.
Marie, of course, was the model. Three years older than him, his sister had achieved in the eyes of her father. She had always seemed to take everything so easily, so much in her stride, apparently never doubting that she would get her first in PPE from Oxford. Perhaps she also had always assumed that she would find a husband like Karl, Oxford law graduate, specialising in things corporate, and now about to adopt the status of partner in her father’s practice. She, in contrast, degree in hand and qualified to the hilt, embraced marriage straight after college and, after just months of ‘setting things straight’ in their Islington terrace, decided on pregnancy, achieved it, bore the result and then did the whole thing again. An almost full-time mum, assisted by a live-in nanny on an allowance plus board and lodging, she granted some of her time to the Conservative Party her parents had always supported and, with her background, she had soon become established as a part-time researcher on social policy, specialising in family issues, for which she was now, of course, eminently qualified. Now that was achievement. “More’s the pity that she married such a prat,” Douglas thought. With the world at her feet, or so her parents would lead others to believe, confident, achieving Marie dossed down with a slobbering gut of an upper class twit who even wore those shirts, uniform of his trade, with white collars above dark blue and white vertical stripes, like a butcher playing vicar. But then Douglas would have to keep his thoughts to himself tonight. With two of the priest things in attendance he might even be outnumbered.
“Let me introduce you,” said David, gently manoeuvring Douglas towards Michael. “Father Bernard you know, of course, but this, this is Father Michael …”
“Doherty,” confirmed Michael, offering his hand to Douglas.
“Douglas Smythe, Father Michael Doherty,” said David redundantly, with unnecessarily huge formality, the full stop at the end becoming a short gruff rolling cough. “He was a friend of your mother’s when she lived in Africa.”
“I think that might have been before my time,” said Douglas quietly, but with an exaggerated trill of the head, which Michael noticed immediately. Douglas was convinced he heard a quiet, knowing, “Ah,” from the priest. “I have to say that you don’t look like a priest. Are you still a priest, or did you decide to join the living after leaving Africa?”
“I was parish priest in Migwani, where your mother worked,” replied Michael, noting the prod. “And, yes to both of your questions: I am still a priest and I did something different!”
“So you must have seen quite a lot of mum?”
“Yes, we became very close friends.”
“So where have you been all these years?”
“I’ve been working for the council parks department. I’ve spent most of my time looking after Clapham Common, in fact. You know, weeding the flower beds, keeping the paths clear, picking the Coke tins out of the pond, clearing up dog shit.”
“But I thought you were still a priest…”
It took only a couple of minutes for Michael to explain his situation, but it was clear throughout that Douglas thought the whole idea was nuts. He picked up on one aspect of Michael’s story, however. When Michael mentioned that he had regularly seen Janet on her way to and from school over the years without once making contact with her, Douglas commented with surprised enthusiasm, “That’s really cool! Amazing! A Marxist priest disguised as a council worker, who looks like he’s weeding the roses, is actually involved in a clandestine, twenty-five year platonic stalk of my mother. As plots go, it sounds like something from a 1960s Italian director, and probably would have finished in a ritualised bloodbath!”
Fathers Doherty and O’Kane laughed. David was horrified, but his words emerged only as inconclusive grunts and were stifled by Janet’s comparatively stentorian tone as she entered from the hallway.
“There. That’s all finished. We can eat in a few minutes. There’s no need to rush, though. You have time to finish your drinks. It can’t spoil.” Janet immediately gravitated towards Marie and took the two-year-old Carla from her arms. “How is my little beauty... mm… mm…” As if on cue, the child burst into tears, its head turning immediately back towards its mother. Marie stood up from the easy chair she had occupied for only a few minutes and took her daughter back. Until then, all the others in the room, all men, had almost carefully ignored the fact that she had spent her whole time organising the children and their associated baggage.
It was Douglas who spoke. “Mum, I hear that you and Father Michael go back a long way.”
“Too long, love. It’s over thirty years since we met.” Her voice gave no clue that they had not been in contact for decades. Janet looked at Michael and realised, in a way that she had not seen two days earlier, just how much he had changed. She remembered him as a plain man, neither tall nor short, not thin, not fat, without any significant feature. He was round faced, rather ruddy in the cheeks, and always wore his black hair short, in no particular style. He had always dressed in jeans and a shirt, always in a neutral shade. He always wore a hat, however. From Kenya she recalled his floppy bush hat, a soft camouflage-patterned, permanent part of his dress. When he took it off indoors she could remember vividly how he would fiddle with it as he spoke, continually rolling and unrolling it, pulling at it, or tugging it into shapes. He had no idea he was doing it. Forty-eight hours before she had registered only recognition, but now it was the differences she saw. The hair was grey, not completely though, and he had a large bald patch, but only evident from the back. His cheeks were still flushed from the cold outside – typically Irish, she could still hear him say – but now his face was heavily lined from his outdoor work and bore light jowls at the side of the mouth. The bush hat was now a baseball cap and it was stuffed in his pocket, not nervously fiddled. He still wore jeans and a shirt (the same ones?) with no sweater underneath the anorak he had removed on arrival. He still looked as fit as he had done thirty years before, with not a hint of extra weight or as yet any slowness admitted to his still mercurial manner. It felt strange, strange, strange to have him here in her own house, like a gateway through which another world admitted itself to her assumed limits. For Janet, memories of Michael Doherty had always been so completely and inextricably linked to her two years in Kenya that now, out of that context, she hardly knew what to say to him. She had not written to him for more than twenty-five years and yet he, it appeared, had constantly been presented with opportunities to greet her, to bridge the years. But because of the needs of his chosen life, he had always kept his anonymous distance.
“So you know all the dirt?” said Douglas, glancing back and forth between Michael and his mother. When Michael did not respond, he repeated the phrase, following on with, “You know about all the boyfriends, the affairs, the wild parties, the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll – everything about mum when she was my age…”
Michael and Janet both smiled. “Douglas, you have such a way with words,” she said, quickly taking the three steps she needed to achieve a mother’s distance from his face, which she touched and then, moving her hands to smooth back his hair, kissed on the cheek. For a moment and for everyone present he was again the son, the child, the boy, and Janet became mother incarnate.
“Oh yes,” confirmed Michael. “I know all there is to know. I know all the stories.” It seemed that the attention of the whole group had focused on the way that Janet still smoothed her son’s hair.
Douglas had responded to Janet’s advance. He had bowed slightly and looked her straight in the eye, her hands still apparently channelling his concentration on her. “So my gorgeous mother had an African boyfriend. Cool.”
***
She remembered holding that head, her hands over his ears, her playful attempt to shut the world from his mind, to concentrate his attention on her, only on her. She remembered him laughing as she kissed him, trying to complain that he couldn’t hear anything. “Just listen to this,” she remembered saying, her lips still touching his, slobbering through the words.
He was older than her, more than ten years older and always reminding her of how different they were. Their affair, he had always said, could be no more than that, so she must not try to make it something bigger, something it could never be. From the start, they had accepted the need for discretion. In Migwani, it seemed common currency to assume that any time a man and a woman found themselves alone yet together then sex would be the automatic consequence, like some form of spontaneous combustion. One penis plus one vagina combined with one opportunity was the perfect and then inevitable mix, the result known, as night followed day. So they could never meet in her house. His place, of course, had been off limits from the start, never possibly private and always likely to admit an unexpected visitor. But then the end of her two years in Migwani began to loom large and she no longer cared what people thought, so their last two meetings had been in her own home, during the day, of course, though she dearly wished he would spend just one night with her. She longed to sleep by his side and wake up next to him so that they could make love again, immediately, without delay, with memories of the last time still fresh in her spine. But he had never relented and she had learned to make the most of the few frantic hours of Saturday afternoons, which were all that the maintenance of what public decorum they still retained, could grant them.
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