‘That’s all right,’ she said eventually. ‘I wish you both well, Matt. You and Flora. Now if you would send on my handbag—’
‘Temper-temper,’ Matthew said teasingly, in a voice which all at once induced unambiguous aversion in Alice. ‘Hell hath no fury an’ all that, bonny lass. Now listen carefully an’ don’t you go getting your little knickers in a twist. When it’s between you and her, Flora’s well and truly down the plughole as far as I’m concerned. Didn’t I say I’d make an honest woman of you? Didn’t I now?’
‘L-look Matthew—’ Alice said. ‘Please—’ But Matthew had become drunk on the idea of his own benevolence. After all, he was offering to take on board not only Alice, but the bairn as well. And giving up his mistress into the bargain.
‘So what’s the little lad’s name?’ he said. ‘Matthew after his da?’ Alice swallowed hard.
‘Matthew,’ she said firmly. ‘I have decided that I never want to see you again.’
After Alice had cast off Matthew Riley, she sought out Sister Teresa, who took her to her room. The room was small and sparsely furnished with an iron bedstead, a small wooden table and a white-painted, plywood cupboard. A crucifix was fixed to the wall over the bed and, on the opposite wall, hung a cheaply framed colour print of Jesus pointing to his heart. It seemed to Alice that he was wearing his heart on the outside of his clothes. There was a sort of radiant glow around the organ, like the glow the children got in the Ready Brek commercials after eating a four-square breakfast. She wished she could have asked Jem about the picture. It disconcerted her a little to think she would have to sleep between an image of Jesus nailed to the wall and another of him practising what looked like an eccentric form of indecent exposure.
Then she took a bath. She removed her smelly knickers and her filthy navy skirt and filthier white blouse and stepped into the tub. Once she was bathed and dried, Alice put on clean knickers. She put on the clean navy skirt and one of the clean white school shirts which Angeletti had bought her. Then, invited by the convent bell, she went to eat some food.
Father Mullholland only summoned her the next morning. She met him in a small office which lay off the hospital reception area. Alice thought he looked tired. But he was courteous and businesslike and came directly to the point. It was to be regretted, he said, that Veronica had not made him party to her wishes for the child before she died, since these had thrown all previous, provisional arrangements into some confusion. But it was none the less important, and indeed much to be welcomed, he said, that she had made her wishes known so clearly – albeit in a characteristically idiosyncratic document which made up in charm and persuasiveness what it lacked in legal validity.
‘Validity?’ Alice said.
‘The document was secreted in her bedside locker,’ he said. ‘Where Sister Teresa found it. Need I say that it has not been witnessed?’ Alice began to freeze inside as she damned Angeletti and his false reassurances. She wondered, had it been her sense of security in the child which had led her, the previous evening, into the high-minded act of casting off Matthew Riley more precipitously than might have been judicious? But the priest appeared to be regarding her with a perfectly benign intent. ‘I think you will understand only too well what I mean, Mrs Riley,’ he said a little sadly, ‘if I observe that Veronica was rather chronically incapable of putting all her cards on the table.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said.
‘How fortunate that you should have materialized like this,’ he said. ‘And I may say that Veronica always made it perfectly clear to me in the course of our friendship that she held you and your parents in the highest esteem. I think we can take it from there, Mrs Riley. That is, if you feel yourself able to take on the responsibility.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Oh yes of course.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I hope that you will feel comfortable here. I will of course arrange a longer meeting with you and your husband as soon as possible.’
Alice, feeling herself dismissed, took her courage in both of her hands. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘But there are things I would like to tell you.’ It embarrassed her slightly that she did not know how to address him. It was a problem she had experienced before, not only with God, but with Whitecross. ‘Mr Angeletti has told you certain things. And some of them aren’t true. I don’t mean to say that he lies, but he doesn’t really know me very well and I misled him, I’m afraid.’ The priest looked up at her, expecting her to go on.
‘I am not an estate agent married to a Catholic,’ she said. ‘I am a student of Classics at Oxford – or I was until I got ill last spring. And, you see, I’m not married at all.’ The priest continued to look at her rather neutrally. ‘I don’t usually tell lies, but I told Mr Angeletti I was married because I had to share a hotel room with him on the night before Jem died.’ She paused, waiting for an interjection, but it did not come. ‘Well, he is sort of large,’ she said. ‘And I knew he was very strong. I’d just seen him heave half a house off a builder’s skip. That was how we found Jem’s manuscripts.’ When the priest still did not speak, she blurted out rather defensively, ‘Well, I had had a whole lot of calls that afternoon. Obscene calls from a pervert. And I had just had to identify dead bodies in the coroner’s court. Flora’s mother and grandmother. I think that you know about Flora?’ It was a relief to her when he finally spoke.
‘And you thought that if you lied about your marital situation, it would protect you from molestation?’ he said.
‘Well yes,’ Alice said, feeling suddenly very young and silly. ‘Yes. I suppose so.’ The priest’s facial expression wavered only slightly.
‘Then you evidently considered Mr Angeletti to be a man of honour,’ he said. She thought he looked faintly amused.
‘Well,’ Alice said, and she surprised herself. ‘I suppose so.’ The priest’s eyes were returning to some papers on the desk. She assessed that he was rather busy with sorting out the headache into which Jem’s clandestine inclinations had led him. ‘Well—’ she said again. ‘That’s all really. That was what I wanted to tell you.’
The priest got up. ‘Thank you for being so frank with me,’ he said. ‘Now, with your permission, I would like to talk to you tomorrow about Veronica’s funeral. Good day to you, Mrs Riley.’
Alice had already got up from her chair. ‘So the thing is,’ she said firmly, ‘I am not Mrs Riley.’
And then there was Jem’s funeral. It was so extraordinary and so unexpected in the scale of its poignant grandeur, that Alice saw the sages standing in the holy fire. There was a choir, whose polished excellence Alice was in no position to question, throughout the sequence of the Mass. And Jem’s priest prayed that Jem, who in baptism had died with Christ, would share in His resurrection and that her mortal body would be raised and made in glory like His own, and that she would be welcomed into that Kingdom where – through, and in, and with, the power of Christ the Lord – she would see God. The curious, insistent prepositions hung like dewdrops in the mazes of Alice’s brain, recalling for her that winding sheet and that ravishing power through which dazzling paradox the soul of man was made chaste.
She walked away from the graveside, feeling her grief by no means gone, but milled from rag and bone by the psalm and the miserere and the absolution, and by the tender, almost domestic intimacy by which the music had presumed to make its reference to the Holy Spirit. And all through the Benediction, the tall, hand-held cross in the graveyard had risen darkly against the clouded sky.
Chapter 33
The time which Alice spent at the hospital and the convent was agreeably quiet and structured. While her life outside had taken on too much complexity, there inside the walls she was able to fix her mind on the simple round of the day. It did not trouble her that, after four weeks, she had still not heard from the office of Giovanni B. Angeletti. The baby had become so much a priority with her that she was more amused than angry to reflect that, for the second time, she had lost Jem’s manuscripts. Jem had not cared about
the stories and why, therefore, should she? They were only pen and paper. Jem had cared about the baby. She had cared enough and trusted Alice enough to make a confident ecumenical leap in the name of human friendship. This was the shining reality which had finally released Alice’s heart from half a decade of grief.
From the first, the nurses had required Alice to take on the care of the baby between the hours of seven in the morning and ten o’clock at night. In order to accomplish the necessary routine tasks she had become a regular occupant of the intensive care unit. During these times her interaction with the women who made up the nursing staff gave her very great pleasure. It underlined for her how much she liked the company of her own sex. And to watch Jem’s baby evolving rapidly from that small, wizened parody towards smooth-skinned cherub was a source of indescribable satisfaction.
Sister Teresa, throughout her stay, was invariably kind and reassuring. She strove to make Alice feel indispensable by allotting to her a multitude of minor tasks which helped make up the daily running of the hospital. Alice carried bedlinen to the laundry. She folded nightdresses and counted tea-cloths. She mended worn patches in hospital sheets and found herself surprised by the pleasure she took when – thanks to Miss Cummings’ protracted indoctrination in the Needlework room – the regularity and finesse of her stitching became a focus for the nuns’ hyperbole. Her renown in this respect led her into replacing the pocket fabric and the linings of Father Mullholland’s black winter coat. In a world where the run-and-fell seam had fallen into disuse, these things gave her back the flavour of the form room. And, because she went to bed so very much earlier, Alice found that she rose equivalently early, which gave a morning hour to be consumed in reading library books, or in undertaking dawn walks.
For almost a week after the funeral, she saw very little of Jem’s priest, but one afternoon, on her way to the library, she met him in a newsagent’s shop and accompanied him to a small café. There she discovered not only that he had an impressive appetite for German apple cake smothered in dollops of whipped cream, but also that his father, like her own, was a successful building contractor. She found that these discoveries made him all at once more accessible.
‘But I must not be out too long,’ Alice said, enjoying the innocent treat. She brushed cake crumbs from the corner of her mouth. In the context of her recent plain life, the occasion stood out like a birthday party. ‘I must get back and see to the baby.’
‘On the contrary,’ said the priest. ‘The sisters worry that you are quite incurably industrious. You may regard this hour with me, Mrs Riley, as a lesson in the profligate waste of time.’
‘But I am not Mrs Riley,’ Alice said.
‘Then I will call you Alice,’ he said. ‘If I may.’
She had begun to like him enormously. She tried to envisage him talking with Jem in that engaging Irish way, every word so carefully measured, in contrast to the kinetic energy of Jem’s bright verbiage.
‘But I have such hours in my day somehow,’ she said. ‘I am in serious danger of taking up drawn thread work.’ Father Mullholland laughed. He glanced rather ironically at her library books. These comprised a single doctrinal work along with a selection of what Roland had called ‘the Old Worthies’.
‘So you have signed up at the library,’ he said. ‘In order to improve yourself.’
Self-consciousness made Alice satirical.
‘I have been reading a book about the Eucharist,’ she said. ‘And I have learned from it that it is extremely inadvisable to celebrate the Mass at sea – that’s for fear of having the chalice overturn in choppy weather.’
Father Mullholland took this rather gracefully, she thought. ‘You are making fun of my religion,’ he said. ‘But as a person tempted by drawn thread work, Mrs Riley, the Church’s laudable attention to detail will surely not have passed you by.’
‘But I am not Mrs Riley,’ she said.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
She swallowed and paused and spoke rather awkwardly. ‘I think that I sh-should become a Cthacolic,’ she said.
‘Why?’ said Father Mullholland.
‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘Because it would be a c-convenience to me in bringing up Jem’s child.’
‘And why else?’ said Father Mullholland.
‘Well, because I like it here,’ she said. ‘At the hospital and at the convent, I like the simp-limp-plimp—’ She stopped and swallowed and started again. ‘I like the order and the peace here. I find it comfortable.’
‘Why else?’ he said.
‘Gosh,’ Alice said. ‘Why else? Well, perhaps because Jem always made it sound alluring. Are you saying that-that it’s a club that won’t have me?’ She began to feel both embarrassed and piqued. ‘I always thought that C-catholics liked c-converts,’ she said. Father Mullholland filled her tea cup from the pot.
‘You would like some more hot water in that tea,’ he said in the tone of a concerned hostess. ‘It has taken on the colour of brown ale.’ He summoned the waitress to bring more hot water and handed over the jug while Alice watched him. She felt considerably put down.
‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I was taught that c-c-cru-s-saders made people k-kiss the C-cross. Blood-stained knife to the throat and all that.’
Father Mullholland didn’t get needled. ‘The Church is our mother,’ he said. ‘Will you – since you are now also a mother – undertake never to make any mistakes?’
Oh, Alice thought, admiringly, but that’s clever. To wrap one’s debating society skills in that winning, rural accent. No wonder Jem was charmed by it.
‘Are you saying that my reasons are rubbishy?’ she said, feeling defensive. ‘Like convenience. And safety. And wanting the badge and the membership card?’
‘Now you are being rather hard on yourself,’ he said. ‘What about belief, Alice?’
‘Belief,’ Alice thought with shock. But belief was absolutely impossible, of course! Belief was completely out of the question.
‘I think that my g-gullibility could be a great help,’ she said. ‘Jem will have explained all that to you – about how gullible I am. If you could tell me what to believe, you see, then I will go away and believe it.’ Father Mullholland seemed very much amused by this. She watched him laugh with pleasure.
‘Now I see that you are subversive,’ he said. ‘It is not any wonder to me that you were Veronica’s dearest friend.’
Not believing made Alice so irritable at first that she strove hard to give him offence, even though he was more than generous with his time. On one occasion, for instance, it was the statue outside the chapel. There was a curious wooden canopy over the figure of Christ. A rustic log roof topped a sort of three-sided chalet inside which Jesus hung. He was nailed to the back wall. The figure of Christ, which was about half life size, was painted a pale russet beige. There was a jam-coloured trickle of blood painted on it which ran down from the left side of his chest to the bottom of his ribs. Jesus’s feet were nailed to the post on which the chalet was perched. One day when she went past it on her way to see Father Mullholland, Alice observed that one of the female patients – no longer quite in possession of her wits – was dancing around the statue and throwing up flowers into the air. Alice stopped, unobserved, and watched the patient, transfixed. After a while the woman stopped dancing and began to slot flower stems into the spaces between Christ’s toes. Alice went on her way. It gave her a feeling of eavesdropping to have witnessed the strange little scene. It made her feel ashamed.
‘I’m very sorry I’m late,’ she said to him. ‘But I’ve been admiring your Donatello.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Father Mullholland.
‘Your statue,’ Alice said. ‘Really. It makes Christ look like one of those little charity models where you put your money into a slot in the head. You know. Those little old figures of crippled boys on callipers. Do you suppose those are collector’s items by now?’ When he did not reply she went on. ‘I expect your statue could go under
the hammer any day. Like Jem’s sister’s gnomes. Gosh, but don’t Catholics love kitsch?’
‘Well,’ said Father Mullholland mildly. ‘It is not a very beautiful statue.’
‘ “Beautiful”?’ Alice said. She heard herself sounding like Iona Morgan. ‘So where does it say in the Bible that Jesus was crucified in a very large nesting box?’
‘My dear Alice,’ he said. ‘You must try not to be so angry with yourself.’
‘I’m not angry,’ Alice said.
‘The wish to believe is in itself a gift of grace,’ he said.
Alice tried to fix her mind on this assertion. She did not feel in any way endowed with grace. She felt irritable and covetous. She wanted access to the Holy Spirit. She wanted that wooing, brooding Spiritus Sanctus which the choir at Jem’s funeral had seemed to evoke and embrace with such a tender and familiar devotion. She looked at Father Mullholland through narrowed eyes.
‘There is a picture in my room,’ she said crossly, ‘of Jesus exposing his heart.’ Father Mullholland talked, with a provoking lack of touchiness, about the sacred heart as a symbol of Christ’s charity and interior life.
‘But this heart,’ Alice said. ‘Well, this heart, it isn’t “interior”. That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s very much “exterior”. It glows on the outside of his clothes. Really, it’s very nasty. It looks a bit like Woolworth’s jewellery.’ She thought that she had succeeded in shocking him, because he did not speak for quite a while. But then, when he did, it was every bit as nicely as before.
‘These things have no sanctity in themselves,’ he said. ‘If the picture is a hindrance to you, then I suggest that you try not to look at it.’
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