On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘There isn’t a baby.’

  ‘You can’t be sure.’

  ‘Of course I can be sure. I’m on the pill.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was as if she had hit him.

  ‘And that isn’t all. I had a boyfriend in London.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘He didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it was Henry.’

  He said nothing but avoided her eyes.

  She cried quietly. ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I wish to God I’d knever known him or any of those other morons …’

  He looked at her and took her hand. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ he said.

  ‘If I’d known, I’d have waited.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For you.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have known.’

  ‘I did dream of you,’ she said. ‘Not of you, Andrew, but of someone who would love me immediately and for ever.’

  ‘And I will love you for ever,’ he said. ‘All this, really, it can’t make a difference if you’re sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, that you love me and not him.’

  ‘I am sure …’

  ‘But a week ago …’ He said this as if for the record – not as an accusation.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘A week ago I was with Henry. I didn’t love him but I didn’t leave him. And he chucked me after three months to the day. And I won’t pretend that there weren’t times when I was happy with him up to a point; because I never knew if the kind of love I imagined actually existed. Now I know it does and, well, just like you said, I feel that we’re married, and I never felt that before.’

  He smiled. ‘“If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.”’

  She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘John Donne.’

  ‘I guess that’s about it.’

  He kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘We both have a past, haven’t we? A week ago I loved that bizarre idea of God as a celibate, crucified Jew. And I didn’t leave him, he chucked me by showing up in that cistern. So let’s forget our pasts and think of now and the future.’

  ‘Sure.’ She smiled through her tears, leaned forward and hugged him. Then, because she wanted to sleep, she sent him to visit the Rockefeller Museum.

  Nineteen

  He could have taken a bus or a taxi, but he chose to walk, weaving his way between the other pedestrians on the crowded pavement of the Jaffa Road, or stepping onto the street and dodging the taxis and buses as he walked towards the Old City.

  He was in no hurry; he was only going to the museum to kill time while Anna rested. Yet he took long strides, and had an anxious look on his face, as if he were late for some appointment or impatient to get to work.

  Since it was a weekday morning, this businesslike manner blended with the bustle of those around him. His thoughts, however, were anything but businesslike. They were in complete confusion; for, while he was not the first young romantic to discover that love sometimes follows an uneven course, there were ways in which his case was an exception – even unique.

  He had had no experience whatsoever of emotional exchanges with women. Even before he had decided to become a Catholic or a Simonite monk, he had been sufficiently shy, romantic and frightened of girls to have got no further than a quick kiss at the end of a teenage party. Whereas most of his contemporaries had, by the time they reached the age of twenty-eight, been through one or two affairs from which they had learned something about love, Andrew had been through none. His only knowledge came on the one hand vicariously from his brother’s cynical adventures, and on the other from the blend of romanticism and sentimentality which so often affects the attitude of the clergy towards the love they have sacrificed to pursue their vocation.

  It was this innocence which had led Andrew to take Anna back to his room at the American Colony Hotel. There had seemed to him at the time an inexorable logic which made it right and proper that he should. He had not considered that he had fallen in love with Anna since coming to Jerusalem, but that he had suddenly understood the true nature of the affection he had felt for her now for almost two years. His commitment to celibacy was, as he had explained to Anna, bound up with his belief in the divinity of Jesus. Purity – even virginity – was necessary for the sanctification of the body which, like Christ’s, would rise from the dead.

  Even while he believed this, he had been aware of the argument against it which Henry, and also Anna, had tacitly presented – that celibacy was unnatural and, therefore, by definition, the symptom of a neurosis. So, when he had seen the skeleton of a crucified man buried beneath the Temple Mount, and had believed that it was that of Jesus of Nazareth, he had found himself without the foundation upon which his commitment to celibacy was based. The first hypothesis being no longer tenable, the second took its place; and, all at once, he felt cured of that neurosis which had seen sexual longing as a serious sin.

  The departure of the ascetic, however, did not mean the arrival of a cynic like his brother. There remained the idealism about love embalmed from his adolescence. He had therefore made for the only girl with whom he could plausibly consider himself to have been in love. Moreover, because he had not felt that he was falling in love, but merely recognizing something for what it was, it never occurred to him that Anna would not recognize it too. He knew, of course, that she had had boyfriends in the past; but she herself had told him how transitory and unsatisfactory these liaisons had been. He also knew – or so he had thought – that she had no boyfriend in London, because she would certainly have told him if she had. He therefore assumed, because he had been not just her closest but almost her only male friend in London, that she too must have been deceived about the true nature of the bond between them; or, quite possibly, not deceived at all, but heroically reticent about the real nature of her feelings in deference to the vows he had taken to lead a celibate life.

  Thus, with the sublime egoism of the young man in love, he had taken it for granted that his love for Anna would be not just requited, but consummated there and then. A blend of fashionable theology and heady romanticism had convinced him that, after two years of sublimated courtship, it would be wrong to wait a moment longer. As he had explained to Anna, a wedding only blessed a bond which was formed by a couple’s commitment; and she had seemed to accept in its entirety his understanding of the way things were. If she had said very little that first evening, as they had walked through the streets of the Old City, he had assumed it was because everything was dearly stated by the touch of their hands and the look in their eyes.

  And the certainty that she too had recognized that she had loved him when they had only professed to be friends had given him great confidence as a lover. He knew that, if he bungled things in bed, it would make no difference to such a deeply rooted affection. As a result, his body had not let him down, but had enhanced and strengthened the newfound emotions in ways he had not imagined. He had anticipated the delight of his own senses, but not the joy it would give him to bring about such ecstasy in another; nor the beauty he would find, even after the demands of his instincts had been met, in the shape and texture of Anna’s body. To be able to run his hand over her undulating skin, or gently to implant kisses wherever he chose, made him happy in a way he had not envisaged and could not explain.

  As they made love again and again, he became almost afraid of the power he possessed to transform Anna from an alert, intelligent, sarcastic girl into a whispering, clinging creature craving his attentions. Even as he was taken up by his own rapture, he was astonished – almost envious – of her complete oblivion as, with her mouth half-open and her eyes half-closed, she murmured like a mystic in an ecstatic trance. No wonder, he thought, that sex so obsesses the human race. Why should anyone ever want to do anything else?

  In those first days with Anna, they had indeed done little else – eating and sleeping o
nly to recover their strength to make love again and again. However, from the beginning, thoughts had come unbidden into his mind which suggested that all was not as straightforward as it seemed. He had found, for example, when he and Anna were discussing Father Lambert’s seduction of Veronica Dunn, and he told her how Father Lambert had apologized not for what he had done but for what he had done badly, that a cruel grin crossed his face, and a callous laugh accompanied his conjecture as to whether Father Lambert had been unable to finish what he had started, or whether it was all over before it had properly begun.

  It was only the next morning, in that limbo between sleeping and waking, that he had inwardly flinched as he recalled this ridicule of the man he had loved so much. Without mentioning it to Anna, he quickly repented of his cruel thoughts, even disowning the arrogant young male who had had them. Then, out in the street, he had been ambushed by another, contradictory and shameful sequence of thoughts and emotions when he had seen, walking towards him, wearing shorts and tight tee-shirts, two tall European girls – Dutch or German. One of them was, not only pretty, but gave Andrew a fleeting glance of interest, which, involuntarily, he returned, wondering, before he was aware of what he was doing, what it would be like to sleep with her – wondering, and then wanting to try her for size, to give her the benefit of that skill and vigour which had left Anna with such a fresh complexion and happy smile.

  Again, he had soon repented of these wayward thoughts, and even considered going to the nearest Catholic church to say a decade of the rosary before the Blessed Sacrament – the kind of penance he would have imposed upon himself in his days as a Simonite monk. Now, however, such a practice seemed slightly absurd. Moreover, since he was constantly in Anna’s company, he could hardly go into a church and fall to his knees without her knowing what he was doing; and, for a reason he could not fathom, he felt inhibited – even ashamed – about being seen by her at prayer.

  Clearly, on that first night in the American Colony Hotel, it would have been inappropriate to kneel at his bed as he usually did to say his night prayers: and the next morning, too, since they had breakfast in bed and did not get up until lunchtime, he missed the moment to say his morning prayers. Nor, at midday, when he heard the Angelus ringing from one of the churches in the Christian quarter, did he stop to say that ancient prayer as he did in the Simonite monastery. This omission came not from a deliberate decision to stop addressing the God in whom he still believed; rather, it seemed tactless to make these outward displays of an inward disposition in front of someone who did not share it.

  The first excuse he made to himself was that these practices were part of the discipline of a Simonite monk; and that, since he had abandoned his vocation, he could abandon them as well. However, he knew that prayer was not simply for priests, and was obliged to admit that, since recognizing his love for Anna, he had hardly thought of God at all. Clearly, he still believed in him. Why else should he suffer from those stabs of remorse after scoffing at Father Lambert, or lusting after the girl with the flirtatious eye and long brown legs?

  One afternoon, on the pretext of going for a copy of the Jersualem Post, he had gone into a church and said a quick prayer of repentance. He had felt absurd as he did so, since it was Anna, not God, who had been cheated by his lecherous thoughts; and he was perplexed to discover, in recalling this sin, that he did not feel quite as ashamed of it as he should. It was as if the change he had made in leaving the Simonite order, and living with Anna, had not resulted in a straightforward metamorphosis from celibate monk to devoted lover, but had rather fragmented his personality so that two or even three different characters now lived within the same mind – the kind and humble Christian; the loyal and devoted husband of Anna; and this new, strutting embodiment of brute nature that gloried in what was healthy, strong and triumphant and despised what was feeble, needy and poor.

  The confusion was made worse by the impossibility of discussing it with Anna. When he returned to the hotel after praying in the church, she had asked him why he had been so long, and he had lied incompetently about the difficulty of finding a newspaper. She had looked at him with an amused smile, as if realizing that he was up to something, while knowing that it could not be anything particularly bad. He had longed to throw himself at her feet and confess his worthlessness, but could not bring himself to disillusion her by revealing that, only days after declaring his lifelong love, he had fancied a girl he had passed in the street.

  Equally, it had seemed impossible to tell her about his remorse over scoffing at Father Lambert for, if to confess the first would make him seem lecherous and faithless, to admit the second would make him seem humourless and prim. He had therefore kept silent about both matters, playing the role of a cheerful, debonair lover, sinking yet more deeply into a bog of deception.

  Then came their trip to Jericho, Anna’s sickness and the question of a child. If Andrew had decided, upon leaving the Simonite monastery, that everything Christ had taught was bunk, then it would have been easy to disown his Catholic conscience; but because he still thought of himself as a Christian, he still reacted involuntarily in a Christian way. Imbued with the Catholic teaching that sex was meant by God for procreation, he had justified the pleasure he took in it by the fact that it would end in the conception of a child.

  Anna’s blunt statement that she could not be pregnant because she was taking the pill had first shocked him for its reflection on the morality of what he had done; it was only later that he came to see what it implied about Anna. Not knowing that women sometimes take the pill simply to regulate their menstrual cycles – and Anna being too proud to pretend that this was the case – he assumed that she had been taking it because she had been sleeping with some other man. He had not asked her who it was. He had turned the other cheek. And he had been struck a second, harder, blow when she had told him that the other man was Henry.

  This had shocked him on so many different levels, and in so many different ways, that he had been quite unable to consider how he should react or what he should say. Anger, jealousy, embarrassment, disgust, disillusion, all swirled around in his mind to the extent that he might have said or done anything – strangled her, left her, kissed her – had not the lingering monk, whom he had tried so hard to shake off during the days which had gone before, stepped forward with the reflex gentleness and humility which came from the years of religious life.

  This gentleness, however, was most tenuous: the violent emotions were not dissipated, they were merely concealed. Certainly, in telling Anna it did not matter that she had been to bed with his brother – that the past was past – he had wanted it to be true. However, as he walked towards the Rockefeller Museum, he remained confused and tormented, both by the knowledge that Henry and Anna had been lovers, and by the exposure of his own credulity. He was embarrassed to recall his conceited assumption that she had been in love with him for the past year. Why had he not wondered about the men she might have loved before? He had known that she had boyfriends; he should have known that she would have gone to bed with them. The answer was, that he had not stopped to think about possible boyfriends, and what they might have meant to her, because he had not really thought about her at all; and, when he had agreed, with such modesty, that he could only claim to be a substitute, he had not meant a substitute for some other lover who had let her down, but for some more eligible candidate with better prospects who would present himself in the future.

  That she had had lovers before, he now acknowledged, should have come as no surprise; that she had had one so recently might be disagreeable, but, if it was over, it was something that might be quickly forgotten. That it was Henry was almost more than he could bear, because he had always somehow blamed his brother’s behaviour on the depravity of his women. To make love out of wedlock was one thing; to make love out of love was quite another and, since Henry so clearly did not love his girlfriends, Andrew had always taken it for granted that they did not love him and slept with him simply to gratify
their vanity or their lust.

  It therefore seemed that he had to look upon Anna as a girl of this kind, or as an exception; but this alternative seemed almost worse, because it implied that she had loved Henry as sincerely as she now purported to love him – willing, perhaps, to marry him and bear his children. That Anna, at one point, might have been prepared to do that was even more painful to consider than that she was simply depraved. It was better not to think about it at all but distract himself, for the time being, by concentrating on the exhibits in the Rockefeller Museum.

  He had been there a number of times before, often with Father Lambert, and perhaps because of this Andrew now found that the exhibits depressed him. He remembered how excited the Professor had been when showing Andrew the bowls, glasses, ossuaries and sarcophagi from the time of Christ; and he imagined the despair that must have entered his heart upon realizing that the skeleton in the cistern might one day have pride of place between the prehistoric Galilee skull and the remains of the Bronze Age man from Mount Carmel.

  In the Northern Room he paused in front of two Romanesque friezes from the façade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. One of them depicted the life of Jesus; the other had figures of animals, plants and naked human beings. The dragons, he remembered from Father Lambert’s explanations, represented heresy, the Antichrist and the Devil. The sirens were temptation and female lust, while male lust as well as pride and arrogance were represented by the centaur. The birds symbolized parsimony while lechery was embodied in a naked man.

  Andrew stood for some time staring at this marble frieze. Pride, heresy, lust – how simple things had been for these crusading craftsmen and how simple they had been for him. How clear had been the distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil, love and lust. Lust – there she was, the siren on the frieze. Was Anna such a siren? Had she not herself confessed that she could never distinguish love from lust? Had she gone to bed with him so easily just to satisfy a sudden urge of the flesh? And was he, too, no more than that figure of lechery, deceiving himself that he loved her because, like Father Lambert with Mrs Dunn, he was determined to indulge an instinct he had repressed for so long?