2001 - Father Frank (23 page)

“Anyway,” he went on, “that shocking business with Slattery’s. Um…fancy a chat? I’m out in the cab all morning so you can get me on the mobile. Speak to you later. ‘Bye.”

At one o’clock, she was in the back of the taxi.

“Where to, luv?” said the driver, with a grin.

“Anywhere where I can talk to your face rather than the back of your head. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “I am, as it goes.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go and have lunch. My treat. I’ll put it through on expenses.”

“That would be great but, er,” said Frank, pointing to the dog-collar, which he always wore while driving the cab to prove that he was a priest, “I know a lot of people in London, it’ll be just my luck to bump into one of them.”

Sarah was disappointed. “But you’re not doing anything wrong,” she reasoned, “just having lunch with a friend.”

“I know that, you know that,” he replied, “but a priest enjoying any sort of pleasure is always frowned upon. Except, oddly enough, drinking. A priest pissed out of his head is somehow considered all right. That makes him a good old boy.”

“Like your friend Father Conway?”

Frank stared at her blankly in the rear-view mirror before remembering the drunken cleric now supposedly semi-retired in Greenwich. “Exactly,” he said. “Father Conway. The Good Old Boy’s Good Old Boy.” He had a sudden thought. “There is one place we could go, if you don’t mind roughing it a bit.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Little Venice,” he said, and swung the taxi northwards.

Little Venice is a tiny corner of London sandwiched between Maida Vale and Paddington, so called because the Grand Union Canal runs through the middle of it. It’s quite pretty, with its handsome stucco villas and houseboats moored on the canal. To compare it to Venice, however, is a little fanciful but that’s estate agents for you. Apparently there’s a French restaurant in Leytonstone so that area might soon be known as ‘Little Paris’. And isn’t there a dry ski-slope in Uxbridge? Well, there you are then—‘Little Zermatt’.

Sarah knew where Little Venice was, although she didn’t recall the area being overstocked with restaurants. Frank pulled up outside a little green hut set in the middle of the road just by Warwick Avenue tube station, a cabman’s shelter. At one time there were hundreds but most have disappeared. “Ever been in one of these before?” he asked, rhetorically.

“Not this week.”

“The cabmen’s shelter fund,” he informed her, “was set up for the purpose of supplying cabmen with a place of shelter where they could obtain wholesome refreshments at moderate prices.”

“And,” Sarah suggested, “for supplying priests who aren’t cab drivers with a bolt-hole from nosey parishioners.”

It was tiny because, as Frank in his new role as tour guide explained, the Victorian police had decreed that it should take up no more space than a horse and cab. Frank was on nodding terms with Monty, the proprietor, and the menu chalked up on the blackboard comprised the usual English stodge. Mind you, since Frank’s last visit, Monty had gone continental and was now offering Chicken Kiev with the usual chips and processed peas.

Over this delightful meal, the atmosphere wreathed in steam and smoke, they began to talk.

“So, what happened?” was Frank’s opening gambit.

“I was going to ask you that,” she replied.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You were in Wealdstone last night about two hundred yards from this riot.”

“We didn’t know anything about it. Huge bash. Feast of St Thomas. It was fantastic. I wish you could have been there.”

Sarah’s face turned soft and serious. “Do you mean that?”

Frank’s blue eyes met her brown ones. “Yes, I do.”

The two pairs of eyes gazed at each other for a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary. Sarah was the first to break off: Frank had been brought up in Kilburn, where staring people out could have been an Olympic sport. “Anyway, I had a suspicion that that big fight was started by a few of your heavies from the parish centre.”

Frank assumed moral indignation. “How dare you?” he laughed. “What do you think I am?”

For the second time, Sarah’s face went soft and serious, and she seized the opportunity to grill him. “That’s just it,” she said. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what I think you are. You’re a priest but you’re nothing like a priest.”

Frank went into his well-versed counter-argument, having had to answer this charge many times before. “How many priests do you know?”

“Er…none.”

“Right. So how do you know what a priest is like?”

“I don’t, I suppose, but…”

Instead of throwing up the usual smokescreen, Frank, to his surprise and relief, cut Sarah short and found himself giving rather than hearing a confession. “You’re right,” he conceded. “I’m not like a priest. I know hundreds of them but I’ve got very little in common with any of them, except, obviously, what we all do for a living.”

Sarah had been hoping desperately that he would now admit he wasn’t a priest and that the whole thing had been an elaborate joke. But no, he was a priest. A priest who, for the first time since he had become one, was admitting to another human being exactly how he felt about it.

“I’m not saying I don’t like other priests—far from it. Almost without exception, they are good, unselfish people who devote their lives to helping others. How can you not admire people like that? It’s just that…”

“You don’t have much in common with them?” Sarah gently reminded him.

“No, I don’t. They all claim to have received some sort of calling from God, some divine compulsion to go and spread the Word of the Lord. I never did. I’ve never felt personally invited into the priesthood and I sometimes feel as though I’ve gatecrashed the party.”

“But are you enjoying the party now you’re there?” she asked. Please say no. Please, please say no.

“Well, yes,” said Frank, “I suppose I am. I’ve always enjoyed it. For me, the personal rewards are so much greater than in any other walk of life. You can really make a difference to people’s lives.”

“Is that why you went into it?”

“I suppose so. I think I said to you once before that it wasn’t so much a case of getting into the priesthood, more a case of getting out of more conventional ways of life.”

“So you never wanted to marry or have children?”

“Well, I thought I did. I assumed I would, but as I got older and it became a more realistic option it also became a less attractive one.”

“So you had girlfriends?”

Frank recognised the euphemistic nature of this question. “You mean am I gay?”

Sarah was about to insist that this wasn’t what she’d meant but, feeling the left side of her neck reddening, she knew it was pointless.

“No,” Frank told her, “I’m not gay.” If only you knew exactly how not gay I am. “It’s funny,” he said, “how so many people assume that most priests are. Believe me, if you’re gay, the priesthood is just about the worst thing you could go into. You can’t have a relationship. You can’t frequent gay bars and clubs, you can’t be promiscuous. Though, strictly speaking, you wouldn’t be breaking any of your vows if you did.”

Sarah was confused. “Really?” she said. “How about the vow of celibacy?”

“Celibacy just means being unmarried. Chastity means not having sex, but since the Catholic Church forbids sex outside marriage, celibacy effectively means abstention from sex anyway.” He paused and grinned. “Supposedly.”

Sarah was just about to ask whether he had remained chaste, but realised that if he were the sort of priest to flout the rules in this way, he’d have no qualms about denying it. Instead, she repeated her original question. “Have you had girlfriends?”

“Yes, I’ve had girlfriends.”

Sarah gazed at his kind face, with its strong handsome features and thought, I bet you have. She asked for the bill but found that her company credit card was of precious little use. She was embarrassed to discover that she had no cash, but Frank was more than happy to pay. St Thomas’s could bear the loss of twelve pounds eighty-five without calling in the receivers.

They walked out into the sunshine, and strolled by the canal, under a bridge to a little-known open space, too small to be called a park, and sat together on a bench. Frank, as a canoodling sixteen-year-old, had sat there many times with an assortment of girls. After all, they were only about five minutes from Kilburn.

Sarah felt happy and relaxed enough to carry on interrogating him. “Do you believe in God?”

The question rocked him. No one had ever asked him that before. He was a priest—what a stupid thing to say to a priest. Except that, from the moment she met him, Sarah had never seen him as a priest. She saw him more as an ordinary man at a fancy-dress party. Frank was suddenly sitting in the hot seat on
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
, the first contestant ever to be asked the £500,000 question.

Was the answer (a) Yes, (b) No, (c) Don’t know, (d) Yes, with a great big asterisk?

The truth or a downright lie? He went for the truth. “D, Chris. Yes, with a great big asterisk. I do believe in God,” he said slowly, as the weight of twenty years of hypocrisy fell from his shoulders, “but not in the way a Roman Catholic priest is supposed to.”

Sarah’s chocolate-brown eyes were wide open with intrigue.

“I’m supposed to believe in transubstantiation. When I bless that little round wafer biscuit known as the Holy Eucharist, I’m supposed to believe that it actually becomes Christ’s body. Doesn’t just symbolise it, it
is
it. Same with the wine. It’s actually sherry, by the way, wine doesn’t keep. When I bless that, I’m supposed to believe that it really is Christ’s blood.” He stared at the canal in front of them. Sarah waited for him to continue.

“And do you?” she probed gently.

“Of course I don’t. Because it isn’t. If you took a sample of that sherry to a lab for analysis and insisted it was the blood of a man who died two thousand years ago, they’d have you sent to the funny farm. I’m also supposed to believe that the Pope, as God’s representative on earth, is infallible and I don’t believe that either. You might as well say that as the Pope’s representative in Wealdstone—which I am—I’m infallible, which I’m not. I’m supposed to believe in Adam and Eve, when the whole story has been disproved by Darwin. Until recently, I was expected to believe in the authenticity of the Turin Shroud, until it was scientifically proven to be a fake. You only have to read Albert Schweitzer, Ernest Renan or any of the definitive accounts of the life of Jesus to realise that there are too many conflicting stories for us ever to really know the truth. I’m not even convinced that he rose from the dead. I’m not saying he didn’t but it’s hard to believe that he did. I had to study theology at university. Possibly the worst thing for an aspiring priest to do.”

“But you still believe in some sort of God?”

“Yes, I suppose I do. Only because, like most people, I can’t think of a rational, scientific way to explain things. It’s far easier just to attribute it all to something mysterious, something beyond our comprehension. If there is a God, I just believe He wants us to be nice to each other. Not fuck each other over.”

It was the first time Sarah had ever heard him swear. She found it strangely alluring. He was a human being just like her. Thank God for that. She now felt free to swear herself: “Like Slattery’s tried to fuck you over?”

Frank found Sarah’s first foray into profanity strangely alluring too. Every other woman he’d met since taking Holy Orders had assumed that he would be offended by bad language. “Yeah, I suppose so.” He laughed, suddenly remembering that they were supposed to be talking about the fracas at Slattery’s, not his theological misgivings. “That was one of the few times I’ve ever thought I’d seen the hand of God at work.”

“God? Behind all that bar-room brawling?”

“Oh, yeah,” Frank said. “The Almighty is not averse to a bit of argy-bargy. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, forty days of flooding, plagues of locusts.”

“I thought you didn’t believe any of that.”

Frank winked.

“You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?” She thumped him playfully on the arm, which sent a fizz of sexual excitement shooting around his body like a ball round a pinball machine. Lights were flashing, klaxons were going off. “It’s just so hard to know with you. I mean, you’re a priest. I don’t want to offend any of your religious convictions.”

“I’ve told you,” he replied, seriously, “I haven’t really got any. And I can’t bear people who think they have. How can anyone possibly presume that ‘they know’? I mean, how can they? It’s just so ignorant, so arrogant. In that sense I’m probably as religious as you are. Just treat me as you would any other bloke.”

Sarah longed, truly longed, to treat him like any other bloke. Now it was her turn to feel surreal. She was twelve years old again, teetering with apprehension on the high diving board at Wilmslow baths. It was a long way down, her heart was pounding and her pulse raced at the fear and excitement she felt. But she was scared. She turned to go back down the steps but a queue of impatient people were telling her to hurry up, just jump. So she turned, closed her eyes and jumped. “Does that mean we can meet up again?”

“I do hope so,” said Frank, already bobbing up and down in the deep end.

T
hey did meet up again. And again and again and again.

On one particular occasion Charlie, Sarah’s rather plummy neighbour, had seen Frank get out of the cab and ring her doorbell. He took a couple of paces back from the bay window so that he wouldn’t be seen. He watched Sarah get in and was still gazing, mouth agape, long after the taxi had disappeared down the street.

His wife, Caroline, came into the sitting room. “Darling?” she enquired. “What are you staring at?”

“The damnedest thing,” he said, quite slowly. “Chap I was at Oxford with—Frank Dempsey. Have I ever told you about him?”

Caroline shrugged.

“Bloody good man. Came from a working-class Irish family over in North London somewhere. He was a real hoot. Did theology, same as me, didn’t give a shit about anything.”