Strumpet City (28 page)

‘Is it very warm out?’

‘It’s lovely—for October.’

‘Is it October . . .? Well, well.’

She made a noise of disbelief.

‘That’s what I was saying. About the days growing short.’

They always began to grow short in October, the days did. The leaves began to come down on the lawn; a bit of wind and you spent the day sweeping, unless Mrs. Bradhaw saw you and said leave them; a woman that liked leaves lying about, the colours beautiful, the sound as your feet brushed through them on the walks, a sentimental woman. If there was a sup of rain you could slip and break your ankle. Small comfort in the swish and colour then.

The girl handed her the packet and said, ‘Take a little of your snuff.’

It blurred the outer world with water, making the lungs larger inside and the air that entered them weighty and nourishing. She put it back carefully under her pillow.

‘They steal it on me when I’m sleeping,’ she confided. ‘The nurses do it or one of the patients.’

‘Perhaps you mislay it,’ the girl said in a gentle tone.

‘No fear—it’s stolen. If I find out who I’ll crucify her for it. Time and time again I reach under my pillow and it’s gone—spirited away—vanished.’

‘It’s a shame for them,’ Mary said. As she did so the dismissal bell began in a nearby ward. The sound came nearer. She rose, promising to come next Sunday.

‘If I’m still here,’ Miss Gilchrist said.

‘Of course you’ll be here.’

Miss Gilchrist smiled a little and closed her eyes.

They let her sleep through the evening meal. When she awakened she reached for the snuff immediately. It had gone. She raised herself with a great mustering of willpower and looked about her at the other beds.

‘Who took my snuff?’ she shouted. ‘Which of youse thieving trollops made love to my snuff?’ Nobody answered. When she shouted again a nurse came to quieten her.

‘Where did you put it?’ the nurse asked.

‘Here—under my pillow.’

The nurse searched. ‘There’s no snuff,’ the nurse said finally, ‘you must have been dreaming.’

‘I wasn’t dreaming. It was brought to me today.’ The nurse patted the pillow into shape and arranged the bedclothes. Her face was stern.

‘Now, now,’ she said, firmly.

Father Giffley took afternoon devotions. They consisted of rosary, sermon and benediction. While Father O’Sullivan preached the sermon Father Giffley, who sat to one side of the altar, his hands palms downwards on his knees, his head inclined forward, saw the altar boy with ginger hair nod off to sleep—as usual. After tea they sat together in a room on the ground floor which the three priests sometimes shared. Father O’Sullivan, writing at the table, found the matter difficult. He frowned frequently and bit the handle of his pen. At the fireside Father Giffley rested his black book on his knee. He wrote easily but slowly, pausing often to search his memory. He wrote: ‘Thomas A Kempis instructs us as follows:
“I had rather feel compunction than know the definition thereof.”
Father O’Sullivan, who is still trying to write a devotional booklet, if I recognise the signs, and I ought to be able to by now, is an illustration of what it means.
“If thou knowest the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it profit thee without love of God and without grace?”

That hits at me, of course. Except that I don’t know very much by heart.

“It is Vanity to desire to live long and not to care to live well.”

My trouble is that I care to live too well. A Kempis means something quite different. There we are—the difficulty of communication. You do not care to live well. You only care to live well.

“Call often to mind the proverb—The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”

That’s the best thing he has said. We see and we hear. But it is the thing beyond the eye that we immediately wish to see. We hear and there is still something unheard even in what we hear. And it tempts us to seek a more complete satisfaction. What kind of satisfaction? Society, Power, Eminence—what? I do not know. We seek it, just the same. Of course it doesn’t exist, this
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. Only the craving. Of course, a drop from the B. kills it. Temporarily.

“For they that follow their lusts stain their own consciences and lose the grace of God.”

Me again. The drop from the B. Lust of the Belly.’ He closed the book.

‘You are very quiet, Father,’ he said.

Father O’Sullivan looked up vaguely. After a painful knitting of the brows he succeeded in relating the remark to himself.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said.

‘What is the subject this time?’

Father O’Sullivan left down his pen. He was diffident.

‘The Holy Family as a model for the ordering of the humble Catholic home.’

‘It’s always the humble Catholic home we dare to order, isn’t it?’ Father Giffley remarked. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re still trying.’

‘No longer very hopefully,’ Father O’Sullivan confessed.

‘Oh, I don’t know. In the world of—ah—literature’ (Father Giffley stumbled unintentionally over the word) ‘I’m told it’s quite usual to fail, over and over again.’

Father O’Sullivan smiled and looked embarrassed.

‘You mustn’t call it literature—that would frighten me off altogether.’

‘Pamphlets, religious exhortations, devotional booklets—they all have to be written, haven’t they? Though, having read my fill of them I must confess that frequently I fail to see why.’

‘They serve a very great need.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I have no doubt about it. That’s why I keep trying to write them.’

‘Thousands are written. Are they not enough? Why should you try to add to them?’

‘I can never answer that question when I put it to myself. When I sit down to write it comes so terribly hard with me that I feel I’m the last one in the world who should attempt it. And yet, whenever I stop trying, I become desperately unhappy.’

Father Giffley grunted impatiently. Yet his face, turned fully now on Father O’Sullivan, was gentle with sympathy and companionship.

‘Some day, never fear, you’ll write one that will be approved. You’ll see it among the others on the bookstand at the door of the Church.
The Holy Family, A Devotional Booklet for the Catholic Home.
With a nicely coloured cover. Your lifelong ambition available to the world at the popular price of one halfpenny. Does the thought make you happy?’

Father O’Sullivan considered. Then he said:

‘I am not quite sure, Father, whether you are saying that to encourage me or to amuse yourself.’

‘Both,’ Father Giffley confessed. He looked into the fire. His mood changed.

‘How long are you here, John?’

He very rarely used Christian names. He hardly noticed now that he had done so.

‘I came three years after yourself.’

‘And you are contented with St. Brigid’s?’

‘It’s much the same as anywhere else.’

‘In some ways, yes. We baptise, we marry, we minister to the sick, we bury the dead. And that’s all you have to say.’

‘I think so.’

‘Does it never trouble you, John, to think that there are parishes where faces are not hungry and where rooms are not bare and children are not dirty? Don’t you wish, every now and then, that you could hear confessions without having to endure the smell of badly nourished bodies?’

‘I have never thought about it.’

‘Never?’

Father O’Sullivan frowned in his effort to give a precise answer.

‘Perhaps at times I
have
noticed . . . I honestly can’t say.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Father Giffley said. ‘I don’t blame the people. I blame those who are responsible for a deplorable state of affairs; hypocrites and windbags—all of them pious, and all of them pitiless.’

‘Would you agree with Mr. Larkin, then?’

Father Giffley hit the book on his knee with the flat of his hand.

‘I do—by the Lord Harry. He’ll do what our respected colleagues haven’t the stomach to attempt—he’ll put the fear of God into all of them.’

He stared at the opposite wall. Father O’Sullivan, watching his face, began to fear for him. His eyes gleamed too brightly, his mouth was rigid. Once again the eyes turned to Father O’Sullivan.

‘We seem to be missing the pleasure of Father O’Connor’s company.’

Anxiety made Father O’Sullivan’s voice unsure.

‘It’s his evening free.’

‘I am aware of that. Does he visit in the parish?’

‘No. In Kingstown, I think. He has friends out there.’

‘Ah yes, his comfortable friends. I thought he had given up all that to work among the poor.’

Father O’Sullivan attempted an explanation.

‘They give him money from time to time, I understand, which he distributes through the Confraternity Committee.’

‘Hmm. He doesn’t distribute it himself, of course.’

‘He doesn’t wish to have the credit.’

‘You mean he hasn’t the stomach for it,’ Father Giffley said. ‘I may not know the sayings of all the philosophers, but I know something about character. St. Brigid’s has taught me.’

Father O’Sullivan lowered his eyes, embarrassed.

‘You think I should keep a bridle on my tongue—eh, Father?’

Father O’Sullivan did not reply.

‘The tongue was made to speak truth and do battle,’ Father Giffley insisted. ‘I’ll risk the occasional sin of uncharity.’

He went abruptly back to his book, fidgeted about, then wrote the letters of the word
Satisfaction
under each other from the top to the bottom of the page. He began to make a poem. It was an old device of his. Sometimes it worked. He roughed out the lines on one sheet of paper and then, when each seemed right, he put it after its appropriate letter in the black-covered book. As he struggled with his task the night grew older. An hour, two hours, passed. Father O’Sullivan completed what he was writing and excused himself. The servant restocked the fire twice. At last Father Giffley re-read what he had written:

Sun on the river spreads peace in this Sabbath of stillness

After the season of toil, the sorrow of labour

The children of bondage have straightened and flung away tiredness

In parks and at pastimes escaped from their tyrant the harbour

Seagull, you skim on white feathers where old ships are sleeping

Fleeing the stain that pursues on the face of the water

All who are born, all under Heaven’s strange keeping

Carry the stain and drag the same shadow after.

Teach me O symbol, Sing of the Holy Spirit

I am in dread and seek to outstrip the shadow

Oh, lead Thou to God and His Presence—lead, through Christ’s Merit.

Not to His Feet, but Their Print in the dews of His Meadow.

It disappointed him. He did not like it very much, although he had struggled manfully with it and it had taken a long, long time, so long that he was stiff and his eyes ached. Still, it had served its purpose. He went up to his room, undressed wearily and got into bed. He felt tired in a dull way, all his interest spent. He was no poet, yet he had accomplished something better than a poem. He had resisted the urge to open the press, to feel with trembling fingers for the neck of the bottle. Once more he had won a victory. It would be only temporary, he knew that. But each temporary triumph would stave off a little longer the eventual collapse. It would come, that collapse. Father Giffley did not try to fool himself. It was a disease—this appetite of his. He had seen others. Unless by a miracle of grace . . . and he was unworthy of that.

They were lighting the lamps in Chandlers Court. The children still played in the street. They were used to Rashers and his dog by now and let both pass without stopping to jeer at them as was once their habit. Rashers paid no attention either. He was tired and unwell. But he had food in his bag and the whiskey Father Giffley had said he was to get. It was a generous measure—nearly half a bottle. That was something. The housekeeper was glad to give away as much of it as she could. It would leave all the less for the parish priest, God help him. It was not right in a priest to . . . And then his face, purple all the time. The smell of peppermints from his breath too. She had seen it begin and she had seen it become a habit and then more than habit. She had seen . . . Well, there were strange things in the world and indeed if everybody was made the same it would be a very dull place indeed. It wasn’t always the virtuous and the temperate who were the most forbearing and considerate of those in a lowlier station. Not by a long chalk. Father Giffley was a harsh man with his equals and his superiors, more power to him, but he was seldom cross with those who had the menial place. He took everything from them as it came. There were certain others now . . . no names—no pack drill.

Rashers hoped Hennessy might be about, but there was no sign of him. He could have shared some of the whiskey with him and he would have welcomed his chat. Hennessy had an interest in things. Hennessy had suggested staying in the boiler-house. It seemed to have done his rheumatism good, but not his bronchitis. He wanted to tell Hennessy that. Hennessy would be interested. And now this dark damp hall, these rickety stairs and the wave of cold, wet air and the smell of clay as he opened the door to the basement room.

‘Like a grave, Rusty,’ he said, groping about for the bottle with the candle butt. It gave a wavering light. His bedding was still as he had left it, the rags lying in a heap at the bottom of the straw. The biscuit box had another coat of rust and the jamjars were stained with stale tea.