The Submerged Cathedral (11 page)

T
HE VEGETABLE GARDENER
, James, is angular and large-footed in his steel-capped black boots, an older hand even than Martin, who has been sent here to obey his directions.

It seems he is too proud, is spending too much time alone, he has been seen
again
walking the ridge, the novice master (that sniveller) has told him. And so he stands at the garden gate, waiting to be communal, and humbled.

In the refectory, where boredom and silence make hungry men lose their manners, he has watched James. Because in a silent place even chewing becomes an activity. And staring. They all do it, except the odd new arrival who remains polite for a few weeks, until the silence gets to him and he too makes his body's facilities become interesting. Martin can register every movement of his own eyeballs now, he counts them, maps the path of
his shifting iris, sometimes makes himself giddy in this cartography. Or he takes his own pulse, the only shred of ritual left from those long ago days when he thought his hands could heal.

Across the tables he has watched them all. Anthony, that talking infirmarian, gabbler, who eats too fast, looking about him as though willing someone to speak. Matthias, who works on his chewing as though it is a job, staring at the breadboard, his great filthy fingers curled in fists around his knife and fork. He eats with his mouth open, breathing in disgusting catarrhal snorts. It was in the refectory that the realisation came one day, some time back, that this life had acquainted Martin with hatred.

He has his refectory portraits of them all. And James picks out his bread with too much care, he smiles, his fingernails are clean. He makes Martin feel decayed.

Now in the autumn air, leaning over the garden gate, Martin exhales, closes his eyes. For the thousandth time he thinks of leaving. Of finding his way back to Jocelyn and the garden in her head. And then, instantly, as always, of the sickening truth of her being lost, not wanting him.

James's hand is on his arm and the smooth neck of a garden fork slapped into his palm.

Obedience, humility, perseverance.
Hate your own will
, wrote Benedict.

James directs him to dig up the far garden bed and prepare it for planting; it has been untouched since last summer. At first he uses the fork, but after a time he can see the only way to remove all the weeds is to use small movements with the fingers, grasping the base of a weed. After its turning, the soil is soft, the weeds come easily away.
Pick, pick
.

He watches James at another bed from the corner of his eye, on his hands and knees, dibbing holes for seedlings.

There is nothing masculine about this duty here. Pick, pick.

Except the silence, perhaps.

But then the graziers on nearby properties are allowed large gestures, shouts, curses, kicks even, at a dog or a gate. They swagger, they flap their hats at flies, at the sun, and sweat sheens their skin. Despite the hats they are red-and rough-skinned, their hands, even wrists, thickened with callouses. He shifts and kneels again in the soil, his hands beginning to perspire in the welder's gloves. Pick, pick. The straw hat has become heavy. He crouches and removes the gloves. He kneels forward again, plucks at weeds with his fingers, thumb and forefinger, lifting and sinking as though he is sewing, embroidering the earth with the gestures of a woman, or a surgeon.

When he studied medicine he had practised his sutures in the furniture of his house. An old girlfriend had stood outside one night, watching through the window at the movements of his wrist and hand as he knelt on the couch. Like a ballet, she had said. His chairs, couches, cushions, curtains, all sutured with transparent thread to his shining future.

He looks up to see James sitting on his haunches, watching him. Their eyes meet and then each turns back to his work.

He tips a barrow of sheep shit into the soil, fetches the fork again. Foot on iron, forces it into earth, and lifts and turns the soil clods.

Sexual need runs through this place sometimes like a shiver. His own desire has become a weed through his sleep. He has dreamt of that old girlfriend, of the needle in his fingers. He dreamt he sewed her to himself. In the morning he realised he had ejaculated in his sleep. Is not ashamed, they cannot make him that. But his need wearies and bores him.
Our Father, Who art in heaven
. It is common, he knows; these thoughts happen to everyone.

But still, after all these years, during these needy nights it is mostly Jocelyn in his bed.

He pushes the thought away, again puts a foot to the iron shelf of the fork. Whispers the prayer inside his head, begins again. Reminds himself that every minute
here – in the garden, the chapel, the library – each second is a point in time further from her, from that day. He welcomes it.

All things pass.

B
EHIND THE BUILDING
is the view from the verandah – the pale valley, the dark velvet ring of reeds and rushes around the dam. It is not visible to him. He walks, circling the rose garden, watching the grey cement path and the appearance, disappearance, appearance of his black boots from beneath the skirts of his habit. The roses list over the dust-dry earth. The doubt, always only just dormant, rises through him like a temperature. Is it possible to believe in something one cannot understand?

He walks. He wishes he could see the valley. He watches the same tough straggle of rosebush as he passes it. He sits, for a while, under the awning covering the cloister walk, reading. Or rather, tracing the pattern of marks of ink on the page with the movement of his eyes, comparing the way some letters bleed more heavily into
the paper than others.
H
, for example, seems to sink more thoroughly into the paper than
A
. He breathes, slowly, this dry air and the heat of the place contained in this breath. Then in this breath.

He thinks of Jocelyn's fantasised garden, of her somewhere – still in England? In Europe? – standing amid a field of plants, without him. Forces his mind away from this, yet again, and stands. He shakes his head quickly, violently, as he used to do when driving long distances to keep himself awake. He walks, tries to turn his mind to God. Whatever this word might mean.

Later, as he's walking up the hillside to the old grave with the letter in his pocket, he wonders why he has written it. He has long ago understood there are some things for which forgiveness is not possible. He did not ask for it.

Dear Jocelyn
. Her written name so unfamiliar now, only her face unforgettable. Are she and Ellen together, still, with Sandra? He imagines Sandra. She would be much older now, though it is impossible for him to say how many years have passed. Does she remember him, the doctor who let her brother die?

He has said barely anything in the letter, only where he is, and
sorry
, and something Anthony told him, from the Song of Songs.

The season shifts again and it is hot, and the sheep start, then stumble away across the stony ground as he walks up the hill. One bleats a guttural, low groan, some others repeat the sound in another key.

The fence around the little grave is rusted in parts. He has not been here for some months, since the day he wrote to her. He will paint the fence soon. He climbs over it and kneels on the cement, begins grasping at the base of the weeds around the grave, then starts to heap them in the centre of the cement. He makes a rosary of the weeds.
Hail Mary full of Grace
, aloud, ‘The Lord is with Thee,' digging the roots out with his fingers. After some time the words themselves become soothing.

The letter was sent many months ago and nothing has come back. He is not surprised. He had written only a guessed-at street name, a London suburb, remembered from those old blue letters from Thomas.

He should not have written to her, reviving that old need. Her silence is not a surprise, but still he feels the small hard mass of a cry beginning in his chest for the first time since he arrived here those years ago. He sits on the cement grave with his face in his hands.

A
NTHONY RISES IN
the dark, as he does every morning, feels around the cupboard for his clothes. He does not turn on the light. He has come to love darkness, knows the spaces of his room and its furnishings – bed, desk, cupboard and drawers – like the mathematics of his own body. Quickly dressed, he likes to scurry to the abbey for Vigils before the others get there. He begins his prayer before he sees another man's face, before the lights are lit. These are the times he is most able to believe in God, and in love. Just after waking from sleep, and just before falling into it. When perhaps life is most like dying.

 

In the vegetable garden James hands Martin a palm-sized river stone on which he has carved a Latin word.
Colo.

Martin's schoolboy language lessons fail him. He holds the stone in his hand and looks at James, shakes his head.

‘It means both –' James says – ‘cultivate, and worship.'

Martin nods. He signs,
Beautiful
. Rests the stone on the low wall around the onion bed, they both stand to look at it. So poetry can grow among the weeds and the mistakes and the onion sprouts. Then James smiles and walks back between the beds to return to the composting heap.

Martin watches his shoulders move beneath his habit, and he realises that for the first time in years, in this unaccountable moment, he is feeling it: love.

 

One early morning after rain they are finding snails and crushing them on the concrete paths. It is an easy triumph, the fight against the snails simpler and more final than against the daily destruction by wallabies and kangaroos, the rabbits, the great holes dug by a disoriented wombat. Against these they build fortresses of fences, surround the lettuce plants with barbed wire and broken glass.

‘And people think a garden is a gentle place,' James whispers to him, standing rueful, looking at the traps protecting their food.

He looks up to Martin, smiling, waiting.

And suddenly Martin is talking about Jocelyn and her
dreamt garden, and then about the dead trees rising from silver water, about Ellen and the baby. That triangular centre of his life. He is sitting on a low brick wall, rocking in James's arms with tears streaming down his face, and James's voice is only as loud as the insects catching the sun in the air, rocking Martin, whispering,
Poor one, poor one, poor one
.

T
HEY WALK TOGETHER
to the rubbish tip, wheel-barrowing the monastery's refuse. Tin cans, cardboard flour boxes. Wheat bags, an old metal bucket with holes rusted in its base. A chair repaired so many times and now irreparable. They stand sorting the rubbish into anything reusable. James takes what he can for the compost, for mulch. Over the year they have learned one another's rhythms, they work companionably for an hour, lifting, bending, sorting. James tries now and then to sign to Martin. He shrugs in return, not understanding.

They work. The sun lifts in the blue air. James walks to the fence and watches Martin shovelling rubbish into the pit. Martin sees him then, leaning over the fence post, head in his hands. He walks over to him. James is trembling, shamed. Martin puts his hand on his shoulder. The man turns around.
I know
, Martin says.
I know
.

He holds his hands out, James takes them. Then James's face is close, his hands are shaking and he is kissing and kissing Martin's soft and tender mouth.

 

It is a poorly fenced yellow paddock under a blue sky beside a pale dirt road. Inside the fence, beside the old but well-kept gate with its mended hinges, is a white wooden shelter. Inside the shelter is a simple wooden bench, where guests who do not drive here sit waiting for the bus back to town.

Turning from the grave one morning, through the eucalypts, Martin thinks he sees the figure of a man climb into the bus. It heaves away down the road, leaving the dust and the sound of its changing gears hanging in the air behind it.

That evening James is not at dinner. His chair has disappeared and the brothers have been instructed to move their chairs so as to fill the space. When they retire the novices all walk past the space where his bed has been in the dormitory. The bed is waiting for removal in the corridor, mattress stripped, the blankets folded in neat squares in a stack on the corner of the grey ticking. They see it. They avoid each other's looks. No one signs James's name with their fingers as they exchange goodnights.

It is a kind of unmentionable death.