The Past (23 page)

BUT THE HEATHER could have held all three of them. We made our way through it, mounds of it. Once again he showed himself younger than his years. I stumbled now and then but he trod on.

‘And what are all scandals about but love? Love, sacred and profane, carried in words, all of them echoes of that greatest scandal of them all when the word was made flesh and the scandal was the word and the word was love. She visited them for the best part of the year until the fit-ups took her on that provincial tour. The old man died soon after and the Scots returned for their summer weekends. I walked the promenade, I sat in my rooms. I turned my mathematical inquiries to that exquisite system of triadic ambiguity that is Marian theology.'

He strode on, his boots raising clouds of dust, or was it pollen?

D
ESPITE LUKE'S FEAR of open spaces he must have ventured out that summer to a garden fete, a large open field where he seems restless even in the photograph, surrounded by upturned temporary tables and crumpled cloths. There are Jesuits in the background and among them a female figure which could be Rene. He seems like a large thin bull there, who would make of the field a pattern on a living-room wall, if he could. His hair is thin and lank so that the bristling quiff, so evident above his forehead years ago, is all but hidden. He seems to be leaning towards the camera, imploring it to release him, perhaps so that he can get back to the security of those massed Jesuits. There is accusation in his eyes. He must have been held there for an inordinate length of time so that his father could get the focus right. The space of this field in which his father has placed him appals him, but no more than the spaces of the world into which his father has thrown him. And he stands, apparently tottering forward for what seems an age before the shutter clicks, and then turns and walks stiffly, as rapidly as he can without running, towards the black mass of the Jesuits and the white tables.

He meets their crowded backs with relief, their serge shoulders, shiny rather than black from rubbing against one another. The sandwiches on the long tables have gone soft in the heat but the Jesuits keep eating them and the maids keep running for more. These maids
are squat and have freckled faces and wear aprons identical in shape if not in design. They approach the Fathers with slightly bowed heads, transport the blue and white plates with banana sandwiches, but once out of earshot they clasp each others' hands, they giggle, running towards the refectory for more. The Fathers stand in groups, scattered round the white tables, round the mothers of the schoolboys. They stare at this agoraphobic boy, seeing in him perhaps a lost pupil and possibility. But he just stands there clutching the white tablecloth, inhaling the odour of Jesuit serge, looking for the small circle of massed priests among whom he hopes is Rene.

James Vance brings tripod and box down past the longest of the tables and is approached by a lay brother who fifteen years ago took minor Abbey parts. I tend the garden now, this brother tells him, I dig trenches and grow vegetables for the community meals. Do you remember that snap you took of
The Workhouse Ward
where I could be seen in the background talking to the Peeler? The priesthood is not for everyone, this lay brother tells him, and not for such as me who grew up in that profane trade.

The Superior is tall and rigid and one half of his crown is bald. Perhaps the only one of the Fathers who hasn't eaten sandwiches, he walks among the tables towards James, holds him gently by the elbow. Hopkins, he tells him,
was
a poet. Swinburne, for whom I've heard you profess such a liking, has been responsible for the most blasphemous line in the last two thousand years. He quotes softly as if his lips are trying to separate themselves from the words.

The Superior's crown gleams like a mirror with perspiration. His hand is firm and irritating. We must come to some arrangement, he lowers his voice, about all school photographs . . .

A young athlete from the Sixth Form walks between the tables and the knots of priests. He is still dressed for running and perspiration and effort have stiffened his hair into a mass of blond curls. He acknowledges none of the Fathers' nods, and yet the Fathers seem not to mind. Vigour, they seem to say, and youth obey their own laws. A glow of vapour and distilled effort surrounds him. A yearly figure, the Superior whispers, for portraits of all the forms . . .

Luke walks between two maids, carrying empty plates. Take me to the house, he asks them. They walk beyond the tables, clasping their hands behind his back. One is taller than him, the other smaller. Do you all wear the same sized apron? he asks, noticing how the small one is wrapped in hers, the tall one choked by hers. No, says the tall maid, laughing, there's two sizes. Too big and too small. She has a brace and her consonants click. They cross the large field, beyond the tables. Their clasped hands separate and fall around his waist.

THE SUN CURVES gradually downwards and as the day grows cooler the Fathers disperse, Jesuit by Jesuit, from their small groups. The Sixth Form athlete walks towards the field exit arm in arm with a middle-aged, elegant lady. His mother, the lay brother whispers, shaking his head, is a saint. Our persuasions are different, the Superior muses. He tries to disguise his curiosity. The young woman who came with you, she's not a local girl?

Luke finds her in the kitchen, sitting at a wooden table, surrounded by the maids. Each maid is plucking her apron, laughing coarsely. Rene's smile seems to include each one of them. We seen you on the train, says the maid with the braces, you getting off it and us getting on—

A
YOUNG WAITRESS BROUGHT us the tea. She walked between the small patio and the Eagle's Nest, bringing first the cups, then the tea and then the sugar and milk. It was a wooden building with a corrugated iron roof which sang whenever it rained. Luckily enough the sun had again come out so we sat outside. The whole arrangement was quite a suntrap since the Head loomed over the Eagle's Nest, shielding it from the prevailing winds, and the Eagle's Nest loomed over the patio. I asked the serving-girl had they had many trippers and she said no, that we were the first yet. Could you drink outside like this, I asked her, in the old days? I don't remember, she answered. She seemed annoyed by the question and I couldn't understand why until I realised she couldn't have been born then. Is this your first job then? I continued when she came with the milk. What's it to you? she muttered, her young eyes narrowing.

We plucked the sprigs of heather from our trousers while she poured the tea. Between the last pylon of the lift and the Eagle's Nest there was nothing but heather, two or three feet deep. We both agreed that there must have been a track there once and that a new one would appear soon when the lift caught on again.

But we sat in silence once the girl had poured the tea, he hardly touching his cup, sitting with his face to the bay and his eyes
half-closed. I wondered was he tired or was our silence caused by our sudden intimacy some moments back, just when the lift stopped? Or perhaps by the young girl's annoyance? I put my face close to his but only the whites of his eyes showed through his half-opened lids; they didn't register the blue bay before them. Perhaps old priests are like old horses, I thought, they sleep at odd moments only, in postures of waking. So I put his saucer on top of his cup to keep it warm and went ahead and drank my own tea. It was scalding, though a little weak.

Time passed and clouds flitted over the heather, like heather themselves. Father Beausang stayed asleep. I sensed someone looking at me then and turned to see the serving-girl in the wooden doorway with a camera raised to her face. The camera clicked as I turned and she ran into the interior, clutching it to her breast. I rose from my seat quietly so as not to waken him and walked towards the door, and inside.

I stood just inside the doorway looking across the wooden floor and the round tables to where she sat, behind the counter. Move over, she said, you're blocking the light. I walked forward and the light flooded in behind me, which seemed to satisfy her since her air of annoyance faded and she focused on the camera in her hand with a kind of innocent concentration. Is this your first job then? I asked again, but she silenced me with a Shhh! and placed the camera on the counter where I could see it. It was an instant one I saw, streamlined and plastic with an aperture from which the print would slide out. We both watched the print slide out then and fall on to the wooden counter, as if it had a will of its own. It was a wonderful grey colour which gradually changed as if smoke was drifting across it and the
gaunt shape of the pylon loomed out of the smoke and the broken shape of the coastline and the softer shapes of two figures at a table. For a terrible moment I feared that the pylon would be as it was in its heyday and the heather would be worn to a track by countless feet and the figures at the table would be those of Luke and Rene. But no, I saw my own surprised face and Father Beausang with his head towards the bay and the bay itself coloured in a glorious blue, more heightened, if anything, than the blue outside.

I ordered two more teas. Outside Father Beausang was still asleep. I would have liked to ask her who had revitalised the lift when she came up with the teas. But she was still wearing her air of youthful annoyance so I asked her instead why she took the picture. Because you, she answered, are my first customers. She gathered up the old cups and set down two new ones with a fresh pot of tea. Father Beausang woke with the disturbance. He turned his head away from the water, towards me. It's getting cooler, he said, and it was.

His eyes were fully open and looking towards the yellow chairs. They only moved, I surmised, when there was a passenger.

‘SO I HAVE seen her. The whole promenade must have seen her, in one way or another. Certainly my superior, a parish priest named Cartan had heard and seen enough of her to be worried. If she were Catholic and modelled each weekend for a Protestant painter, you see, something would have to be done. I had to inquire then, discreetly, into her background. And discretion suited me especially since, as you know, I couldn't visit the house any longer. It was not
only a point of delicacy with me, it was my recognition that something had ended. My function in that house had been replaced by hers. Or to put it another way, the cup that I had half-filled, flowed right over with her. If I met James on the promenade or behind a bathing shelter we would continue our discussions for the length of a stroll, but meeting like that was never satisfactory. The room within bay windows was missing, you see, and the figure of Luke with his tray of sandwiches and tea, which incidentally—'

He drained his cup

‘—was far, far better than this. And you can't talk mathematics walking down a promenade, surrounded by Scots. I wasn't jealous or resentful of her but I was intensely curious. I felt an odd affinity with her too. She was to take up my guardianship, after all, and I could sense from James on the promenade this air of blossoming after all those years. No matter how far our discussions had ranged, you see, their original purpose had never been quite forgotten. He was still “talking instruction”, I was still waiting for the staff to blossom. And there he was, blossoming after all those years.'