2001 - Father Frank (13 page)

H
e was a big man in a small garden, a man trying to get to grips with a hobby he had taken up to stop him going insane in retirement and yet, if insanity were ever diagnosed in Edward Dempsey, this new hobby would be its most likely cause.

Eddie was sixty-six, a year into retirement and, having followed his brother Eamonn over from Connemara, had spent forty years as one of West London’s most colourful publicans. Notting Hill, or ‘Netting Dale’ as it was known when Eddie first arrived from Ireland, was not the cosy, gentrified honeypot it would eventually become. It was one of the most volatile and dangerous areas in Britain, and the Elgin, the Eagle and the Bramley Arms were three of its most volatile and dangerous pubs. Though not when ‘Big Eddie’ was behind the bar. He had earned and kept the respect of some of London’s hardest hoodlums. Just the sight of the huge ex-Gaelic footballer was usually enough to stop a disturbance before it even started. And God help anyone who didn’t stop when he told them to.

Even now, retired in the garden of his neat little semi in Perivale, he was still a formidable figure. Horticulture didn’t suit him: deadheading roses, weeding flowerbeds, nurturing pansies—it simply wasn’t him. He’d tried but was becoming increasingly depressed and frustrated at the futility of it. He could spend three or four hours toiling in that garden and a week later there would be no evidence that he’d ever stepped out of the back door. In the pub trade, every day had been different. In the garden, every day was the same. He became morose, and when he became morose he drank, and the more he drank, the more morose he became.

The children came to visit, the little grandchildren too, but for Eddie their visits were too few and far between. No matter how long they stayed it was never long enough to fill more than the occasional crevice in the huge, empty rockface of his life. Then, just as he was considering growing a few tomatoes in the far corner by the shed, the phone rang. It was a cordless phone and its constant presence in the garden made Eddie feel a little less lonely.

“Hello?”

“Uncle Eddie? It’s Frank.”

“How are you, boy?” smiled the reluctant Alan Titchmarsh. “Settling into the new job all right?”

“Great, thanks,” said Frank. “It’s going really well. Do you know where Wealdstone is?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, a little puzzled. “It isn’t far from here.”

“Good,” said Frank. “Can you meet me at the church in half an hour? I’ve got a little proposition for you.”

Eddie needed no persuasion to fling down his rake and come out of retirement. He was immediately installed as the new manager of St Thomas’s Parish Centre oh an annual salary of absolutely nothing.

Frank had decided to extend his original scheme, some might say scam, where nobody was paid a penny for working there. He viewed it as ethical collectivism (he knew those Oxford philosophy lectures would come in handy one day), all working together for the common good—and, to be fair, it was true: bar staff, cleaners, maintenance men all donated their services and were more than happy to do so.

With Big Eddie at the helm, the place was an instant hit. Eddie had anticipated a lot of trouble in persuading his long-suffering wife Nora to go along with the idea: she’d worked hard and waited patiently for the big publican to throw in the bar towel. Now, just eleven months later, he was going back—and not only that, but he wasn’t even being paid. Eddie explained, without going into detail, that the extra-curricular activities in which any shrewd publican, especially one on first-name terms with most of West London’s underworld, could get involved meant that they’d always have enough money to live on, and anyway, this was real charity work: a chance to put something back.

To Eddie’s surprise, his decision met with little resistance. Auntie Nora adored Frank, and could see that her husband was far from fulfilled in the garden. He was getting under her feet, he was drinking too much, and she feared that he might go into deep decline. Death, perhaps, by missing adventure.

With ‘St Tom’s’ staffed entirely by voluntary workers, any cash coming in was pure profit. There were discos, dances, aerobics classes, and on Monday night live Premiership football; there were quiz nights, karaoke nights, bingo and, most popular of all, Jimmy Flynn’s horse-racing nights. Jimmy would bring in videos of old races from the sixties and seventies, usually in black and white. People would line up with no knowledge of the horses, no odds, five pounds a punt, and anyone who picked the winner would split the jackpot, minus a sizeable chunk that went straight into the parish coffers.

Frank wanted the money handled properly and efficiently, with any surplus distributed among various charities. It was Danny Power who told him, “There’s no finer fella than Pat Walsh.”

F
rank called round. The house was on a new estate of almost identical properties, all ‘aged’ up with rustic brick, half-timbering and leaded windows in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that eighteen months ago they hadn’t even existed. There was a carriage lamp above the doorbell and the name of the house, ‘Patanne’, a hideous hybrid of the names of its occupants, was carved into a flat board made of artificial bark. Frank pressed the bell and was alarmed to hear the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons chime out.

“Mrs Walsh?” He smiled at the frowning face in front of him. “I’m Father Frank Dempsey, the new parish priest.”

Anne Walsh almost smiled, and invited him in. Frank was lucky: if he hadn’t been the new parish priest, she would have made him take off his shoes. Muddy boots, fair enough: if she were Mrs Daniel Power, this policy would have been understandable. But she was Mrs Patrick Walsh: her husband spent all day behind his desk in a clean, carpeted office and his shiny black slip-ons were spotless. Yet every evening at the front door, those slip-ons had to be slipped off and replaced with a pair of backless burgundy slippers. You know the ones—leather and prone to making that horrible plap-plap sound when walked in.

Pat came plap-plapping in from the kitchen, his little fat hand outstretched. “Father,” he beamed, “good to meet you.”

Pat was a man who didn’t wear clothes, he wore outfits, colour co-ordinated, that no man would choose for himself. Today it was a lemon Pringle golfing sweater, with a thin grey stripe through it, to which his wife had matched a grey and lemon shirt and a pair of grey slacks. It was a fairly safe bet that between his feet and those backless slippers you’d find a little pair of lemon socks.

“Little bird tells me, Father, that you’re big into music.”

“The little bird’s right,” said Frank.

“C’mere, let me show you something,” he said, leading Frank into the sitting room—or ‘through lounge’, as Mrs Walsh preferred to call it. “What do you think?” He was gesturing towards something of which he was, clearly, chest-puffingly proud. “Takes a hundred CDs.”

The object of Pat’s pride was a brand-new replica of a Wurlitzer juke-box, delivered and installed that very morning. “Reproduction, of course, but, well, who can be bothered with old singles nowadays? This is the digital age.”

Pat’s views were valid but, to Frank, he could hardly have said a worse thing. He could have dismissed the whole notion of Catholicism, transubstantiation, papal infallibility. Scoffed at the very idea of the Immaculate Conception and a virgin birth, declared all four Gospels to be nothing but a pack of lies and propaganda, accused Jesus of a sordid affair with Mary Magdalene who, incidentally, was a whore, and the priest would have found it hard to disagree. But decrying the sanctity of old vinyl was nothing short of heresy. The little fat accountant should be burned at the stake. However, Frank just nodded, with a tight, polite smile.

Pat was warming to his theme. “CDs have transformed music,” he went on. “The sound quality—no hisses, no scratches, no surface noise.”

Frank nodded again, considering Pat’s point. “Though don’t you think life has surface noise?”

The conversation had taken a philosophical turn for which Pat hadn’t been prepared. “Very profound, Father,” was the best he could manage. He strode over to the juke-box and said, “What would you like to hear, Father? I’m a country and western fan myself.”

Well, what a surprise.

“Me too.” This was a blatant lie. Frank had always loathed country music’s inherent tragedy, its mawkish sentimentality, noble women standing by brutal men, crippled orphans dying in the snow. To the backing of Charlie Rich singing ‘Behind Closed Doors’, Frank settled into the Parker Knoll Dralon armchair. The house was immaculate. Nothing out of place, not a speck of dust anywhere. Frank could imagine Pat sitting on the sofa, with his legs permanently raised eighteen inches above the carpet so that Anne could Hoover beneath them.

Everywhere Frank looked, he could see tasteless attempts to be tasteful. The books on the shelf had been bought by the yard. Cheap unread leatherbound volumes of Shakespeare and Dickens, Austen and Trollope, all delivered within twenty-eight days, from the back page of the
Sunday Express Magazine
. Pristine nets and enormous, swirly-patterned curtains, which looked like great big baggy knickers, hung at the double-glazed windows. The new Yorkstone fireplace contained one of those gas-effect log fires, which looked about as convincing as the Turin Shroud. The place was alive with coasters, doilies, antimacassars. You felt henpecked just walking in there.

The henpecker herself then entered from stage left in blue velveteen slippers pushing one of those little gilt hostess tea trolleys. A tray on the top shelf bore a dainty, flowery bone-china tea service, while on the bottom was a selection of biscuits from Fox’s Vienna Assortment neatly arranged on a circular plate. “Earl Grey all right for you, Father?”

“Yeah, lovely, Mrs Walsh. Thank you.”

Again, the not-quite smile as she poured the tea and proffered the biscuits. Her whole persona was an elaborate affection. At least, that was how it had started out. After affecting any sort of behaviour for long enough, it becomes real. We are our affectations. Now Anne Walsh really was that respectable Catholic woman, that paragon of piety. She was what you might call a born-again prude, folding her arms, pursing her lips, shaking her head at anything she regarded as crude. It hadn’t always been so. There was nothing remotely prudish about the feisty young Annie O’Malley, barmaid at the Crown, Cricklewood. Even now, when riled, her eyes would flash with anger and her accent would become laced with its original Dublin coarseness. Oddly enough, this always gave Pat a brief frisson of sexual excitement as he caught a fleeting glimpse of the pretty girl with whom he had fallen in love on the number 16 bus.

She wasn’t a bad person—in many ways quite the opposite. She worked hard for the parish, oversaw the cleaning and flower-arranging rotas, did voluntary work at the local hospital, and was parish secretary of the Association for the Propagation of the Faith. She’d certainly been a kind and dutiful mother: both Kathleen and Geraldine Walsh, now in their twenties, had done well. Kathleen was a radiologist at a private clinic in Edinburgh and Geraldine, with her father’s head for figures, worked as a broker for one of the big banks in the City. The city being Tokyo. They loved their mother, but both felt that the best way to carry on loving her was to live as far away from her as possible.

Both girls had grown weary of Anne’s desire to be holier than thou, more respectable than thou, more hard-done-by than thou—the martyr in the Mini Metro. She’d like to have been a martyr, like St Agnes or St Anastasia: she felt that the more she suffered (or pretended to suffer) in this life, the greater would be her reward in the next. Hence the illnesses. It was never anything serious. It was never ‘I think I’ve got breast cancer’, because a doctor could immediately say, “Oh, no, you haven’t.” They were always minor but painful, debilitating ailments, for which Pat just had to take her word.

“I’ve got a terrible headache. I’ve got an upset tummy. I’ve got a sore throat. I’ve really hurt my back. I’ve twisted my ankle.” Sometimes it was the all-purpose “I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I don’t feel well at all.” Over the years, Pat had made a mental list of at least fifty of these complaints and often felt like typing them up, printing them off and pinning them to the kitchen wall. Then his wife could just tick the appropriate number each morning and save a lot of time.

If Pat outlived his wife, he could imagine the inscription on her gravestone: “Now Do You Believe Me?”

If Anne outlived Pat, she’d do what a lot of people do when they’ve been consistently unkind to a so-called loved one in life: she’d venerate and lionise him in death. A huge marble headstone would be erected, eulogising Patrick J. Walsh who ‘fell asleep’ on such-and-such a date, sadly missed by his adoring wife and family. Every day she’d be up at the cemetery, tending the grave, depositing fresh flowers, making sure it was tidier and better-kept than any of the neighbouring plots, tut-tutting reprovingly at the way theirs had become so straggly and unkempt. All that grief, all that suffering, all that martyrdom. Surely that would ease her passage to Heaven. Anne Walsh (Mrs) would revel in being a widow. So much more Catholic than being a wife.

Over tea, Frank outlined his plans to Pat for the parish centre, expressing his need for a ‘sound man’ to take care of the money, adding that Danny Power and ‘all the lads’ spoke very highly of him. It was the approval from ‘the lads’ that clinched it. It was what Pat still craved and, yes, he would be delighted to direct the whole operation financially. And no, of course there would be No Charge (one of Pat’s country-and-western favourites) for his services.

F
rank woke up at 3.23, at 4.07, at 4.51 and finally at 5.18. Then he got up. The house shook and the windows rattled to the sound of Father Lynam’s snoring. Frank tiptoed into the bathroom, his stomach somersaulting at the prospect of seeing Sarah Marshall again. In just over an hour she’d be in the back of his cab. Oh, Jesus!

Why was he bothering to tiptoe? If Father Conlon could sleep through Father Lynam’s snoring, which sounded like a herd of wildebeest rampaging through the house, then nothing short of a nuclear explosion would wake him.