Seminary Boy (26 page)

A
S THE WEEKS
passed, and I became increasingly settled in my infirmary domain, with only occasional invasions from the genuinely sick, I began to take my privileges for granted. Matron, I came to realise, wanted me to stay in the infirmary for as long as she could wangle it. She had a great capacity for friendship and little opportunity to express it. Her indulgence towards her favourite convalescent, however, was not without opposition.

Father Doran descended on me one afternoon to find me lying on my bed reading
Brideshead Revisited
, at Father McCallum’s recommendation. He took the book from my hands and made a tutting noise as he handed it back. He seemed appalled at the oasis of comfort I had made for myself within Cotton’s stern regime. The piles of books (many of them novels with bright covers), the armchair (Matron had found two cushions to make it more comfortable), the fruit bowl, the biscuit tin, the cake stand, the lemonade bottle. Father McCallum had been in earlier, and had left behind a hint of Sobranie cigarette smoke to add to the air of dissipation.

‘You haven’t been smoking, have you?’ Father Doran asked in his heart-stoppingly caustic voice.

I stood up and put the book down. ‘No, Father,’ I said respectfully. ‘Father McCallum just looked in and has left a puff or two behind.’

Father Doran guffawed huskily, evidently seeing more in the remark than I did; but mention of Father McCallum did not seem to improve his mood. ‘Are you not taking any exercise whatsoever?’ he asked testily. ‘I don’t think it such a good idea for you to be lying on your bed all afternoon reading novels; you’re hardly an invalid. And you might consider smartening this place up.’

Not long after this, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, with just three weeks to the end of the term, the infirmary door opened and in came Paul Moreland.

‘Ah, Fru, this is where you are. I’ve been deputed by Father Doran to entice you out on a walk, just the two of us, at your own pace. Do you think you are up to it?’

S
O
I
WENT
on a walk. During that tranquil afternoon of misty sunlight and hard frost I got to know Paul Moreland. There was something out of control about his gestures and expressions, as well as his frequent digressions; although, at times, I could detect playful connections.

His accent was impeccably upper-class, clipped and, I thought at the time, womanish in the style of English film stars like Anna Neagle and Deborah Kerr. Certain showy words cropped up, with the inevitable superlative: ‘too elegant’, ‘too odious’, ‘too banal’, ‘too horrifying’, and his images were often strained: the work of Swinburne, whom I had not read, was, he insisted, a ‘masterpiece of corruption’, and the atom bomb proved ‘not a shining young angel of new science but an ancient mushroom-shaped hag’. He quoted Plato – repeatedly invoking the allegory of the cave, which he explained to me – but he seldom strayed long from Catholic subjects. That first afternoon he talked about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the doctrine of Mary’s birth free of original sin, which he thought ‘too stunningly beautiful’, while discussing the proposition that Mary conceived the Son of God in her soul before the conception in her body. This led to a lecture on the dogma itself and the papacy of Pius IX, citing Lytton Strachey’s ‘too wicked’
Eminent Victorians
, and lingering over
the predicament of our ‘too weepy’ Cardinal John Henry Newman; then a digression on the ‘mountain-top mysticism’ of Meister Eckhart and the ‘menopausal ravings’ of Saint Teresa of Avila.

That afternoon he told me that his parents (his father was a retired civil servant) were divorced, and that his mother was a Catholic convert; that he had grown up an only child surrounded by books and intellectual conversation, with an unusually intense and close friendship with a priest in West London. This priest, he told me, became his guide and mentor. The priest had introduced him to philosophy, theology, literature and art. ‘But I don’t see
him
any more,’ he said with pointed emphasis. He divided his holidays between his mother in West London and his father in the Midlands.

Halfway through the walk we sat together on a railway bank close to a tunnel in the Churnet valley. ‘I love it here,’ he said. ‘I come here sometimes by myself and consider how easy it would be to throw oneself before a train the moment it emerges into the daylight: sex, birth and death!’

I did not then understand what he meant, but I was shocked. I took it as an item of affectation, like other things he said.

At one point that day I attempted to share with him my deepest thoughts. ‘Moreland, how do you think about God? How do you think God to be?’

‘Oh, Frumentum Bene!’ he wailed in a tone of elated superciliousness. ‘The question I want answered is what we think Father McCallum to be.’

I felt hurt by the instant trivialisation of my question, but I was instantly amused by what he said next. Father McCallum, he said, was ‘too, too camp for words…a veritable sanctuary queen…and what a face: he needs a Velásquez to paint that corrupt smirk.’ Then he changed tack: ‘And how do we think about Vince Armishaw?’ He told me that on Saturday nights he sometimes went to his room with two or three other members of the sixth form. With this he embarked on a parody
of Father Armishaw, imitating his voice with extraordinary accuracy: ‘…I want this clearly understood, Moreland: I’ve got the best hair in the whole of this college. That’s because I shampoo it in egg white and Guinness every day and massage it before I go to bed…Now let me tell you something about the finer features of my motor cycle…Moreland, how dare you read Milton for pleasure. Come over here. You see this book, this is F. R. Leavis’s
Revaluation
, the most important book in my room. Remember that and you can’t go wrong…So put that bloody
Paradise Lost
away and read something decent, like
Middlemarch
!’

I was not to realise until the following year that when Father Armishaw was at Cambridge he had sat at the feet of F. R. Leavis, the famous judgemental literary critic, and had come to emulate many of Leavis’s attitudes.

Eventually Moreland said: ‘Oh, Vincent. He’s wasted at Cotton…He should have stayed in Cambridge.’

Before we reached Little Bounds, he did what he had done the night of the house play: he stood before me, looked into my eyes and tweaked my nose, gently. I just let it happen. ‘You’re so sweet, Fru,’ he said. ‘You’re an absolute poppet.’

For the rest of the day and the evening I found it difficult to get Moreland out of my mind. I felt, again, those early symptoms of infatuation, and I was trying to resist.

The next morning at breakfast Moreland handed me a sealed envelope. He whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t open it here. Open it when you are alone.’

I took it to the infirmary.

I could hear an echo of his speaking voice in the note. It went something like this:

‘Dearest John,

Walking with you was
too nice
yesterday. I enjoyed my time with you
too much.
Did you realise that? Can you see it? I dare say you can with your discerning eye.
There are some things I can only just think, so much do I think them. I expect you know that too. Would you accompany me again? Say that you will. I loved you asking me How do I think God to be? That was so sweet. But I wasn’t quite in the mood just then to launch forth on those deep and mysterious waters. Dearest, I would love to sit beneath a larch tree talking with you about How I think God to be.

Much love,

Paul

The drift of the letter, with its ‘dearest’ twice over, its ‘sweet’, and its ‘much love’ opened the prospect of a relationship that I knew, instinctively, was something more than ‘special friendship’. Yet I suspected that these endearments, which affected tender feelings, were exaggerated mannerisms that Paul uttered without thinking. I found myself yielding to fascination; but I remained guarded.

P
AUL INVITED ME
for another walk in the last week of term, the day after we had finished exams. We walked to Alton via Oakamoor on a freezing day, the woods white with hoar frost under a pale cloudless sky. He did not talk about God. He asked me first about my spiritual reading. When I told him that I had a great fondness for the autobiography of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, he joined his hands, looked upwards and said in a simpering voice: ‘
Ah, oui, la petite fleurette.
’ He went on to say how much he preferred Teresa of Avila. ‘Now there’s a tough lady. Did you know, Fru, that the Devil threw her down the stairs and she broke her arm in three places? They
had to break it again and again to get it straight.’ He said that after she died the odour of sanctity was so great that the nuns in her convent passed out. Did I know, he asked, that when they dug her up a year later her habit was rotten, but the corpse was entirely incorrupt? ‘But her devotees tore her fresh, pink incorrupt body to pieces in the violent scramble to get themselves relics…’

On and on he went. It was a prelude to an extraordinary monologue ranging over the darker side of sainthood and mysticism: a saint who licked the sores of lepers; another who drank a cup of pus to show solidarity with the sick; one that lived solely on the Eucharistic wafer.

At Alton, strictly against the rules, he insisted that we stop at the Bridge Café where he ordered tea and buttered toast, which we ate by an open wood fire. He told me about Saint Catherine of Genoa’s vow of chastity while still married, and how she and her husband founded a hospice for the sick and the dying where she worked and prayed for thirty years until her death. He told me of Saint Catherine of Genoa’s visions and ‘lights in prayer’, as he called them; her unusual experience of odours of sweetness, her great fasts, her experience of fiery darts of love, and her unusual acts of self-abnegation. Once she came upon a patient dying of the plague. The patient was wordlessly uttering the name of Jesus with her dying breath. Catherine could not resist kissing the diseased person’s lips, since as far as she was concerned she was kissing Jesus himself. She caught the plague, suffering all its horrid torments, although she was not to die of it.

We walked back to Cotton via Farley and the Old Star crossroads, and all the way Moreland’s monologue ranged over the problem of distinguishing between mysticism and madness. He was very worked up; and I gathered that this was more than just a topic of passing interest. One memorable thing he said was that Saint Catherine could tell the difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated host. ‘She knew
this,’ said Paul, ‘because the consecrated host sent forth a ray of love that pierced her heart.’

Before we reached Top Bounds he grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed his forehead, cool in the late afternoon, on my forehead. I felt a momentary return of those breathtaking emotions I had experienced with Charles. But this was different; I was fearful of Paul, and I was determined not to put myself in danger again of being expelled.

T
HAT WEEK
I received a letter from Mum telling me that the family had moved from the house at the Peel and into a ‘halfway-house hostel’ in Ilford. The new address was at the top of the page with directions. She assured me that this was just temporary accommodation until the council provided us with a proper house at an affordable rent. It would be a tight squeeze when I came home, she wrote, but she was determined that we would stay together as a family and that we would have a good Christmas. There was no mention of my having to leave Cotton, but the very phrase ‘halfway house’ filled me with anxiety. I had a vague childhood memory of our insecure wanderings during the war, and I imagined having to spend the Christmas holiday living temporarily, like the bombed-out homeless, in a public assembly hall.

Paul Moreland and I did not take another walk before the end of term but we exchanged addresses. On the night before GH, Moreland came into the infirmary at about midnight. I was reading. He seemed distracted and restless and kept twisting strands of his thick black hair. Eventually he said: ‘God bless and love you, Fru. Have a happy and holy Christmas.’ Then he bent over and kissed me on the cheek.

He left me in the infirmary, my face burning with excitement and emotion, and I could tell that his footsteps were echoing in the direction of the church rather than back towards the school cloister and the dormitories. Then I remembered the night when I had seen him prostrating himself before the Blessed Sacrament on the darkened sanctuary, praying in that odd repetitive way out loud. There was something frightening about Moreland; he was, I thought, a troubled person.

On the following day I travelled to London with James and Derek. Then I found my own way from Saint Pancras to Ilford mainline station, walking the rest of the way to our temporary home where I arrived after dark.

The ‘halfway house’ for the homeless was a barrack-like building in which a number of families shared kitchens in common, but had their own rooms situated off corridors on two floors. The Cornwell family, all six of us, had one living room, with two bedrooms. We shared our kitchen, toilet and bathroom with another couple and their baby who dwelt in the room facing our living room across the corridor. Mum and Maureen slept in one room upstairs, and the boys in the other. I was to sleep on a sofa in the living room which Mum had made comfortable. There was a Christmas tree and decorations. A hissing gas fire was attached to a meter which had to be fed frequently with pennies. My two younger brothers were glued to the television set, which was turned up loud to drown out the screams of the baby in the room opposite. The TV had a poor reception which Michael was constantly trying to improve by placing the aerial in different positions.

Mum showed me the communal kitchen. It was basic. One gas stove, one sink, some cupboards and a table. A window looked out over a concrete yard with a washing line. As we stood watching the kettle boil, the woman with the baby came in. Her dyed hair was unkempt, her bare legs were bruised and covered in sores. The baby was convulsed with crying and the woman awkwardly attempted to heat a bottle of milk. Mum
intervened and helped. The baby fell silent as the woman put the teat in its mouth.

We made tea for ourselves and went back into the sitting room. I said: ‘That woman looks pitiful.’

Then Mum started to cry: tears of rage. ‘Scum of the earth!’ she said through her teeth. ‘We’re living with the scum of the earth, and all because of that dirty rat your father!’ There was something melodramatically disingenuous about the way she said this; I thought better than to begin an argument on the point.

After a while my sister and elder brother arrived. Maureen was beautifully dressed and bright-eyed; Terry was relaxed and seemingly unconcerned about our new situation. When Mum went out to the kitchen to prepare supper I spoke to Terry about her ‘scum of the earth’ comment. He said: ‘Don’t worry about it. We could have stayed at the Peel longer, but Mum got us into this place because it’s the quickest route to a council house.’

It struck me, and not for the first time, that Mum could keep several versions of her life, and several paths of emotion, in train at the same time. Later that evening Uncle Mike, Mum’s youngest brother, turned up to stay the night before driving back to Somerset the next day. Even in our homelessness Mum would find room for anybody in need: shades of the old Silvertown hospitality. He was to sleep on the floor in the sitting room with me. We sat around the gas fire talking until late. At one point he said: ‘You know, Kath, I went over to Ireland not so long ago and visited Tralee. Our Egan forebears knew what they were doing when they got out of that dump and came to England.’ I saw my mother’s face cloud. ‘Don’t talk like that, Mike,’ she said. Then Mike began to sing: ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ and she joined in.

Then he offered me a Senior Service cigarette: ‘Come on, mate, won’t do you any harm. Help you to relax in this madhouse. ’ The baby was screaming again in the room opposite.
So I took it and smoked it through, enjoying the kick it gave me, but feeling slightly ill. The Cotton priests had been effective role models as smoking enthusiasts.

Terry, who did not smoke, nor ever would, grinned at me oddly: ‘You’re nuts!’ he said.