The Keys of the Kingdom (8 page)

When the repast was over Ned got up slowly, amidst applause. He struck an oratorical attitude, one thumb in his arm-pit. He was absurdly nervous.

‘Your Reverence, Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you one and all. I’m a man of few words,’ – a cry of ‘No, No’ from Thaddeus Gilfoyle – ‘I say what I mean, and I mean what I say!’ A short pause while Ned struggled for more confidence. ‘I like to see my friends happy and contented round about me – good company and good beer never hurt any man.’ Interruption at the doorway from Scanty Magoon, who had sneaked in with the gowks and contrived to remain. ‘God save you, Mr Bannon!’ – brandishing a drumstick of the goose. ‘You’re a fine man!’ Ned remained unperturbable – every great man has his sycophants. ‘As I was remarkin’ when Mrs Magoon’s husband flung a brick at me …’ Laughter. ‘… I favour the social occasion. I’m sure we’re proud and pleased, every mother’s son of us, – and daughter, – to welcome into our midst my poor wife’s brother’s boy!’ Loud applause and Polly’s voice: ‘Take a bow, Francis.’ ‘ I’m not going into recent history. Let the past bury its dead, I say. But I say and say it I will, Look at him now, I say, and when he came!’ Applause and Scanty’s voice in the corridor: ‘Maggie, for the love of God, will ye bring some more of the goose!’ ‘Now, I’m not one to blow my own trumpet! I try to do fair between God and man and beast. Look at my whippets if ye don’t believe me.’ Gilfoyle’s voice: ‘The best dogs in Tynecastle!’ A longer pause, during which Ned lost the thread of his speech. ‘Where am I?’ ‘Francis!’ Polly prompted quickly. ‘Ah, yes.’ Ned raised his voice. ‘When Francis came, I said to myself, says I, Here’s a boy that might be useful. Shove him behind the bar and let him earn his keep? No, by God – Saving your presence, Father Clancy – that’s not us. We talk it over, Polly and me. The boy’s young, the boy’s been ill-treated, the boy has a future before him, the boy’s my poor dear wife’s brother’s boy. Let’s send him to college, we say; we can manage it between us.’ Ned paused. ‘Your Reverence, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m pleased and proud to announce that next month Francis starts off for Holywell!’ Making the name the triumphant keystone of his peroration, Ned sat down, perspiring, amidst loud applause.

Though the elm shadows were long upon the cropped lawns of Holywell, the northern June evening was still light as noon. The darkness would come late, so closely to dawn the aurora borealis would but briefly glitter across the high pale heavens. As Francis sat at the open window of the high little study which he shared, since his election to the ‘Philosophers’, with Laurence Hudson and Anselm Mealey, he felt his attention wander from the notebook, drawn, almost sadly, with a sense of the transience of beauty, to the lovely scene before him.

From the steep angle of his vision he could see the school, a noble grey granite baronial mansion, built for Sir Archibald Frazer in 1609, and endowed, this century, as a Catholic College. The chapel, styled in the same severity, lay at right angles, linked by a cloister, to the library, enclosing a quadrangle of historic turf. Beyond were the fives and handball courts, the playing fields, the end of a game still in progress, wide reaches of pasture threaded by the Stinchar River with stumpy black Polled Angus cattle grazing stolidly, woods of beech and oak and rowan clustering the lodge, and in the ultimate distance the backdrop, blue, faintly serrated, of the Aberdeenshire Grampians.

Without knowing, Francis sighed. It seemed only yesterday that he had landed at Doune, the draughty northern junction, a new boy, scared out of his wits, facing the unknown and that first frightful interview with the Headmaster, Father Hamish MacNabb. He remembered how ‘ Rusty Mac’, great little Highland gentleman, blood cousin to MacNabb of the Isles, had crouched at his desk beneath his tartan cape, peering from bushy red eyebrows, dread-fully formidable.

‘Well, boy, what can you do?’

‘Please, sir … nothing.’

‘Nothing! Can’t you dance the Highland Fling?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What! With a grand name like Chisholm?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Humph! There’s not much profit in you, is there boy?’

‘No, sir, except sir …’ Trembling: ‘… Maybe I can fish.’

‘Maybe, eh?’ A slow dry smile. ‘Then maybe we’ll be friends.’ The smile deepened. ‘The clans of Chisholm and MacNabb fished together, ay, and fought together, before you or I were thought of. Run now, before I cane ye.’

And now, in one more term, he would be leaving Holywell. Again his gaze slanted down to the little groups promenading to and fro on the gravelled terraces beside the fountain. A seminary custom! Well, what of it? Most of them would go from here to the Seminary of San Morales in Spain. He discerned his room-mates walking together: Anselm, as usual, extrovert in his affections, one arm tenderly linking his companion’s, the other gesticulating, but nicely, as befitted the outright winner of the Frazer Good Fellowship Prize! Behind the two, surrounded by his coterie, paced Father Tarrant – tall, dark, thin … intense yet sardonic … classically remote.

At the sight of the youngish priest Francis’ expression tightened oddly. He viewed the open notebook before him on the window ledge with distaste, picked up his pen and began, after a moment, his imposition. His frown of resolution did not mar the clean brown moulding of his cheek or the sombre clearness of his hazel eyes. Now, at eighteen, his body had a wiry grace. The chaste light heightened absurdly his physical attractiveness, that air, unspoiled and touching, which – inescapable – so often humiliated him.

‘June-14th, 1887.
Today there occurred an incident of such phenomenal and thrilling impropriety I must revenge myself on this beastly diary, and Father Tarrant, by recording it. I oughtn’t really to waste this hour before vespers – afterwards I shall be dutifully cornered by Anselm to play handball – I should jot down
Ascension Thursday: Fine day; memorable adventure with Rusty Mac
, and leave it. But even our incisive Adminstrator of Studies admitted the virtue of my breed – conscientiousness – when he said to me, after his lecture: “Chisholm! I suggest you keep a diary. Not of course for publication,” – his confounded satire flashed out, – “as a form of examen. You suffer, Chisholm, inordinately, from a kind of spiritual obstinacy. By writing your inmost heart out … if you could … you might possibly reduce it.”

‘I blushed, of course, like a fool, as my wretched temper flared “Do you mean I don’t do what I’m told, Father Tarrant?”

‘He barely looked at me, hands tucked away in the sleeves of his habit, thin, dark, pinched in at the nostrils and oh, so unanswerably clever. As he tried to conceal his dislike of me, I had a sharp awareness of his hard shirt, of the iron discipline I know he uses unsparingly upon himself. He said vaguely: “There is a mental disobedience …” and walked away.

‘Is it conceit to imagine he has his knife in me because I do not model myself upon him? Most of us do. Since he came here two years ago he has led quite a cult of which Anselm is deacon. Perhaps he cannot forget the occasion when, at his instruction to us upon the “one, true, and apostolic religion” I suddenly remarked: “ Surely, sir, creed is such an accident of birth God can’t set an exclusive value on it.” In the shocked hush which followed he stood nonplussed, but icy cold. “What an admirable heretic you would have made, my good Chisholm.”

‘At least we have one point in common: agreement that I shall never have a vocation.

‘I’m writing ridiculously pompously for a callow youth of eighteen. Perhaps it is what is named the affectation of my age. But I’m worried … about several things. Firstly, I’m terribly, probably absurdly, worried about Tynecastle. I suppose it’s inevitable that one should lose touch, when one’s “ home-leave” is limited to four short summer weeks. This brief annual vacation, Holywell’s only rigour, may serve its purpose of keeping vocations firm, but it also strains the imagination. Ned never writes. His correspondence during my three years at Holywell has been effected through the medium of sudden and fantastic gifts of food: that colossal sack of walnuts for instance, from the docks, in my first winter, and last spring, the crate of bananas, three quarters of which were over-ripe and created an undignified epidemic amongst the “ clergy and laity” here.

‘But even in Ned’s silence there’s something queer. And Aunt Polly’s letters make me more apprehensive. Her dear inimitable gossip about parochial events has been replaced by a meagre catalogue of, mainly, meteorological facts. And this change in tone arrived so suddenly. Naturally Nora hasn’t helped me. She is the original postcard girl, who scribbles off her obligations in five minutes, once a year, at the seaside. It seems, however, centuries since her last brilliant
Sunset from Scarborough Pier
and two letters of mine have failed even to produce a
Moon over Whitley Bay.
Dear Nora! I shall never forget your Eve-like gesture in the apple loft. It’s because of you that I anticipate these coming holidays so eagerly. Shall we walk again, I wonder, to Gosforth? I have watched you grow, holding my breath – seen your character – by which I mean your contradictions – develop. I know you as someone quick, shy, bold, sensitive and gay, a little spoiled by flattery, full of innocence and fun. Even now, I see your impudent sharp little face, lit up from within as you indulge your amazing gift of mimicry – “taking off” Aunt Polly … or me – your skinny arms akimbo, blue eyes provoking, reckless, ending by flinging yourself into a dance of gleeful malice. Everything about you is so – human and alive, and – even those flashes of petulance and fits of temper which shake your delicate physique and end in such tremendous weepings. And I know, despite your faults, how warm and impulsive is your nature, making you run, with a quick and shamefaced blush, towards someone you have hurt … unconsciously. I lie awake thinking of you, of the look in your eyes, the tender pathos of your collar bones above your small round breasts…’

Francis broke off here, and with a sudden flush scored out the last line he had written. Then, conscientiously, he resumed.

‘Secondly, I am selfishly concerned about my future. I’m now educated above – here again Fr Tarrant would agree – my station. I’ve only another term at Holywell. Am I to return gracefully to the beer-pulls of the Union? I can’t continue to be a charge on Ned – or more justly Polly, since I recently ascertained quite by accident that my fees have been discharged, out of her modest income, by that wonderful woman! My ambitions are so muddled. My fondness for Aunt Polly, my overbrimming gratitude, make me long to repay her. And it is her dearest wish to see me ordained. Again, in a place like this, where three quarters of the students and most of one’s friends are predestined for the priesthood, it is hard to escape the inevitable pull of sympathy. One wants to line up in the ranks. Tarrant apart, Father MacNabb thinks I should make a good priest – I can feel it in his shrewd, friendly provocativeness, his almost Godlike sense of waiting. And as Principal of this College he should know something about vocations.

‘Naturally I’m impetuous and hot-tempered; and my mixed upbringing has left me with a schismatic quirk. I can’t pretend to be one of these consecrated youths – our college library teems with them – who lisp prayers throughout their infancy, make boyish shrines in the woods, and sweetly rebuke the little girls who jostle them at the village fair. “Keep away, Therese and Annabelle, I am not for thee.”

‘Yet who can describe those moments that come to one suddenly: alone upon the back road to Doune, waking in the darkness in one’s silent room, remaining behind, quite solitary, when the scraping, coughing, whispering mob has gone in the empty yet breathing church. Moments of strange apprehension, of intuition. Not that sentimental ecstasy which is as loathsome to me as ever – Query: why do I want to vomit when I see rapture on the Master of Novices’ face? – but a sense of consolation, of hope.

‘I’m distressed to find myself writing like this – though it is for no other eye than mine. One’s private ardours make chilling stuff on paper. Yet I must record this inescapable sense of belonging to God which strikes at me through the darkness, the deep conviction, under the measured, arranged, implacable movement of the universe, that man does not emerge from, or vanish into, nothing. And here – is it not strange? – I feel the influence of Daniel Glennie, dear, cracked Holy Dan, feel his warm unearthly gaze upon me …

‘Confound it! And Tarrant! I
am
literally pouring out my heart. If I am such a Holy Willie why don’t I set out and do something for God, attack the great mass of indifference, of sneering materialism in the world today … in short, become a priest? Well … I must be honest. I think it is because of Nora. The beauty and tenderness of my feeling for her overfills my heart. The vision of her face, with its light and sweetness, is before me even when I am praying to Our Lady in church. Dear, dear Nora. You are the real reason why I don’t take my ticket on the celestial express for San Morales!’

He stopped writing and let his gaze travel into the distance, a faint frown on his brow, but his lips smiling. With an effort, he again collected himself.

‘I must, I must get back to this morning and Rusty Mac. This being a holiday of obligation, I had the forenoon on my hands. On my way down to post a letter at the lodge I ran into the Headmaster coming up from the Stinchar with his rod and without fish. He stopped, supporting his short burly form on the gaff, his ruddy face screwed up, rather put out, beneath his blaze of red hair. I do love Rusty Mac. I think he has some fondness for me and perhaps the simplest explanation is that we are so dourly Scottish and both of us fishers … the only two in the school. When Lady Frazer endowed the College from her Stinchar properties, Rusty claimed the river as his own. The jingo in the
Holywell Monitor
beginning,

I’ll not have my pools
Whipped to ribbons by fools …

neatly takes off his attitude – for he’s a mad fisher. There’s a story of him, in the middle of mass at Frazer Castle, which Holywell serves, when his staunch friend, the Presbyterian Gillie, stuck his head through the window of the oratory bursting with suppressed excitement. “Your reverence! They’re rising like fury in Lochaber Pool!” Never was a mass more quickly completed. The stupefied congregation, including Her Ladyship, was pattered over, blessed at breakneck speed; then a dark streak, not unlike the local concept of the Devil, was seen flying from the sacristy. “ Jock! Jock! What flee are they taking?”