The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (16 page)

But this seemed too impersonal. She looked up at the Sacred Heart for guidance and saw with shame that He was turned towards the wall. She stood on the bed and turned Him around to face her. His eyes, as always when the sin was committed, were hurt and reproving.

‘I am sorry, I am terribly sorry and I promise Thee that it will never happen again.’

But He did not believe her. His eyes said as much: she half expected Him to shake His head and turn His sad face away.

And who could blame Him? Why should He believe me when I’m such a backslider, such a weak, useless, hopeless sinner?

Useless and hopeless, she straightened the bed, lit the bedside lamp and went to the mantelpiece to stare at the photograph of her dear aunt. A good thing God took you away, she thought, a mercy. For if you could only see me now, how could you have borne the shame of it?

Penitence gave strength. The open admission of error helped

to drive it out. Still trembling, but with new confidence, she lit her gas fire. She warmed her hands for some minutes, then went to the wardrobe and put on her old green tweed coat and a dark red hat. She turned the stove and lights out and locked the door. She felt light-headed and terribly weak, it was the want of food, she was sure. If she hurried, the teashop at Bradbury Place would still be open. A cup of tea and a sandwich would do wonders.

But there was to be no slipping out. When she reached the

hallway, the curtained door opened to reveal Mrs Henry Rice, fat and curious, her bland eyes showing nothing of what went on behind them. She stepped close to Miss Hearne, took her arm and put her face very near. At that moment, Miss Hearne blessed her foresight in eating so many of the nauseating scented cachous.

‘Feeling better now?’

‘O, yes, thanks.’

‘Catch a chill or something? You certainly slept a long time.’ ‘Well, I wasn’t feeling up to the mark.’ (Woman to woman, I must find a bond.) ‘O dear,’ she said, holding her handbag tight against her stomach to stop the trembling. ‘We women have to put up with a lot. Men are so lucky.’

Mrs Henry Rice raised her eyebrows. ‘You feel sick with it?

Some do. I used to get awful headaches myself, every thirty

three days, regular as clockwork.’

‘I know,’ Miss Hearne said. ‘Headaches are even worse than

being sick. Still, I do feel rotten.’

But her lie had not taken. Mrs Henry Rice had opened

a trap for her victim. She closed it now, with a smile of

full-bloated malice. ‘Well, it seems to affect you pretty

merrily. Why, you were singing away all afternoon.’

‘ No - I mean

‘Yes, singing and talking away to yourself as happy as a lark. It’s a wonder nobody complained, you were louder than the wireless.’

‘I-I used to sing a lot. I was-practising. I give music lessons, you know. I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t realise I was disturbing anyone. I-I suppose the walls are thinner than I expected.’

‘The walls in this house are not thin, they’re old walls, very thick, as a matter of fact. You’d have to shout at the top of your voice to be heard.’

‘Well, a person singing - you know the singing voice carries. The tones penetrate. I’m awfully sorry if I disturbed you.’

‘O, singing’s loud, I know that. Why, there was a drunk man in the street last week, you could hear him a mile away. It’s terrible the noise a drunk man makes.’

She knows. The bad, black-hearted slimy voice of her. O, I could kill her. ‘Well, I must hurry on out now, Mrs Rice, if you don’t mind. I have an engagement.’

‘It’s a pity you weren’t up and about sooner. My brother was asking for you, but he’s gone downtown now.

‘O, indeed? Well, I must be on my way. Good night, Mrs

Rice.’

‘Good night, Miss Hearne. And-Miss Hearne?’

Yes?

‘You will be careful, won’t you? About singing. I wouldn’t like people to get the wrong impression.’

‘What do you mean, the wrong impression?’

‘Well, people are funny. Even Jim, my brother, he got the wrong idea about it. Why he said to me this afternoon that it sounded as if you were having a party in your room. I said no,

that was silly, you were just singing to yourself.’ ‘Good night, Mrs Rice.’ ‘Good night.’

The night air helped. It tasted clean and fresh and she breathed deeply as she walked, trying to stop the trembling

which had now become a sort of shivering as the cold crept into her bones. She felt nauseated. Singing, talking to herself, awful, it was awful. And in front of other people. In front of him, what could he think of her? He had waited to see her, his horrid sister had rubbed that in, the sly one.

The Bon-Bon teashop was still open, thank heavens. She picked a table near the radiator. A slow, shuffling waitress took her order and served a pot of tea and an egg sandwich. With her eyes on the slightly soiled tablecloth, Miss Hearne forced herself to get the food down. She drank the tea and when the pot of tea was empty, she asked for more hot water. But the waitress h ad seen her before and knew that she never tipped. The kitchen was closed, she said, she was sorry, but the teashop closed in five minutes, at nine o’clock.

She paid and went out. The thought of going back to her room was hateful. It was too late to go anywhere else, the pictures, for instance, and besides, even the pictures couldn’t stop the shaking. There was only one other place to go, and perhaps an hour there, an hour of quiet prayer, would give her strength to resist the temptation that was coming fast upon her.

It was shameful, shameful. Singing like a crazy woman, lying on the floor of her room, drunken, dirty, sinning, while God in His Heaven looked down at her. And then being forced to humiliate herself in front of a person like Mrs Rice, telling that lie about monthlies and being caught in it. Could anybody blame her if she despised me? I deserve it. I’m rotten, rotten, just a useless woman, all alone.

But there in front of her was Saint Finbar’s, its Gothic spire uplifted like two praying hands, a grey religious place, the house of God in the peace of night. She went in, dipping her hand in the dirty Holy Water font, making the Sign of the Cross as she pushed open the door leading from the vestibule to the nave.

The church was dark: here and there, a small lamp or a cluster of candles burned in lonely devotion before a picture, beneath an altar. The church was empty: cleared of its stock of rituals, invocations, prayers, a deserted spiritual warehouse

waiting new consignments. One old woman kept watch for the community, sitting in the darkness with her back to a radiator. Was she praying as she watched the altar, or had she come in to keep warm?

This quiet, this gloom, this immense repose, soothed Miss Hearne as she Stood in the deep shadows at the back of the church. She walked up the highway of the centre aisle, past the side aisles tormented by the Stations of the Cross, up to the great golden and white sweep of the main altar. She genuflected, and sat down in the front bench, feeling faint, weary, but at peace.

O Sacred Heart forgive me, she prayed, her eyes on the small golden door of the tabernacle. God sat behind that door, God in the form af bread by the sacrifice of the Mass, God sat alone behind that door in His empty church. Deserted God, she thought, You “wait alone each night while men forget You.

The tabernacle glowed red-old from the small light of the hanging sacristy lamp She rmlembered that when the lamp is lit, God is in the tabernacle. When it is put out on Good Friday, He is absent.

The sacristy lamp winked In the shadows the old woman stood up, genuflected, and “turned her back on God. Miss Hearne watched the tabernacle, heard the dragging footsteps, the muffled slap of the swinging door, as the old woman went out into the streets. Alone in the immensity of His house, she gazed at the unseer, Presence behind the little golden door. Alone with her God, she knelt down and begged Him.

O Sacred Heart, please, I need Your strength, Your help. Why should life be so hard for me, why am I alone, why did I yield to the temptation of drink, why, why has it all happened like this? O Sacred Heart, lighten my cross, You know it was hard, aunt dying after all those years of caring for her and You, only You, know the things I wanted, the home, children to raise up to honour and reverence You. O Sweet Jesus, You have shared my suffering, You know that I love You, please dear Lord, give me a sign, give me strength.

Tears wet her eyes. She raised her head. But the tabernacle was silent. Behind the door, God watched. He gave no sign.

And around her the statues, unlit and unlovely, stared coldly across the church, unhearing, uncaring. Our Lady, her eyes and hands uplifted in her own private prayer; Saint Patrick, a

aunt old man in a green chasuble and a golden mitre, his right and gripping a staff, unmindful of the snakes which coiled around its base; Saint Joseph, his meek eyes downcast, a good grey-beard few people prayed to. Plaster saints, no entreaty could move them. Alone, rejected, Miss Hearne looked again at the tabernacle, behind whose tiny door bread made into the Body of God lay hidden. The Holy of Holies.

Behind the altar an old sacristan appeared, a minor mummer on God’s stage. Perfunctorily, he paused, genuflected in front of the tabernacle, then mounted the altar steps. His old eyes sought the tabernacle, dismissed it and he went wearily around the back of the altar. She heard him fumble with a switch and the lights in the side aisles went out. Then he came around the front again, walked down the steps and opened the little gate at the Communion rail. He did not genuflect but walked straight down the main aisle.

‘Closing now, closing,’ he said in an angry voice as he passed her bench.

But she sat stiffly, terrified by the thing she had felt. For when the lights went out, it seemed as though the tabernacle were empty, a little golden house, set in the middle of a huge mantelpiece. It was as though the old sacristan, keeper of secrets, knew he had no need to genuflect again. The lights were out, the people had gone home, the church was closing. In the tabernacle there was no God. Only round wafers of unleavened bread. She had prayed to bread. The great ceremonial of the Mass, the singing, the incense, the benedictions, what if it was show, all useless show? What if it meant nothing, nothing?

O God, God forgive me! she cried, falling on her knees. Forgive me, O Sacred Heart, for the terrible doubt the devil put in my head. O my guardian angel, shield me, protect me. Forgive me, O God, for I have sinned. I have blasphemed.

The footsteps returned. ‘You’ll have to leave now, missis,’ the old sacristan said. His soutane was unbuttoned, showing a

dirty brown pullover underneath. She looked into his old discoloured eyes, searching for secrets. But saw only that he was fired, that he wanted to close the church, that he wanted her to go.

She sat up then and watched as the old man banged the Communion gate shut, all pretence at devotion gone, as he went to close the side door without bending a knee to his immortal God.

She stood up, bowed her head to the tabernacle, genuflected and went quickly down the aisle to the door. She made the Sign of the Cross in dirty Holy Water (if it is only ordinary water and the priest is wrong…?) and went out of the church, hearing the swinging door slap shut.

Outside the church gates, people passed. People busy with the immediate things of life. People making a living, bringing up children, planning, talking, sharing each other. Alone, Miss Hearne looked back at the church, an unhaunted house of God, an empty place, stripped of the singing, the ritual, stripped of men; men who brought it to sudden glorious life.

Empty. And above her, the night sky, curved and vast. An empty sky, nothing beyond it but the stars, the planets, with the earth spinning among them. Surely some great design kept it all moving, some Presence made it meaningful. But what if the godless were right, what if it all started back ions ago with fish crawling out of the sea to become men and women? What if not Adam and Eve, but apes, great monkeys, were our ancestors? In that world, what place had a God who cared for suffering?

She began to walk. Supposing, just supposing, her heart cried, supposing nobody has listened to me in all these years of prayers. Nobody at all up above me, watching over me. Then nothing is sinful. There is no sin. And I have been cheated, the crimson nights in that terrible book from Paris, the sin, permissible then. Nobody above. Nobody to care. Whiteness hers, he seized, revelled in. Virile he, his dark flashing eyes, they lifted beakers of wine and quaffed them, losing themselves in the intoxication of love, homage to Bacchus, lusts of the flesh. That handsome boy bathing that

day at Greystones, standing up in his tight bathing trunks, his bump of virility sticking out, he would enfold me, he would run gracefully with me up the strand to the dunes. No sin in it. It would be passion, sublime freedom. And my breasts bare, that day in Doctor Bowe’s surgery, his assistant, McNamara his name, me lying on the examination couch, my arms hanging over the edge, and he came close, yes, close, his stethoscope cold on my chest, he bent over and against the back of my hand his trousers pressed, I felt it, his thing, swelling there soft, he didn’t notice, an accident, but behind the material it was there, soft, swelling, the hot flushes I had, daren’t move my hand for fear he’d notice, felt it against the back of my hand, soft, hard, warm, supposing he had noticed, it swelled, all caution gone, he had turned, the rough beast, tearing his clothes off, black hair all over him, lusting after my whiteness, yes, I could too, give myself, gipsy girl, hair about my shoulders, my breasts bare, rolling on the greensward, Romany marriage, blood mixing blood, while he, his male blackness enfolds me. It would be nature, not sin. For remember the night old John Healy said to aunt that if he weren’t a Catholic and did not believe, then what would there be to prevent him living as a profligate, cheating his neighbours, owning slaves, living like a great Roman in the golden days of Ikome. R.ome, Samson and Delilah, his great powerful half-naked body in the picture. What would prevent him, what indeed? No hell, no purgatory, no responsibility to God. If all the priests were wrong and you died and slept into nothingness, what point, then, in all of that? The community, it can go hang, what did the community ever do for me that I should help my fellow man?