The Thorn Birds (68 page)

“What did you do last night, Jus?”

“I lost my virginity. At least I
think
I did.”

Both his eyes opened. “You’re a prawn.”

“Pooh! High time, I say. How can I hope to be a good actress if I don’t have a clue what goes on between men and women?”

“You ought to save yourself for the man you marry.”

Her face twisted in exasperation. “Honestly, Dane, sometimes you’re so archaic I’m embarrassed! Suppose I don’t meet the man I marry until I’m forty? What do you expect me to do? Sit on it all those years? Is that what you’re going to do, save it for marriage?”

“I don’t think I’m going to get married.”

“Well, nor am I. In which case, why tie a blue ribbon around it and stick it in my nonexistent hope chest? I don’t want to die wondering.”

He grinned. “You can’t, now.” Rolling over onto his stomach, he propped his chin on his hand and looked at her steadily, his face soft, concerned. “Was it all right? I mean, was it awful? Did you hate it?”

Her lips twitched, remembering. “I didn’t hate it, at any rate. It wasn’t awful, either. On the other hand, I’m afraid I don’t see what everyone raves about. Pleasant is as far as I’m prepared to go. And it isn’t as if I chose just anyone; I selected someone very attractive and old enough to know what he was doing.”

He sighed. “You
are
a prawn, Justine. I’d have been a lot happier to hear you say, ‘He’s not much to look at, but we met and I couldn’t help myself.’ I can accept that you don’t want to wait until you’re married, but it’s still something you’ve got to want because of the person. Never because of the act, Jus. I’m not surprised you weren’t ecstatic.”

All the gleeful triumph faded from her face. “Oh, damn you, now you’ve made me feel awful! If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were trying to put me down—or my motives, at any rate.”

“But you do know me better, don’t you? I’d never put you down, but sometimes your motives are plain thoughtlessly silly.” He adopted a tolling, monotonous voice. “I am the voice of your conscience, Justine O’Neill.”

“You are, too, you prawn.” Shade forgotten, she flopped back on the grass beside him so he couldn’t see her face. “Look, you know why. Don’t you?”

“Oh, Jussy,” he said sadly, but whatever he was going to add was lost, for she spoke again, a little savagely.

“I’m never, never,
never
going to love anyone! If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do, I tell you!”

It always hurt him, that she felt left out of love, and hurt more that he knew himself the cause. If there was one overriding reason why she was so important to him, it was because she loved him enough to bear no grudges, had never made him feel a moment’s lessening of her love through jealousy or resentment. To him, it was a cruel fact that she moved on an outer circle while he was the very hub. He had prayed and prayed things would change, but they never did. Which hadn’t lessened his faith, only pointed out to him with fresh emphasis that somewhere, sometime, he would have to pay for the emotion squandered on him at her expense. She put a good face on it, had managed to convince even herself that she did very well on that outer orbit, but he felt her pain. He
knew
. There was so much worth loving in her, so little worth loving in himself. Without a hope of understanding differently, he assumed he had the lion’s share of love because of his beauty, his more tractable nature, his ability to communicate with his mother and the other Drogheda people. And because he was male. Very little escaped him beyond what he simply couldn’t know, and he had had Justine’s confidence and companionship in ways no one else ever had. Mum mattered to Justine far more than she would admit.

But I will atone, he thought. I’ve had everything. Somehow I’ve got to pay it back, make it up to her.

Suddenly he chanced to see his watch, came to his feet bonelessly; huge though he admitted his debt to his sister was, to Someone else he owed even more.

“I’ve got to go, Jus.”

“You and your bloody Church! When are you going to grow out of it?”

“Never, I hope.”

“When will I see you?”

“Well, since today’s Friday, tomorrow of course, eleven o’clock, here.”

“Okay. Be a good boy.”

He was already several yards away, Riverview boater back on his head, but he turned to smile at her. “Am I ever anything else?”

She grinned. “Bless you, no. You’re too good to be true; I’m the one always in trouble. See you tomorrow.”

There were huge padded red leather doors inside the vestibule of Saint Mary’s; Dane poked one open and slipped inside. He had left Justine a little earlier than was strictly necessary, but he always liked to get into a church before it filled, became a shifting focus of sighs, coughs, rustles, whispers. When he was alone it was so much better. There was a sacristan kindling branches of candles on the high altar; a deacon, he judged unerringly. Head bowed, he genuflected and made the Sign of the Cross as he passed in front of the tabernacle, then quietly slid into a pew.

On his knees, he put his head on his folded hands and let his mind float freely. He didn’t consciously pray, but rather became an intrinsic part of the atmosphere, which he felt as dense yet ethereal, unspeakably holy, brooding. It was as if he had turned into a flame in one of the little red glass sanctuary lamps, always just fluttering on the brink of extinction, sustained by a small puddle of some vital essence, radiating a minute but enduring glow out into the far darknesses. Stillness, formlessness, forgetfulness of his human identity; these were what Dane got from being in a church. Nowhere else did he feel so right, so much at peace with himself, so removed from pain. His lashes lowered, his eyes closed.

From the organ gallery came the shuffling of feet, a preparatory wheeze, a breathy expulsion of air from pipes. The Saint Mary’s Cathedral Boys’ School choir was coming in early to sandwich a little practice between now and the coming ritual. It was only a Friday midday Benediction, but one of Dane’s friends and teachers from Riverview was celebrating it, and he had wanted to come.

The organ gave off a few chords, quietened into a rippling accompaniment, and into the dim stone-lace arches one unearthly boy’s voice soared, thin and high and sweet, so filled with innocent purity the few people in the great empty church closed their eyes, mourned for that which could never come to them again.

Panis angelicus

Fit panis hominum,

Dat panis coelicus

Figuris terminum,

O res mirabilis,

Manducat Dominus,

Pauper, pauper,

Servus et humilis….

Bread of angels, heavenly bread, O thing of wonder. Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice! Let Thine ear be attuned to the sounds of my supplication. Turn not away, O Lord, turn not away. For Thou art my Sovereign, my Master, my God, and I am Thy humble servant. In Thine eyes only one thing counts, goodness. Thou carest not if Thy servants be beautiful or ugly. To Thee only the heart matters; in Thee all is healed, in Thee I know peace.

Lord, it is lonely. I pray it be over soon, the pain of life. They do not understand that I, so gifted, find so much pain in living. But Thou dost, and Thy comfort is all which sustains me. No matter what Thou requirest of me, O Lord, shall be give, for I love Thee. And if I might presume to ask anything of Thee, it is that in Thee all else shall be forever forgotten….

“You’re very quiet, Mum,” said Dane. “Thinking of what? Of Drogheda?”

“No,” said Meggie drowsily. “I’m thinking that I’m getting old. I found half a dozen grey hairs this morning, and my bones ache.”

“You’ll never be old, Mum,” he said comfortably.

“I wish that were true, love, but unfortunately it isn’t. I’m beginning to need the borehead, which is a sure sign of old age.”

They were lying in the warm winter sun on towels spread over the Drogheda grass, by the borehead. At the far end of the great pool boiling water thundered and splashed, the reek of sulphur drifted and floated into nothing. It was one of the great winter pleasures, to swim in the borehead. All the aches and pains of encroaching age were soothed away, Meggie thought, and turned to lie on her back, her head in the shade of the log on which she and Father Ralph had sat so long ago. A very long time ago; she was unable to conjure up even a faint echo of what she must have felt when Ralph had kissed her.

Then she heard Dane get up, and opened her eyes. He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of the laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face. It had not yet occurred to her that actually he was no longer in any way a child.

However, the moment of realization came to Meggie at that instant, watching him stand outlined against the crisp sky in his brief cotton swimsuit.

My God, it’s all over! The babyhood, the boyhood.
He’s a man
. Pride, resentment, a female melting at the quick, a terrific consciousness of some impending tragedy, anger, adoration, sadness; all these and more Meggie felt, looking up at her son. It is a terrible thing to create a man, and more terrible to create a man like this. So amazingly male, so amazingly beautiful.

Ralph de Bricassart, plus a little of herself. How could she not be moved at seeing in its extreme youth the body of the man who had joined in love with her? She closed her eyes, embarrassed, hating having to think of her son as a man. Did he look at her and see a woman these days, or was she still that wonderful cipher, Mum? God damn him, God damn him! How dared he grow up?

“Do you know anything about women, Dane?” she asked suddenly, opening her eyes again.

He smiled. “The birds and the bees, you mean?”

“That you know, with Justine for a sister. When she discovered what lay between the covers of physiology textbooks she blurted it all out to everyone. No, I mean have you ever put any of Justine’s clinical treatises into practice?”

His head moved in a quick negative shake, he slid down onto the grass beside her and looked into her face. “Funny you should ask that, Mum. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time, but I didn’t know how to start.”

“You’re only eighteen, love. Isn’t it a bit soon to be thinking of putting theory into practice?” Only eighteen. Only. He was a man, wasn’t he?

“That’s it, what I wanted to talk to you about. Not putting it into practice at all.”

How cold the wind was, blowing down from the Great Divide. Peculiar, she hadn’t noticed until now. Where was her robe? “Not putting it into practice at all,” she said dully, and it was not a question.

“That’s right. I don’t want to, ever. Not that I haven’t thought about it, or wanted a wife and children. I have. But I can’t. Because there isn’t enough room to love them and God as well, not the way I want to love God. I’ve known that for a long time. I don’t seem to remember a time when I didn’t, and the older I become the greater my love for God grows. It’s a great mystery, loving God.”

Meggie lay looking into those calm, distant blue eyes. Ralph’s eyes, as they used to be. But ablaze with something quite alien to Ralph’s. Had he had it, at eighteen? Had he? Was it perhaps something one could only experience at eighteen? By the time she entered Ralph’s life, he was ten years beyond that. Yet her son was a mystic, she had always known it. And she didn’t think that at any stage of his life Ralph had been mystically inclined. She swallowed, wrapped the robe closer about her lonely bones.

“So I asked myself,” Dane went on, “what I could do to show Him how much I loved Him. I fought the answer for a long time, I didn’t want to see it. Because I wanted a life as a man, too, very much. Yet I knew what the offering had to be, I knew…. There’s only one thing I can offer Him, to show Him nothing else will ever exist in my heart before Him. I must offer up His only rival; that’s the sacrifice He demands of me. I am His servant, and He will have no rivals. I have had to choose. All things He’ll let me have and enjoy, save that.” He sighed, plucked at a blade of Drogheda grass. “I must show Him that I understand why He gave me so much at my birth. I must show Him that I realize how unimportant my life as a man is.”

“You can’t do it, I won’t let you!” Meggie cried, her hand reaching for his arm, clutching it. How smooth it felt, the hint of great power under the skin, just like Ralph’s.
Just like Ralph’s
! Not to have some glossy girl put her hand there, as a right?

“I’m going to be a priest,” said Dane. “I’m going to enter His service completely, offer everything I have and am to Him, as His priest. Poverty, chastity and obedience. He demands no less than all from His chosen servants. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do it.”

The look in her eyes! As if he had killed her, ground her into the dust beneath his foot. That he should have to suffer this he hadn’t known, dreaming only of her pride in him, her pleasure at giving her son to God. They
said
she’d be thrilled, uplifted, completely in accord. Instead she was staring at him as if the prospect of his priesthood was her death sentence.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be,” he said in despair, meeting those dying eyes. “Oh, Mum, can’t you understand? I’ve never, never wanted to be anything but a priest! I
can’t
be anything but a priest!”

Her hand fell from his arm; he glanced down and saw the white marks of her fingers, the little arcs in his skin where her nails had bitten deeply. Her head went up, she laughed on and on and on, huge hysterical peals of bitter, derisive laughter.

“Oh, it’s too good to be true!” she gasped when she could speak again, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes with a trembling hand. “The incredible irony! Ashes of roses, he said that night riding to the borehead. And I didn’t understand what he meant. Ashes thou wert, unto ashes return. To the Church thou belongest, to the Church thou shalt be given. Oh, it’s beautiful, beautiful! God rot God, I say! God the sod! The utmost Enemy of women, that’s what God is! Everything we seek to do, He seeks to undo!”