John McGahern - The Dark

The meal passed in continual pleasantry and gossip, even Ryan towards the end asserted himself enough to tell a safe joke. Afterwards they sat together till close to midnight, a kind of intensity or excitement gathering, whether from the closeness of bodies or personalities, for the local talk hardly deserved such eagerness or passion. The priest’s face was flushed when he rose, he lingering for twenty minutes pro¬ longing it between the chair and the door, reluctant to let the evening go, though it was past its time.

That was the one chance he got alone with Joan. She’d grown since she left them, but her face was more pale and drawn.

“Are you alright?”

She said nothing, he knew something was the matter.

“Are you not happy, Joan, or what?”

“No, it’s worse than home,” she said and that was all there was time for before they were joined by Mrs. Ryan.

“It’s worse than home,” troubled him in the priest’s car but he had no time to hunt to see.

“We’re late, strange how you hang too long talking once it goes late, anything rather than go home. And when you think back you can’t know what you’ve been talking all the time about,” the priest said as he drove fast into the empty night, the branches of the trees along the road clean in the moon.

He sat on the leather seat, the flies flaring constantly into the sweep of the headlamps, worse than home fading from his mind. He was driving with a priest in the night, his father and home miles away. This night he’d sleep in a strange house. He knew nothing.

The car slowed in the road of sycamores, and turned in open gates, the tyres sounding on the gravel. The church with its bell-rope dangling and the presbytery at the end of the circular drive were clear in the moon, the graveyard between, the headstones showing over the laurels along the drive. In the gravel clearing before the house the car stopped beside where a cactus flowered out of a bugled pedestal. He got out his case and coat and stood in the moon. Between the laurels of the drive a path of white gravel ran unbordered through the graves to the sacristy door.

“We have the good company of the dead about us,” the priest smiled as if he’d read his mind, “but there’s no need for them to disturb you, they do not walk, not till the Last Day.”

“It’s a strange feeling though.”

“It’ll pass, don’t worry.”

The house was cluttered with old and ponderous furniture, religious pictures in heavy gilt frames and an amazing collection of grandfather clocks on the walls. Two glasses with sandwiches and a jug of milk stood on a tray in the sitting-room.

“John has left us something. We might as well eat,” the priest said and filled both glasses.

“Who is John?”

“I never told you, he keeps house for me.”

“And is he old?”

“Younger than you, just sixteen. He’s from a large family at the other end of the parish.”

“Isn’t it unusual for a boy?”

“I suppose. It was his mother mentioned to me that he was fond of housework, which is unusual, I suppose. I was driven crazy at the time with an old harridan of a priest’s housekeeper who was trying at the time to run me and the parish as well as the house. So I suggested to the mother that he should come to me until he is eighteen, I’ll try to use what influence I have to get him placed in a good hotel then. It’s a career with enormous opportunity these days. So everyone is quite happy with the arrangement. I give him some training, so I’d be glad while you’re here if you’re not free with him, treat him respectfully of course, but never forget that both of you are in unequal positions. Anything else would do his training no good.”

They’d finished eating. The priest’s eyes fixed on the mantelpiece where two delf bulldogs flanked a statue of St. Martin de Porres as he returned to his chair from leaving the tray back on the table.

“This is what I mean,” he said. “He must have dusted the mantelpiece and look how he’s arranged the things, absolutely no sense of placing.”

He gazed respectfully as the priest changed the bulldogs to a position that satisfied him but he could see no difference now than before, just bulldogs about a statue of a small negro in brown and cream robes on the white marble.

“Absolutely no sense of taste, a very uncultivated people even after forty years of freedom the mass of Irish are. You just can’t make silk out of sow’s ear at the drop of a hat,” he smiled and took off his Roman collar and lay back in the chair.

It was shocking to see a priest without his collar for the first time. The neck was chafed red. The priest looked human and frail.

“I always have to eat just before bed, since I was operated on, they cut two-thirds of my stomach away that time.”

“When was that, father?”

“In Birmingham. I hadn’t felt well for ages but put it on the long finger. Then I suddenly collapsed in the sacristy as I was unrobing myself after Mass. The surgeon said it was a miracle I pulled through.”

He yawned and in the same sleepy movement began to unbutton his trousers. He drew up the shirt and vest to show his naked stomach, criss-crossed by two long scars, the blue toothmarks of the stitches clear. He showed the pattern of the operation with a finger spelling it out on the shocking white flesh.

“One-third has to do the work of the whole now, so it’s why I have to eat late, you can never take much at any one sitting,” he was saying as he replaced his clothes when a clock chimed once in the hallway. Its echoes hadn’t died when another struck, harsher and more metallic, and then a medley of single strikes from all the house, startling when two clocks struck on the wall of the room.

“The last curate died here, he was a collector, and left them to the parish. They say the collection is worth something but you can’t very well go and sell them so soon. They’re a nuisance but John takes some curious delight in keeping them wound.

“It’s one anyhow,” he rose.

They knelt beside the armchairs, continual yawns impossible to suppress in the prayerful murmur.

Then he took the oil-lamp to show the way upstairs to the room.

“THERE’S THE WARDROBE, YOU CAN HANG YOUR CLOTHES. John’s left a candle and matches. Would you like to light it before I go?”

“No, thanks, father, it’s bright enough. I’ll just get into bed.”

“Don’t worry about the morning. Sleep as long as you want. We’ll call you for breakfast.”

“What time will you say Mass, father?”

“Early but there’s no need for you to go. You came a long journey. There’ll be other mornings. If you’re awake you’ll hear noises.”

“I’ll probably be awake, father.”

“If you are you can come down but it doesn’t matter.”

Yet he didn’t move. He stayed with the lamp in his hand at the door, as if he expected to say a closer goodnight than the word, the collarless shirt was open on the chafed throat, and not the goodnight kiss your cursed father took years ago now on this priested mouth.

“Thanks, father. You’re very good to me,” you managed to shift away to the foot of the bed.

“I hope you sleep and are comfortable,” he made uneasy pause before he dipped his fingers into the holy water container in the robes about the feet of the statue of the Virgin on the wall and sprinkled drops towards you and said, “Good night. God guard you.”

“Good night, father,” you said as you made the sign of the cross, and he was gone, the door closed.

You took the few things you’d brought out of the suitcase and left them in the wardrobe, the textbooks you hoped to study while you were here to one side on the bed, with the nightclothes. The moon came across the graveyard, its image cut in two by a diagonal crack in the dressing-table mirror the other end of the room. Underneath the window the car shone black on the gravel beside the cactus. Wild grasses twisted on the iron railings in the graveyard grew living and yellow. The bell-rope dangled from the tower down over the gravel path to the sacristy in the moonlight.