Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

But before Denise could speak, Bernard Negri said, ‘It’s all right for Alan to concentrate on what sort of goodnight kiss you’re going to give a girl, but I think the most important thing for a Catholic boy to worry about is where the kiss takes place. I mean we’ve been taught all our lives not to go into an occasion of sin. I think I heard once that if you deliberately go into an occasion of sin that you know full well will probably cause you to sin, you’ve already committed a mortal sin as serious as the one you thought you were probably going to commit anyway.

‘Well, as I was saying, it depends where you are when the kiss takes place. If you’re standing on her front veranda with the front light on and you know her parents are sitting up inside waiting for her, there’s probably no danger in it. But if you’re at one of these parties where the parents go away and leave the young people on their own and somebody turns the lights off, isn’t there a grave danger that you’ll be tempted to do something worse than kissing?’

Adrian congratulated himself for having avoided all the tangled moral problems of company-keeping. He kissed Denise tenderly on the forehead and said, ‘So much for the pleasures of marriage. To speak of more serious matters — even many good Catholics are not aware of all the graces and spiritual benefits they’re entitled to get from marriage. Luckily for us, I’ve always read everything I could find on the subject. And buried away in an A.C.T.S. pamphlet today I found a wonderful bit of news.

‘The author (a priest, of course) says marriage is a sacrament that goes on providing grace for the marriage partners all their lives. Year after year they can draw on this bottomless reservoir of grace to increase their own sanctity and earn for themselves a higher place in heaven. How? Well, believe it or not, every act of sexual intimacy between the partners (provided it’s performed with the right motives and isn’t sinful for some other reason) actually earns them an extra amount of grace.

‘That’s something to think about some night when you’re just about to say you’re too tired for it. If you can make a special effort to oblige me, you’ll enjoy a spiritual reward.’

It was now completely dark on the veranda. Sherd couldn’t see his wife’s face, but she squeezed his fingers to show she was quietly thrilled by what he had told her.

Inside, the boys had finished their discussion and the priest was walking out from his corner into the middle of the room to sum up.

The priest said, ‘You’ll notice I kept right out of the discussion, boys. It’s very important in a job like mine to hear the views of people like yourselves who have to live in the world, and let you explain your attitudes without any fear of having your heads bitten off by a priest for contradicting the Church’s teachings.

‘By and large, most of you seem to have a fairly sound idea of where a young Catholic man stands when he’s dealing with the opposite sex. But I think the whole discussion went wrong somehow when you got onto this business of the goodnight kiss. (He looked at the notes in his hand.) Now I don’t want to single out any one boy for what he said, but one of you seemed to think that just because, “it’s the custom nowadays” or “everybody’s doing it” or “you see it in all the latest films”, then a Catholic has to be in it and go along with the mob for fear they’ll laugh at him or think he’s old-fashioned.

‘If any boy still thinks after all his years at a Catholic secondary school that he’s going to decide what to do in life by what the rest of the world is doing, he’d better use the time remaining in this retreat to sit down and ask himself some very serious questions. Or, better still, he’d better make an appointment to see me or one of the other priests for a man-to-man chat.’

The priest paused and looked at his notes. The boys all knew it was childish and unfair to look at Alan McDowell just then, but most of them sneaked a look, even so. McDowell was pale and still, but otherwise he was taking it fairly well.

The priest said, ‘Perhaps this is the time to go over very briefly the few facts a Catholic has to know about this whole matter of mixed company-keeping.’

While he talked, the priest looked hard at one boy after another. Adrian was sure the priest was annoyed with the boys. He hoped the priest had noticed how he himself kept aloof from the childish discussion. Perhaps the priest would even realise from the look on Adrian’s face that he was far beyond the stage of kissing on doorsteps and already deep into the Church’s teachings on married life.

The priest was saying, ‘It’s quite simple, really. The basic rules cover all possible situations that you’re likely to come up against. To commit a mortal sin you have to fulfil three simple conditions. There must be grave matter, full knowledge and full consent.

Now there’s no need to explain about knowledge and consent. All of you are sane rational creatures and you all possess free will. You know what it means to know fully what you’re doing. And you know what it means to consent to something fully with your will. These things are clearcut. The third condition — grave matter — might not be so clear in your minds, but the Church’s rules are very simple.

‘The pleasures of the body are for married people alone. At your age anything you do with a girl that gives rise to physical pleasure is sufficient material for a mortal sin. With regard to the bosom, the breasts of a girl — those are grave matter at all times. And you shouldn’t have to be told that her private places are absolutely out of bounds.

‘But of course you can commit a mortal sin with any part of a girl’s body. I can readily imagine the circumstances when a young fellow would sin over a girl’s hands or arms, the exposed skin around her neck, even her feet or her bare toes.

‘It’s no use saying afterwards, “But I only intended to give her an innocent kiss.” The Church is older and wiser than any of you. Listen to her advice.’

While the boys followed the priest into the chapel for evening prayers, Adrian looked at their solemn faces and pitied them. They could do no more than look at the faces and forearms, and perhaps the ankles and calves, of all the girls they met until they finally married. How could they face such a bleak future without the thought of someone like Denise to inspire and console them?

Sherd’s daily life at Our Lady of the Ranges left him plenty of time for thinking. Thrusting his potato-fork into the clotted red soil and lifting out the ponderous tubers, swollen with nourishment, or perched on a handmade stool in the milking-shed, resting his head against the glossy flank of a Jersey cow and squirting her warm creamy milk so that it rang against the silvery metal of the bucket or lost itself with a rich satisfying sound in the fatty bubbles all over the surface, he looked back on his youth or pondered over the problems of the modern world.

He often remembered the year before he met Denise — the year when he became a slave of lust and couldn’t sleep at night until he had seduced some film star. When he looked back on that year from the peace of the Otways (where he and his wife went to mass and communion every morning and confession every fortnight — although they had only a few petty faults to confess) he squirmed with shame. It was the episode in his life that still disturbed him.

Sometimes, to make himself more humble and less self-satisfied, he deliberately paused just before making love to his wife and thought, ‘If I were to do to this angelic creature beneath me what I once did to those bold-faced film stars; if I grabbed those parts of her that I used to handle and slobber over on their bodies; if I did everything slowly to prolong the act and tire her as I tired them; or if I lost control of myself at the last moment and said to her the crazy things I used to blurt out to them—.’ But he could never imagine what she would do — the very idea was preposterous.