The Collected Stories

‘There are soldiers with guns all over the place. And a girl came up to me on the street. There was that man with a bit of the Cross. There’s you, drinking and smoking in this place –’

‘Now, listen to me, Francis –’

‘Nazareth would be a disappointment. And the Sea of Galilee. And the Church of the Loaves and Fishes.’ His voice had risen. He lowered it again. ‘I couldn’t believe in the Stations this morning. I couldn’t see it happening the way I do at home.’

‘That’s nothing to do with her death, Francis. You’ve got a bit of jet-lag, you’ll settle yourself up in Galilee. There’s an atmosphere in Galilee that nobody misses.’

‘I’m not going near Galilee.’ He struck the surface of the table, and Father Paul told him to contain himself. People turned their heads, aware that anger had erupted in the pale-faced man with the priest.

‘Quieten up,’ Father Paul commanded sharply, but Francis didn’t.

‘She knew I’d be better at home,’ he shouted, his voice shrill and reedy. ‘She knew I was making a fool of myself, a man out of a shop trying to be big –’

‘Will you keep your voice down? Of course you’re not making a fool of yourself.’

‘Will you find out about planes tomorrow morning?’

Father Paul sat for a moment longer, not saying anything, hoping his brother would say he was sorry. Naturally it was a shock, naturally he’d be emotional and feel guilty, in a moment it would be better. But it wasn’t, and Francis didn’t say he was sorry. Instead he began to weep.

‘Let’s go up to your room,’ Father Paul said, ‘and I’ll fix about the plane.’

Francis nodded but did not move. His sobbing ceased, and then he said, ‘I’ll always hate the Holy Land now.’

‘No need for that, Francis.’

But Francis felt there was and he felt he would hate, as well, the brother he had admired for as long as he could remember. In the lounge of the Plaza Hotel he felt mockery surfacing everywhere. His brother’s deceit, and the endless whisky in his brother’s glass, and his casualness after a death seemed like the scorning of a Church which honoured so steadfastly the mother of its founder. Vivid in his mind, his own mother’s eyes reminded him that they’d told him he was making a mistake, and upbraided him for not heeding her. Of course there was mockery everywhere, in the splinter of wood beneath plastic, and in the soldiers with guns that were not toys, and the writhing nakedness in the Holy City. He’d become part of it himself, sending postcards to the dead. Not speaking again to his brother, he went to his room to pray.

‘Eight a.m., sir,’ the girl at the reception desk said, and Father Paul asked that arrangements should be made to book two seats on the plane, explaining that it was an emergency, that a death had occurred. ‘It will be all right, sir,’ the girl promised.

He went slowly downstairs to the bar. He sat in a corner and lit a cigarette and ordered two whiskys and ice, as if expecting a companion. He drank them both himself and ordered more. Francis would return to Co. Tipperary and after the funeral he would take up again the life she had ordained for him. In his brown cotton coat he would serve customers with nails and hinges and wire. He would regularly go to Mass and to Confession and to Men’s Confraternity. He would sit alone in the lacecurtained sitting-room, lonely for the woman who had made him what he was, married forever to her memory.

Father Paul lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one. He continued to order whisky in two glasses. Already he could sense the hatred that Francis had earlier felt taking root in himself. He wondered if he would ever again return in July to Co. Tipperary, and imagined he would not.

At midnight he rose to make the journey to bed and found himself unsteady on his feet. People looked at him, thinking it disgraceful for a priest to be drunk in Jerusalem, with cigarette ash all over his clerical clothes.

Lovers of Their Time

Looking back on it, it seemed to have to do with that particular decade in London. Could it have happened, he wondered, at any other time except the 1960s? That feeling was intensified, perhaps, because the whole thing had begun on New Year’s Day, 1963, long before that day became a bank holiday in England. ‘That’ll be two and nine,’ she’d said, smiling at him across her counter, handing him toothpaste and emery boards in a bag. ‘Colgate’s, remember,’ his wife had called out as he was leaving the flat. ‘The last stuff we had tasted awful.’

His name was Norman Britt. It said so on a small plastic name-plate in front of his position in the travel agency where he worked, Travel-Wide as it was called. Marie a badge on her light-blue shop- coat announced. His wife, who worked at home, assembling jewellery for a firm that paid her on a production basis, was called Hilda.

Green’s the Chemist’s and Travel-Wide were in Vincent Street, a street that was equidistant from Paddington Station and Edgware Road. The flat where Hilda worked all day was in Putney. Marie lived in Reading with her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Druk, both of them widows. She caught the 8.05 every morning to Paddington and usually the 6.30 back.

He was forty in 1963, as Hilda was; Marie was twenty-eight. He was tall and thin, with a David Niven moustache. Hilda was thin also, her dark hair beginning to grey, her sharply featured face pale. Marie was well- covered, carefully made up, her hair dyed blonde. She smiled a lot, a slack, half-crooked smile that made her eyes screw up and twinkle; she exuded laziness and generosity. She and her friend Mavis went dancing a lot in Reading and had a sizeable collection of men friends. ‘Fellas’ they called them.

Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her coral-coloured lips, like two tiny sausages, only softer, pressed upon his moustache and his abbreviated mouth. He imagined the warmth of her hand in his. For all that, she was a little outside reality: she was there to desire, to glow erotically in the heady atmosphere of the Drummer Boy, to light cigarettes for in a fantasy.

‘Isn’t it cold?’ he said as she handed him the emery boards and the toothpaste.

‘Shocking,’ she agreed, and hesitated, clearly wanting to say something else. ‘You’re in that Travel-Wide,’ she added in the end. ‘Me and my friend want to go to Spain this year.’

‘It’s very popular. The Costa Brava?’

‘That’s right.’ She handed him threepence change. ‘In May.’