The Red And The Green (11 page)

Millie was transfigured. She bounded furiously forward and cracked the flat of her hand down upon the table. ‘What are you doing in here, you beast? Why are you spying on us? What do you mean by it? Get up!’

Barnabas got to his feet, gaping miserably at Millie and over her shoulder at Pat. He was hunched up, shrinking into himself like a disturbed spider. ‘Sure I just fell asleep. I wasn’t spying, Millie, word of honour. I meant no harm. I don’t know why, I just fell asleep.’

‘I know you creep about and listen. I know your mean ways. Well, take your drunken sleep somewhere else. Go on, get away with you!’ Her long skirt swirled as she aimed a kick at him.

Barney edged round the chair and then bolted past them as if fearing another kick. He fled, not out of the house but toward the back quarters as if to take refuge dog-like in the kitchen.

The incident disgusted Pat. He knew, but preferred not to reflect on, the fact that Barnabas trailed about after Millie and she contemptuously tolerated him. But what angered him now was that Millie simply did not seem to have realized that the person she was thus humiliating was Pat’s stepfather.

Millie herself seemed to become aware of this a second later. She put her hands to her face and said, ‘I’m sorry—’

‘Well, goodbye.’ Pat quickly opened the front door and let himself out into the rain. He turned up his coat collar. She is trash, he thought as he strode away, she is trash, she is trash.

Chapter Seven

‘A
T this period of my life I imperceptibly became aware that I was becoming steadily estranged from my sister Hilda. Perhaps such slow partings, who knows, are our inevitable rehearsals for the final severance. Hilda and I had been united, at an obscure but effectively deep level during childhood by our joint opposition to our parents. But, as time and circumstance shook our characters into position, it became clear that we abhorred the parental way of life for different reasons: Hilda, because it was brittle, noisy, shrewdly inexpensive, and not socially grand; I, because it was utterly unspiritual.

‘There was also, and I felt this increasingly whenever Hilda visited Ireland, the fact that she did not understand either of the women in my life or appreciate the subtle threads of my relationship with them. She was simply not “in the picture”! The dumb devotion of Kathleen, the tender possessive raillery of Millie: Hilda could make little of all this. Indeed, self-absorbed as always, she
saw
very little; but what her intuition silently told her was that there were women, and women whom she variously deemed unworthy, who were rivals for the monopoly of her adored brother.'

Barnabas Drumm had penned these words that very afternoon as he sat at his ‘work' in the National Library, and they now ran through and through his head, all pure and glittering like a clear brook. Or perhaps the words were the stones in the brook, speckled and smooth, which through a trembling translucent medium he saw steadfastly arrayed before him. His words, it seemed to him, rang out with a quiet authority; and when he had uttered a convincing passage it remained with him and eased his spirit for the rest of the day. For several years now Barney had been secretly working on his Memoir. The tattered notebooks about the Irish saints had been touched more intermittently and lately not touched at all. Barney had become completely absorbed in the more interesting task of self-analysis.

Barney had commenced this task when, after a Lenten retreat, he had decided that he must make a serious effort to find out ‘what had gone wrong'. He must, in the most relentless way, examine himself. He had for too long assumed that he could lay it all at
her
door, could count himself a man ruined by a single catastrophe, a catastrophe which passed in a matter of weeks. But a man's life is not so easily destroyed; and as he realized this later he wished that he had known it
then.
He could have picked himself up. So if he was now the wreck that he was it could not simply be
her
fault. There must have been ancient reasons why he had made of himself the young man that he had, so lately it seemed to him, been, and other reasons, or perhaps the same ones, why he had gone on, with all the appearance of a ruthless intention, driving himself into a wilderness of the spirit. He was very unhappy and he felt that he deserved not to be. He did not especially hope that finding out what had gone wrong would help to put it right. He started his project in a mood of pure self-castigation. Sometimes he felt very old and told himself that the least he could do before he died was to face, clear-eyed and squarely, the wreck of his life. Later he found that the task he had undertaken was curiously consoling.

He had been a talented boy for whom much was hoped. He gained a top classical scholarship at Cambridge and mastered Hebrew while still at the University. He was a crack shot and a noted rowing man. He had loving parents, an adoring sister, and plenty of friends. He had loving parents, and yet somehow, from the earliest times he could remember, Barney had resented his parents. He could not think what, in a small child, that resentment could have been. Later on it took form as a thorough impatience with the noisy frolicsome frivolity of the parental world. His fashionable-on-a-shoestring mother laughed, or rather screamed, too much, and his father's ingenious set-piece parties and elaborate much screamed-over practical jokes seemed to him unbearably vulgar. He was hurt by their whole mode of being, although when he reflected upon their misdemeanours they did not really seem very grave. He decided to go to Ireland.

Barney's mother, Grace Drumm,
née
Richardson, was Anglo-Irish, a connection of the Kinnard family, and Barney and his sister had had their share of Irish holidays, during which Hilda had had her eyes dazzled by the splendours of Rathblane. Other things impressed Barney. Ireland was for him a dark place, slow, dignified and mystical: everything that was unlike the gay little, bright little flat in South Kensington. He lost his heart; and it was not long before, the focus shifting a little, he perceived that the mystic beauty of Ireland resided in the Catholic Church.

This perception developed into a great spiritual crisis during which it became clear to him that he had an extreme destiny. He must forswear the world and aim at perfect sanctity: anything less would be, for him, a meaningless, perhaps a disastrous, goal. He took himself away alone to the saint-haunted solitude of Clonmacnoise and stood beside the round tower in the holiest place in Ireland. Here he felt himself, in what later seemed to be a mystical experience, confronted, captured, claimed. What claimed him then was something very old and pure, a Christianity still simple and innocent of blood, whose humble and unpretentious saints lived in little low-roofed cells. The sacred river Shannon, flooding yellow-reeded between the small barrow-like hills, turned under his gaze from pewter-grey to blue and Barney decided that he must become a priest.

To the despair of the family he entered Maynooth and soon donned the soutane. He lived in a perpetual exaltation, giving himself up to austerities and enthusiasms which earned him many a shrewd rebuke from his spiritual advisers. He developed a passionate relationship to the Eucharist. He constantly pictured himself, as it was soon to be, holding the very Body of Christ in his hand and feeding a starving kneeling flock which stretched away to the confines of the earth. At nights he dreamed of the Chalice from which the blood of his Master streamed to take away the sins of the world. He held the cup in his hands, turning with an unspeakable happiness to say,
Ite, missa est.
But he was never ordained. He quite suddenly fell in love with Millie.

Millie in fact, as it seemed later, simply coerced him into love. She was recently widowed and in a condition of intoxication with her new freedom. She had been but vaguely aware of him, had largely ignored him, at their few meetings since her marriage, and Barney had been equally unobservant of her. But when Millie saw him in his soutane she suddenly, recklessly, coveted him. She never deceived him, at least not verbally. She simply wanted this black-robed priestling as her slave, a pet to fondle and caress. She wanted to arouse a blasphemous passion in this pale long-skirted half man. She told him constantly that she was not in love with him. She just needed him to be in love with her. Barney found this absolutely pure-hearted wickedness quite irresistible.

He had had some vague emotional involvements with girls at Cambridge and had counted these as his wild oats. The experience with Millie was entirely different. He was shattered, scattered; and he could not help in fact believing that she loved him. She certainly behaved as if she did. His body, which had seemed a pure vessel, a spiritual temple, scoured, empty and awaiting the final installation of a ghostly visitor, now hotly and needfully enclosed him, a tugging animal of unquiet flesh. It was as if his veins had been emptied and given new blood. He became horribly incarnate; and when the desperately beautiful, desperately desirable Millie looked meltingly into his eyes and inclined her warm lips slowly upon his he felt that God was become man indeed. Of course, Millie restricted her favours to the most superficial caresses, thereby reducing him to a state near to madness. The end came with a party at Maynooth where Barney was discovered with Millie sitting on his knee. He left the College shortly afterwards.

In what order things happened then was never very clear to Barney in his memory: whether he repented and gave up Millie, or whether Millie dropped him and he repented. He often felt able to give himself the benefit of the doubt, since the shock of his dismissal brought back to him an appalling sense of what he had lost. While falling in love he had not explicitly told himself that this meant the end of his vocation. He suffered continual sharp pangs of guilt about what he was doing, but he still felt that he was acting somehow within the framework of his former intention. When that whole numinous world vanished from him and he found himself outside, with nothing to help him except the daily bread of the Church and the penny plain machinery of repentance, he felt himself so broken that he could hardly envisage himself any more as a man. Here Millie, even if she had not at once removed herself, could have been no use to him. In fact, when Millie saw Barney outside Maynooth, stripped of his soutane, a miserable confused young man running round Dublin looking for a job, her interest in him ceased abruptly; and after a meeting at which she treated the whole matter as a joke and then practically accused him of having invented it all, she ceased seeing him altogether. Perhaps she felt ashamed. If so, the only sign of it was that she kept this interlude a close secret and never spoke of it to anyone. Barney's superiors at Maynooth were discreet, and Barney himself had no motives for being talkative, so the part which Millie had played in his life remained almost entirely unknown. It was thought that ‘some woman' had been involved in his decision not to be ordained, but beyond this even rumour did not go.

Kathleen, however, knew. By a curious accident, which Barney later felt to have been decisive in his life, Kathleen, admitted unexpectedly to the house in Upper Mount Street, found Millie and Barney in an embrace. Barney was never sure whether, if that had not happened, he would have chosen to confide in Kathleen; very possibly not. In any case the shock, the sudden appearance of Kathleen as a spectator, and her continued existence as one of the few people ‘in the know' gave her, for him, a privileged position. Through her surprised censorious eyes he saw himself, a robed ordinand passionately embracing a pretty widow of dubious reputation. He resented her knowledge, but it also brought her near to him. In his dereliction, with both Millie and the priesthood lost to him, he had to turn to someone and he turned to Kathleen.

But why did he despair so quickly? he often asked himself. Why did he not accept the full force of the blow, regard himself as someone who, for years perhaps, must remain a broken, humbled man? He ought to have left Dublin and joined himself in a menial capacity to some remote religious house. There were places for such as he. For the disaster had not broken his faith. It had not broken it, but it must, he later felt, have temporarily cracked it, or he would not so quickly have attempted to rearrange the whole pattern of his wishes. He ought to have kept his attention fixed upon the priesthood, regarding that great treasure, which had been so nearly within his grasp, as having simply receded far away, perhaps impossibly far away, but still presenting itself as the only good. He ought to have repented relentlessly, ferociously, and been prepared to lie upon the ground. He ought, strip by strip, to have divested himself of his former mind, of everything that had made him frail and false. Instead of which, without hope, turning his back entirely upon all that had happened, he sought an immediate consolation.

Kathleen, herself lately left a widow, was several years his senior, and he turned to her at first as to a mother or an elder sister. He told her everything, everything not only about Millie but about his whole life, his childhood, his parents, everything. He came to her again and again; and Kathleen listened to him with a plain gentleness and wisdom which made her seem to him a supremely good woman, the first good woman that he had ever met. She uttered no reproaches, but she made no allowances and he was grateful for her willingness to judge him. Then there began to be a kind of meaning in his escape from the bad woman to the good woman. With an easeful sweetness which was quite unlike his recent frenzy he started to love her. And it seemed that she loved him too, loved him for his history and for his need of her. She represented suddenly and as it were all complete the possibility of the good life which he had previously sought in a mistaken quarter. He now saw himself as a Catholic husband, a Catholic father, the upholder of a pure, robust, cheerful Catholic home, his house renowned as a refuge for the guilty and the unfortunate. He saw a way here which led straight back to innocence. He proposed to Kathleen and she accepted him.

What went wrong? It seemed to him that he was settling down. He found himself a small job in the Civil Service and started work upon his history of the early Irish Church. He published an article, which was lengthily though adversely criticized in
The Sword of the Spirit,
entitled ‘Some Druidic Origins of the Christian Mysteries'. He became interested in the struggle between the Irish and the Roman Church which preceded the Council of Whitby. He began to perceive important affinities between the Irish Church and the Eastern Church. Ireland and the East, he proposed to demonstrate, had spoken the pure tongue of the Gospels, preserving a mystical freedom and a spirit of love which were increasingly lost to the over-organized and over-theorized Roman machine. He published a tract called
From Athos to Athlone
and began to correspond with some very sophisticated French Jesuits who chaffed him about the dangers of heresy. He made a detailed study of the origins of monasticism in Ireland and formed a strong attachment to Saint Brigid, generous, gentle, miraculous saint, and went on devout pilgrimages upon her tracks. He projected a book entitled
The Significance of Brigid
as the first volume of his
ouvre.
It seemed like the good life. Yet during all this time he had not consummated his marriage with Kathleen.

Perhaps it was that after all there was really no short way back to innocence. As soon as he had tied himself to Kathleen, Barney began to feel subdued resentment which had to do both with the priesthood and with Millie. At a conscious reflective level he made out the irrevocable and tedious nature of the marriage bond which linked him to a material, cheated him of a spiritual, destiny; while in the deeper thoughts of his flesh he hopelessly missed Millie and knew it would be sacrilege without zeal to accept a second best. He had missed two absolutes and was left with a compromise. Symbol of two losses, he retained his virginity.