Crooked Vows (24 page)

Into thin air. And there will be nothing left except that ugly grey shed of a church and Sister Agatha hauling children around by their ears, and Father Kevin going through the motions and harrying his flock about the parish debt, and much worse. And if there's nothing else left, what then? Perhaps there will be something else after all, but for the moment he can't see what it might be.

Thomas turns away to the problem of the moment. What about Father Kevin and the Regan boy? The unavoidable conclusion emerges ready-made from the recesses of his mind. Like the unexplained disappearance of a young lady, this is not the archbishop's business; it is police business. The archbishop might, in spite of Father Kevin's fears, simply move him on to another parish, as the previous incumbent had done, several times. Of course Thomas must go to the police with his story. And of course the consequences for Father Kevin will be dire, with an adult eyewitness testifying to what he saw. He can see the tears spilling down the old man's cheeks. But there is no possible alternative.

The consequences for Thomas himself, these are more difficult to think about. Going to the police will surely be seen as treachery. He will be cutting himself off from the world he has lived in for years. But that world of the imagination, with its spires and saints and stained glass and Latin plain-chant, has already faded. For him it will be completely gone soon, he realises, no matter what he does about Father Kevin. And he will have to look for another world. He has no idea what else he is likely to find there.

He wanders past the church towards the presbytery, and beyond it, the boundary of the church property. There is that shrub leaning over from the other side of the fence. Apple blossom hibiscus. Pink flowers covering it. So many have fallen that there's a fading carpet of blossom covering a patch of the otherwise barren ground. To have a shrub like that would be worth something. It wouldn't last forever; but perhaps nothing does.

17

Another World

Tom wakes again suddenly, out of the same dream. It has been waiting for him in ambush for weeks, emerging at least once, sometimes twice a night; one night it came three times. In the dream he is swimming in a huge expanse of dark water. He sees her in the water, too. He is conscious in the dream that it is some time since she was with him, but she is there, a long way off, and swimming steadily towards him. He sets out to swim to her, to touch her, to hold her. They approach closer and closer until both are stretching out arms to each other and their hands are almost touching. And he wakes, stretching out his arm to touch her, hold her, finding again her absence in the empty bed.

Sleep has become even more difficult. He goes to bed every night afraid of the dream hiding there in wait for him, and the desolate awakening. What sleep he gets seems to leave him feeling more exhausted than before.

Everyone has good advice to offer. Time, they say, will make it easier; they don't explain how much more of it is needed. Time moves at its own pace.

Try to remember the good times—that is another piece of advice that he hears everywhere. He thinks of a good time. Calls up a cherished memory of her walking towards him naked out of the water on a secluded beach. One of their many camping trips. Tears come to his eyes with the thought that a time like that will not come again.

She laughs, asks him whether he ever imagined himself naked on a beach with a naked woman during all those years when he was studying to be a priest. She's never understood how he could have given even a moment to considering that as a plan for life. Even if he was only thirteen or fourteen at the beginning. He must have wanted to feel important. Like all those priests up there in pulpits, telling everyone who'll listen about how to live their lives. How on earth would they know, when they've cut themselves off from most of life? Like men and women coming together, as he and she have done. And feeding the kids and giving them a hug at bed-time, and getting up in the middle of the night to change the baby's nappy. Things like that keep the world turning, as everyone who's involved in them would know. Not spires and church windows and imaginary angels and saints and chanting in a language hardly anyone understands. How could he be taken in by that fantasy for so long?

She could be like that—confronting him with forthright, challenging questions while standing naked on a beach. He could find no response that satisfied her. Or that really satisfied him either. How is he going to live from this time on?

Behind her, behind the memory of her standing on the beach, appears an image of another beach, even more remote in time and space, with, away in the distance, another human figure. Another young woman. And waves breaking on a reef of dark rock, and a channel of water sheltered by the dark reef with a line of foam running through it.

He shakes his head, trying to dissipate the black fog that has settled over him. Realising that something more decisive is needed to break the mood, he decides to walk down to the beach for an early morning swim.

It's a short walk, only a quarter of an hour at the sort of brisk pace he needs to set in order to get a bit more life and light into his legs and his thoughts. Tom finds himself thinking about the couples in the houses he passes on the way, in bed still, most of them, at this time of the morning, pressed against the comfort of each other's bodies. Not all of them, he supposes. He and she had been lucky. In most ways.

The beach is deserted. The tide has retreated, leaving a strip of sand washed clear of yesterday's footprints. His own prints are the first of the new day. There is a small pleasure in that. He drops towel and thongs on the sand and wades into the water.

It's another windless morning. The sun has not long cleared the horizon and the glare is reflected off the glassy surface, dazzling him when he looks back. There is still nobody else on the beach. He turns away from the harsh light and plunges in, swimming away from the shore.

He's unfit and out of practice. It's not as easy as it used to be to control his stroke and his kick and his breathing into a steady rhythm. He can already feel the strain in muscles that have not had enough use for months, for years. But he swims on.

He's panting when he slows his pace and stops for a rest, treading water as he looks back towards the empty beach. How far? Maybe a couple of hundred yards. Probably a bit less. He turns away again from the sun.

Underwater, the ocean is dark. At such a shallow angle, the sunlight is barely penetrating the surface. He can make out the indistinct mass of a reef about ten or twelve feet down, and on the seaward side of it, a drop-off into deeper water. The surfaces of the reef are covered with a dense growth of seaweed like a dim, shadowy forest.

He lifts his head to breathe, thinking about the wretched priest standing on the edge of the wharf at Fremantle, looking down into dark murky water, taking a breath while he can, and then another, holding off the unthinkable moment when breathing will stop, trying to build up enough courage for the final plunge. Did he regret the decision later? A pointless question; he was not there later to regret it. What was left of him was buried, of course, in the Catholic section at Karrakatta Cemetery. Was that really Father Kevin? He had simply ceased to exist. He was nowhere. He had surely been right about that when he had finally got around to looking hard at it: no resurrection, no life everlasting, either for punishment or reward. 
Macbeth
comes back into Tom's mind. A dark play.
Duncan is
in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Father Kevin is in his grave. Does he sleep well? Tom is not sleeping well. It's his sleep, not his waking, that's fitful, interrupted, filled with disturbing dreams, haunted by the fear of waking to the pain of loss. The priest will not wake at all, of course. Nobody else will either. But who would want to wake to more pain? A deep dreamless sleep without any looming fear of waking, ever—the image does something to blur the sharp edges of reality. There must be millions of tombstones in thousands of cemeteries inscribed with the words
Sleeping
Peacefully.
The living softening the thought of the death of someone they have loved, making it a little more bearable. And perhaps, unconsciously, looking towards their own deaths through the same consoling lens
. Sleeping Peacefully
. In the end what else could anyone look for?

His legs are beginning to feel chilled, stiff from the cold and the unaccustomed exercise. It's time he was heading back to the beach before they begin to cramp. Instead he decides to swim a little further out to sea before turning back. He doesn't examine the quick decision to ask himself what it means.

He swims out slowly but steadily. There's another fragment of verse stirring in a back corner of his memory, but it's not coming into view yet.

He thinks about a conversation with her, many years before, fairly early in their marriage. He can picture her standing at the kitchen table sketching out on a piece of cloth a part of the tiny nightie that she was making for the baby who was due two months later.

They had been talking about Father Kevin's end, and about the man who had taken exactly the same way out only a few months before him. She wanted to know what the Catholic Church had to say about suicide. As a recent and well-informed ex-member, he was ready with an answer. Suicide was classed as a major sin. Possibly the gravest sin of all. And when she asked about sins, he produced the school catechism definition of them as offences against the law of God.

Her reaction was surprisingly quick and passionate.
That's all nonsense, isn't it? Beside the point. What harm would suicide do to God, for him to have made a law banning it? That is assuming that there is a God. The question is, what it does to the people who are left behind. With someone like that miserable priest, maybe that wasn't a problem. Did anyone cry at his funeral? There might have been a few people who were pleased to know that he'd gone, from what she's heard about him. The other fellow, he was a different case. He had a wife. He'd promised to love her. There were probably children, too. What was he doing to them? He was walking out on all his commitments. All his promises. Pure selfishness. Surely nobody needs to imagine a God to see what's wrong with that.

All these years later, he can still picture her turning back to her task, picking up the pattern book, smiling down at the baby in the illustration—imagining no doubt, her own baby dressed in the tiny garment she was making.

He has stopped swimming, holding the memory close, thinking about what she said. Walking out on all his commitments. He's promised to go to his daughter's for tea tonight—the same daughter for whom that tiny nightie was being made over forty years ago. And he has made a commitment to look after her dog for a few days next month. Other things too, for other people. Trivial promises maybe; the time for the big promises that shape a life is long gone. But there are still small fragments left of what keeps the world turning.

He turns back towards the shore, looking briefly down into the shadowy depths of the water and the dim masses of reef and seaweed, thinking, again, about Father Kevin. And Jane, whose body was never found on that far-away beach so long ago. And now that other once-young woman for whom he still reaches out, waking in the empty bed. All sleeping peacefully. The fragment of verse that has been stirring at the back of his memory finally steps out of the shadows.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

He faces into the sunlight and strikes out for the shore.