The Keys of the Kingdom (3 page)

Returning from the station at four o’clock, sombrely leaping the puddles to which Nora, his half-cousin, gaily dared him, – his mother walking with Aunt Polly, who came, dressed up and sedate, behind, – he felt the day oppressive with disaster. Nora’s friskiness, the neatness of her new brown braided dress, her manifest delight in seeing him, proved but a wan diversion.

Stoically, he approached his home, the low neat grey-stone cottage, fronting the Cannelgate, behind a trim little green where in summer his father grew asters and begonias. There was evidence of his mother’s passionate cleanliness in the shining brass knocker and the spotless doorstep. Behind the immaculately curtained window three potted geraniums made a scarlet splash.

By this time, Nora was flushed, out of breath, her blue eyes sparkling with fun, in one of her moods of daring, impish gaiety. As they went round the side of the house to the back garden where, through his mother’s arrangements, they were to play with Anselm Mealey until teatime, she bent close to Francis’ ear so that her hair fell across her thin laughing face, and whispered in his ear. The puddles they had barely missed, the sappy moisture of the earth, prompted her ingenuity.

At first Francis would not listen – strangely, for Nora’s presence stirred him usually to a shy swift eagerness. Standing small and reticent, he viewed her doubtfully.

‘I know he will,’ she urged. ‘He always wants to play at being holy. Come on Francis. Let’s do it. Let’s!’

A slow smile barely touched his sombre lips. Half unwilling, he fetched a spade, a watering can, an old news-sheet from the little toolshed at the garden end. Led by Nora, he dug a two-foot hole between the laurel bushes, watered it, then spread the paper over it. Nora artistically sprinkled the sheet with a coating of dry soil. They had barely replaced the spade when Anselm Mealey arrived, wearing a beautiful white sailor suit. Nora threw Francis a look of terrible joy.

‘Hello, Anselm!’ she welcomed brilliantly. ‘ What a lovely new suit. We were waiting on you. What shall we play at?’

Anselm Mealey considered the question with agreeable condescencion. He was a large boy for eleven, well-padded, with pink and white cheeks. His hair was fair and curly, his eyes were soulful. The only child of rich and devoted parents, – his father owned the profitable bone-meal works across the river, – he was already destined, by his own election and that of his pious mother, to enter Holywell, the famous Catholic college in Northern Scotland, to study for the priesthood. With Francis he served the altar at St Columba’s. Frequently he was to be found kneeling in church, his big eyes fervent with tears. Visiting nuns patted him on the head. He was acknowledged, with good reason, as a truly saintly boy.

‘We’ll have a procession,’ he said. ‘ In honour of St Julia. This is her feast day.’

Nora clasped her hands. ‘Let’s pretend her shrine is by the laurel bushes. Shall we dress up?’

‘No.’ Anselm shook his head. ‘ We’re praying more than playing. But imagine I’m wearing a cope and bearing a jewelled monstrance. You’re a white Carthusian Sister. And Francis, you’re my acolyte. Now, are we all ready?’

A sudden qualm swept over Francis. He was not of the age to analyse his relationships; he only knew that, though Anselm claimed him fervently as his best friend, the other’s gushing piety evoked in him a curious painful shame. Towards God he had a desperate reserve. It was a feeling he protected without knowing why, or what it was, like a tender nerve, deep within his body. When Anselm burningly declared in the Christian Doctrine class ‘I love and adore our Saviour from the bottom of my heart’, Francis, fingering the marbles in his pockets, flushed a deep dark red, went home sullenly from school and broke a window.

Next morning when Anselm, already a seasoned sick-visitor, arrived at school with a cooked chicken, loftily proclaiming the object of his charity as Mother Paxton, – the old fishwife, sere with hypocrisy and cirrhosis of the liver, whose Saturday-night brawls made the Cannelgate a bedlam, – Francis, possessed, visited the cloakroom during class and opened the package, substituting for the delicious bird – which he consumed with his companions – the decayed head of a cod. Anselm’s tears, and the curses of Meg Paxton, had later stirred in him a deep dark satisfaction.

Now, however, he hesitated, as if to offer the other boy an opportunity of escape. He said slowly: ‘Who’ll go first?’

‘Me, of course,’ Anselm gushed. He took up his position as leader. ‘Sing, Nora: Tantum Ergo.’

In single file, at Nora’s shrill pipe, the procession moved off. As they neared the laurel bushes Anselm raised his clasped hands to heaven. The next instant he stepped through the paper and squelched full-length in the mud.

For ten seconds no one moved. It was Anselm’s howl as he struggled to get up that set Nora off. While Mealey blubbered clammily, ‘It’s a sin, it’s a sin!’ she hopped about laughing, taunting wildly. ‘Fight, Anselm, fight. Why don’t you hit Francis?’

‘I won’t, I won’t,’ Anselm bawled. ‘I’ll turn the other cheek.’

He started to run home. Nora clung deliriously to Francis – helpless, choking, tears of laughter running down her cheeks. But Francis did not laugh. He stared in moody silence at the ground. Why had he stooped to such inanity while his father walked those hostile Ettal causeways? He was still silent as they went in to tea.

In the cosy front room, where the table was already set for the supreme rite of Scots hospitality, with best china and all the electroplate the little household could muster, Francis’ mother sat with Aunt Polly, her open rather earnest face a trifle flushed from the fire, her stocky figure showing an occasional stiffening towards the clock.

Now, after an uneasy day, shot equally with doubt and reassurance, – when she told herself how stupid were her fears, – her ears were tuned acutely for her husband’s step: she was conscious of an overwhelming longing for him. The daughter of Daniel Glennie, a small and unsuccessful baker by profession, and by election an open-air preacher, leader of his own singular Christian brotherhood in Darrow, that shipbuilding town of incomparable drabness which lies some twenty miles from the city of Tynecastle, she had, at eighteen, during a week’s holiday from the parental cake counter, fallen wildly in love with the young Tweedside fisher, Alexander Chisholm, and promptly married him.

In theory, the utter incompatibility of such a union fore-doomed it. Reality had proved it a rare success. Chisholm was no fanatic: a quiet, easy-going type, he had no desire to influence his wife’s belief. And she, on her side, sated with early piety, grounded by her peculiar father in a strange doctrine of universal tolerance, was not contentious.

Even when the first transports had subsided she knew a glowing happiness. He was, in her phrase, such a comfort about the place; neat, willing, never at a loss when it came to mending her wringer, drawing a fowl, clearing the beeskeps of their honey. His asters were the best in Tweedside, his bantams never failed to take prizes at the show, the dovecot he had finished recently for Francis was a wonder of patient craftsmanship. There were moments, in the winter evenings when she sat knitting by the hearth, with Francis snug in bed, the wind whistling cosily around the little house, the kettle hissing on the hob, while her long raw-boned Alex padded the kitchen in his stockinged feet, silently intent upon some handiwork, when she would turn to him with an odd, tender smile: ‘Man, I’m fond of you.’

Nervously she glanced at the clock: yes, it was late, well-past his usual time of homecoming. Outside a gathering of clouds was precipitating the darkness and again heavy raindrops splashed against the windowpanes. Almost immediately Nora and Francis came in. She found herself avoiding her son’s troubled eye.

‘Well, children!’ Aunt Polly summoned them to her chair and wisely apostrophized the air above their heads. ‘Did you have a good play? That’s right. Have you washed your hands, Nora? You’ll be looking forward to the concert tonight, Francis. I love a tune myself. God save us, girl, stand still. And don’t forget your company manners, either, my lady – we’re going to get our tea.’

There was no disregarding this suggestion. With a hollow sensation of distress, intensified because she concealed it, Elizabeth rose.

‘We won’t wait on Alex any longer. We’ll just begin.’ She forced a justifying smile. ‘He’ll be in any moment now.’

The tea was delicious, the scones and bannocks homemade, the preserves jelled by Elizabeth’s own hands. But an air of strain lay heavily about the table. Aunt Polly made none of those dry remarks which usually gave Francis such secret joy, but sat erect, elbows drawn in, one finger crooked for her cup. A spinster, under forty, with a long, worn, agreeable face, somewhat odd in her attire, stately, composed, abstracted in her manner, she looked a model of conscious gentility, her lace handkerchief upon her lap, her nose humanly red from the hot tea; the bird in her hat brooding warmly over all.

‘Come to think, Elizabeth –’ she tactfully filled a pause. ‘ They might have brought in the Mealey boy – Ned knows his father. A wonderful vocation, Anselm has.’ Without moving her head she touched Francis with her kindly omniscient eye. ‘We’ll need to send you to Holywell too, young man. Elizabeth, you’d like to see your boy wag his head in a pulpit?’

‘Not my only one.’

‘The Almighty liked the only ones.’ Aunt Polly spoke profoundly.

Elizabeth did not smile. Her son would be a great man, she was resolved, a famous lawyer, perhaps a surgeon; she could not bear to think of him as suffering the obscurity, the sorry hardships of the clerical life. Torn by her growing agitation she exclaimed: ‘I do wish Alex would come. It’s … it’s most inconsiderate. He’ll keep us all late if he doesn’t look sharp.’

‘Maybe he’s not through with the tallies,’ Aunt Polly reflected considerately.

Elizabeth flushed painfully, out of all control. ‘He must be back at the bothy by now … he always goes there after Ettal.’ Desperately she tried to stem her fears. ‘ I wouldn’t wonder if he’d forgotten all about us. He’s the most heedless man.’ She paused. ‘We’ll give him five minutes. Another cup, Aunt Polly?’

But tea was over and could not be prolonged. There was an unhappy silence. What had happened to him? … Would he never, never come? Sick with anxiety, Elizabeth could restrain herself no longer. With a last glance, charged with open foreboding, towards the marble timepiece, she rose. ‘ You’ll excuse me, Aunt Polly. I’ll have to run down, and see what’s keeping him. I’ll not be long.’

Francis had suffered through these moments of suspense – haunted by the terror of a narrow wynd, heavy with darkness and surging faces and confusion, his father penned . . fighting … falling under the crowd … the sickening crunch of his head upon the cobblestones. Unaccountably he found himself trembling. ‘Let me go Mother,’ he said.

‘Nonsense, boy.’ She smiled palely. ‘You stay and entertain our visitors.’

Surprisingly, Aunt Polly shook her head. Hitherto she had betrayed no perception of the growing stress. Nor did she now. But with a penetrating staidness she remarked: ‘Take the boy with you, Elizabeth. Nora and I can manage fine.’

There was a pause during which Francis pleaded with his eyes.

‘All right … you can come.’

His mother wrapped him in his thick coat; then, bundling into her plaid cape, she took his hand and stepped out of the warm bright room.

It was a streaming, pitch-black night. The rain lathered the cobblestones, foamed down the gutters of the deserted streets. As they struggled up the Mercat Wynd past the distant Square and the blurred illumination of the Burgess Hall, new fear reached at Francis from the gusty blackness. He tried to combat it, setting his lips, matching his mother’s increased pace with quivering determination.

Ten minutes later they crossed the river by the Border Bridge and picked their way along the waterlogged quay to Bothy No.3. Here his mother halted, dismayed. The bothy was locked, deserted. She turned indecisively, then suddenly observed a faint beacon, vaporous in the rainy darkness, a mile up-river: Bothy No.5, where Sam Mirlees, the underwatcher, made his lodging. Though Mirlees was an aimless, tippling fellow, he could surely give them news. She started off again, firmly plodding across the sodden meadows, stumbling over unseen tussocks, fences, ditches. Francis, close at her side, could sense her apprehension, mounting with every step.

At last they reached the other bothy, a wooden shanty of tarred boards, stoutly planted on the riverbank, behind the high stone butt and a swathe of hanging nets. Francis could bear it no longer. Darting forward with throbbing breast, he threw open the door. Then, at the consummation of his daylong fear, he cried aloud in choking anguish, his pupils wide with shock. His father was there with Sam Mirlees, stretched on a bench, his face pale and bloodied, one arm bound up roughly in a sling, a great purple weal across his brow. Both men were in their jerseys and hip-boots, glasses and a mutchkin jar on the near-by table, a dirty crimsoned sponge beside the turbid water dipper, the hurricane swing lamp throwing a haggard yellow beam upon them, while beyond the indigo shadows crept, wavered in the mysterious corners and under the drumming roof.

His mother rushed forward, flung herself on her knees beside the bench. ‘Alex … Alex … are ye hurt?’

Though his eyes were muddled he smiled, or tried to, with his blenched and battered lips.

‘No worse nor some that tried to hurt me, woman.’

Tears sprang to her eyes, born of his wilfulness and her love for him, tears of rage against those who had brought him to this pass.

‘When he came in he was near done,’ Mirlees interposed with a hazy gesture. ‘But I’ve stiffened him up with a dram or two.’

She threw a blazing look at the other man: fuddled, as usual on Saturday night. She felt weak with anger that this sottish fool should have filled Alex up with drink on top of the dreadful hurt he had sustained. She saw that he had lost a great quantity of blood … she had nothing here to treat him with … she must get him away at once … at once. She murmured, tensely:

‘Could you manage home with me, Alex?’