The Thorn Birds (23 page)

At three o’clock Mary Carson rose to her feet and yawned. “No, don’t stop the festivities! If I’m tired—which I am—I can go to bed, which is what I’m going to do. But there’s plenty of food and drink, the band has been engaged to play as long as someone wants to dance, and a little noise will only speed me into my dreams. Father, would you help me up the stairs, please?”

Once outside the reception room she did not turn to the majestic staircase, but guided the priest to her drawing room, leaning heavily on his arm. Its door had been locked; she waited while he used the key she handed him, then preceded him inside.

“It was a good party, Mary,” he said.

“My last.”

“Don’t say that, my dear.”

“Why not? I’m tired of living, Ralph, and I’m going to stop.” Her hard eyes mocked. “Do you doubt me? For over seventy years I’ve done precisely what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, so if Death thinks he’s the one to choose the time of my going, he’s very much mistaken. I’ll die when
I
choose the time, and no suicide, either. It’s our will to live keeps us kicking, Ralph; it isn’t hard to stop if we really want to. I’m tired, and I want to stop. Very simple.”

He was tired, too; not of living, exactly, but of the endless façade, the climate, the lack of friends with common interests, himself. The room was only faintly lit by a tall kerosene lamp of priceless ruby glass, and it cast transparent crimson shadows on Mary Carson’s face, conjuring out of her intractable bones something more diabolical. His feet and back ached; it was a long time since he had danced so much, though he prided himself on keeping up with whatever was the latest fad. Thirty-five years of age, a country monsignor, and as a power in the Church? Finished before he had begun. Oh, the dreams of youth! And the carelessness of youth’s tongue, the hotness of youth’s temper. He had not been strong enough to meet the test. But he would never make that mistake again. Never, never…

He moved restlessly, sighed; what was the use? The chance would not come again. Time he faced that fact squarely, time he stopped hoping and dreaming.

“Do you remember my saying, Ralph, that I’d beat you, that I’d hoist you with your own petard?”

The dry old voice snapped him out of the reverie his weariness had induced. He looked across at Mary Carson and smiled.

“Dear Mary, I never forget anything you say. What I would have done without you these past seven years I don’t know. Your wit, your malice, your perception…”

“If I’d been younger I’d have got you in a different way, Ralph. You’ll never know how I’ve longed to throw thirty years of my life out the window. If the Devil had come to me and offered to buy my soul for the chance to be young again, I’d have sold it in a second, and not stupidly regretted the bargain like that old idiot Faust. But no Devil. I really can’t bring myself to believe in God or the Devil, you know. I’ve never seen a scrap of evidence to the effect they exist. Have you?”

“No. But belief doesn’t rest on proof of existence, Mary. It rests on faith, and faith is the touchstone of the Church. Without faith, there is nothing.”

“A very ephemeral tenet.”

“Perhaps. Faith’s born in a man or a woman, I think. For me it’s a constant struggle, I admit that, but I’ll never give up.”

“I would like to destroy you.”

His blue eyes laughed, greyed in the light. “Oh, my dear Mary! I know
that
.”

“But do you know why?”

A terrifying tenderness crept against him, almost inside him, except that he fought it fiercely. “I know why, Mary, and believe me, I’m sorry.”

“Besides your mother, how many women have loved you?”

“Did my mother love me, I wonder? She ended in hating me, anyway. Most women do. My name ought to have been Hippolytos.”

“Oh! That tells me a lot!”

“As to other women, I think only Meggie…But she’s a little girl. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say hundreds of women have wanted me, but loved me? I doubt it very much.”

“I have loved you,” she said pathetically.

“No, you haven’t. I’m the goad of your old age, that’s all. When you look at me I remind you of what you cannot do, because of age.”

“You’re wrong. I have loved you. God, how much! Do you think my years automatically preclude it? Well, Father de Bricassart, let me tell you something. Inside this stupid body I’m still young—I still feel, I still want, I still dream, I still kick up my heels and chafe at restrictions like my body. Old age is the bitterest vengeance our vengeful God inflicts upon us. Why doesn’t He age our minds as well?” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, her teeth showing sourly. “I shall go to Hell, of course. But before I do, I hope I get the chance to tell God what a mean, spiteful, pitiful apology of a God He is!”

“You were a widow too long. God gave you freedom of choice, Mary. You could have remarried. If you chose not to remarry and in consequence you’ve been intolerably lonely, it’s your own doing, not God’s.”

For a moment she said nothing, her hands gripping the chair arms hard; then she began to relax, and opened her eyes. They glittered in the lamplight redly, but not with tears; with something harder, more brilliant. He caught his breath, felt fear. She looked like a spider.

“Ralph, on my desk is an envelope. Would you bring it to me, please?”

Aching and afraid, he got up and went to her desk, lifted the letter, eyed it curiously. The face of it was blank, but the back had been properly sealed with red wax and her ram’s head seal with the big
D
. He brought it to her and held it out, but she waved him to his seat without taking it.

“It’s yours,” she said, and giggled. “The instrument of your fate, Ralph, that’s what it is. My last and most telling thrust in our long battle. What a pity I won’t be here to see what happens. But I
know
what will happen, because I know you, I know you much better than you think I do. Insufferable conceit! Inside that envelope lies the fate of your life and your soul. I must lose you to Meggie, but I’ve made sure she doesn’t get you, either.”

“Why do you hate Meggie so?”

“I told you once before. Because you love her.”

“
Not
in that way! She’s the child I can never have, the rose of my life. Meggie is an idea, Mary, an idea!”

But the old woman sneered. “I don’t want to talk about your precious Meggie! I shall never see you again, so I don’t want to waste my time with you talking about her. The letter. I want you to swear on your vows as a priest that you don’t open it until you’ve seen my dead body for yourself, but then that you open it immediately, before you bury me. Swear!”

“There’s no need to swear, Mary. I’ll do as you ask.”

“Swear to me or I’ll take it back!”

He shrugged. “All right, then. On my vows as a priest I swear it. Not to open the letter until I’ve seen you dead, and then to open it before you’re buried.”

“Good, good!”

“Mary, please don’t worry. This is a fancy of yours, no more. In the morning you’ll laugh at it.”

“I won’t see the morning. I’m going to die tonight; I’m not weak enough to wait on the pleasure of seeing you again. What an anticlimax! I’m going to bed now. Will you take me to the top of the stairs?”

He didn’t believe her, but he could see it served no purpose to argue, and she was not in the mood to be jollied out of it. Only God decided when one would die, unless, of the free will He had given, one took one’s own life. And she had said she wouldn’t do that. So he helped her pant up the stairs and at the top took her hands in his, bent to kiss them.

She pulled them away. “No, not tonight. On my mouth, Ralph! Kiss my mouth as if we were lovers!”

By the brilliant light of the chandelier, lit for the party with four hundred wax candles, she saw the disgust in his face, the instinctive recoil; she wanted to die then, wanted to die so badly she could not wait.

“Mary, I’m a priest!
I can’t
!”

She laughed shrilly, eerily. “Oh, Ralph, what a sham you are! Sham man, sham priest! And to think once you actually had the temerity to offer to make love to me! Were you so positive I’d refuse? How I wish I hadn’t! I’d give my soul to see you wriggle out of it if we could have that night back again!
Sham, sham, sham
! That’s all you are, Ralph! An impotent, useless sham! Impotent man and impotent priest! I don’t think you could get it up and keep it up for the Blessed Virgin herself! Have you ever managed to get it up, Father de Bricassart?
Sham
!”

Outside it was not yet dawn, or the lightening before it. Darkness lay soft, thick and very hot over Drogheda. The revels were becoming extremely noisy; if the homestead had possessed next-door neighbors the police would have been called long since. Someone was vomiting copiously and revoltingly on the veranda, and under a wispy bottle brush two indistinct forms were locked together. Father Ralph avoided the vomiter and the lovers, treading silently across the springy new-mown lawn with such torment in his mind he did not know or care where he was going. Only that he wanted to be away from her, the awful old spider who was convinced she was spinning her death cocoon on this exquisite night. At such an early hour the heat was not exhausting; there was a faint, heavy stirring in the air, and a stealing of languorous perfumes from boronia and roses, the heavenly stillness only tropical and subtropical latitudes can ever know. Oh, God, to be alive, to be really alive! To embrace the night, and living, and be free!

He stopped on the far side of the lawn and stood looking up at the sky, an instinctive aerial searching for God. Yes, up there somewhere, between the winking points of light so pure and unearthly; what was it about the night sky? That the blue lid of day was lifted, a man permitted glimpses of eternity? Nothing save witnessing the strewn vista of the stars could convince a man that timelessness and God existed.

She’s right, of course. A sham, a total sham. No priest, no man. Only someone who wishes he knew how to be either. No!
Not
either! Priest and man cannot coexist—to be a man is to be no priest. Why did I ever tangle my feet in her web? Her poison is strong, perhaps stronger than I guess. What’s in the letter? How like Mary to bait me! How much does she know, how much does she simply guess? What is there to know, or guess? Only futility, and loneliness. Doubt, pain. Always pain. Yet you’re wrong, Mary. I
can
get it up. It’s just that I don’t choose to, that I’ve spent years proving to myself it can be controlled, dominated, subjugated. For getting it up is the activity of a man, and I am a priest.

Someone was weeping in the cemetery. Meggie, of course. No one else would think of it. He picked up the skirts of his soutane and stepped over the wrought-iron railing, feeling it was inevitable that he had not yet done with Meggie on this night. If he confronted one of the women in his life, he must also deal with the other. His amused detachment was coming back; she could not disperse that for long, the old spider. The wicked old spider. God rot her,
God rot her
!

“Darling Meggie, don’t cry,” he said, sitting on the dew-wet grass beside her. “Here, I’ll bet you don’t have a decent handkerchief. Women never do. Take mine and dry your eyes like a good girl.’

She took it and did as she was told.

“You haven’t even changed out of your finery. Have you been sitting here since midnight?”

“Yes.”

“Do Bob and Jack know where you are?”

“I told them I was going to bed.”

“What’s the matter, Meggie?”

“You didn’t speak to me tonight!”

“Ah! I thought that might be it. Come, Meggie, look at me!”

Away in the east was a pearly luster, a fleeing of total darkness, and the Drogheda roosters were shrieking an early welcome to the dawn. So he could see that not even protracted tears could dim the loveliness of her eyes.

“Meggie, you were by far the prettiest girl at the party, and it’s well known that I come to Drogheda more often than I need. I am a priest and therefore I ought to be above suspicion—a bit like Caesar’s wife—but I’m afraid people don’t think so purely. As priests go I’m young, and not bad-looking.” He paused to think how Mary Carson would have greeted that bit of understatement, and laughed soundlessly. “If I had paid you a skerrick of attention it would have been all over Gilly in record time. Every party line in the district would have been buzzing with it. Do you know what I mean?”

She shook her head; the cropped curls were growing brighter in the advancing light.

“Well, you’re young to come to knowledge of the ways of the world, but you’ve got to learn, and it always seems to be my province to teach you, doesn’t it? I mean people would be saying I was interested in you as a man, not as a priest.”

“
Father
!”

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” He smiled. “But that’s what people would say, I assure you. You see, Meggie, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re a young lady. But you haven’t learned yet to hide your affection for me, so had I stopped to speak to you with all those people looking on, you’d have stared at me in a way which might have been misconstrued.”

She was looking at him oddly, a sudden inscrutability shuttering her gaze, then abruptly she turned her head and presented him with her profile. “Yes, I see. I was silly not to have seen it.”

“Now don’t you think it’s time you went home? No doubt everyone will sleep in, but if someone’s awake at the usual time you’ll be in the soup. And you can’t say you’ve been with me, Meggie, even to your own family.”

She got up and stood staring down at him. “I’m going, Father. But I wish they knew you better, then they’d never think such things of you. It isn’t in you, is it?”

For some reason that hurt, hurt right down to his soul as Mary Carson’s cruel taunts had not. “No, Meggie, you’re right. It isn’t in me.” He sprang up, smiling wryly. “Would you think it strange if I said I wished it was?” He put a hand to his head. “No, I don’t wish it was at all! Go home, Meggie, go home!”

Her face was sad. “Good night, Father.”

He took her hands in his, bent and kissed them. “Good night, dearest Meggie.”