And then I saw in my dream how Blanchaille remembered himself and the other altar boys in the dark sacristy of St Jude where the altar boys robed for early morning Mass, for Benediction and weekly Wednesday Novena. Cramped like the crew’s quarters of some old schooner, smelling of wax candles, of paraffin, of white Cobra floor polish, of altar wine, incense, rank tobacco, of the pungent lemon and lime after-shave lotion which came off Father Lynch in waves as Mass wore on and he began sweating beneath his heavy vestments, and the terrifically strong brandy fumes from the old drunken sacristan, Brother Zacharias, of the socks and sweat of countless frantic altar boys dragging from the cheap boxwood cupboards their black cassocks, limp laced and always begrimed surplices, with a noisy clash of the frail, round shouldered wire hangers against the splintered plywood partitions. While from the robing room next door, so close you could hear the rumblings of his stomach knowing as it did that Mass still lay between it and breakfast, there came the smooth unceasing polished tirade of Father Lynch’s invective as he briskly cursed the scrambling altar boys next door for the dirty-fingered, incompetent and unpunctual little poltroons they were. ‘Oh, I shall die of hunger, or boredom, or both, at the hands of you little devils, far from home in this strange hot land, to be done to death by boredom and waiting…’ Knock-knock went his black hairy knuckles on his biretta, ‘Come along! Come along! What are you waiting for — the Last Judgement?’ Those were the weekday Masses, early morning, low and swift.
In theory Brother Zacharias was there to assist the robing of Father Lynch. In reality he lay slumped in the chair most mornings nursing the hangover he’d got the previous evening from a colossal consumption of altar wine, cheap sweet stuff which came in thick-necked bottles with the Star of David stamped on the label, supplied by the firm of Fattis and Monis. Mass began a race between Father Lynch and his altar boys, as next door he struggled into his stole, maniple, chasuble, picked up the gold and bejewelled chalice, dropped onto his head with the finality of a man closing a manhole his four-winged biretta so that it rested on his jug ears and, swinging the key of the tabernacle on its long silver chain, he pounded on the plywood partition: ‘Where is that damn server this morning?’ And the server in question, frantically buttoning up his high collar and smoothing the lace that hung in tatters from the sleeves of his surplice, swooped out in front of him and led him down, out of the sacristy through the Gothic arch of the side chapel and on to the altar: Introibo ad altarem Dei… ‘I will go to the altar of God… to God who gives joy to my youth…’
‘— and employment to his priests,’ Father Lynch liked to add.
On Sundays, in the olden times, when Father Lynch still had priests beneath him, before his clash with Blashford over his wish to integrate the pews, he had revolutionary dreams: ‘Black and white, one Church in Christ,’ Lynch said.
‘More like a recipe for bloody disaster,’ Blashford responded. ‘Your parishioners will shoot you.’
These were the days before ‘African renewal’ or ‘the mission to the townships’, or ‘the solidarity with our black brothers and sisters in Christ’, with which Blashford was so closely associated in later years — it was before, in short, as Lynch said, ‘the powers-that-be had looked closely at the figures’.
In those days then, on Sundays, there was in Lynch’s church an occasional High Mass with enough priests to go around and of course Van Vuuren would dominate the altar as Master of Ceremonies, adroit, self-possessed; taller than most of the priests before the tabernacle, this smoothly assured MC moved, bowed, dispensed and disposed with expert precision. His command of the most technical details of the High Mass, the air of brooding concentration with which he overlooked the three concelebrating priests, his grave air of commanding authority and his expert choreography, moving between epistle and gospel sides of the altar, between chalice and the water and wine, between tabernacle and communicants, between incense bearers and bell boys, between altar and rail, was a marvel to see. His hands joined before his chest, the fingers curving in an elegant cathedral nave so that the tips almost touched his straight nose. The professional hauteur of it, the utter oiled assurance with which Van Vuuren managed such matters, always struck Blanchaille as a wonder and as being utterly at odds with the way he used his fists back in the dormitory in the hostel when he was about Father Cradley’s business.
Thick creamy aromatic smoke rose from the bed of glowing charcoal on which they scattered the incense seeds, the smoke entered the nostrils like pincers, pierced the sinus passages and burst in a fragrant spray of bells somewhere deep inside the cranium. You never coughed, you learnt not to cough. Only the new ones coughed in the holy smoke. The new ones like little Michael Yates, who was Blanchaille’s boat boy and was afterwards to become Mickey the Poet, martyr and victim of the traitor Kipsel, so tiny then that he came up to Blanchaille’s hip and stood beside him holding the incense boat, the silver canoe with the hinged lid which closed with a snap upon the spoon at the flick of a finger. Father Lynch spooned incense from the incense boat, spreading it on the glowing charcoal in the thurifer where it crackled and spat and smoked. Van Vuuren, standing directly behind Lynch, sighted down his perfectly touching forefingers during the ladling of the incense and then with a contained nod, satisfied, dismissed Blanchaille and his boat boy. Both backed away slowly and bowed. Then Blanchaille adjusted the thurifer, lowering its perforated sugar-shaker cap down through the billowing incense, adjusting its closing with the complicated triple-chain pulley and then returned with little Yates to his place, swinging his smoking cargo before him slowly in a long lazy curve over his toe-caps. The fat puff of incense to left and right marked the furthest reaches of the swing. Van Vuuren wearing his elegant, economical, sober black and white cassock and surplice seemed in his plain costume almost a rebuke to the priests in their gaudy emerald-green vestments who lifted their arms to show the pearl-grey silk of their maniples, and turned their backs on their congregations to show the sacred markings, the great jewel-encrusted P slashed by the silver and oyster emphasis of the magic X. Van Vuuren carried more authority than all of them and it was about him, around the strong fixed point, that the other holy flamboyancies revolved like roman candles in the thickening aromatic fog of incense. Lynch had something of the truth in his prophecy about Van Vuuren because when you looked at Van Vuuren you knew, you said, he could have been a priest already. It was, Blanchaille supposed later, the air of authority that impressed, the sense of knowing what to do and when you had grown up among flounderers, it was an impressive sight.
All Father Lynch’s boys, with the exception of Ferreira, lived in the hostel across the road from the Catholic High School of St Wilgefortis, a curious saint much celebrated in Flanders and generally depicted with a moustache and beard which God in his grace had granted to her to repulse the advances of would-be suitors. The school was run by the Margaret Brethren, a Flemish teaching order of brothers who, for reasons never known, took as their model of life the example of their medieval patroness, the formidable St Margaret of Cortona, who after a dissolute early life repented of her sins and began whipping into saintliness her flesh and the flesh of her flesh, her illegitimate son, the fruit of her seduction by a knight of Montepulciano.