Frequent and savage beatings she no doubt felt were deserved by this walking reproach to her saintly aspirations. At the same time she went about calling on the citizens of Cortona to repent, and given the lady’s determination it was a call that would not be denied. As Margaret in the thirteenth century so did her Brethren in the twentieth, they beat the devil out of their boys with tireless piety and unstinting love for their souls and if this sometimes resulted in certain injuries, a simple fracture or bleeding from the ear, why then the Brothers laid on the strap or stick once more, happy in their hearts they were drawing close to their beloved patroness.
Education was not their aim but salvation. Their job was to unveil the plots and stratagems by which unsuspecting boys were led into mortal sin, to sudden death and to eternal damnation. Improper thoughts, loose companions, tight underwear, non-Catholic girlfriends, political controversy, these were the several baits which sprung the trap of sudden death and broke the neck of Christian hope. Yet they could be beaten, they were beaten, daily.
The boys of the Catholic school endured their years under the whip with sullen obedience. Like some small unruly, barbarian state crushed by an occupying army, they paid lip service. They bided their time. They worshipped the gods of their conquerors in public, and spat on them in private; sat, knelt or stood stonily through the obligatory daily prayers and Masses with heads bowed only to return to the worship of their own horrid deities the moment the school gates closed behind them. The gods of their underground church were genuinely worthy of worship. They were lust, loose-living, idleness, tobacco, Elvis Presley, liberalism, science, the paradise called Overseas, as well as those bawdy spirits whom some held were hiding in girls’ brassières and between their legs and of which strange exhilarating legends circulated among the hidden faithful in the bicycle sheds, the changing rooms and lavatories. And of course what made these native gods more powerful, more adorable than any other, was the fact that they so clearly haunted and terrified the Margaret Brethren. The Margaret Brethren taught the knowledge of death, they cultivated the more advanced understanding of dying, of judgement, of hell and heaven. Education for them was the pursuit of a reign of terror. The dirty little secrets of the native gods which promised fun, excitement, escape, horrified them and they fought them tooth and nail.
If this strengthened the boys’ sense of coming doom, of impending Armageddon, that was because they were so naturally adapted to it. They grew up with it, it came as no surprise to learn that the end of the world was at hand, though there was no way they could have explained this to the uncomprehending Flemish immigrants who simply couldn’t understand how it was possible to be hated by anybody, except perhaps the French. The Margaret Brethren taught lonely, sudden violent death as the Wages of Sin. But white children of a certain sort, born in South Africa, then as now, knew of a wider and more general catastrophe, that the world was very likely to end in violence and sooner rather than later. One noted at one’s mother’s knee that the end of the world very probably was at hand and it was only a question of time before the avenging hordes swept down from the north.
Whether this was true or not didn’t matter. It was believed. It was an article of faith.
And then there was the deep loathing which the Margaret Brethren instinctively felt for the wayward and disreputable Father Lynch, another of the highly impressive qualities about him that attracted to him his altar servers.
Blanchaille was among the first. Blanchaille’s mother lived three thousand miles away and sent him to the hostel when he was seven. She had been destitute and so the hostel, and the Margaret Brethren across the road, waived their fees and took him in in the name of Catholic charity. Blanchaille’s father, a Mauritian sailor, had deserted his mother when she fell pregnant and never returned and yet she kept his name and passport, drew one for her son later which she renewed religiously, placing her faith in the French connection, clearly determined that her son would one day return to his motherland in triumph, like Napoleon. This foreign document embarrassed Blanchaille and he hid the passport for years. No one else had one. It looked strange and besides he wasn’t going anywhere. No one was going anywhere. The others teased him about it, calling him Frenchie. But after he’d hidden it they forgot about it and began calling him Blanchie instead, a name that stuck. Trevor Van Vuuren appeared to have no parents but he had an elder brother who worked on the whalers and drove a bottle-green MG sports, which was all terrifically exciting. Zandrotti’s father was a crooked businessman, a building contractor handling large commissions in the Government road programme. He made it his business to add rather too much sand to his cement and eventually catastrophe overtook him when bridges began collapsing across the country. A huge hulking man, he’d arrive in his blood-red Hudson Hornet to visit his skinny knock-kneed little son with his spiky hair and his ghostly pallor. Zandrotti Senior made these visits specifically for the purpose of abusing and ridiculing young Roberto. This so impressed the Margaret Brethren that they presented Zandrotti Senior with his very own scapular of the Third Order of St Francis, a devotional association to which they were vaguely attached for reasons never made clear except that Margaret of Cortona had been fond of it. His father, as Roberto later explained, had absolutely no culture and repaid the honour by making his mistress dance naked on a table for a visiting delegation of Portuguese Chianti merchants wearing the scapular as a G-string. This story so delighted Father Lynch that he suggested that since the scapular had bounced up and down on what he called ‘the lady’s important point of entry’, they should return it in the same wrapper to the Margaret Brethren challenging them to touch it to their nostrils and try to identify the fragrance, providing the helpful clue that they inhaled that very perfume which had so excited the saint’s knightly seducer back in the bad old days when she was plain Margaret, just another unmarried mother of Cortona.
This love of the blasphemous jest was one of Father Lynch’s appealing characteristics. Another was the conviction that he was dying and hence everything must be done in a hurry, a conviction repeated often but without any apparent sign of alarm since haste did not preclude style.
Kipsel seldom came to Mass and never to the picnics. Perversely as ever, Lynch praised his loyalty and predicted that Kipsel would go far in life.
Last in the group but first in martyrdom, poor Michael Yates, later Mickey the Poet. If there was any epitaph for him it was that he never knew what was going on. It might have been inscribed above his lost gravestone — ‘He never had the faintest idea.’ He was only to write one short poem, four lines of doggerel, which led Lynch to call him Mickey the Poet, and the name stuck. Lynch went on to discern in him, in that wild prophetic way, ‘some gymnastic ability’.
Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille grieved at the death of Ferreira. I saw him shaking his head and muttering to himself repeatedly: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do? First Mickey the Poet, then Miranda, now Ferreira.’
Naturally he detected in these violent deaths real signs that the end was near, this fuelled his anxiety, deepened his general feeling of doom, of approaching extinction. It is common enough at the best of times in beleaguered minorities in Africa, this feeling of looming apocalypse. Blanchaille’s people, a despised sub-group within a detested minority waited for the long-expected wrath to fall on them and destroy them. They didn’t say so, of course. They didn’t say anything unless drunk or tired or very pushed — and then they would say, ‘Actually, we’re all finished.’ Or ruined, some of them said, or washed-up, or words a lot worse.