I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know.
World of happiness without end.
You’d have to give that up to be a priest, but it would come to nothing on its own anyhow, the moments couldn’t be for long escaped. Death would come. Everything riveted into that. Possession of neither a world nor a woman mattered then, whether you could go to the Judgment or not without flinching was all that would matter. I strove as fierce as I was able, would be a lot to be able to say. A priest could say that. He’d chosen God before life.
Though who wanted happiness of heaven, to sing hymns for ever in an eternal garden, no change and no hunger or longing.
Hell was there too, the fires and crawling worms, sweat and curses, the despair of for ever. How would the innocent afternoons on the river look from hell, the brush strokes through the black hair in the mirror. Was it better never to know happiness so that there’d be no anguish of loss. A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.
Yet your father was no priest, he’d gone out into the world, played football in the Rock Field, danced in the summer marquees and at winter parties under the mistletoe: he’d married, children had come, and he didn’t seem to have got much sweetness. But what has your father’s life got to do with your life?
If you married you would plant a tree to deny and break finally your father’s power, completely supplant it by the graciousness and marvel of your life, but as a priest you’d remain just fruit of the cursed house gone to God.
If you became a priest, would you not be crazed on your deathbed because of the way you’d cheated your life out of human fulfilment, never to have loved and received love, never to have married in the June of passion. Three months of it would have been a great gift.
I married when I was passionately in love, would be something to look back on no matter what the present horror. It would be something too to haunt you, you’d always hanker after it, it was the red rose of life, you’d never been even given it for a day.
Though what was the use, there was no escape. You were only a drifter and you’d drift. You couldn’t carry the responsibility of a decision. You were only a hankerer. You’d drift and drift. You’d just dream of the ecstasy of destruction on a woman’s mouth.
You were sitting on a green bench in the morning, was that not enough. The sun was blazing clear as glass. Your hands were damp with sweat. A ceaseless hum was droning into the heat. You could take off your coat and tie.
Six apple trees stood in the garden: three cookers, a honeycomb, Beauty of Bath, apples with the rust of pears and not ripe till the frosts. Jam-jars half full of syrup hung on twine from the branches. Wasps circled and circled the rims before they were tempted into the struggling froth of the dead and dying trapped in the sweetness. Some apples had fallen on the ground, shells of flaming colour, rotting brown of the flesh eaten far as the skins. The Beauty of Baths on the tree were cold and sharp, the teeth shivered once they sank in, there was nothing to do but throw it out of sight into the tall cocksfoot along the hedge.
You left coat and tie with the Penguin on the seat and idled back into the graveyard, alive with bees moving between the small flowers of the graves. There was such heat and nothingness now. A white clover at your feet swayed under the clambering of a sucking bee. You watched it, the trembling flower, the black bee unsteady and awkward on the ruffled whiteness, and suddenly you jumped and trampled bee and flower into the earth of the grave. More were moving between the red and white and yellow heads in the sunshine. You could turn it into a sport, tramp bee after bee down, it’d amuse the morning, you could keep a count, as they grew scarce in the graveyard the stalking’d grow more difficult. Nero used tear wings off flies above Rome once, though what was the use. After all you were in the graveyard in the day.
This place was such a green prison. The wall of sycamores shut it away from the road. The tall graveyard hedges and the steep furze-covered hill at the back of the house, only one green patch in its centre where a lone donkey grazed, closed it to the fields around, it ran to no horizon. There was little movement. A general noise of machinery came. A car or van went by behind the sycamore screen. Two living voices in conversation drifted from some field. Somewhere a hen cackled with fright. Here was only interest of the graves and names, the verses, the dates, the weeds and withered wreaths, the ghastly artificial roses and lilies under globes of glass. You could make a catalogue of all these, they’d pass the time just as well as the slaughter of bees, whatever either would really do. The day would probably go its own way anyhow.
The toll of a funeral bell sounded close, after a minute a slow second followed. What was obviously a funeral went past through the sycamores, shod hooves coming clean through the noise of motors. John came towards you out of the house.
“I was wondering where the bell is ringing from, John.”
“From the Protestant church, sir. Mr. Munro’s funeral is there today, sir.”
It brought you to a halt, the sirring was so strange, you’d never been sirred by anyone before, and there seemed no reason for it now either. It was as uncomfortable as any pretending.
“Why do you call me sir, John? We’re not much different in years or anything.”
He stopped. A quick flash showed in the eyes, and the pale face flushed.
“I don’t know, sir. You’re stopping here, sir,” he said doggedly, after a long embarrassed pause, a dogged defiance in the voice, you’d blundered, though you’d never discover how from him. The slow tolling of the Protestant bell continued.
“Have you to go far?” you tried to make conversation on the gravel.
“Just to the church to ring the Angelus, sir. It’s probably better to wait till the funeral’s over now, sir.”
“Are there many Protestants here?”
“About half as many as Catholics but they have the good land, sir.”
At the church door he caught the wire bell-rope in his hand but he didn’t pull it till he was sure the last funeral toll had sounded. You blessed yourself and tried to pray but couldn’t, his white arms went up and down with the bell-rope, that was all.
“What time would you like your lunch at, sir?” he asked when he’d finished.
“I’m not particular, whatever time is easy for you.”
“In about an hour so, sir. At one.”
“That’ll be all right, if it’s easy for you then.”
“Thanks, sir.”
You watched him on the gravel to the front door. The sirring was strange, the boy housekeeper, you here alone in the day, it was all baffling and strange.