My Lovely Frankie Read online

  I felt close to God in those days. When I went into church I’d catch my breath as I passed through the heavy wooden doors. It gave me a little rush of joy to set my feet on the worn red carpet of the aisle, close my eyes for a moment and then look up and see everything in its place, all there: the glossy brown pews, the white marble altar and the great crucifix above it—and I swear that I could sometimes sense a hand which must surely be God’s, stretched tenderly above my head. I never told anyone about that hand; I never told my parents or teachers or Father Boyle. I never told the Bishop in my interview before St Finbar’s, I never even told Frankie on that night he shared the story of Manda Sutton with me.

  ‘I should have,’ I whisper to myself, ‘I should have told him.’

  I told Miri though. Not then, not when we were young, but much later, when we were both in our fifties, long after Frankie had gone and her husband Chris had died. ‘You won’t believe this,’ I began, a little diffidently, ‘but when I was a boy, that time before I went to St Finbar’s, I really did think—no, I actually felt it—that God’s hand was stretched out, just above my head. Protecting me, you know.’ I thought she’d smile—Miri was never a believer, or so it seemed to me back then. But the glance she gave me was utterly straight and serious. ‘Perhaps it was,’ she said.

  *

  Though they both came from old Catholic families, my parents weren’t happy with my plans.

  ‘You’ll never have children,’ my mother said. ‘You’ll never have a family of your own, Tom. I can’t understand it.’

  ‘I’ve got a family, I’ve got you and Dad.’

  ‘We won’t always be here, Tom.’

  It took me a moment to understand that she meant they would die some day, and when I realised, I had a small feeling of shock, even anger, that they’d leave me in this way. It was I who was leaving them, but I didn’t understand this, I didn’t understand their unhappiness with my decision. ‘You’re just scared I’ll get like Father Boyle,’ I said, trying to make a joke of it. ‘You think I’ll grab the best chair when I come to visit and expect you to wait on me.’

  She tried to smile. I watched her lips curve slowly and then droop down again so sharply that it looked as if some tiny essential muscle had been cut. She touched my cheek lightly and I felt how cold her fingers were.

  ‘You need to consider that you might feel differently in a few years’ time,’ my father said. ‘You’ve only just turned sixteen.’

  I didn’t want to consider anything, I was sure. I knew—then—I’d always be sure. It was that simple. I wanted to go now. Already I felt late—other boys had entered the seminary at twelve or even eleven. I felt panic-struck; it was like being in love when you’re too young. It made me desperate, it made me cruel. I screamed at him, ‘You can’t stop me!’

  ‘I’m not stopping you, I’m simply asking you to think.’

  ‘I have. I have thought.’

  Sighing, he turned away.

  I didn’t tell Miri, I don’t know why.

  ‘Because you knew I’d hate it,’ she said later. ‘You knew I’d tell you not to go. You knew I’d argue.’

  Perhaps. Anyway, I didn’t tell her. She heard. I suppose my mother wrote to Aunty Sarah, and Aunty Sarah told Miri. Miri was twenty by then, and engaged to Chris.

  Her letter came a few weeks before I left for St Finbar’s. It was a card she’d made herself, a simple square of white cardboard, with the single word DON’T printed on it fifty times.

  I wrote back. I’ve made up my mind I said.

  What mind? she replied, on another white card, though with kisses all around it, like thick blue embroidery. Indigo kisses. I still have that card.

  *

  Everyone was kind to me in those last weeks before I went to the seminary: the people at church, our neighbours, my father’s patients. My godparents Denny and Joseph bought me a present, an anthology of modern poetry with fine gilt-edged pages and a red leather cover with a design of a cornucopia spilling fruits and flowers. ‘So you can take all the good things with you,’ they said. Denny and Joseph were old friends of my parents from university. They were gay, though the term wasn’t in use then. ‘They love men instead of women,’ my father had explained to me. ‘It’s the love that counts, Tom.’ He looked at me then. He said, ‘It isn’t wrong, Tom. Being able to love another person: in all your life, that’s the most important thing.’

  *

  Most people seemed happy for me, though occasionally I caught the flicker of another expression beneath the kind words—pity, was it? I didn’t understand—how could anyone pity me? My friends at school clapped with the others when Father Boyle made the announcement, though afterwards they seemed almost shy of me, as if my decision had suddenly revealed me to be a different person, someone they hadn’t really known, and never would now. When I was with them, they steered clear of the subject of my vocation. Only Jimmy Blewett said something. He was one of the kids from the old army camp on the edge of our suburb, where the long metal huts, freezing in winter, boiling hot in summer, had been made into housing for poor families. My father sometimes took me there on his rounds. It was a rough place, full of fights and drunks and sobbing; the very walls of the huts seemed to vibrate with a kind of roaring. No matter how late it was, how dark or cold or wet, there’d be little kids playing outside in the mud of the trampled paddock that was their yard. I never once saw Jimmy Blewitt on those visits, but I knew he was there somewhere. I knew he saw me. On that day Father Boyle made the announcement, Jimmy Blewitt came up to me in the school playground. ‘Geez, Tom, are you sure?’ he said. He was always in trouble at school, always in fights, like most of the army camp kids. Once he’d sworn at a teacher—yet when he asked me this question, there was a kind of deep seriousness in his voice that reminded me of my father. Yes, that was it, he was like Dad.

  Quickly I said, ‘I’m sure.’

  He stared at me then. He scanned my face so closely that I began to feel uneasy, as if I was telling some kind of lie. Then he said, ‘Tom, it’s forever. Every day, every day forever.’

  His thick, throaty voice rose on that last word, which he made into two: ‘for ever’ as if to show how long. And when he did that I knew at once that he’d also thought of going to St Finbar’s, of ‘entering’, as we called it. That he’d thought seriously.

  ‘I know it’s forever,’ I said brusquely. I wanted the subject closed. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  Jimmy shook his head, shook the whole of his body, like a big dog coming out from a pond. ‘I couldn’t do it, me,’ he sighed. ‘I just couldn’t, Tom. I thought about it, I thought and thought, and then, I decided—I decided to stay out.’ He went quiet then, his head was down, his face was hidden, he was waiting for me to speak.

  I didn’t want to, I was afraid. He looked up and he saw me. He knew me, that’s what I thought. He put out a hand and touched my arm. ‘Good luck,’ he said. Then he turned and hurried away. I watched him get out of sight, up the hill, and then over it, slowly, like he was thinking all the way.

  4.

  A few weeks before the new term started my parents took me to see St Finbar’s. Father James showed us round; he was the Philosophy teacher to the senior classes. He’d gone to school with my father and when he came to our house he and Dad would sit in the study for hours, smoking and talking together. He was shy with my mother. Once when Dad persuaded him to stay for dinner, she passed him a dessert dish and his hand shook so much that half an apricot slid out and fell onto the table right in front of him. His long pale cheeks turned crimson, he jumped to his feet and cried, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry,’ in a voice that sounded almost heartbroken. ‘It’s nothing, James,’ said my mother, ‘nothing at all.’ And she cleaned it up, and made him sit down again and we went on with our meal as if nothing had happened. Only it had, I could see it. He liked her. When he thought no one was watching him he would gaze at her across the table and his face would remind me of the faces in The Adoration of
the Magi, a picture we had on the wall at school. Then suddenly his expression of adoration—I was sure of it—would be replaced by a flicker of something like fear, and he’d look down quickly at his plate again.

  On that afternoon when we came to look round St Finbar’s, he had a guilty, almost flinching manner, as if he thought my parents might suspect my decision had something to do with him. He showed us the chapel and the library and the gloomy refectory where we would have our meals. Then he led us down a long corridor lined with portraits of rectors and bishops and archbishops, up a staircase to the room which would be mine in only a few weeks’ time. My father took it in with one swift glance, my mother stood in the doorway for a long time, as if she was learning everything she saw in there by heart: the bare wooden floor, the narrow strip of window high up near the ceiling, the wardrobe on one side of the room and the narrow bed on the other, the small desk with a single straight-backed chair. It seemed to dismay her; she put her hand up to her mouth and all of us looked away—my father and I, and Father James. We couldn’t think what to say. When we came downstairs again Father James excused himself—he had a meeting—and we were left to explore the grounds.

  We walked through the cloisters and down to the sports fields and the vegetable gardens, past the old dairy and then up the hill and along a path beside the encircling wall. The wall was beginning to crumble in places; stones lay on the ground and there were gaps where you could look down and see the road below, a scattering of holiday cottages and the wrought-iron gates of the school I would come to know as St Brigid’s. We walked in silence, all three of us, until the wall gave way to a dense thicket of lantana and blackberry. Somewhere beyond it you could hear the sea. We turned into a narrow track between the bushes, where the sandy ground was the colour of cement, damp and sticky from a recent rain, and thorny strands of blackberry arched over us in a green tunnel whose walls seemed to close us in. The air was thick and warm and small black flies circled dreamily round our heads.

  It was a shock when the green walls gave way suddenly to a vastness of sky and air.

  ‘Careful.’ My father pulled me back just in time. The ledge where we stood was a mere shelf of grey sandstone, pitted with small hollows that had caught the rain and spray. Down below us the waves boomed unseen. It was a hot cloudy day, everything was grey, the sullen sea and sky merged seamlessly; we could have been gazing out at nothing. Beside me I felt my mother shiver.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ she whispered, sounding almost frightened. ‘I don’t like it here.’ She brushed at her skirt, a light summer skirt where the sticky grey sand from the track had gathered along the hem. ‘I’ve never seen sand like that before,’ she said. ‘It’s like cement.’

  ‘Come on.’ My father caught hold of her hand.

  We were silent on the long drive back. I sensed a kind of expectancy in the car. I felt they were waiting for me to say, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go to St Finbar’s,’ but I didn’t say it. I hadn’t changed my mind. The gloom of the great seminary, that small bare room, it hadn’t been enough. Only the ledge above the sea and that strange vacant horizon had frightened me—but I told myself there was no reason I’d ever go there again. It was a long walk from the seminary. It was probably out of bounds.

  That night, when I’d gone to bed, my parents talked together in the study for a long, long time. Finally I heard the door open and my mother’s footsteps going slowly down the stairs. I got up and walked along the hall. The study door was closed and a muffled thumping came from inside the room. ‘Dad?’ I called softly. There was no answer. The thumping sound went on.

  I pushed the door open. My father was standing at the window, his back to me, one fist pounding at the sill. There was blood. Only a little bit, but I saw it: drops, thick drops, red blood.

  Frightened, I closed the door. I went back to my room and I searched for Miri’s card, the one with the embroidery of kisses. When I found it I lay down on my bed and studied those two small words and the indigo kisses until I fell asleep.

  It was well after midnight when I woke and went downstairs to get a glass of water. The light was on in the kitchen and I saw Dad sitting at the table and Mum standing beside him, smoothing ointment on his knuckles where he’d grazed them against the sill.

  The way he looked at her, the way, meeting his gaze, she smiled at him—they were like a small island of perfect tenderness in that uneasy night.

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred

  They didn’t notice me standing at the door. My parents loved each other.

  That night it was two weeks and three days and a night till I would first see Frankie. I know the time exactly because I looked at the hall clock as I left the kitchen and it was five to one. Then I glanced through the window on the landing and the night sky was indigo. I count backwards: it was at morning mass on the Saturday of my first week at St Finbar’s that I saw Frankie, so when I left my parents in the kitchen and walked up the stairs to my room it was two weeks and four days, fifteen hours and twenty minutes, give or take a few of those, till I first saw Frankie Maguire.

  5.

  He was late. Being late was so much a part of him. I have so many images: Frankie running down the staircase at St Finbar’s, hair still wet from the shower, cassock flying, its top buttons unfastened, bits of grubby shirt escaping from the collar; tearing round a corner, notebooks slipping from his arms. I’ll see a classroom, old Father Beasely at the blackboard writing up his interminable notes, young heads bent, perfect silence except for the scrape of chalk—and then there’ll be the sound of big boots clattering along the veranda, and our heads shoot up, and there’s his bright face at the door. In these images Etta is always there. He’s hidden, you never see him, but the sense of him informs the very air. It’s like those picture puzzles in the books Denny and Joseph used to give me when I was little—those small mysterious landscapes where a figure hides inside the lines and shadings: ‘Where is Farmer Brown’s horse?’ ‘Where is Dog Toby?’ ‘Someone is hiding. Someone is there.’

  *

  To be late for your very first day at St Finbar’s was something of an achievement because the arrival of new students was meticulously planned. Mimeographed sheets of instructions arrived through the post at our homes: we were to be at Central Station by seven a.m. on Monday, well in time to catch the Northern Express on platform one at seven-thirty. Three hours into the journey we were to alight at the small town of Nyobie, where a local bus left the station for Shoreham at eleven. On arrival at Shoreham we’d be met by prefects and escorted up the hill to the seminary. On rare occasions a student might miss the train at Central, but there was another slower one at noon, another bus to Shoreham, and he’d arrive late that evening, red-faced and flustered, only a few hours behind the rest of us.

  Frankie was four days behind.

  He came from a very small place in the west; the nearest railway station was in a larger town sixty miles away. Like many people in those days his family didn’t own a car; a neighbouring farmer who chanced to be going that way had given him a lift to catch the train. The farmer had dropped him off at the station an hour early and Frankie had set out to explore the town. Staring hungrily into the window of a cake shop he’d heard the whistle at the level crossing gates, which meant the train was already past the station and on its way to the city. The next one wouldn’t come for four days. He had no money, only his ticket and a few coins for the bus ride to Shoreham, and the farmer who’d driven him in was long gone.

  He’d camped out in the station waiting room for the first night; the stationmaster found him first thing in the morning, still sound asleep. He’d made him tea and then given him directions to his own house down the road. ‘The wife’ll look after you,’ he’d promised. And she did. Frankie spent three days with the Tooheys, bunking down in the sleepout which had once belonged to their grown-up son, eating big country meals. ‘Mrs Toohey made a
cream sponge on my last night,’ he told me. ‘It was this high!’ And he showed me the height—a space of about thirty centimetres—between his thin brown hands. The mornings he spent talking with Mrs Toohey, whose children had long grown up and moved away, in the afternoons he wandered round the town. ‘Everyone was so kind to me,’ he said. ‘So good. I had a lovely time. People are good, mostly. It’s only when—’ I remember he tailed off then, like you do when you’ve suddenly remembered something bad. I wanted to ask, ‘When what?’ but I’d only known him for a few days then, and this, together with a kind of sober thoughtfulness in his expression, made me keep silent.

  I’d been terribly homesick that week before he came. I hadn’t expected it, I hadn’t known about homesickness, I’d never been away before. Everything was strange. Our day began at six, when we got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, still half asleep, washed and dressed, fumbling with the buttons of shirts and unfamiliar cassocks, then hurried to the chapel for mass and morning meditation. All day long there were classes and study and sport and prayer, meals in the refectory, work in the gardens—every minute was filled up until lights out at ten p.m. There was no time to think about home, to think of anything—we did stuff, that was all. At lights out I would get into bed and plunge almost instantly into sleep, only to wake an hour later in the middle of the Great Silence, that time between evening prayers and breakfast the next morning, when we were not allowed to speak a word.

  This was the time I learned about homesickness: how it was quite simply that, a sickness, a low ache all through you, an anguish for home. I’d turn on my side beneath the grey blankets and the pictures would rush in: I’d see the rooms in my house, each piece of furniture, sofas and chairs and tables and beds and wardrobes. I’d see the pictures on the walls and the pattern on the carpets, a long procession of small lost objects right down to the pots of ferns on the front veranda and the cracked cake of soap beside the laundry tub.