The devils diary, p.14
The Devil's Diary, page 14
He made his way back to the boat with his hands in his trouser pockets touching the stones he had found on his last visit. It seemed to him that he was a prisoner of his brother’s imagination, that he was being jostled by spectres that were not of his own creation. He took the stones and flung one over each shoulder. Now they were somewhere behind him, lost in a field of white.
He started the engine and headed south-east in the direction of Glenshask. Gradually, the Devil’s Pintle took shape before him, dark, asymmetrical and weirdly obtrusive. He circled slowly, keeping clear of the submerged rocks that surrounded its base. It towered above him, rising in irregular layers with vertical and horizontal fissures that gave an impression of unmortared brickwork. The narrow base and the wider circumference of the projecting top gave the whole structure a look of bluntness, brutishness and ugliness combined. Hugo once told him that he had put his hand in one of the crevices in its side but Father Jerry did not believe him. Its power over his brother must surely come from its unequivocal demand to be seen as an unknown part in a comprehensible whole. On that day in Glenshask he and Hugo had seen it rising from behind the rocky spit, half-hidden by the land with only the blunt tip visible, an unmistakably alien presence in a landscape that was itself almost homely. Again and again it drew his eye. The effect on him then was immediate. It was one of utter disbelief.
He headed for home with a feeling that he was escaping from unknown territory. Both the island and the tor represented in some unfathomable way areas of life that were outside his waking experience, yet they had gripped his imagination as places which touched on the secret life that Hugo’s diary adumbrated but did not explore. As he went over in his mind the events that Hugo had described, it occurred to him that in trying to understand his brother he was trying to understand himself.
Chapter 13
When Hugo returned on Monday afternoon, he uttered one word: ‘Lost’.
‘You mean your journey was in vain?’
‘Not in every sense. I got my trunk back all right but not my diaries.’
‘Surely they’ll turn up.’
‘Not unless the man who’s nicked them is a fool. There were things in my diaries that would shame civilisation as we know it. They were a rain forest of forbidden knowledge.’
‘You may be better off without them.’
‘You don’t understand. They weren’t just idle rumination. I recorded without comment; I was present only in my choice of what was worth recording. They were my defence against meaninglessness; they made my life real.’
‘I’m sure it’s a loss you’ll get over. Most of one’s life is only filling. You’re bound to remember whatever is important.’
‘Remembering’s no good, it’s unconscious forgery. I can never resurrect the same events, and the events I do resurrect will be falsified. They’ll never again be seen in the light I shone on them in my diary. What I’ve lost is a whole history of departed selves.’
He saw little of Hugo in the weeks that followed. Most mornings he had already left for Burke’s by the time he returned from Mass. He did not come back for lunch, and in the evenings he had dinner with Olga. Father Jerry ate alone and wondered if he should call on her since she no longer came to see him. One afternoon he went to Burke’s to see how his brother was getting on. He had finished his work on the roof and had repointed the stonework of the east gable. Father Jerry found him on his knees in one of the bedrooms, replacing joists and floor boards that had gone soft from dry rot.
‘Never take on an old house,’ Hugo said. ‘There’s enough work here to keep a jack of all trades going for a twelvemonth.’
‘It will be a snug little nest when you’ve finished.’
‘It takes two to make a nest. Do you think Olga has an instinct for nidification?’
‘She’s already married. I thought you knew.’
‘She’s less wary of me now than she was. Maybe one day she’ll come up that lane with a piece of straw dangling from her beak. Now that’s the sign I’m waiting for. When I get it, you’ll be the first to know.’
He left his brother to his sawing and hammering and wandered down the lane between the sycamores. At the gate he met Olga who smiled warmly as he spoke. She was wearing half-length wellingtons, black trousers and a red shirt, the tail of which hung out from under her white pullover at the back. She looked strong and healthy, young and self-confident.
‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said. ‘I must call on you some time for one of our chats. Do you still lay out milk and biscuits for two?’
‘Always.’
‘Does anyone come?’ She smiled pleasantly.
‘Rarely, but that doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me be your visitor, then.’ She walked away up the lane to the house with the tail of her shirt flapping over her buttocks.
On the way back he got caught in a shower and sought shelter under a blackthorn bush. At a bend in the road three girls with heavy backpacks were taking pictures of one another in the rain. He listened to their laughter as they approached and wondered if they were speaking German or Dutch. It was raining heavily. Their trousers clung to their legs and their hair looked straight and bedraggled. They passed without looking his way. Their laughter echoed with youthful energy and joy, reminding him of the hunger for experience he had found so exasperating in Mary Rose. He felt dry, brittle and old – or, worse still, middle-aged.
When he arrived home, he went to the wardrobe and took out Olga’s carving of the weeping woman. He placed it on the table and sat down in front of it, as if waiting for it to speak. Outside Dr Sharma’s consulting room a sculpture of a naked female figure had faced the wall. As he climbed the stairs to the landing, the statue would tower over him; and afterwards, as she listened to his ramblings, it would overshadow his very feelings and thoughts. One day, as he reached the landing, he found the female figure facing him with a smile playing on her marble lips. Suddenly he felt weightless. The black raven within him seemed to fly out of the window into the sun, bearing with her a whole woeful world of umbrageous connections.
‘I feel better today,’ he said to Dr Sharma.
‘You look better. The clouds have lifted. Soon you won’t have to remember to smile when you hear a joke.’
‘Why have you moved the statue on the landing?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t. It must have been the cleaner.’
‘Then the statue has no significance.’
‘None. Do you think it should?’
‘Somehow I had come to believe that you put it facing the wall while the patient is unwell and that you turn it round again only when he gets better.’
Dr Sharma laughed and sat on the couch beside him.
‘What do you feel now?’
‘A sense of release, and relief from the weight of circular thoughts. I feel like a dove that’s been let out of its cote with a message in its bill. I can’t read the message. I don’t know what it says, only that sooner or later I shall meet someone who will have need of it.’
At dinner he felt shivery. He lit a fire in the study, thinking that he should have changed after the wetting he’d got earlier in the day. He sat at the table pretending to read and make notes. At last he got up and wrote a postcard to Dr Sharma. Then he wrote a second and finally a third:
Dear Dr Sharma,
September 3rd; 10.45 p.m. A faded half-moon hangs low in the sky between the dark outlines of two trees, a piece of parchment with faint squiggles, a worn-out palimpsest, wafer-thin. Above the moon in a clearing between clouds is a single star, coldly steadfast, a piercing point of light.
Father Jerry
Dear Dr Sharma,
September 3rd; 11.04 p.m. The star has lost its brilliance, stolen by the tugging moon, now a cutting-wheel with a rim that slices. The moon has come closer; the star has retreated to a great distance from all that is human and warm.
Father Jerry
Dear Dr Sharma,
September 3rd; 11.36 p.m. No star. No moon. No trees. Total darkness. Total night. Tomorrow the sun will rise before breakfast. Cold collation.
Father Jerry
The following morning he shivered in the sunlight on the way to church. He said Mass before a congregation of six – five old women from the village and one middle-aged bachelor who shaved his head for fear he might inspire lust in young women. After breakfast he took to his bed with two hot-water bottles to keep warm. He felt joyless and weak. He lay on his back listening to the lisp of the tide between the rocks and looking up at the trap-door in the ceiling. Now and again he thought of the girls with backpacks taking pictures of one another in the rain.
Hugo was at Burke’s. He was alone in the parochial house, a solid structure of stone that overlooked the village and the low townlands by the sea. As a boy he had come to this house to do odd jobs for Father Muldoon. Then it was a place of prayer and meditation, of scholarship and spiritual serenity. He remembered the glass-fronted bookcases, the chiming clock, the walking sticks in the hallway, the semicircular hearth rug, and the pipe rack on the leather-topped writing desk. When Father Muldoon died, other priests came and left their mark. One put in a new fireplace. Another modernised the kitchen and threw out the pinewood dresser. His own predecessor replaced the lovely wrought-iron gate with a crude cattle-grid simply because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of his car to shut the gate behind him. These men were vandals and like all good vandals they did not destroy, they prettified.
He had returned determined to re-create the parochial house of Father Muldoon’s time. He bought walking sticks and a chiming clock with a glass case; pipes and a pipe rack though he himself did not smoke a pipe; and a semicircular hearth rug of many colours. On his first evening, as he viewed the empty rooms and gazed at the empty bookshelves, he realised that this house had been at the centre of his vocation from the beginning, representing, as it did, a reclusive life of study and contemplation. He furnished the rooms and filled the bookshelves, but somehow it remained an empty house. The sense of mystery had evaporated, leaving him with an abiding awareness of his own shortcomings as a priest.
During his first month in the glen, he used to stand for hours by his bedroom window looking across the inlet at the sombre cliffs beyond, a black embankment with spilling foam making white veins down rock faces. Outside the blunt-headed bluff stood a single sea stack that resembled the ruined gable of a fallen house. That scene had impressed itself on his imagination. He knew every cleft and promontory. It had become his most valued ‘possession’. In a sense it was the only solid and changeless thing that remained, the antithesis of his life which had become a treacherous quagmire.
Even his childhood lacked shape and commodiousness. Asthma dogged him as a boy, causing him to wheeze at night as if his windpipe were an aeolian harp. He would sit by the open window in the dark, gasping for air while Hugo snored, miserable with guilt because of the strain his illness placed on his hard-pressed mother. Sometimes he had to stay in bed for two or three days in succession, knowing that Hugo was roaming the fields and enjoying the robust games played by Brennan, McDaid and Mary Rose.
One evening he was alone in the house after a weakening fit of asthma when he suddenly remembered a thrush’s nest in the old lane that ran up the side of the hill. Again and again he visualised the spotted, sky-blue eggs, wondering if they had hatched during his illness. It was his nest, and he had been careful to keep it a secret from Hugo. He dragged himself out of bed and stole up the lane, stooping between the ditches in case he should be spotted. His heart gave a sideways flutter as the mother left the nest, shooting past his face in the dusk. Afraid to breathe, he peered into a round hole in the moss and counted four little fledglings, tender balls of fluff with wide, greedy beaks. He looked up and down the lane, suddenly alert. Then he looked up the hill, and at the very top, standing on a rock, was Hugo. He felt weak at the knees and stooped to cough, pretending to spit out an irritation in his throat. He climbed the hill with his hands on his knees to give Hugo the impression that he was still weak.
‘You’ve found a nest.’ Hugo smiled knowledgeably.
‘I thought I might find one but there’s nothing in the old lane this year.’
‘I must have a look myself.’
‘Would you like my hoop and rod?’ he asked in desperation.
‘I’ve got two hoops already and there are more rods growing than I’ll ever cut.’
‘If you like, I’ll give you my rabbit.’
‘Why are you offering me all your things?’
‘It’s my asthma. I’ve been so poorly all week that I haven’t been able to enjoy them.’
Hugo laughed into the sky, picked up a stone and with brute force hurled it down into the lane. Three days later Jerry found the torn nest and the dead fledglings near the spot where the stone had landed. He didn’t mention it to Hugo and he tried not to think about it, because in his heart he knew that if he had not looked for the nest in the first place the nestlings might have survived. Hugo was not a mystery then. He was like any robust and uncaring boy.
He kept thinking of his brother throughout the afternoon, seeking in vain after reason and motivation. Towards evening Hugo returned from Burke’s and brought him up a cup of tea.
‘What have you done with Brennan’s clothes?’ Father Jerry asked as he took the cup which came without its saucer.
‘Nothing. They’re hanging with my own clothes in my wardrobe.’
‘What do you intend doing with them?’
‘I could give them to the poor or I could put them on our next bonfire. To be honest I haven’t given the matter my most profound thought.’
‘Is it a matter that requires profound thought?’
‘At the very least it requires stubborn thought.’
‘I suggest you get rid of them. The parochial house is hardly the place for them.’
‘If you say so, I can only believe you. A knowledge of canon law is not one of my attainments.’
He slept little that night and in the morning he did not feel well enough to say Mass. The day passed in a haze of drowsiness. Several times he dreamt that a black raven had perched on his shoulder with a swish of dirty wings. He called for Dr Sharma to put her to flight and Dr Sharma told him that nothing but feverish activity on his own part, preferably physical labour, would banish her. The raven began pecking at his head, trying to drink his brains. He woke in terror with the conviction that his illness in all its horrifying unreality had returned.
At dusk Olga brought him a bowl of vegetable soup and sat by the bedside recounting the village gossip. In the shadowy room her face had lengthened. Then her hair fell forward, obscuring her neck and cheeks. After she left he fell asleep again. He knew that it was dark outside, and he was standing on a windswept platform waiting for a train. There was no timetable, no indicator, no station-master, and no one knew when the train would arrive.
‘Where is it going?’ he asked an old man when at last it pulled in.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s the last train. There will never be another.’
The train was crowded. He ran up and down the platform in the throng. Finally, he managed to get into the guard’s van and found himself alone in the dark with Olga. The glow of her Gauloise provided the only light. The train was gathering speed. An ill-lit station flashed by, and then another.
‘It’s fast,’ Olga said, as the swaying of the carriage flung her body against his. Her distended belly bounced up and down, rubbing against his own, a quagbelly threatening spillage.
‘The child is Hugo’s but it’s yours too. Sin of lust. Sin of Father O’Mara,’ she whispered.
As they rattled over points, she put her arms round his waist to keep her balance. Then came an announcement in the unmistakable accents of the Preacher: ‘This is a non-stop service, there is no getting off at Paisley. The landscape through which we are passing is the landscape of eternity. Consider yourselves on the endless edge of things. In the words of a later and less quotable preacher, “There is nowhere to go for further enlightenment or explanation.”’
With a lunge that almost toppled Olga he made to open the door.
‘Pull, don’t push,’ she advised. ‘The door of the guard’s van opens in.’
He yanked and yanked until it became obvious that the door had been double-locked. Then Olga put her arms round him again and pressed her belly against his. Now she was eternally pregnant and present. Her Gauloise glowed but did not burn. He was overcome with grief; a senseless, bottomless grief, the grief of his illness persisting for ever. No jouissance, no desire except one: death, the ultimate good, denied for all eternity. A phrase came to mind, doxology and great amen, and he could not recall where he had heard it. Tears ran down his cheeks. He pushed Olga unceremoniously away.
The house was in darkness when he woke. He became aware of the stuttering of the sea. The stuttering ceased. He heard a laugh, a smothered, conspiratorial laugh that could only have come from Hugo’s bedroom. He got up and switched on the landing light, then went back to bed and lay awake in the dark with his door open. In his mind he went over everything that Olga had ever said to him, and he acknowledged a grief quite distinct from that of his dream. After half an hour she came out of Hugo’s room and switched off the light before stealing down the stairs. In the morning he knocked on Hugo’s door and told him never to invite her to the parochial house again.
