"But once your final vows are taken and you are ordained, you realize there can be no going back, no dispensation, absolutely no release?" "I understand that," said Dane patiently. "But if there is a decision to be made, I will have come to it before then." Cardinal Ralph leaned back in his chair, sighed. Had he ever been that sure? Had he ever been that strong? "Why to me, Dane? Why did you want to come to Rome? Why not have remained in Australia?" "Mum suggested Rome, but it had been in my mind as a dream for a long time. I never thought there was enough money."
"Your mother is very wise. Didn't she tell you?" "Tell me what, Your Eminence?"
"That you have an income of five thousand pounds a year and many thousands of pounds already in the bank in your own name?" Dane stiffened. "No. She never told me."
"Very wise. But it's there, and Rome is yours if you want. Do you want Rome?"
"Yes."
"Why do you want me, Dane?"
"Because you're my conception of the perfect priest, Your Eminence." Cardinal Ralph's face twisted. "No, Dane, you can't look up to me as that. I'm far from a perfect priest. I have broken all my vows, do you understand? I had to learn what you already seem to know in the most painful way a priest can, through the breaking of my vows. For I refused to admit that I was first a mortal man, and only after that a priest."
"Your Eminence, it doesn't matter," said Dane softly. "What you say doesn't make you any less my conception of the perfect priest. I think you don't understand what I mean, that's all. I don't mean an inhuman automaton, above the weaknesses of the flesh. I mean that you've suffered, and grown. Do I sound presumptuous? I don't intend to, truly. If I've offended you, I beg your pardon. It's isn't that it's so hard to express my thoughts! What I mean is that becoming a perfect priest must take years, terrible pain, and all the time keeping before you an ideal, and Our Lord."
The telephone rang; Cardinal Ralph picked it up in a slightly unsteady hand, spoke in Italian.
"Yes, thank you, we'll come at once." He got to his feet. "It's time for afternoon tea, and we're to have it with an old, old friend of mine. Next to the Holy Father he's probably the most important priest in the Church. I told him you were coming, and he expressed a wish to meet you."
"Thank you, Your Eminence."
They walked through corridors, then through pleasant gardens quite unlike Drogheda's, with tall cypresses and poplars, neat rectangles of grass surrounded by pillared walkways, mossy flagstones; past Gothic arches, under Renaissance bridges. Dane drank it in, loving it. Such a different world from Australia, so old, perpetual.
It took them fifteen minutes at a brisk pace to reach the palace; they entered, and passed up a great marble staircase hung with priceless tapestries.
Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese was sixty-six now, his body partially crippled by a rheumatic complaint, but his mind as intelligent and alert as it had always been. His present cat, a Russian blue named Natasha, was curled purring in his lap. Since he couldn't rise to greet his visitors he contented himself with a wide smile, and beckoned them. His eyes passed from Ralph's beloved face to Dane O'neill and widened, narrowed, fixed on him stilly. Within his chest he felt his heart falter, put the welcoming hand to it in an instinctive gesture of protection, and sat staring stupidly up at the younger edition of Ralph de Bricassart. "Vittorio, are you all right?" Cardinal Ralph asked anxiously, taking the frail wrist between his fingers, feeling for a pulse. "A little passing pain, no more. Sit down, sit down!"
"First, I'd like you to meet Dane O'neill, who is as I told you the son of a very dear friend of mine. Dane, this is His Eminence Cardinal di Contini-Verchese."
Dane knelt, pressed his lips to the ring; over his bent tawny head Cardinal Vittorio's gaze sought Ralph's face, scanned it more closely than in many years. Very slightly he relaxed; she had never told him, then. And he wouldn't suspect, of course, what everyone who saw them together would instantly surmise. Not father-son, of course, but a close relationship of the blood. Poor Ralph! He had never seen himself walk, never watched the expressions on his own face, never caught the upward flight of his own left eyebrow. Truly God was good, to make men so blind. "Sit down. The tea is coming. So, young man! You wish to be a priest, and have sought the assistance of Cardinal de Bricassart?" "Yes, Your Eminence."
"You have chosen wisely. Under his care you will come to no harm. But you look a little nervous, my son. Is it the strangeness?" Dane smiled Ralph's smile, perhaps minus conscious charm, but so much Ralph's smile it caught at an old, tired heart like a passing flick from barbed wire. "I'm overwhelmed, Your Eminence. I hadn't realized quite how important cardinals are. I never dreamed I'd be met at the airport, or be having tea with you."
"Yes, it is unusual.... Perhaps a source of trouble, I see that. Ah, here is our tea!" Pleased, he watched it laid out, lifted an admonishing finger. "Ah, no! I shall be "mother." How do you take your tea, Dane?" "The same as Ralph," he answered, blushed deeply. "I'm sorry, Your Eminence, I didn't mean to say that!"
"It's all right, Dane, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese understands. We met first as Dane and Ralph, and we knew each other far better that way, didn't we? Formality is new to our relationship. I'd prefer it remain Dane and Ralph in private. His Eminence won't mind, will you, Vittorio?" "No. I am fond of Christian names. But returning to what I was saying about having friends in high places, my son. It could be a trifle uncomfortable for you when you enter whichever seminary is decided upon, this long friendship with our Ralph. To have to keep going into involved explanations every time the connection between you is remarked upon would be very tedious. Sometimes Our Lord permits of a little white lie"-he smiled, the gold in his teeth flashing-"and for everyone's comfort I would prefer that we resort to one such tiny fib. For it is difficult to explain satisfactorily the tenuous connections of friendship, but very easy to explain the crimson cord of blood. So we will say to all and sundry that Cardinal de Bricassart is your uncle, my Dane, and leave it at that," ended Cardinal Vittorio suavely. Dane looked shocked, Cardinal Ralph resigned. "Do not be disappointed in the great, my son," said Cardinal Vittorio gently. "They, too, have feet of clay, and resort to comfort via little white lies. It is a very useful lesson you have just learned, but looking at you, I doubt you will take advantage of it. However, you must understand that we scarlet gentlemen are diplomats to our fingertips. Truly I think only of you, my son. Jealousy and resentment are not strangers to seminaries any more than they are to secular institutions. You will suffer a little because they think Ralph is your uncle, your mother's brother, but you would suffer far more if they thought no blood bond linked you together. We are first men, and it is with men you will deal in this world as in others."
Dane bowed his head, then leaned forward to stroke the cat, pausing with his hand extended. "May I? I love cats, Your Eminence."
No quicker pathway to that old but constant heart could he have found. "You may. I confess she grows too heavy for me. She is a glutton, are you not, Natasha? Go to Dane; he is the new generation."
There was no possibility of Justine transferring herself and her belongings from the southern to the northern hemisphere as quickly as Dane had; by the time she worked out the season at the Culloden and bade a not unregretful farewell to Bothwell Gardens, her brother had been in Rome two months. "How on earth did I manage to accumulate so much junk?" she asked, surrounded by clothes, papers, boxes.
Meggie looked up from where she was crouched, a box of steel wool soap pads in her hand.
"What were these doing under your bed?"
A look of profound relief swept across her daughter's flushed face. "Oh, thank God! Is that where they were? I thought Mrs. D's precious poodle ate them; he's been off color for a week and I wasn't game to mention my missing soap pads. But I knew the wretched animal ate them; he'll eat anything that doesn't eat him first. Not," continued Justine thoughtfully, "that I wouldn't be glad to see the last of him."
Meggie sat back on her heels, laughing. "Oh, Jus! Do you know how funny you are?" She threw the box onto the bed among a mountain of things already there. "You're no credit to Drogheda, are you? After all the care we took pushing neatness and tidiness into your head, too."
"I could have told you it was a lost cause. Do you want to take the soap pads back to Drogheda? I know I'm sailing and my luggage is unlimited, but I daresay there are tons of soap pads in London."
Meggie transferred the box into a large carton marked MRS. D. "I think we'd better donate them to Mrs. Devine; she has to render this flat habitable for the next tenant." An unsteady tower of unwashed dishes stood on the end of the table, sprouting gruesome whiskers of mold. "Do you ever wash your dishes?"
Justine chuckled unrepentantly. "Dane says I don't wash them at all, I shave them instead."
"You'd have to give this lot a haircut first. Why don't you wash them as you use them?"
"Because it would mean trekking down to the kitchen again, and since I usually eat after midnight, no one appreciates the patter of my little feet." "Give me one of the empty boxes. I'll take them down and dispose of them now," said her mother, resigned; she had known before volunteering to come what was bound to be in store for her, and had been rather looking forward to it. It wasn't very often anyone had the chance to help Justine do anything; whenever Meggie had tried to help her she had ended feeling an utter fool. But in domestic matters the situation was reversed for once; she could help to her heart's content without feeling a fool.
Somehow it got done, and Justine and Meggie set out in the station wagon Meggie had driven down from Gilly, bound for the Hotel Australia, where Meggie had a suite.
"I wish you Drogheda people would buy a house at Palm Beach or Avalon," Justine said, depositing her case in the suite's second bedroom. "This is terrible, right above Martin Place. Just imagine being a hop, skip and jump from the surf! Wouldn't that induce you to hustle yourselves on a plane from Gilly more often?"
"Why should I come to Sydney? I've been down twice in the last seven years-to see Dane off, and now to see you off. If we had a house it would never be used."
"Codswallop."
"Why? 11
"Why? Because there's more to the world than bloody Drogheda, dammit! That place, it drives me batty!"
Meggie sighed. "Believe me, Justine, there'll come a time when you'll yearn to come home to Drogheda."
"Does that go for Dane, too?"
Silence. Without looking at her daughter, Meggie took her bag from the table. "We'll be late. Madame Rocher said two o'clock. If you want your dresses before you sail, we'd better hurry."
"I am put in my place," Justine said, and grinned. "Why is it, Justine, that you didn't introduce me to any of your friends? I didn't see a sign of anyone at Bothwell Gardens except Mrs. Devine," Meggie said as they sat in Germaine Rocher's salon watching the languid mannequins preen and simper.
"Oh, they're a bit shy.... I like that orange thing, don't you?" "Not with your hair. Settle for the grey."
"Pooh! I think orange goes perfectly with my hair. In grey I look like something the cat dragged in, sort of muddy and half rotten. Move with the times, Mum. Redheads don't have to be seen in white, grey, black, emerald green or that horrible color- you're so addicted to-what is it, ashes of roses? Victorian!"
"You have the name of the color right," Meggie said. She turned to look at her daughter. "You're a monster," she said wryly, but with affection. Justine didn't pay any attention; it was not the first time she had heard it. "I'll take the orange, the scarlet, the purple print, the moss green, the burgundy suit...."
Meggie sat torn between laughter and rage. What could one do with a daughter like Justine?
The Himalaya sailed from Darling Harbor three days later. She was a lovely old ship, flat-hulled and very seaworthy, built in the days when no one was in a tearing hurry and everyone accepted the fact England was four weeks away via Suez or five weeks away via the Cape of Good Hope. Nowadays even the ocean liners were streamlined, hulls shaped like destroyers to get there faster. But what they did to a sensitive stomach made seasoned sailors quail. "What fun!" Justine laughed. "We've got a whole lovely footie team in first class, so it won't be as dull as I thought. Some of them are gorgeous."
"Now aren't you glad I insisted on first class?" "I suppose so."
"Justine, you bring out the worst in me, you always have," Meggie snapped, losing her temper at what she took for ingratitude. Just this once couldn't the little wretch at least pretend she was sorry to be going? "Stubborn, pig-headed, self-willed! You exasperate me."
For a moment Justine didn't answer, but turned her head away as if she was more interested in the fact that the all-ashore gong was ringing than in what her mother was saying. She bit the tremor from her lips, put a bright smile on them. "I know I exasperate you," she said cheerfully as she faced her mother. "Never mind, we are what we are. As you always say, I take after my dad."
They embraced self-consciously before Meggie slipped thankfully into the crowds converging on gangways and was lost to sight. Justine made her way up to the sun deck and stood by the rail with rolls of colored streamers in her hands. Far below on the wharf she saw the figure in the pinkish-grey dress and hat walk to the appointed spot, stand shading her eyes. Funny, at this distance one could see Mum was getting up toward fifty. Some way to go yet, but it was there in her stance. They waved in the same moment, then Justine threw the first of her streamers and Meggie caught its end deftly. A red, a blue, a yellow, a pink, a green, an orange; spiraling round and round, tugging in the breeze.
A pipe band had come to bid the football team farewell and stood with pennons flying, plaids billowing, skirling a quaint version of "Now Is the Hour." The ship's rails were thick with people hanging over, holding desperately to their ends of the thin paper streamers; on the wharf hundreds of people craned their necks upward, lingering hungrily on the faces going so far away, young faces mostly, off to see what the hub of civilization on the other side of the world was really like. They would live there, work there, perhaps come back in two years, perhaps not come back at all. And everyone knew it, wondered.
The blue sky was plumped with silver-white clouds and there was a tearing Sydney wind. Sun warmed the upturned heads and the shoulder blades of those leaning down; a great multicolored swath of vibrating ribbons joined ship and shore. Then suddenly a gap appeared between the old boat's side and the wooden struts of the wharf; the air filled with cries and sobs; and one by one in their thousands the streamers broke, fluttered wildly, sagged limply and crisscrossed the surface of the water like a mangled loom, joined the orange peels and the jellyfish to float away.
Justine kept doggedly to her place at the rail until the wharf was a few hard lines and little pink pinheads in the distance; the Himalaya's tugs turned her, towed her helplessly under the booming decks of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, out into the mainstream of that exquisite stretch of sunny water. It wasn't like going to Manly on the ferry at all, though they followed the same path past Neutral Bay and Rose Bay and Cremorne and Vaucluse; no. For this time it was out through the Heads, beyond the cruel cliffs and the high lace fans of foam, into the ocean. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.
Money, Justine discovered, made London a most alluring place. Not for her a penniless existence clinging to the fringes of Earl's Court-"Kangaroo Valley" they called it because so many Australians made it their headquarters. Not for her the typical fate of Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring, working for a pittance in some office or school or hospital, shivering thin-blooded over a tiny radiator in a cold, damp room. Instead, for Justine a mews flat in Kensington close to Knightsbridge, centrally heated; and a place in the company of Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, The Elizabethan Group. When the summer came she caught a train to Rome. In afteryears she would smile, remembering how little she saw of that long journey across France, down Italy; her whole mind was occupied with the things she had to tell Dane, memorizing those she simply mustn't forget. There were so many she was bound to leave some out.
Was that Dane? The tall, fair man on the platform, was that Dane? He didn't look any different, and yet he was a stranger. Not of her world anymore. The cry she was going to give to attract his attention died unuttered; she drew back a little in her seat to watch him, for the train had halted only a few feet beyond where he stood, blue eyes scanning the windows without anxiety. It was going to be a pretty one-sided conversation when she told him about life since he had gone away, for she knew now there was no thirst in him to share what he experienced with her. Damn him! He wasn't her baby brother anymore; the life he was living had as little to do with her as it did with Drogheda. Oh, Dane! What's it like to live something twenty-four hours of every day?
"Hah! Thought I'd dragged you down here on a wild-goose chase, didn't you?" she said, creeping up behind him unseen.
He turned, squeezed her hands and stared down at her, smiling. "Prawn," he said lovingly, taking her bigger suitcase and tucking her free arm in his. "It's good to see you," he added as he handed her into the red Lagonda he drove everywhere; Dane had always been a sports car fanatic, and had owned one since he was old enough to hold a license.
"Good to see you, too. I hope you found me a nice pub, because I meant what I wrote. I refuse to be stuck in a Vatican cell among a heap of celibates." She laughed.
"They wouldn't have you, not with the Devil's hair. I've booked you into a little pension not far from me, but they speak English so you needn't worry if I'm not with you. And in Rome it's no problem getting around on English; there's usually someone who can speak it."
"Times like this I wish I had your gift for foreign languages. But I'll manage; I'm very good at mimes and charades."
"I have two months, Jussy, isn't it super? So we can take a look at France and Spain and still have a month on Drogheda. I miss the old place." "Do you?" She turned to look at him, at the beautiful hands guiding the car expertly through the crazy Roman traffic. "I don't miss it at all; London's too interesting."
"You don't fool me," he said. "I know what Drogheda and Mum mean to you." Justine clenched her hands in her lap but didn't answer him. "Do you mind having tea with some friends of mine this afternoon?" he asked when they had arrived. "I rather anticipated things by accepting for you already. They're so anxious to meet you, and as I'm not a free man until tomorrow, I didn't like to say no."
"Prawn! Why should I mind? If this was London I'd be inundating you with my friends, so why shouldn't you? I'm glad you're giving me a look-see at the blokes in the seminary, though it's a bit unfair to me, isn't it? Hands off the lot of them."
She walked to the window, looked down at a shabby little square with two tired plane trees in its paved quadrangle, three tables strewn with them, and to one side a church of no particular architectural grace or beauty, covered in peeling stucco.
"Dane...."
"Yes?"
"I do understand, really I do."
"Yes, I know." His face lost its smile. "I wish Mum did, Jus." "Mum's different. She feels you deserted her; she doesn't realize you haven't. Never mind about her. She'll come round in time."
"I hope so." He laughed. "By the way, it isn't the blokes from the seminary you're going to meet today. I wouldn't subject them or you to such temptation. It's Cardinal de Bricassart. I know you don't like him, but promise you'll be good."
Her eyes lit with peculiar witchery. "I promise! I'll even kiss every ring that's offered to me."
"Oh, you remember! I was so mad at you that day, shaming me in front of him."
"Well, since then I've kissed a lot of things less hygienic than a ring. There's one horrible pimply youth in acting class with halitosis and decayed tonsils and a rotten stomach I had to kiss a total of twenty-nine times, and I can assure you, mate, that after him nothing's impossible." She patted her hair, turned from the mirror. "Have I got time to change?" "Oh, don't worry about that. You look fine."
"Who else is going to be there?"
The sun was too low to warm the ancient square, and the leprous patches on the plane tree trunks looked worn, sick. Justine shivered. "Cardinal di Contini-Verchese will be there."
She had heard that name, and opened her eyes wider. "Phew! You move in pretty exalted circles, don't you?"
"Yes. I try to deserve it."
"Does it mean some people make it hard on you in other areas of your life here, Dane?" she asked, shrewdly.
"No, not really. Who one knows isn't important. I never think of it, so nor does anyone else."
The room, the red men! Never in all her life had Justine been so conscious of the redundancy of women in the lives of some men as at that moment, walking into a world where women simply had no place except as humble nun servants. She was still in the olive-green linen suit she had put on outside Turin, rather crumpled from the train, and she advanced across the soft crimson carpet cursing Dane's eagerness to be there, wishing she had insisted on donning something less travel-marked.
Cardinal de Bricassart was on his feet, smiling; what a handsome old man he was.
"My dear Justine," he said, extending his ring with a wicked look which indicated he well remembered the last time, and searching her face for something she didn't understand. "You don't look at all like your mother." Down on one knee, kiss the ring, smile humbly, get up, smile less humbly. "No, I don't, do I? I could have done with her beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It's what you and your art can convince people the face is."
A dry chuckle came from a chair; once more she trod to salute a ring on an aging wormy hand, but this time she looked up into dark eyes, and strangely in them saw love. Love for her, for someone he had never seen, could scarcely have heard mentioned. But it was there. She didn't like Cardinal de Bricassart any more now than she had at fifteen, but she warmed to this old man.
"Sit down, my dear," said Cardinal Vittorio, his hand indicating the chair next to him.
"Hello, pusskins," said Justine, tickling the blue-grey cat in his scarlet lap. "She's nice, isn't she?"
"Indeed she is."
"What's her name?"
"Natasha."
The door opened, but not to admit the tea trolley. A man, mercifully clad as a layman; one more red soutane, thought Justine, and I'll bellow like a bull.
But he was no ordinary man, even if he was a layman. They probably had a little house rule in the Vatican, continued Justine's unruly mind, which specifically barred ordinary men. Not exactly short, he was so powerfully built he seemed more stocky than he was, with massive shoulders and a huge chest, a big leonine head, long arms like a shearer. Ape-mannish, except that he exuded intelligence and moved with the gait of someone who would grasp whatever he wanted too quickly for the mind to follow. Grasp it and maybe crush it, but never aimlessly, thoughtlessly; with exquisite deliberation. He was dark, but his thick mane of hair was exactly the color of steel wool and of much the same consistency, could steel wool have been crimped into tiny, regular waves.
"Rainer, you come in good time," said Cardinal Vittorio, indicating the chair on his other side, still speaking in English. "My dear," he said, turning to Justine as the man finished kissing his ring and rose, "I would like you to meet a very good friend. Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Rainer, this is Dane's sister, Jus- 72 tine.
He bowed, clicking his heels punctiliously, gave her a brief smile without warmth and sat down, just too far off to one side to see. Justine breathed a sigh of relief, especially when she saw that Dane had draped himself with the ease of habit on the floor beside Cardinal Ralph's chair, right in her central vision. While she could see someone she knew and loved well, she would be all right. But the room and the red men and now this dark man were beginning to irritate her more than Dane's presence calmed; she resented the way they shut her out. So she leaned to one side and tickled the cat again, aware that Cardinal Vittorio sensed and was amused by her reactions.
"Is she spayed?" asked Justine.
"Of course."
"Of course! Though why you needed to bother I don't know. Just being a permanent inhabitant of this place would be enough to neuter anyone's ovaries."
"On the contrary, my dear," said Cardinal Vittorio, enjoying her hugely. "It is we men who have psychologically neutered ourselves."
"I beg to differ, Your Eminence."
"So our little world antagonizes you?"
"Well, let's just say I feel a bit superfluous, Your Eminence. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here."
"I cannot blame you. I also doubt that you like to visit. But you will get used to us, for you must visit us often, please."
Justine grinned. "I hate being on my best behavior," she confided. "It brings out the absolute worst in me. I can feel Dane's horrors from here without even looking at him."
"I was wondering how long it was going to last," said Dane, not at all put out. "Scratch Justine's surface and you find a rebel. That's why she's such a nice sister for me to have. I'm not a rebel, but I do admire them." Herr Hartheim shifted his chair so that he could continue to keep her in his line of vision even when she straightened, stopped playing with the cat. At that moment the beautiful animal grew tired of the hand with an alien female scent, and without getting to its feet crawled delicately from red lap to grey, curling itself under Herr Hartheim's strong square stroking hands, purring so loudly that everyone laughed.
"Excuse me for living," said Justine, not proof against a good joke even when she was its victim.
"Her motor is as good as ever," said Herr Hartheim, the amusement working fascinating changes in his face.
His English was so good he hardly had an accent, but it had an American inflection; he rolled his rather's.
The tea came before everyone settled down again, and oddly enough it was Herr Hartheim who poured, handing Justine her cup with a much friendlier look than he had given her at introduction.
"In a British community," he said to her, "afternoon tea is the most important refreshment of the day. Things happen over teacups, don't they? I suppose because by its very nature it can be demanded and taken at almost any time between two and five-thirty, and talking is thirsty work." The next half hour seemed to prove his point, though Justine took no part in the congress. Talk veered from the Holy Father's precarious health to the cold war and then the economic recession, all four men speaking and listening with an alertness Justine found absorbing, beginning to grope for the qualities they shared, even Dane, who was so strange, so much an unknown. He contributed actively; and it wasn't lost upon her that the three older men listened to him with a curious humility, almost as if he awed them. His comments were neither uninformed nor naive, but they were different, original, holy. Was it for his holiness they paid such serious attention to him? That he possessed it, and they didn't? Was it truly a virtue they admired, yearned for themselves? Was it so rare? Three men so vastly different one from the other, yet far closer bound together than any of them were to Dane. How difficult it was to take Dane as seriously as they did! Not that in many ways he hadn't acted as an older brother rather than a younger; not that she wasn't aware of his wisdom, his intellect or his holiness. But until now he had been a part of her world. She had to get used to the fact that he wasn't anymore.
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 32 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |