"Well, Your Grace, unless you're sailing tomorrow you can still see Meggie."
The words popped out before Anne let herself stop to think; why shouldn't Meggie see him once before he went away, especially if, as he seemed to think, he was going to be away a very long time? His head turned toward her. Those beautiful, distant blue eyes were very intelligent and very hard to fool. Oh, yes, he was a born diplomat! He knew exactly what she was saying, and every reason at the back of her mind. Anne found herself hanging breathlessly on his answer, but for a long time he said nothing, just sat staring out over the emerald cane toward the brimming river, with the baby forgotten in the crook of his arm. Fascinated, she stared at his profile-the curve of eyelid, the straight nose, the secretive mouth, the determined chin. What forces was he marshaling while he contemplated the view? What complicated balances of love, desire, duty, expediency, will power, longing, did he weigh in his mind, and which against which? His hand lifted the cigarette to his lips; Anne saw the fingers tremble and soundlessly let go her breath. He was not indifferent, then. For perhaps ten minutes he said nothing; Anne lit him another Capstan, handed it to him in place of the burned-out stub. It, too, he smoked down steadily, not once lifting his gaze from the far mountains and the monsoon clouds lowering the sky.
"Where is she?" he asked then in a perfectly normal voice, throwing the second stub over the veranda railing after the first. And on what she answered depended his decision; it was her turn to think. Was one right to push other human beings on a course which led one knew not where, or to what? Her loyalty was all to Meggie; she didn't honestly care an iota what happened to this man. In his way he was no better than Luke. Off after some male thing with never the time or the inclination to put a woman ahead of it, running and clutching at some dream which probably only existed in has addled head. No more substance than the smoke from the mill dissipating itself in the heavy, molasses-laden air. But it was what he wanted, and he would spend himself and his life in chasing it. He hadn't lost his good sense, no matter what Meggie meant to him. Not even for her-and Anne was beginning to believe he loved Meggie more than anything except that strange ideal-would he jeopardize the chance of grasping what he wanted in his hands one day. No, not even for her. So if she answered that Meggie was in some crowded resort hotel where he might be recognized, he wouldn't go. No one knew better than he that he wasn't the sort who could become anonymous in a crowd. She licked her lips, found her voice. "Meggie's in a cottage on Matlock Island."
"On where?"
"Matlock Island. It's a resort just off Whitsunday Passage, and it's specially designed for privacy. Besides, at this time of the year there's hardly a soul on it." She couldn't resist adding, "Don't worry, no one will see you!"
"How reassuring." Very gently he eased the sleeping baby out of his arms, handed her to Anne. "Thank you," he said, going to the steps. Then he turned back, in his eyes a rather pathetic appeal. "You're quite wrong," he said. "I just want to see her, no more than that. I shall never involve Meggie in anything which might endanger her immortal soul."
"Or your own, eh? Then you'd better go as Luke O'neill; he's expected. That way you'll be sure to create no scandal, for Meggie or for yourself." "And what if Luke turns up?"
"There's no chance of that. He's gone to Sydney and he won't be back until March. The only way he could have known Meggie was on Matlock is through me, and I didn't tell him, Your Grace."
"Does Meggie expect Luke?"
Anne smiled wryly. "Oh, dear me, no."
"I shan't harm her," he insisted. "I just want to see her for a little while, that's all."
"I'm well aware of it, Your Grace. But the fact remains that you'd harm her a great deal less if you wanted more," said Anne.
When old Rob's car came sputtering along the road Meggie was at her station on the cottage veranda, hand raised in the signal that everything was fine and she needed nothing. He stopped in the usual spot to reverse, but before he did so a man in shorts, shirt and sandals sprang out of the car, suitcase in hand.
"Hooroo, Mr. O'neill!" Rob yelled as he went. But never again would Meggie mistake them, Luke O'neill and Ralph de Bricassart. That wasn't Luke; even at the distance and in the fast-fading light she wasn't deceived. She stood dumbly and waited while he walked down the road toward her, Ralph de Bricassart. He had decided he wanted her after all. There could be no other reason for his joining her in a place like this, calling himself Luke O'neill. Nothing in her seemed to be functioning, not legs or mind or heart. This was Ralph come to claim her, why couldn't she feel? Why wasn't she running down the road to his arms, so utterly glad to see him nothing else mattered? This was Ralph, and he was all she had ever wanted out of living; hadn't she just spent more than a week trying to get that fact out of her mind? God damn him, God damn him! Why the hell did he have to come when she was finally beginning to get him out of her thoughts, if not out of her heart? Oh, it was all going to start again! Stunned, sweating, angry, she stood woodenly waiting, watching that graceful form grow larger. "Hello, Ralph," she said through clenched teeth, not looking at him. "Hello, Meggie."
"Bring your case inside. Would you like a hot cup of tea?" As she spoke she led the way into the living room, still not looking at him. "That would be nice," he said, as stilted as she. He followed her into the kitchen and watched while she plugged in an electric jug, filled the teapot from a little hot-water geyser over the sink, and busied herself getting cups and saucers down from a cupboard. When she handed him the big five-pound tin of Arnotts biscuits he took a couple of handfuls of cookies out of it and put them on a plate. The jug boiled, she emptied the hot water out of the teapot, spooned loose tea into it and filled it with bubbling water. While she carried the cookie plate and the teapot, he followed with the cups and saucers, back into the living room. The three rooms had been built alongside each other, the bedroom opening off one side of the living room and the kitchen off the other, with the bathroom beyond it. This meant the house had two verandas, one facing the road and the other the beach. Which in turn meant they each had somewhere excusable to look without having to look at each other. Full darkness had fallen with tropical suddenness, but the air through the wide-open sliding doors was filled with the lapping of water, the distant surf on the reef, the coming and going of the warm soft wind. They drank the tea in silence, though neither could eat a biscuit, and the silence stretched on after the tea was finished, he shifting his gaze to her and she keeping hers steadfastly on the breezy antics- of a baby palm outside the road-veranda doors.
"What's the matter, Meggie?" he asked, so gently and tenderly her heart knocked frantically, and seemed to die from the pain of it, the old query of the grown man to the little girl. He hadn't come to Matlock to see the woman at all. He had come to see the child. It was the child he loved, not the woman. The woman he had hated from the moment she came into being. Round and up came her eyes to his, amazed, outraged, furious; even now, even now! Time suspended, she stared at him so, and he was forced to see, breath caught astounded, the grown woman in those glass-clear eyes. Meggie's eyes. Oh, God, Meggie's eyes!
He had meant what he said to Anne Mueller; he just wanted to see her, nothing more. Though he loved her, he hadn't come to be her lover. Only to see her, talk to her, be her friend, sleep on the living room couch while he tried once more to unearth the taproot of that eternal fascination she possessed for him, thinking that if only he could see it fully exposed, he might gain the spiritual means to eradicate it. It had been hard to adjust to a Meggie with breasts, a waist, hips; but he had done it because when he looked into her eyes, there like the pool of light in a sanctuary lamp shone his Meggie. A mind and a spirit whose pulls he had never been free from since first meeting her, still unchanged inside that distressingly changed body; but while he could see proof of their continued existence in her eyes, he could accept the altered body, discipline his attraction to it.
And, visiting his own wishes and dreams upon her, he had never doubted she wanted to do the same until she had turned on him like a goaded cat, at Justine's birth. Even then, after the anger and hurt died in him, he had attributed her behavior to the pain she had gone through, spiritual more than physical. Now, seeing her at last as she was, he could pinpoint to a second the moment when she had shed the lenses of childhood, donned the lenses of a woman: that interlude in the Drogheda cemetery after Mary Carson's birthday party. When he had explained to her why he couldn't show her any special attention, because people might deem him interested in her as a man. She had looked at him with something in her eyes he had not understood, then looked away, and when she turned back the expression was gone. From that time, he saw now, she had thought of him in a different light; she hadn't kissed him in a passing weakness when she had kissed him, then gone back to thinking of him in the old way, as he had her. He had perpetuated his illusions, nurtured them, tucked them into his unchanging way of life as best he could, worn them like a hair shirt. While all the time she had furnished her love for him with woman's objects.
Admit it, he had physically wanted her from the time of their first kiss, but the want had never plagued him the way his love for her had; seeing them as separate and distinct, not facets of the same thing. She, poor misunderstood creature, had never succumbed to this particular folly. At that moment, had there been any way he could have got off Matlock Island, he would have fled from her like Orestes from the Eumenides. But he couldn't quit the island, and he did have the courage to remain in her presence rather than senselessly walk the night. What can I do, how can I possibly make reparation? I do love her! And if I love her, it has to be because of the way she is now, not because of a juvenile way station along her road. It's womanly things I've always loved in her; the bearing of the burden. So, Ralph de Bricassart, take off your blinkers, see her as she really is, not as she was long ago. Sixteen years ago, sixteen long incredible years... I am forty-four and she is twenty-six; neither of us is a child, but I am by far the more immature. You took it for granted the minute I stepped out of Rob's car, isn't that so, Meggie? You assumed I had given in at last. And before you even had time to get your breath back I had to show you how wrong you were. I ripped the fabric of your delusion apart as if it had been a dirty old rag. Oh, Meggie! What have I done to you? How could I have been so blind, so utterly self-centered? I've accomplished nothing in coming to see you, unless it is to cut you into little pieces. All these years we've been loving at cross-purposes.
Still she was looking into his eyes, her own filling with shame, humiliation, but as the expressions flew across his face to the final one of despairing pity she seemed to realize the magnitude of her mistake, the horror of it. And more than that: the fact that he knew her mistake. Go, run! Run, Meggie, get out of here with the scrap of pride he's left you! The instant she thought it she acted on it, she was up out of her chair and fleeing.
Before she could reach the veranda he caught her, the impetus of her flight spinning her round against him so hard he staggered. It didn't matter, any of it, the grueling battle to retain his soul's integrity, the long pressing down of will upon desire; in moments he had gone lifetimes. All that power held dormant, sleeping, only needing the detonation of a touch to trigger a chaos in which mind was subservient to passion, mind's will extinguished in body's will.
Up slid her arms around his neck, his across her back, spasmed; he bent his head, groped with his mouth for hers, found it. Her mouth, no longer an unwanted, unwelcome memory but real; her arms about him as if she couldn't bear to let him go; the way she seemed to lose even the feel other bones; how dark she was like the night, tangled memory and desire, unwanted memory and unwelcome desire. The years he must have longed for this, longed for her and denied her power, kept himself even from the thought of her as a woman!
Did he carry her to the bed, or did they walk? He thought he must have carried her, but he could not be sure; only that she was there upon it, he was there upon it, her skin under his hands, his skin under hers. Oh, God! My
Meggie, my Meggie! How could they rear me from infancy to think you profanation?
Time ceased to tick and began to flow, washed over him until it had no meaning, only a depth of dimension more real than real time. He could feel her yet he did not feel her, not as a separate entity; wanting to make her finally and forever a part of himself, a graft which was himself, not a symbiosis which acknowledged her as distinct. Never again would he not know the upthrusts of breasts and belly and buttocks; the folds and crevices in between. Truly she was made for him, for he had made her; for sixteen years he had shaped and molded her without knowing that he did, let alone why he did. And he forgot that he had ever given her away, that another man had shown her the end of what he had begun for himself, had always intended for himself, for she was his downfall, his rose; his creation. It was a dream from which he would never again awaken, not as long as he was a man, with a man's body. Oh, dear God! 1 know, 1 know! I know why I kept her as an idea and a child within me for so long after she had grown beyond both, but why does it have to be learned like this?
Because at last he understood that what he had aimed to be was not a man. Not a man, never a man; something far greater, something beyond the fate of a mere man. Yet after all his fate was here under his hands, struck quivering and alight with him, her man. A man, forever a man. Dear Lord, couldst Thou not have kept this from me? I am a man, I can never be God; it was a delusion, that life in search of godhead. Are we all the same, we priests, yearning to be God? We abjure the one act which irrefutably proves us men. He wrapped his arms about her and looked down with eyes full of tears at the still, faintly lit face, watched its rosebud mouth drop open, gasp, become a helpless O of astonished pleasure. Her arms and legs were round him, living ropes which bound him to her, silkily, sleekly tormented him; he put his chin into her shoulder and his cheek against the softness of hers, gave himself over to the maddening, exasperating drive of a man grappling with fate. His mind reeled, slipped, became utterly dark and blindingly bright; for one moment he was within the sun, then the brilliance faded, grew grey, and went out. This was being a man. He could be no more. But that was not the source of the pain. The pain was in the final moment, the finite moment, the empty, desolate realization: ecstasy is fleeting. He couldn't bear to let her go, not now that he had her; he had made her for himself. So he clung to her like a drowning man to a spar in a lonely sea, and soon, buoyant, rising again on a tide grown quickly familiar, he succumbed to the inscrutable fate which is a man's.
What was sleep? Meggie wondered. A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance? Whatever it was, he had yielded himself to it, and lay with his arm over her and his head beside her shoulder, possessive even in it. She was tired, too, but she would not let herself sleep. Somehow she felt if she relaxed her grasp on consciousness he might not be there when she picked it up again. Later she could sleep, after he was awake and the secretive, beautiful mouth uttered its first words. What would he say to her? Would he regret it? Had she been a pleasure to him worth what he had abandoned? So many years he had fought it, made her fight it with him; she could hardly make herself believe he had lain down his arms at last, but there had been things he had said in the night and in the midst of his pain which blotted out his long denial of her.
She was supremely happy, happier than she could remember ever being. From the moment he had pulled her back from the door it had been a body poem, a thing of arms and hands and skin and utter pleasure. I was made for him, and only for him.... That's why I felt so little with Luke! Borne out beyond the limits of endurance on her body's tide, all she could think was that to give him everything she could was more necessary to her than life itself. He must never regret it, never. Oh, his pain! There had been moments when she seemed actually to feel it as if it had been her own. Which only contributed to her happiness; there was some justice in his pain.
He was awake. She looked down into his eyes and saw the same love in their blueness which had warmed her, given her purpose since childhood; and with it a great, shadowed fatigue. Not a weariness of the body, but a weariness of the soul.
He was thinking that in all his life he had never woken in the same bed as another person; it was in a way more intimate than the sexual act preceding it, a deliberate indication of emotional ties, a cleaving to her. Light and empty as the air so alluringly full of marine tang and sun-soaked vegetation, he drifted for a while on the wings of a different kind of freedom: the relief of relinquishing his mandate to fight her, the peace of losing a long, incredibly bloody war and finding the surrender far sweeter than the battles. Ah, but I gave you a good fight, my Meggie! Yet in the end it isn't your fragments I must glue together, but the dismembered chunks of myself. You were put in my life to show me how false, how presumptuous is the pride of a priest of my kind; like Lucifer I aspired to that which is God's alone, and like Lucifer, I fell. I had the cha/y, the obedience, even the poverty before Mary Carson. But until this morning
I have never known humility. Dear Lord, if she meant nothing to me it would be easier to bear, but sometimes I think I love her far more than I do Thee, and that, too, is a part of Thy punishment. Her I do not doubt; Thou? A trick, a phantom, a jest. How can I love a jest? And yet, I do. "If I could get the energy together, I'd go for a swim and then make breakfast," he said, desperate for something to say, and felt her smile against his chest.
"Go for the swim part, I'll make the breakfast. And there's no need to put anything on here. No one comes."
"Truly paradise!" He swung his legs off the bed, sat up and stretched. "It's a beautiful morning. I wonder if that's an omen."
Already the pain of parting; just because he had left the bed; she lay watching him as he walked to the sliding doors giving onto the beach, stepped outside and paused. He turned, held out his hand. "Come with me? We can get breakfast together."
The tide was in, the reef covered, the early sun hot but the restless summer wind cool; coarse grass sent feelers down onto the crumbling, unsandlike sand, where crabs and insects scuttled after pickings. "I feel as if I've never seen the world before," he said, staring. Meggie clutched at his hand; she felt visited, and found this sunny aftermath more incomprehensible than the night's dreamy reality. Her eyes rested on him, aching. It was time out of mind, a different world. So she said, "Not this world. How could you? This is our world, for as long as it lasts."
"What's Luke like?" he asked, over breakfast. She put her head on one side, considering. "Not as much like you physically as I used to think, because in those days I missed you more, I hadn't got used to doing without you. I believe I married him because he reminded me of you. At any rate, I had made up my mind to marry someone, and he stood head and shoulders above the rest. I don't mean in worthiness, or niceness, or any of the things women are supposed to find desirable in a husband. Just in some way I can't put a finger on. Except perhaps that he is like you. He doesn't need women, either."
His face twisted. "Is that how you see me, Meggie?" "Truthfully? I think so. I'll never understand why, but I think so. There's something in Luke and in you which believes that needing a woman is a weakness. I don't mean to sleep with; I mean to need, really need." "And accepting that, you can still want us?"
She shrugged, smiled with a trace of pity. "Oh, Ralph! I don't say it isn't important, and it's certainly caused me a lot of unhappiness, but it is the way things are. I'd be a fool to waste myself trying to eradicate it, when it can't be eradicated. The best I can do is exploit the weakness, not ignore its existence. Because I want and need, too. And apparently I want and need people like you and Luke, or I wouldn't have spent myself over the pair of you the way I have. I'd have married a good, kind, simple man like my father, someone who did want and need me. But there's a streak of Samson in every man, I think. It's just that in men like you and Luke, it's more pronounced." He didn't seem at all insulted; he was smiling. "My wise Meggie!" "That's not wisdom, Ralph. Just common sense. I'm not a very wise person at all, you know that. But look at my brothers. I doubt the older ones at any rate will ever get married, or. have girlfriends even. They're terribly shy, they're frightened of the power a woman might have over them, and they're quite wrapped up in Mum."
Day followed day, and night followed night. Even the heavy summer rains were beautiful, to be walked in naked and listened to on the iron roof, as warm and full of caresses as the sun. And when the sun was out they walked too, lazed on the beach, swam; for he was teaching her to swim.
Sometimes when he didn't know he was being watched Meggie would look at him and try desperately to imprint his face upon her brain's core, remembering how in spite of the love she had borne Frank, with the passing of the years his image had dimmed, the look of him. There were the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the stunning silver wings in that black hair, the long hard body which had kept the slenderness and tautness of youth, yet had set a little, lost elasticity. And he would turn to find her watching him, a look in his eyes of haunted grief, a doomed look. She understood the implicit message, or thought she did; he must go, back to the Church and his duties. Never again with the same spirit, perhaps, but more able to serve. For only those who have slipped and fallen know the vicissitudes of the way.
One day, when the sun had gone down far enough to bloody the sea and stain the coral sand a hazy yellow, he turned to her as they lay on the beach. "Meggie, I've never been so happy, or so unhappy."
"I know, Ralph."
"I believe you do. Is it why I love you? You're not much out of the ordinary way, Meggie, and yet you aren't ordinary at all. Did I sense it, all those years ago? I must have, I suppose. My passion for titian hair! Little did I know where it would lead me. I love you, Meggie."
"Are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow. I must. My ship sails for Genoa in less than a week." "Genoa?"
"Rome, actually. For a long time, perhaps the rest of my life. I don't know."
"Don't worry, Ralph, I'll let you go without any fuss. My time is almost up, too. I'm leaving Luke, I'm going home to Drogheda."
"Oh, my dear! Not because of this, because of me?" "No, of course not," she lied. "I'd made up my mind before you arrived. Luke doesn't want me or need me, he won't miss me in the slightest. But I need a home, somewhere of my own, and I think now that Drogheda is always going to be that place. It isn't right that poor Justine should grow up in a house where I'm the servant, though I know Anne and Luddie don't think of me like a servant. But it's how I think of myself, and how Justine will think of me when she's old enough to understand she hasn't a normal sort of home. In a way she never will enjoy that, but I must do as much for her as I can. So I'm going back to Drogheda."
"I'll write to you, Meggie."
"No, don't. Do you think I need letters, after this? I don't want anything between us which might endanger you, fall into the hands of unscrupulous people. So no letters. If you're ever in Australia it would be natural and normal of you to visit Drogheda, though I'm warning you, Ralph, to think before you do. There are only two places in the world where you belong to me ahead of God-here on Matlock, and on Drogheda."
He pulled her into his arms and held her, stroking her bright hair. "Meggie, I wish with all my heart I could marry you, never be apart from you again. I don't want to leave you.... And in a way I'll never be free of you again. I wish I hadn't come to Matlock. But we can't change what we are, and perhaps it's just as well. I know things about myself I would never have known or faced if I hadn't come. It's better to contend with the known than the unknown. I love you. I always have, and I always will. Remember it." The next day Rob appeared for the first time since he had dropped Ralph, and waited patiently while they said their farewells. Obviously not a couple of newlyweds, for he'd come later than she and was leaving first. Not illicit lovers, either. They were married; it was written all over them. But they were fond of each other, very fond indeed. Like him and his Missus; a big difference in age, and that made for a good marriage. "Goodbye, Meggie."
"Goodbye, Ralph. Take care of yourself."
"I will. And you."
He bent to kiss her; in spite of her resolution she clung to him, but when he plucked her hands from around his neck she put them stiffly behind her and kept them there.
He got into the car and sat while Rob reversed, then stared ahead through the windscreen without once looking back at her. It was a rare man who could do that, Rob reflected, without ever having heard of Orpheus. They drove in silence through the rain forest and came at last to the sea side of Matlock, and the long jetty. As they shook hands Rob looked into his face, wondering. He had never seen eyes so human, or so sad. The aloofness has passed from Archbishop Ralph's gaze forever.
When Meggie came back to Himmelhoch Anne knew at once she would lose her. Yes, it was the same Meggie comb so much more, somehow. Whatever Archbishop Ralph might have told himself before he went to Matlock, on Matlock things had gone Meggie's way at last, not his. About time, too. She took Justine into her arms as if she only now understood what having Justine meant, and stood rocking the little thing while she looked around the room, smiling. Her eyes met Anne's, so alive, so shining with emotion that Anne felt her own eyes fill with reciprocal tears of that same joy. "I can't thank you enough, Anne."
"Pish, for what?"
"For sending Ralph. You must have known it would mean I'd leave Luke, so I thank you just that much more, dear. Oh, you have no idea what it did for me! I had made up my mind I was going to stay with Luke, you know. Now I'm going back to Drogheda, and I'm never going to leave it again."
"I hate to see you go and especially I hate to see Justine go, but I'm glad for both of you, Meggie. Luke will never give you anything but unhappiness." "Do you know here he is?"
"Back from the CSR. He's cutting near Ingham,"
"I'll have to go and see him, tell him. And, much as I loathe the idea, sleep with him."
"What?"
The eyes shone. "I'm two weeks overdue, and I'm never a day overdue. The only other time I was, Justine was starting. I'm pregnant, Anne, I know I am!"
"My God!" Anne gasped at Meggie as if she had never seen her before; and perhaps she had not. She licked her lips and stammered, "It could be a false alarm."
But Meggie shook her head positively. "Oh, no. I'm pregnant. There are some things one just knows."
"A nice pickle if you are," Anne muttered.
"Oh, Anne, don't be blind! Don't you see what this means? I can never have Ralph, I've always known I could never have Ralph. But I have, I have!" She laughed, gripping Justine so hard Anne was frightened the baby would scream, but strangely she did not. "I've got the part of Ralph the Church can never have, the part of him which carries on from generation to generation. Through me he'll continue to live, because I know it's going to be a son! And that son will have sons, and they'll have sons-I'll beat God yet. I've loved Ralph since I was ten years old, and I suppose I'll still be loving him if I live to be a hundred. But he isn't mine, where his child will be. Mine, Anne, mine!"
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