The Submerged Cathedral Page 12

  He should not have written to her, reviving that old need. Her silence is not a surprise, but still he feels the small hard mass of a cry beginning in his chest for the first time since he arrived here those years ago. He sits on the cement grave with his face in his hands.

  Twenty-Five

  ANTHONY RISES IN the dark, as he does every morning, feels around the cupboard for his clothes. He does not turn on the light. He has come to love darkness, knows the spaces of his room and its furnishings – bed, desk, cupboard and drawers – like the mathematics of his own body. Quickly dressed, he likes to scurry to the abbey for Vigils before the others get there. He begins his prayer before he sees another man’s face, before the lights are lit. These are the times he is most able to believe in God, and in love. Just after waking from sleep, and just before falling into it. When perhaps life is most like dying.

  In the vegetable garden James hands Martin a palm-sized river stone on which he has carved a Latin word. Colo.

  Martin’s schoolboy language lessons fail him. He holds the stone in his hand and looks at James, shakes his head.

  ‘It means both –’ James says – ‘cultivate, and worship.’

  Martin nods. He signs, Beautiful. Rests the stone on the low wall around the onion bed, they both stand to look at it. So poetry can grow among the weeds and the mistakes and the onion sprouts. Then James smiles and walks back between the beds to return to the composting heap.

  Martin watches his shoulders move beneath his habit, and he realises that for the first time in years, in this unaccountable moment, he is feeling it: love.

  One early morning after rain they are finding snails and crushing them on the concrete paths. It is an easy triumph, the fight against the snails simpler and more final than against the daily destruction by wallabies and kangaroos, the rabbits, the great holes dug by a disoriented wombat. Against these they build fortresses of fences, surround the lettuce plants with barbed wire and broken glass.

  ‘And people think a garden is a gentle place,’ James whispers to him, standing rueful, looking at the traps protecting their food.

  He looks up to Martin, smiling, waiting.

  And suddenly Martin is talking about Jocelyn and her dreamt garden, and then about the dead trees rising from silver water, about Ellen and the baby. That triangular centre of his life. He is sitting on a low brick wall, rocking in James’s arms with tears streaming down his face, and James’s voice is only as loud as the insects catching the sun in the air, rocking Martin, whispering, Poor one, poor one, poor one.

  Twenty-Six

  THEY WALK TOGETHER to the rubbish tip, wheel-barrowing the monastery’s refuse. Tin cans, cardboard flour boxes. Wheat bags, an old metal bucket with holes rusted in its base. A chair repaired so many times and now irreparable. They stand sorting the rubbish into anything reusable. James takes what he can for the compost, for mulch. Over the year they have learned one another’s rhythms, they work companionably for an hour, lifting, bending, sorting. James tries now and then to sign to Martin. He shrugs in return, not understanding.

  They work. The sun lifts in the blue air. James walks to the fence and watches Martin shovelling rubbish into the pit. Martin sees him then, leaning over the fence post, head in his hands. He walks over to him. James is trembling, shamed. Martin puts his hand on his shoulder. The man turns around. I know, Martin says. I know.

  He holds his hands out, James takes them. Then James’s face is close, his hands are shaking and he is kissing and kissing Martin’s soft and tender mouth.

  It is a poorly fenced yellow paddock under a blue sky beside a pale dirt road. Inside the fence, beside the old but well-kept gate with its mended hinges, is a white wooden shelter. Inside the shelter is a simple wooden bench, where guests who do not drive here sit waiting for the bus back to town.

  Turning from the grave one morning, through the eucalypts, Martin thinks he sees the figure of a man climb into the bus. It heaves away down the road, leaving the dust and the sound of its changing gears hanging in the air behind it.

  That evening James is not at dinner. His chair has disappeared and the brothers have been instructed to move their chairs so as to fill the space. When they retire the novices all walk past the space where his bed has been in the dormitory. The bed is waiting for removal in the corridor, mattress stripped, the blankets folded in neat squares in a stack on the corner of the grey ticking. They see it. They avoid each other’s looks. No one signs James’s name with their fingers as they exchange goodnights.

  It is a kind of unmentionable death.

  Twenty-Seven

  A GARDEN IS NOT a gentle place, James had whispered to him.

  Since he has gone Martin thinks constantly of Eden, and Gethsemane, those places of serpents and betrayal. He finds himself crying quite often now, and wondering why it is that he does not leave. He tries to pray.

  He thinks of war. He heard from a brother who went into town to the dentist that there is a war in Asia, and that Australian men are being sent there to fight.

  His father was in the medical corps on the Kokoda Trail. When the child Martin asked him about it – wanting heroic tales of bullets and snipers and jungle greens – he would never speak of it. Except to talk about the mud, and to say ‘it was two steps forward and one slide backwards, all the bloody time’. And that coming home was ‘bloody beautiful’.

  He thinks he is a coward, perhaps, for not leaving now and joining up. Do they still call it ‘joining up’? He thinks of setting foot on the road outside the monastery gate, and then the imagined motion stops. Even a country road is beyond him now. Is this failure of courage the only thing keeping a monastery together?

  He knows there is a rifle back at the monastery, in a room near the laundry. Imagines it, the cold tip sharp against the roof of his mouth.

  He tries to pray. He prays. He digs, sorts potatoes. He tries to hallucinate the Virgin Mary, Jesus, St Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, with his Bible and shovel.

  Martin has been sentenced to take over the gardening. He is not supposed to enjoy it. But he kneels at the cauliflower curds to pray and pull weeds, wishing James a better life outside the monastery than he had in it.

  ‘You are to reflect there on what you know of sin,’ the abbot tells him. ‘You must think hard and ask for God’s forgiveness.’

  That lunchtime Brother Paul is kneeling in the refectory, holding above his head a broken axe-handle, which had split as he swung the axe down onto the chopping block. His arm wavers. These punishments – the ritualised penance, the public example – are not uncommon. Paul, too, was James’s friend.

  Martin eats slowly, and does not see Frank’s smug glance at him across the room.

  In the infirmary Anthony lifts the compress away from a novice’s boil and dabs it with ointment. They speak about the weather, about Easter. The novice knows better than to ask about James’s departure. When a disappearance happens like this, the place divides into the skittish and the still, and this morning Anthony seems barely to be breathing.

  The boy is sent on his way with a plaster on his neck, and Anthony washes his hands in hot water at the sink. He holds them there, watching the steam and the colour wash red through his skin. Dries his hands on a cloth by the window, staring down towards the road. He too had watched James climb onto that bus and wished for both their sakes that Martin could be going with him.

  Anthony feels the old loss of Ignatius creeping up again, after all these years, like the first swell of nausea. And he takes a deep breath, and prays that this winter will not be a long one.

  Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the chapel sings with incense and the men are all day kneeling, praying the Stations of the Cross. Once again Martin feels it as a kind of delirium; the sore knees, the aching back are part of him but not, as if he could shrug out of his own skin and float to the rafters to watch himself down here, his falling into grief as Jesus falls on his knees under the weight of the cross.

  Last night
he read again of Christ at Gethsemane. The garden of death. And as always, in the images that came into Martin’s mind, Gethsemane was not the steep foreign place of olive trees and stone but a wide Australian lake, a garden of silver water and broken trees.

  He remembers Anthony whispering in his ear those days of his first visit to the infirmary, Do not cry, I am here. He had stared up at the man giving him tea and biscuits and shook his head. ‘You mean nothing to me,’ he had said.

  In the chapel on his knees now he is tired and sick of thinking and praying all the time to understand, to lose himself in belief. When any gain is temporary, any decision undone, any faith instantly out of reach. His shoulders hurt. He hauls himself up. It is all he can do to hold onto the pew, and in that moment he decides to release himself. To abandon thought, prayer, feeling. He remembers those first days here, the post-morphine relief at finding someone else steering him through those dead hours between waking and sleep, and he longs again for that surrender of his own will.

  But when his body finally meets his bed that night he falls into a deep sleep and in it he dreams of James and Jocelyn, and of that small stone in the vegetable garden and its invocation. Cultivate, and worship.

  In the morning he goes to the ledge behind the onion bed and the stone is there. He holds it for a while, and then pushes it into the earth, and as long as it’s buried there James is still here, and the baby still lies in its old earth bed among the trees.

  Only Jocelyn still sails out there, somewhere, beyond his rest.

  PART THREE

  Jocelyn

  1975

  Twenty-Eight

  SHE WALKS OUT of her gloomy country hotel into the hard Australian light and across the road into the town’s one stock and station agency. The agent is a jocular man in moleskins and riding boots. When she gives him her name, surprise registers on his face.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were a woman, from the letter,’ he says, and takes his hands from his pockets. He flicks her an up-and-down glance, then begins to talk about his ideas for a country retreat, how he has thought of doing the place up himself over the years. He’s known for a long time that the area is ripe for a tourism boom.

  Jocelyn stands silent among the sacks of fertiliser and boxes of weed killer, waiting.

  The agent smiles at her ruefully. ‘But the work in those old buildings,’ he says. ‘The plumbing alone –’ He shuts his mouth as Jocelyn bends in her coat and old trousers over his desk and begins writing a cheque. He goes out into the small back office and takes down from a hook a bunch of keys with a faded red plastic tag.

  That same night she drives up the scaly track to the derelict monastery. Too tired to eat, she walks the corridors, which smell of old floor polish and linoleum, until she finds the abbot’s room, lies down in a narrow bed in the moonlight and goes to sleep under a small wooden crucifix that imprints itself in her dreams.

  In the morning she stands on the porch and scans what she can see of her property. A few stunted rosebushes on mottled grass, a leaning post-and-rail fence, the paddocks beyond stretching out and away. A stagnant dam, then more land until the ridge of bush rises up in the distance, a blackened high wall against the pale yellow of the paddocks. She moves between the buildings, always looking to the treed distance, her eye stopping here and there at a clearing on the encircling ridge.

  In the oversized kitchen she unpacks a box of groceries. The entire place is still furnished, though sparsely, and there’s a kerosene refrigerator, instead of electric; a wood stove. On the linoleum next to it is a fruit box full of pale kindling pieces, cobwebbed from years of spiders. She tears up the newspaper she has brought with her and begins stuffing the old stove.

  Hours later, with a cup of tea and a smoky piece of bread she tours the buildings. The refectory, the laundry. Across the cloister courtyard to the dormitory with its forty pale wooden beds, their grey blankets tucked in tight, like a hospital ward in a war film.

  There’s surprisingly little dust. She walks through the living rooms, the small visitors’ parlour, the scriptorium. Words from an era she does not understand, printed in tiny handwriting on the floor plan in her hands, the deeds of the place in her pocket. Along with Martin’s letter, paled with age.

  The library with its shelves of books only half-empty, the abbot’s office. The echoes, the yellow light of the bathrooms. She hears her own footsteps. Then to the pale infirmary with its high beds and opaque windows and workbench set with bowls and drawers of medicinal tubes and pill bottles. A museum of illness. Did they really live such medieval lives?

  She leaves that room, thinking of leeches and its musty smells, keeps walking.

  She tries not to think that she is only searching these buildings for signs of him. She moves outside, into the sunlight. Walks among the machinery sheds, the potting shed, the woodshed. Down the path to the abbey; she pushes this door open and the place is flooded with honey light over wooden pews. Moving inside, she sits. Kneels for a minute on the hard wooden plank and rests her chin, on her folded hands, on the back of the pew in front of her.

  She stares at the crucifix-shaped white space on the wall above a bare wooden altar.

  What is she doing here?

  Twenty-Nine

  ALMOST THREE YEARS after arriving in England, Jocelyn took the train from London to a Cotswolds village for a job interview.

  As she stepped from the Paddington platform onto the train she felt how heavy her body was, how old, how tired from wearing so many heavy clothes. But once past Oxford, the train’s windows had filled with a green light. She took off her jacket and leaned towards the window. For the first time she could feel the years of the city’s darkness – of typing publishers’ rejection letters, answering solicitors’ telephones in gloomy offices – dissolving.

  Then she was standing on an empty platform and a man was holding out his hand to shake hers. He had dark curly hair, his coat flapped in the wind. His hand was warm.

  Duncan had been talkative that first Sunday morning. She had sat in the sun on a wooden bench at the rough outdoor table and watched him move back and forth across the garden in his work clothes, digging a trench for drainage pipes, with a green hill rising up beyond him like a picture in a storybook. He called over his shoulder, ‘I’ll get us lunch in a minute.’ It was simple as childhood here, away from London’s greasy rain.

  Duncan made sandwiches and they ate them from a wooden board with a glass of beer.

  She said, ‘I feel as though I’m in a painting.’

  He drained his glass. His pale throat was prickled with stubble. She remembered the feel of shaven skin under her fingertips.

  They finished the day’s work in the garden together, then he showed her his preliminary drawings, on the dining-room table, for the Lisbon gallery garden.

  He chewed his lip, then said, ‘I’m not good with words. I mean, I can read and write and that, but not properly. That’s what I need a secretary for.’

  His father was a Sheffield copper, his mother a teacher, he said. He went to the local comprehensive, then to work cutting lawns at one of the big houses in the south. He sniffed. ‘They treated you like shit, but you learned things.’

  He had learned about gardens, started managing places, fixing things up. Now he designed them. He had started to make a good deal of money, was beginning to get commissions throughout Europe.

  ‘But I’ve still got a Sheffield voice, haven’t I?’ He ran his fingers over the whorls in the wooden grain of the table. Then he looked at her, and grinned. In England they both knew what it was like to be from the wrong place.

  ‘So,’ he said later, after they had walked, leaning and breathless, back up to the house from the valley. ‘What made you come here anyway?’

  She scanned the hillsides, following the lines of the drystone walls. ‘I want to learn about gardens,’ she said.

  He sniffed again, and smiled. ‘I meant to England,’ he said. ‘But that’s good enough.’

 
; She had not seen Ellen or Sandra in the first years after the day they had all three driven in a taxi from Heathrow, Jocelyn cradling Sandra, half-asleep, in her arms. In the taxi Ellen had turned from looking at the grey streets and spoken to Jocelyn:

  ‘Where will you stay?’

  Jocelyn stared at her, felt the glass windows closing them in. ‘What do you mean?’

  Ellen’s green eyes gazed back. The cab slowed, then stopped outside a house, and at the top of the stairs a door opened, and Jocelyn could see Thomas standing there in a dark blue shirt, waiting. Sandra sat up. Ellen put her hand on Sandra’s arm and said then to Jocelyn, ‘We don’t want you. We don’t want anything to do with you.’

  Jocelyn sat in the cold taxi, numbed from the feet, not believing this cutting away.

  But the cab doors were opening and then Ellen was running up the stairs into Thomas’s outstretched arms, and the terrible birdcall of her crying sounded out into the street, and Sandra and Jocelyn were getting out of the cab.

  Sandra’s mittened hand gripped tight to Jocelyn’s there on the pavement. Controlling her own voice, somehow, Jocelyn told her: she would write, and Sandra must write or telephone her if she needed anything, and she would come.

  ‘Do you understand?’ she asked, crouching, kissing Sandra’s hand. But Sandra stood staring up the steps, shaking her head. And Jocelyn had peeled her little fingers away and got back into the taxi.

  The last image she saw before the car turned the corner was her niece, six years old in a brown overcoat, standing alone on a cold pavement in a London fog.

  She let the taxi drive on. She looked out into the drizzle that childhood memory had flashed back, of Ellen walking away from her up the strange street to the crest of the hill.