A Month of Sundays Read online

  “Will you be having another rasher, Father?” From the half-open presbytery door came a female voice which O’Driscoll recognized as belonging to Mrs. O’Reilly, but it was a softer, gentler version of the harsh tones she usually adopted. There was a short silence and then, somewhere between a murmur and a grunt, an answering, “I will.”

  Mrs. O’Reilly continued in a soft breathless voice quite unlike her usual one, “And I’m sure you could make room for another couple of pieces of white pudding. It’s Galtee - your favourite - got specially from the market, and you do need to keep your strength up, what with three masses to say and the sick to visit as well.”

  O’Driscoll had not until that moment imagined that the priest’s duties included calling on the infirm and couldn’t help feeling that the prospect of a visit from Father Kennedy would be enough to induce a complete recovery in any invalid with an ounce of sense. Perhaps Lazarus himself had been anticipating a visit from some biblical version of Kennedy - it would certainly account for the alacrity with which history’s most notorious malingerer had restored himself to health and vitality.

  “I’ll just be having a couple of pieces of the white pudding,” came Kennedy’s voice, adding, “I wouldn’t want to be getting a corporation, now,” and through the half-opened door, O’Driscoll saw a large ecclesiastical hand patting a large ecclesiastical stomach.

  “Not a bit of it,” crooned Mrs. O’Reilly. “Sure, a man has a much greater air of dignity when he is carrying a little condition, not like those skinny articles you see around these days. Now Father, there’s the last sausage there,” she continued, pushing it onto his plate, “t’would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

  “Ah Mrs. O’Reilly, you’ll feed me to death if I’m not careful.”

  “Go on with you! Now Father, will you have another cup of tea - the pot’s still warm?”

  Still debating whether to move authoritatively into the room and declare himself, or to creep back down the hall and escape, O’Driscoll looked around and noticed that Parnell had returned and was once more regarding him with studied insolence from across the corridor. Under the cat’s unnerving stare, his nerve failed completely and he beat a hasty retreat, entering the church, which was now open, a few moments later.

  John O’Driscoll was not normally a young man who sought out the limelight but, aware of what was at stake and unable to contemplate the thought of what life would be like if his tenure at the school came to an end, he steeled himself and swept around the church on a number of spurious pretexts. He made an unnecessary journey to the pew where Miss Gillespie and the girls were sitting, and ostentatiously went through the motions of checking the hymn books, looking surreptitiously across at Father Kennedy to see if his presence was being noted. The priest returned his look and muttered, “O’Driscoll,” by way of a greeting, but as Bishop McCarthy was at that moment standing right alongside him, he then had no option but to introduce the bishop to O’Driscoll, which he did with a short description of the role that the young teacher was to play.

  “Rebinding the hymn books, splendid, splendid!” said the bishop in the cultured tones of the Irish east coast. “One finds that events such as this are so much more successful when the burden of preparation is a shared one.” Rubbing his hands enthusiastically, he went on, “I am reminded of the passage from Matthew where Our Lord first spoke to the Pharisees on the subject of...” But it was no use, O’Driscoll had left him in body and spirit. He had just seen Karen on the other side of the church looking ravishing in black, and with a muttered apology, he retired to a pew at the back where, unnoticed by the congregation, he would be able to indulge in a solitary daydream.

  There was a perceptible increase in the bustle and movement around the church as the service time grew near. Altar boys scurried up and down the nave and teachers checked for the umpteenth time that their pupils were sitting, well-behaved and quiescent in their places. In a radical new departure for Saint Catherine’s, a video camera had been purchased, which would film the events of the service, and by some strange alchemy, project the moving images onto a huge screen which had been erected at the back of the altar. It was cutting-edge technology for 1995, and Father Kennedy was proud of the minute detail with which it would record the sacred proceedings ahead.

  As the mass began and Kennedy’s nostril hairs, each three feet high and whirling furiously, were projected in all their glory onto the screen, O’Driscoll drifted into a delicious reverie. Fanatical separatists from an obscure central Asian territory had overrun the church and within minutes were set to detonate the industrial quantities of explosive strapped to their bodies, causing massive devastation and loss of life. John O’Driscoll had volunteered to undertake the task of opening negotiations with them and Karen was trying desperately to prevent him going into the church.

  “But John,” she said, her bosom heaving (Heaving! - that was one that O’Driscoll/Fleming hadn’t thought of!), “you can’t. It’ll be certain death.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and said in halting tones, “And what about... us... I’d thought that we ...”

  O’Driscoll was never to know what was to follow that “we...,” because at that moment he was jerked out of his reverie by a commotion at the front of the church. Mildly annoyed at having his fantasy so rudely interrupted, he looked ahead to see what the cause of the disturbance was, secure in the knowledge that, whatever had gone wrong this time, at least they couldn’t pin it on him. It took him a couple of seconds to make sense of what was happening and then the blood froze in his veins and the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. An “OOST” began to form in his diaphragm, but died unborn and unlamented around his larynx, for the most emphatic “OOST” ever uttered would not have conveyed a fraction of the horror he was feeling at the images unspooling before his disbelieving eyes. At some point, the cameraman must have changed position because a picture of the choir was now being projected in enormous detail onto the screen behind the altar. Elderly spinsterish Miss Gillespie was standing in front with the twelve girls, all chosen for their radiance and innocence, in a line behind her. Each was holding a large red missal, upon which could be clearly seen, huge and picked out in gold leaf, the inscription:

  HYMENS

  ANCIENT AND MODERN

  As the realization of what had happened hit him, O’Driscoll’s brain went numb, his mind refusing to work other than to wonder inconsequentially whether it was the Ancient Greeks or Romans who had coined the phrase about the Gods making merry in their mischief. He couldn’t remember, other than to reflect that the group of deities entrusted with his care must be possessed of particularly capricious senses of humour, for with cruel symmetry they had once again chosen to change the meaning of a message completely by altering just one letter. For O’Driscoll, the outcome in either case was the same, immediate disgrace and ignominy, followed by banishment to the edge of the ecclesiastical universe, and any hopes he might have held for a future at St. Catherine’s would surely be consigned to the same outer darkness.

  There was a buzz of noise around the church and Father Kennedy could be seen looking behind him, eyes squinting as he tried to make out the inscription projected on the huge screen. O’Driscoll watched in horror as the realization of what had happened slowly dawned on Kennedy and the piggy eyes that he knew so well began to relentlessly quarter the area, scanning each pew as they narrowed their field of search. Meanwhile, the object of his search stood transfixed, like a rabbit caught in headlights, until finally, after what seemed like an age, the priest’s eyes alighted on him. Kennedy’s nostril hairs began to dance a demented hornpipe whilst one of his hands made a gesture towards O’Driscoll that was assuredly not a sign of the cross. As the priest’s mouth worked in a manic but silent pantomime, O’Driscoll saw rather than heard his name being invoked in a wrathful ecclesiastical bellow and his body began to experience a familiar sensation - the frantic fizzing and churning i
n his bowels as they began the process of turning to liquid.

  Week Two

  Monday

  The instant John O’Driscoll woke, he knew that something awful, something truly awful had occurred and as the full weight of what he had allowed to happen bore down on him, he mouthed silent imprecations and scratched his scrotum in misery. It was nearly twenty-four hours since the Year Six mass, but O’Driscoll still felt the pall of disgrace hanging over him. Actually, the disaster could have been worse, had it not been for the quick thinking of the cameraman, who cut power to the camera and thus blotted out the unholy image on the screen. Perhaps three-quarters of the congregation had no idea anything was amiss, but there had been enough who had seen what was on the screen to ensure O’Driscoll’s disgrace.

  By a supreme collective effort of will, the service proceeded in a more or less normal manner. The camera was found to be working again and Miss Gillespie and the girls remembered to keep their missals resting firmly on the pew in front of them as they sang, but it did not need the presence of a camera for the rage on Father Kennedy’s countenance to be apparent. He strove to maintain an air of composure but his inner turmoil was evident in the manic flaring of his nostrils and the frantic cavorting of the hairs that lay within them. At the end of the service, O’Driscoll had rushed forward and, in a frantic attempt at damage limitation, picked up a missal and looked around in an elaborate pantomime intended to suggest that somehow a malign substitution had taken place.

  Bishop McCarthy, who had been oblivious to the disturbance at the start of proceedings, strolled over to the choir area and, before anyone had the chance to stop him, picked up one of the missals. After examining the front cover, he turned to O’Driscoll, who had been hovering nervously nearby, and said, “An unusual spelling, Mr. O’Driscoll.” Growing up as one of seven boys on a farm outside Clonmel, Bishop McCarthy had entered the local seminary at twelve and thereafter moved in an entirely male-oriented world where knowledge of female anatomy was extremely limited. The word on the missal, therefore, meant nothing to him other than perhaps some variation on the noun “hymn”, such as “hymnal”. Dimly apprehending this in the midst of the turmoil, O’Driscoll gabbled frantically, “Yes, Bishop, it’s a new spelling that the... er... the ecumenical commission recommended, but... er... on reflection, we feel we’ll probably stick with the traditional one.”

  “I think you have chosen wisely, my son,” said the bishop. “I feel that in our headlong rush for change, we forget to respect the traditional terminology that has stood us in good stead for so many years.” Inclining his head gravely but not unkindly in O’Driscoll’s direction, he returned the missal to the pile and moved towards the main body of the church.

  The fact that the catastrophe had passed completely above the head of the bishop had not, however, helped O’Driscoll when the inevitable inquisition had taken place in Sister Bernadette’s office after mass. By some miracle, Father Kennedy had been called away on parish business, and without his terrible presence, the atmosphere was less charged, but in some ways this made O’Driscoll feel even more guilty. Sister Bernadette gently but firmly established that the missals in question had remained in their packaging until minutes before the start of mass, and therefore the printing could not have been checked. Her final words had been not unkind. “You have much potential, John, but you need to realize that achievement can only be assured by rigorous attention to detail.”

  What the implications were on his future, O’Driscoll hadn’t dared to ask and he could only hope when the school leadership did finally meet to decide the following year’s staffing, the incident might have been forgotten. Groaning anew at his remembered shame, he dragged himself out of bed, breakfasted on half a cup of coffee, and an hour later, found himself in the staff room listening to morning briefing.

  After an uneventful day, the hour of eight o’clock found O’Driscoll sitting in the audience at the National Theatre, waiting for Antony and Cleopatra to begin. He had effected the transfer of tickets from Karen without further embarrassment to either party by arranging for her to leave them in his pigeonhole, and was then faced with the tricky decision as to whether he should go ahead and attend the performance, and if so, whom to take with him. He would have preferred word to have got back to Karen that he had cut a conspicuous figure as he entered the National Theatre in the company of a shapely blonde, but if truth be told, he would have settled for a companion with lines built more for comfort than for speed. To be brutally honest, if a fat bird with mousy hair and boils had been available, he would have accepted her presence with gratitude. But the fly in the ointment was that none of these creatures existed in the O’Driscoll firmament, which was why as his gaze moved around the theatre and came to rest on the seat next to him, it alighted on the recumbent form of Michael Quinn, his great carcass spreading out to fill the available space and his boots resting on the back of the seat in front of him.

  Quinn had considered the theatre invitation on Saturday lunchtime when the two had gone for a pint in the Hamborough Tavern on Southall Broadway. “Does anyone get their kit off?” had been his first question.

  “It’s Shakespeare, Mick,” O’Driscoll replied wearily. “No one gets their kit off, or flashes their tits or does a dance with tassels. In fact in the old days, the female parts were played by young boys.”

  Micky considered this information as he took a leisurely draught from his pint. “Jesus,” he said eventually, “there must have been a lot of paedoph... paeda... how’s your father in the theatre in those days.”

  “I think you’ll find things are pretty much the same today,” said Tania the barmaid tartly. She was an aspiring actress and had clearly been finding the impresarios on the West End audition circuit a difficult group to impress.

  “Anyway, are you coming or not?” asked O’Driscoll, whose patience had been worn thin by his friend’s prevarication.

  “Well, on the plus side, I’ve got nothing else on,” said Quinn, taking another long pull from his pint. “But against that, there’s the prospect of spending the evening with a crowd of pretentious arseholes.” He stopped again to take a third swig from his rapidly diminishing pint before adding, “Present company excepted, of course,” and Tania smiled. For once, O’Driscoll had to agree with Micky’s sentiment - he liked Shakespeare but too often the audiences were full of people for whom an evening at the theatre was a chance to show how clever they were and how much they knew about the play in question.

  The next few drinks had lifted Micky’s mood to a point where he was able to contemplate the evening with equanimity, which was how the two came to be sitting side-by-side and relatively sober in the stalls of the National Theatre. Scanning the audience idly, O’Driscoll’s eyes suddenly alighted on the moustachioed figure of the Head, Mr. Barnet, who was sitting a few seats along in the same row. Next to him was Mrs. Goodwin, and further along Mr. Li, Miss Gillespie and several other members of Saint Catherine’s staff. He realized that Karen’s tickets must have been part of a group booking and his heart sank at the prospect of spending an evening making small talk with people whom he had little in common. Mr. Barnet saw him at the same moment and nodded a greeting to him. The Head was a stout, middle-aged man with a florid complexion and a large moustache. His father had been a fighter ace who had become a minor celebrity during the war and no one entering Mr. Barnet’s office could fail to be aware of this, for RAF memorabilia was dotted around the room and there was a framed photo on the wall showing a young man in a leather jacket leaning negligently on the wing of a fighter aircraft. In another frame was an obituary from The Daily Telegraph which began:

  Group Captain Charles Barnet D.S.O., known to his many friends as “Boko”, saw action in several theatres of war in the last conflict, notably during the defensive action which came to be known as “the Battle of Britain”. He also served with distinction in the North African campaign, where...

 
O’Driscoll had never got any further than that, but was aware, like everyone else, how Mr. Barnet revered the memory of his father, and how he lived and breathed in a world of fliers in general and the RAF in particular. As well as sporting the luxurious growth on his upper lip, the Head habitually dressed in a dark blue blazer and beige slacks, and often sported a cravat instead of a tie. He talked with the strangled vowels of a bygone age and when he made reference to the war, aeroplanes and flying, which he often did, his speech was peppered with examples of RAF jargon and terminology that struck an unusual note in the 1990s. With a sinking heart, O’Driscoll noted the intervening seating was empty so there was no impediment to conversation between the two parties.