The year moved forward, cold with frost, the fields firm enough to carry the ploughing tractors. Ash Wednesday, a cold white morning, all the villagers at Mass and the rails, to be signed with the Cross on their lives to be broken, all sinners and needing the grace of God to be saved, the cross thumbed by the priest on their foreheads with the ashes of their mortality. The organ was silent in the organ loft; those who did not get dispensed from the fast could have only one full meal in the day; the yew branches would be blessed Palm Sunday and left in a bath-tub outside the church for the people to take away; and the beautiful, beautiful ceremonies of Holy Week.
On Wednesday and Friday evenings at six they had Lenten Devotions: the rosary and Benediction on Wednesdays; the Stations of the Cross that she loved, on Fridays.
The priest with the small black prayer book, in black soutane and white surplice, the altar-boys in scarlet and white, their breaths blowing like cigarette-smoke in the light of the candles they carried, the candle-flames flickering yellow before their young faces. At every one of the fourteen stations from Pilate to the tomb the priest’s voice ringing: We adore thee, O Christ, and praise thee, as he genuflects in the stillness, and the self-conscious whispers of the small congregation of villagers scattering from beneath the gallery as their feet shuffle on the flagstones, Because by Thy holy Cross Thou has redeemed the world.
Christ on the road to Calvary, she on the same road; both in sorrow and in ecstasy; He to save her in Him, she to save herself in Him — both to be joined for ever in Oneness. She’d gone to these devotions all her life, she’d only once fallen away, some months of bitterness in London. She saw her own life declared in them and made known, the unendurable pettiness and degradation of her own fallings raised to dignity and meaning in Christ’s passion; and always the ecstasy of individual memories breaking like a blood-vessel, elevated out of the accidental moment of their happening, and reflected eternally in the mirror of this way. Though, at the fourteenth station, the body was laid in the tomb, it held the seeds and promise of its resurrection, when the door of the tomb would be thrown back and He who was risen would appear in great light, glorious and triumphant. And if the Resurrection and still more the Ascension seemed shadowy and unreal compared to the way to Calvary, it might be because she could not know them with her own life, on the cross of her life she had to achieve her goal, and what came after was shut away from her eyes. She could only smile and Crucifixion and Resurrection ended in this smiling. As a child she’d been given to believe that the sun danced in the sky Easter Sunday morning, and she’d wept the day she saw that it simply shone or was hidden by cloud as on other mornings. The monstrous faiths of childhood got all broken down to the horrible wonder of this smiling.
She was at the end of her tether, she beat off two attacks in the next week, dragging herself to a chair; but the morning came that she failed to rise out of bed. The alarm had torn away the thin veils of her sleep as on other mornings and with the imbedded force of habit she went to reach across the shape of bedclothes that was Reegan to stop its clattering dance on the table, but she fell back without reaching it, as if stricken. Reegan grunted awake, and stopped it with one impatient movement of his arm. He seldom had to stop it and, sensing the break of habit, searched for something wrong. Elizabeth usually stopped the clock without it waking him. She was at his side: could it be that for once she was in heavy sleep, or was something wrong! As if to meet his thoughts he heard her say, “I tried to stop it but I’m not well,” between gasps. He raised himself on his elbow; one look was enough to tell him she wasn’t well, he thought immediately of the cancer, they had discovered no cure for cancer yet.
She lay quiet there. The weight of bedclothes, the weight of the boards of the ceiling on her eyes, the weights hanging from her body removed any hope she might have that she’d recover in a few minutes and be able to rise. She told Reegan that she must have got a stupid ’flu or something, she didn’t feel able to get up. She heard him say he’d ring the doctor, immediately. She didn’t care, it didn’t concern her. She didn’t care what he did. The day was rocking gently in the room, the brass bells at the foot of the bed shone like swinging lamps. She heard Reegan pull on his clothes, and he left the door open as he went.
He woke Brennan, asleep on the iron bed under the phone, who stirred to ask vaguely out of his waking, “Is there something wrong? Is there something wrong, Sergeant?”
“Don’t get up, don’t move yourself. This woman isn’t well and I just want to ring the doctor,” and before Brennan could ask more questions Reegan was talking with whoever was on the Exchange. When he was put through to the doctor’s house it was the wife who took the call.
The doctor didn’t come till ten that day; and late in the evening the priest arrived at the house, for the first time since she had come from hospital.
7
They rose from their knees about the sick-bed, the pairs of beads in their hands, and the children went to Elizabeth to wish her good night, the girls with their lips, a touch of fingers from the boy; and then they went to Reegan, who stayed in the room after they’d gone.
“Do you know what I think, Elizabeth? We should get a nurse, you’re four weeks down now, and with a nurse we’d have you on yer feet in no time. What do you think, Elizabeth?” Reegan suggested in fumbling, uneasy tones as the vibrations of their feet descending the stairs shivered through the floor boards and furniture.
“What? How do you mean?” she asked. She jerked out of her drowsiness where the prayers and the touch of fresh lips and fingers lingered in confusion in her mind. The question took her unawares, she had been expecting some remark about the great length that was coming into these April evenings to which she’d add her quiet assent. “What? How do you mean?” she asked and there was panic in the voice.
“I thought it might be better to get a nurse. With a nurse you’d be out of bed far quicker,” he said and she was wide awake now. Did he not realize that she was dying? Did they not all realize?
“Is there need?” she answered excitedly. “I don’t see any need.”
“Of course there’s need! There’s need for you to get better,” he protested.
“There’s need for me to get better?”
“Of course there’s need! What else is there need for, Elizabeth?”
“There’s need for me to get better,” she puzzled, and it brought such horrible sweet hope.
“It’d cost money, too much money,” she said.
“We’re not paupers,” he answered. “The quicker you get the nurse the quicker you’ll be out and about again and the expense will be over quicker, not draggin’ on. With the nurse and the good weather comin’ you’ll be on your feet in no time.”
Jesus Christ, she thought; that was rimming it — the good weather! She wanted to laugh hysterically. The good weather, that was rich. All the old tricks were being played back. It was always sunshine and summer for hope, never the lorry loads of salt and sand being shovelled on the slush of the street.
Jesus, how often she herself had comforted the doomed poor bitches in the ward, “No, you’re not that bad, Mrs Ashby; and you mustn’t let yourself get depressed. Things take time. With the new treatment Dr Granville is getting you and the summer around the corner you’ll be home before you know.”
She’d see it clutched at, as they clutched at every other floating straw. Even when the bedclothes were lightened, and bodies lay clammy under a single sheet, the reflected glitter from the cars crawling between the stunted plane trees below in Whitechapel Road hurting the eyes at the windows and there could be no more hope in that summer, how their single passion used seek and find other omens to clutch. She’d noticed very little of the irony of understanding in any eyes.