Elizabeth sank steadily, and she didn’t care. Sometimes she tried to imagine her own heart and breasts laid bare on the lurid anatomy charts in the Training Hospital; she’d try to imagine what had gone wrong or what could be done but soon that’d fail and she’d be listening to one of the Sister Tutors drone through an hour of words falling like light rain. And when she woke to vital life it was often to hate.
One night a door banged to frighten her to life. She’d been more in a stupor than asleep when the noise rocked through the house, and peeling flakes of whitewash fell from the walls. She woke in a state of panic and saw the children on the landing.
“Who banged that door?” she called as fierce as she was able.
They shifted on their feet and then explained, “We were tuggin’ and the door gev.”
“Can you give me no peace? Have you no consideration for anybody? Have you nothing else to do?” their explanation only roused her more.
Both Mrs Casey and Reegan came, attracted by the loud bang, and the commotion. “There’s nothing but noise and doors slamming. I was nearly frightened out of my senses,” she complained.
“Didn’t I tell ye not to make noise upstairs?” Mrs Casey reproached and Reegan said, “I thought the blasted house was comin’ down about our ears. What did ye think ye were doin’? What was goin’ on here?”
“We were playin’ and the door gev.”
“And have ye to behave like wild animals in the house?”
“We didn’t mean.”
“Ye were warned before, weren’t ye? This time you’ll have to be taught a lesson, long threatenin’ comes at last,” and he pushed them before him downstairs.
Her anger drained as she heard them go. She began to curse herself for not holding it in check. She heard their cries, they were being punished, and what was the futile use? Later she was overcome with shame when their tear-stained faces appeared in the doorway.
“Daddy sent us to say that we are sorry.”
“It’s all right, don’t worry. I lost my temper. It was my fault as much as yours.”
They stood there.
“It’s all right now, isn’t it? There’s sweets in this bag on the table. Will you take one?”
They smiled and accepted, it was over. No matter how she spoiled them she couldn’t take responsibility for causing more pain. Not so many evenings ago she’d flown at one of the girls because her piece of toast was burned black on one side and had a trace of ashes where it must have slipped from the fork. She must be careful. This fiendish resentment was ready to possess her at every petty chance. She’d make a hell for herself and every one about her if she didn’t watch. This petty world of hers wasn’t the whole world; each person was a world; and there were so many people. None of them had to move to her beck and call, they were all free. They came to her out of their generosity or loneliness; and surely she should try to meet them with some graciousness. That was the way it should be, she was certain. But it was hard to keep that before her mind with this body and room dragging her down till she could hardly tell one thing from another.
Though everything wasn’t black, even if it seemed so now, she’d want to affirm. Very late that same night, the house was asleep, Mullins brought down his bed. She had to smile as she heard his feet go downstairs for the second and last time, with the load of green-braided blankets surely, for she remembered how he used always bring the two pillows on top of the awkward mattress first. In spite of her discomfort there was rich enjoyment in her eyes: he’d hardly ever be likely to change that habit now! The dayroom door banged shut. “No concern for anybody, just lorry round the place,” Reegan would complain if he was awake. That door would be the last loud noise of the night, she could hear Reegan’s heavy breathing from the bed over at the fire-place, there was no sound from the children’s room, and then some place at the other end of the house began the quick, pattering race of mice on the boards of the ceiling.
The priest came constantly and soon after she’d been taken bad he gave her Extreme Unction, it seemed awful ordinary, the touching of nostrils and eyes and ears and lips, the hands and feet with the yellow oil, smell of the 65 per cent wax candles burning, the wooden crucifix, the vessels of ordinary water and holy water, the host in the little pyx on the table.
She had prepared patients in the hospitals herself for this same Sacrament. They’d have to wash them beforehand; make the bed so that the clothes at the bottom would be free to fold back from the feet; and when it was over she used burn the cotton-wool that had soaked the holy oil. She’d never been able to envisage herself receiving it, always it was other people.
She flinched as she was touched with the wet wool. The organs of sense, through which sin had entered the soul, were being anointed; and she wanted to declare in the face of the Latin words that sense of truth and justice and beauty and all things else had entered that way too. She felt terribly unreal, frightened of the significance, till her eyes lit on the little bottle of yellow oil the priest had. Surely it was olive oil. Out of the Cathecism Notes they used singsong by heart at school,
O oil of olives
mixed with balm
and blessed by the bishop
on Holy Thursday.
That was all, no awe now or intimations or anything, the priest with the purple stole touching the senses in their turn with the oil and murmuring the prayers and the 65 per cent wax candles burning that had been blessed too and, Oil of olives/mixed with balm/and blessed by the bishop/on Holy Thursday, beating in her mind, echoed by a choir of young voices preparing for Confirmation in a lost schoolroom, shutting out the full realism of the Sacrament being administered to her in this room that had grown somehow horrible. They’d got such a careful upbringing in a way, so careful that it was hard now to see what it had all been for, was it just for this? And the terror that brought could be soothed by this chanting in the memory.
O oil of olives
mixed with balm
and blessed by the bishop
on Holy Thursday.
Then it was over, and she’d managed not to realize much, the priest was going away, he’d come again tomorrow.
He was kind, now that she was ill, but she continued to dislike him, their first meeting and clash was deep in her mind and it would never leave it. She had always found her first instinctive reaction to people right, no matter how false somebody’s conduct made that first judgement seem for a time it had never been really proved wrong, no matter how successfully she was able to override it with reason or even a late liking.
She tried never to let this priest close. In the confessional she put everything into formula. She didn’t let him know any of her thoughts. It was dishonest, though lawfully proper enough. Her thoughts had been with her too long, they had changed themselves too often for her to want to change them now because of another’s interpretation of a law big enough to include every positive position of honesty; and if her own truth wasn’t within herself she didn’t see how it could possibly concern her anyhow. She wanted to be understood, that was the old craving, but was it not an indulgence? How could anyone have time to understand her, they were as full of their own lives as she was of hers; all their lives had to overflow or cripple and die and did it matter where the overflow ran? This priest would have to examine and try to understand what she’d say in the light of his own life, and it could only lead to the wilful agreement of sympathy, or open or silent conflict. He’d want to change her to his view and she’d want to hold her own. The whole of her vital world was in herself, contracting or going outwards to embrace according to the strength and direction of her desire, but it had nothing to do with what some one else thought or felt. She didn’t want to struggle and argue, she hadn’t blind strength enough for that in years, she wanted to have her own way and be let go it in peace. Now she was losing even that desire.