Free The Dark by John McGahern Page B

of the day about it than the dust and memory of the others, it was too new for many dead hands to have turned the pages.
    You took it outside, your feet on the ground. The sun was beating through the last shades of mist, the blazing day close. You watched the cactus, colour of ripe vegetable marrow, and wondered had it religious significance, the one place you’d seen it before was in front of the Convent of Mercy in Long¬ ford, in a bugled pedestal too, and surrounded too by white gravel, but that faded, to look at the yellow cactus long enough was to come to silence and fear.
    But where were you to go? What were you to do with yourself and this book?
    Round by the side was the apple garden. The white paint was new on the iron gate. Just inside was a green seat, fuchsia bushes overhanging it, their bells so brute red, and the purple tongues. You sat there, and looked at the row of cabbages beyond the apple trees, and then turned to the book, but not for long.
    Why are you here? the questioning started.
    To sit and read a book.
    But no, beyond that, why did you come, why are you alone here?
    To think about being a priest.
    You’ll not be able. Even last night you had to sin again. You weren’t able to go to Communion this morning. The only reason you stopped abuse for the last weeks was to be able to put a face on it before the priest.
    You want to go out into the world? You want girls and women, to touch their dresses, to kiss, to hold soft flesh, to be held in their caressing arms? To bury everything in one swoon into their savage darkness?
    Dream of peace and loveliness, charm of security: picture of one woman, the sound of wife , a house with a garden and trees near the bend of a river. She your love waiting at a wooden gate in the evening, her black hair brushed high, a mustard-coloured dress of corduroy or whipcord low fromthe throat, a boy and a girl, the girl with a blue ribbon in her hair, playing on the grass. You’d lift and kiss them, girl and boy. Then softly kiss her, your wife and love, secrets in eyes. Picnics down the river Sunday afternoons, playing and laughing on the river-bank, a white cloth spread on the grass. Winter evenings with slippers and a book, in the firelight she is playing the piano. In the mirror you’d watch her comb her black hair, so long, the even brush strokes. The long nights together, making love so gently it lingered for hours, your lips kissing, “I love you. I love you, my darling. I am so happy.” A Christmas of rejoicing and feasting. You’d hear the thawing snow outside slip from the branches, the radio playing:
    I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
,
Just like the ones I used to know
.
    World of happiness without end.
    You’d have to give that up to be a priest, but it would come to nothing on its own anyhow, the moments couldn’t be for long escaped. Death would come. Everything riveted into that. Possession of neither a world nor a woman mattered then, whether you could go to the Judgment or not without flinching was all that would matter. I strove as fierce as I was able, would be a lot to be able to say. A priest could say that. He’d chosen God before life.
    Though who wanted happiness of heaven, to sing hymns for ever in an eternal garden, no change and no hunger or longing.
    Hell was there too, the fires and crawling worms, sweat and curses, the despair of for ever. How would the innocent afternoons on the river look from hell, the brush strokes through the black hair in the mirror. Was it better never to know happiness so that there’d be no anguish of loss. A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life movingin the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.
    Yet your father was no priest, he’d gone out into the world, played football in the Rock Field, danced in the summer marquees and at winter parties under the mistletoe: he’d married, children had come, and he