Free The Holy City by Patrick McCabe Page B

making myway up Ethel’s driveway. Hoping against hope that she herself might open the door. That those high French windows at last would admit me and as she warmly opened them, I’d finally hear someone say:
    â€” It’s Christopher Thornton, our own Protestant kind!

11 In the Cathedral
    And that is exactly what I wanted to feel as I sat there that day in Ethel Baird’s neat and tidy suburban parlour — impossibly organised in that domestic, near-perfect Protestant way. But in point of fact was actually feeling quite desolate, still gripping
A Child’s Garden of Verses
in my hand, asking Ethel would she mind playing the tune.
    â€” Please will you play it, Ethel — ‘Abide With Me’.
    â€” What’s wrong with you, Christopher? I can still remember her saying. You seem so pale, quite out of sorts. Do you want me, perhaps, to get you a drink of water?
    I don’t know why I did it, what it might have been that made me say it. I continued to be too emotional and did not exercise enough reason in the circumstances. That’s the only defence I can make. My eagerness was excessive — I ought to have seen that it frightened the poor lady.
    â€” Juh-juh-just play it, Ethel! Will you puh-please play the hymn! For kuh-kuh-Christ’s sake!
    I had no right whatever to address her in such a fashion. It was shameful, really, when I look back on it now. Ironically, I could feel Henry Thornton’s presence so strongly as I stood there. His picture was in a gilded frame on the mantelpiece — an old sepia photo, I thought, from theforties. He was standing in the grounds of the Manor, attired, as always, formally, in his worsted tweed suit. Holding my mother’s hand and looking out as if to say: He thinks that this will change things. He thinks coming up to Ethel’s will do it. He’s a fool, of course. The mystery is much much deeper than that. As of course it has to be. Otherwise riff-raff like that would routinely be admitted to spoil everything.
    My mother was wearing a tweed costume too. Standing there, impassively, beside him, with a cluster of cherries on her lapel. I think that might have been what gave me the idea. The idea, I mean, of asking Ethel to put on the pillbox.
    â€” The one, I mean, that you used to wear to Dimpie’s. Do you still have it?
    As it turned out, she did. And now, she might have been at any Sabbath service as she sat there on the piano stool wearing it, the milky notes of the plaintive melody lilting out into the evening, as Ethel sang and played, with pale trembling hands:
    â€”Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
    All I could see, as I sat there listening in that beeswax-heavy drawing room with its small china ornaments and pictures of soldiers from the First World War, was Henry Thornton — explaining, ‘for the very last time’, why hewould never allow me to cross the threshold of the Manor.
    â€” The only thing you’re good at, and that much I will acknowledge, McCool, is being a bastard. You are quite excellent at that. And for that very reason, you will never gain entrance.
    â€” Ethel Baird, I said, will you hold me?
    â€” What? said Ethel, obsessively twisting the buttons on her lambswool cardigan. Her face was white.
    â€” Puh-please, I implored her. I could think of nothing else.
    She continued agitatedly plying the buttons, tugging the hem of her tweed skirt down below her knees.
    My voice was shaking as, exhausted, I took her hand and, as gently as I could, said:
    â€” It’s going to be OK, Ethel, it is really. This is the way it always should have been.
    As, ever so gently, I climbed on to her lap. In a world of my own then as I held her hand and she turned the pages. And I gazed at the illustration over which the poem was printed, a boy with wide