Year of the Beast Read online

  Katherine is still listening to the priest, but saying little. She’s reserved, even, as if to say my faith is strong, as it always has been, but you, Father Geoghan, you are another matter again. People err, she might be thinking, but faith is always faith – in spite of its guardians. And that, dear sister, Maryanne tells herself, is the difference between us. For let me tell you, when they come for you, when they come for your belly, when they walk in off the street and into your best room like a king strolling into some corner of his kingdom, telling you that what you thought was yours is actually theirs, the look of faith leaves your face. That’s what tells us that the magic show – the magician’s robes, the mirrors of stained glass, the smoke of incense, the holy choirs – has lost its magic. The mask is ripped away and the holy book becomes just another storybook.

  More and more she has this odd, sometimes disquieting feeling of being one of those who are thrown into life in advance of her times. One of those whose world is still out there somewhere, still forming. Swirling around in distant dust and skies, a remote corner of the universe. She is travelling towards it but will never inhabit it, her true world. Maryanne looks at Father Geoghan, not so much listening as observing him, even a little sadly now, like bumping into an old teacher who once filled her with fear.

  And as the priest rises, he looks at her again, looks right into her eyes, seeking assurance that his words have been understood and his counsel taken. But although Maryanne’s manners, the look on her face, are cordial enough, the way she would be for any guest, he finds no such assurance. There is no hint of a bow, no deferring. She simply stares at him. We are equals, you and I, Father Geoghan, the look says, so shall we drop the play-acting? The look is noted.

  ‘I sincerely hope we understand each other, because if we don’t – and I’m sure we do, but if not – you may find it difficult to step inside our schools again. We must be so careful, you understand. The young are so impressionable. And we can’t be giving them the wrong impression.’

  It is his last piece of advice. And it is delivered in a tone that says: believe me, we mean exactly what we say. We trained you, we gave you the shelter of work and we will take it from you as easily as we gave it to you. It is advice that Maryanne takes in silence.

  Father Geoghan turns to Katherine, who, eyes narrowed, scrutinises him while taking in the meaning of his parting words. He nods farewell and is reassured by her returned nod, though he does not notice Katherine’s reserve, her sudden formality. He turns back to Maryanne, eyes cold and steely, as if to say, you have much to learn from your sister. Maryanne shows him the door that opens onto the street, now dark, but with spring still in the air. And without further speech, abruptly even, he is walking away, bespectacled eyes looking down at his feet, footsteps audible at first, then fading: a dark figure dissolving into the inky night.

  3.

  Maryanne lingers in the doorway, staring into the inky night, watching the retreating figure of Father Geoghan. Her belly larger and heavier with every week. Lately, the more she looks at her belly the more the feeling comes over her that what is in there, the life inside her, can’t possibly come out, that its emergence is an extraordinary mystery that will only be solved when the moment comes.

  On the other hand, what happened to bring about Maryanne’s belly was common, some might even say grubby – and like nothing else that had ever happened to her before. Or will again. Two people, by a mixture of accident and design, stepped outside the rules. If she had been a society lady, he a gentleman, it might be called a scandal or an affair: Madame X and her lover. But the reality is, in the world that Maryanne moves in, it is more than likely not called anything, because nobody talks about these things. Perhaps a knowing nod or a sigh. Or a reference to ‘that business’. But most of the time, these things are simply not brought up. Certainly nothing as grand as an affair or a scandal.

  She had come to a country town to teach. The town’s teacher had enlisted, and her school sent her to the town, famous for its mineral water. She was the logical choice. Experienced, single. And low on the list of senior teachers. Besides, nobody else wanted to go. So she did. And straightaway she liked it. It was a pretty town. A little Switzerland in the Victorian countryside. At least, that was how it looked when she stepped off the train. You could have adventures in a place like this, she imagined, as she made her way up the main street to the school.

  He was a shopkeeper. Viktor, spelled the German way, from a long line of German shopkeepers. Drapers and haberdashers. In her first couple of weeks she passed the shop often enough, for it was near the school. And the shop stood out because its displays were eye-catching. One day, a roll of material in the window caught her attention, and she bought it from him for a dress. That was the start.

  And she’d like to think it was his charm (for he was charming) or a certain tenderness in his voice (he was nothing to look at) that stirred her. A tenderness that told her that she interested him. A look on his face that suggested we don’t get your type around here often. City types. Smart eyes. Something new. Is that what he saw? He smoothed the cloth with his soft, draper’s hands and spoke of the material like a tailor with a client – at one point draping it over her shoulder, letting it fall and nodding with approval: a gesture that, professional as it was, had planted within it the seed, the hint, of a liberty. And which she didn’t mind him taking. The effect was immediate. Awoke her to a sense of possibility. It was, in fact, flattering. Not something that Maryanne – striking, not beautiful; not what the age calls beautiful – was used to.

  But as much as she might point to all this and say that’s what happened, there was something else beside the charm and the flattering attention. He was a shopkeeper, after all. It was his job to be charming. No, even if she didn’t admit it to herself at the time, she was stirred by something else: the indefinable but unmistakable feeling that this man represented what she could only call a last chance.

  She leans in her doorway, staring out into the balmy night, the priest long gone. A last chance for what? She was thirty-nine; if life hadn’t already slipped by it soon would. Worse still, it was slipping by predictably. An ordinary, dull life stared her in the face. When all the time she knew that she, like her sister, was not the ordinary run. Never had been. She’d always felt different. Destined for something other than what she was getting. Always felt that life ought to hold in store for her something else. Something more. But life was miserly. Life wasn’t giving away anything.

  After she settled in, that sense of adventure soon faded. The pattern of her life quickly reassembled itself. She was alone, and would stay alone. This would be her life. A spinster. A school teacher. A bush school. Taking junior students. The headmistress taking the other class, the older ones. Nothing changed. Only the view from the window. This was it, her life. She would teach in town and country, beating her students into submission if need be, until she lost her strength or her will to dominate them and fell by the way. Just another leaf off just another tree. Passing away quietly, soundlessly, for all the world as though she’d never existed. One of those who come and go leaving no record, apart from the bare facts of their birth and death certificates. No story. Just two dates. And she had come to accept this.

  Until the town’s draper stepped out from behind his counter, suggesting to her the indefinable but unmistakable hint of an opportunity, and the conclusion that if life, miserly life, wasn’t going to give her that something more, then she would have to take it. Perhaps someone really could have adventures in a place like this.

  Perhaps her life didn’t have to amount to just two dates on a certificate or a gravestone. There could be a story in between. A happy one. A sad one. Or even an ordinary one, for suddenly the ordinary run, the prospect of an ordinary life, filled her with something that at first she couldn’t name, until she realised it was hope: husband, children, house. A chance to live just like everybody else. And, at the same time, she asked herself if this business of telling herself
that she was not the ordinary run was a sort of compensation. That, deep in her, all she wanted was the ordinary life.

  She went back to the shop after that first purchase, always mindful of the window displays. Viktor was proud of them, asking her whenever she came to the shop what she thought, the way a painter might ask about a painting, and it occurred to her after a while that his windows were artistic. Stood out from everything else in the town. One Saturday morning, in particular, she passed the shop and her attention was immediately caught by rolls of cloth: blue, grey, green, flowing down the window like rivers to where men’s shirts and jumpers lay artfully arranged. Oh, yes, he was good at it. She could see that. But it wasn’t the displays or the trifles, the buttons, needles and thread, that she returned for over the weeks that followed.

  She looks around the dark city street: the wind has dropped, the night is quiet and calm, good for thinking. No, it wasn’t the trifles. He knew it, she knew it. At some point, be it an exchange of glances, a compliment or a smile of greeting, they came to an understanding that something was happening beyond the purchase and sale of cloth and thread. And even when she discovered he was engaged to be married (a long engagement that the town had puzzled over, but was losing interest in), she kept returning. For the news of a long, drawn-out engagement was an opportunity. Carried a hint of indecision.

  So she returned and returned, until one day he closed the shop for an hour after school and they walked up the hill to the botanical gardens that overlooked the town. Here, with no one about, they were free, for the town rarely bothered with its gardens. This chance, this opportunity to change her life so that it would never be the same again, she told herself, would never come again. This was one of those moments. One of those tremendous moments that change things forever, and from which most people run. And as much as Maryanne may have felt the impulse to turn and run, she wanted this thing more, whatever it came to. And so, amid birdsong and exotic trees, in the dark privacy of a corner of the gardens, she closed her eyes and let it happen.

  ***

  Where was the child conceived? It’s something she’s thought about frequently over the last five or six months. For, somehow, it has become important. As though the environment in which a child is conceived determines the nature of the child. Was it in those gardens, amid birdsong and exotic trees, on a secluded bench, or was it in that drab back room at the school that was her accommodation? Her head tells her the latter, for that is where most of their meetings took place. But her heart tells her the gardens: a child conceived in birdsong and nature. In the end, the child will tell her, from the moment it appears and opens its eyes. For the eyes will tell her all she needs to know of the child’s nature: the bright eyes of birdsong and bush, or the sombre, brooding eyes of a drab back room in a country school.

  But as much as it may have been a dingy, dark room, painted in regulation brown and cream, there was an hour in the late afternoon when the sunlight flooded in. A mellow sun. And it was during one of those hours, while Viktor was pulling his trousers up as she sat fully clothed on the narrow bed (they never saw each other naked), her hair down, her head leaning back against the window, the sun behind her, that he stopped slipping his braces over his shoulders and stared at her. She didn’t notice at first, but he kept staring. A long, puzzled stare.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  The question was a mixture of curiosity and concern. Even alarm. Was something wrong? Still he looked at her, almost in a trance, without answering.

  ‘Viktor,’ and there was distinct concern in her voice this time, ‘what are you staring at?’

  ‘You.’

  She looked back at him with a frown. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  He spoke like someone trying to explain something that had only just occurred to him and which he didn’t really understand himself. Some mystery that he hadn’t yet found words for.

  ‘You look different. Sitting there,’ he said slowly, pointing at her, then letting his hand fall to his side. His face still puzzled.

  ‘How?’

  He said nothing, seeking the answer in her face.

  ‘How? How do I look different?’

  ‘Schöne,’ he said, almost in a dream. ‘Schöne Frau.’

  Such strange-sounding words. The language of the enemy. But wonderful. Like something out of a fairytale. And Viktor changed, it seemed to her, by the words he spoke. Not the Viktor he was a moment before.

  ‘Schöne …’ he repeated, almost whispered, slowly and thoughtfully, as if it were the only word that said what he wanted to say.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Beautiful. You look beautiful,’ he said, still in a daze.

  She sat in silence, lingering on the words and what they meant, the wonderfully strange sound of them hanging in the air.

  Hers, she knows, is not a face that the age calls beautiful. Striking is the best she gets, and not often. But when he spoke to her that afternoon, in their hour of sunlight, in a voice that was both deeply puzzled and trance-like, what the age called beauty or what any age calls beauty ceased to matter. Her skin prickled, her eyes widened, her body shivered as it would before some wondrously momentous event, and she felt beautiful. Never mind what the age thinks, never mind all those English roses. He believed it, and she felt it.

  The local children call out in the night. A baby cries somewhere in the next street. Schöne, schöne Frau … She whispers the words to herself, lingering on them once more as she did that day. It was the only time in her life anybody called her beautiful. And she firmly believes it will be the only time. The beautiful, she imagines, nodding in the dark street, hear it all the time until they cease to hear it. But hearing it once, when she never thought she’d hear it at all, was like one of those special moments in church when church mattered, when a rousing hymn and a bright sun lighting the coloured windows could still move her. Only this was brighter and sweeter. Hear the word time after time, like the beautiful do, and you cease to hear it at all. Hear it once and you never forget it. He believed it, she felt it.

  ‘Do I?’ she finally asked, when she’d recovered sufficiently to reply at all.

  He nodded, then, as if snapping out of a spell, and finished slipping the braces over his shoulders. He then sat in the only chair in the room and, holding her stare, nodded again.

  For Viktor, she suspected even back then – drunk on unfamiliar feelings and unfamiliar sounds as she was, yet clearheaded for all that – it was a dangerous moment. For it is, she imagines, staring out over the street, in moments such as those that people fall in love. Or say they have. Or think they have. And she fancifully asks herself: did he, in that moment, fall in love with her in German? Did she? A forbidden language; a forbidden love?

  For Viktor was engaged. And she only had to look at him to see the mind of Viktor, who believed what he said but, at the same time, could scarcely believe he’d said it, weighing up the moment. And, judging it dangerous, he laced his shoes and put his coat on without speaking further. Almost as though he didn’t trust himself to speak further. He merely muttered something about the time and the shop, and she nodded. She understood.

  And with this understanding hanging in the air, and with the room’s allotted afternoon sun almost run out, he closed the door behind him and slipped out along the side of the school and over the small yard that led onto the main street. Unobserved. Or so he imagined. But Viktor’s departure was observed, every furtive step of the way, from the senior classroom window where Mrs Collins, the headmistress (a woman six years older than Maryanne, whose husband was away at the war), noted Viktor’s exit, and that he was possibly coming from the direction of the junior mistress’s room, or possibly not. But, above all, she would have noted that the town’s draper was departing like a thief from a crime scene, and it was this, more than anything, that would have raised her eyebrows and roused her curiosity.

  Maryanne knows this because as soon as he closed the
door on her she rose from her bed and followed him out into the laneway, unseen. She leaned against the school wall, watching him, on the point of calling him back. But she didn’t. It was only when he was gone, as she slowly turned back to her room, that she saw the fleeting, but unmistakable, figure of Mrs Collins disappearing from her window. And in that moment, she drew the inevitable conclusion: Viktor had been observed. Mrs Collins knew.

  Afterwards she sat on her bed looking about the room. A room now changed. Dingy, but with its moments of sunlit danger. And words – schöne, schöne Frau – the likes of which had never been spoken in the room before, still hanging in the air.

  ***

  After the doctor told her (it was a school half-day and she’d gone to him because she had mysteriously lost her appetite, didn’t feel like eating), she floated up the hill to the gardens in a dream. Not just in the sense that everything looked and felt like a dream: people in the town floating by, she herself unaware of her feet on the ground, trees a luminous green, roses a golden yellow. It was more than that. As she floated up the hill, she had the distinct feeling of looking at everything for the first time. Really looking at things, and feeling them: their movements, their vibrations. The sort of sensation that, one day, people in another age would call a ‘trip’.