The Thorn Birds Read online

  “Get back as soon as you can, Father!” Paddy pleaded.

  But Father Ralph was rather longer than a simple visit to the presbytery demanded. Before he turned his car in that direction he drove down one of Gillanbone’s more prosperous side streets, to a fairly pretentious dwelling surrounded by a well-laid-out garden.

  Harry Gough was just sitting down to his dinner, but came into the parlor when the maid told him who had called.

  “Father, will you eat with us? Corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce, and for once the beef’s not too salty.”

  “No, Harry, I can’t stay. I just came to tell you Mary Carson died this morning.”

  “Holy Jesus! I was there last night! She seemed so well, Father!”

  “I know. She was perfectly well when I took her up the stairs about three, but she must have died almost the moment she retired. Mrs. Smith found her at six this evening. By then she’d been dead so long she was hideous; the room was shut up like an incubator all through the heat of the day. Dear Lord, I pray to forget the sight of her! Unspeakable, Harry, awful.”

  “She’ll be buried tomorrow?”

  “She’ll have to be.”

  “What time is it? Ten? We must eat dinner as late as the Spaniards in this heat, but no need to worry, it’s too late to start phoning people. Would you like me to do that for you, Father?”

  “Thank you, it would be a great kindness. I only came into Gilly for vestments. I never expected to be saying a Requiem when I started out. I must get back to Drogheda as quickly as I can; they need me. The Mass will be at nine in the morning.”

  “Tell Paddy I’ll bring her will with me, so I can deal with it straight after the funeral. You’re a beneficiary, too, Father, so I’d appreciate your staying for the reading.”

  “I’m afraid we have a slight problem, Harry. Mary made another will, you see. Last night after she left the party she gave me a sealed envelope, and made me promise I’d open it the moment I saw her dead body for myself. When I did so I found it contained a fresh will.”

  “Mary made a new will? Without me?”

  “It would appear so. I think it was something she had been mulling for a long time, but as to why she chose to be so secretive about it, I don’t know.”

  “Do you have it with you now, Father?”

  “Yes.” The priest reached inside his shirt and handed over the sheets of paper, folded small.

  The lawyer had no compunction about reading them on the spot. When he finished he looked up, and there was a great deal in his eyes Father Ralph would rather not have seen. Admiration, anger, a certain contempt.

  “Well, Father, congratulations! You got the lot after all.” He could say it, not being a Catholic.

  “Believe me, Harry, it came as a bigger surprise to me than it does to you.”

  “This is the only copy?”

  “As far as I know, yes.”

  “And she gave it to you as late as last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why didn’t you destroy it, make sure poor old Paddy got what’s rightfully his? The Church has no right to Mary Carson’s possessions at all.”

  The priest’s fine eyes were bland. “Ah, but that wouldn’t have been fitting, Harry, would it now? It was Mary’s property, to dispose of in any manner she wished.”

  “I shall advise Paddy to contest.”

  “I think you should.”

  And on that note they parted. By the time everyone arrived in the morning to see Mary Carson buried, the whole of Gillanbone and all points of the compass around it would know where the money was going. The die was cast, there could be no turning back.

  It was four in the morning when Father Ralph got through the last gate and into the Home Paddock, for he hadn’t hurried on the return drive. All through it he had willed his mind to blankness; he wouldn’t let himself think. Not of Paddy or of Fee, or Meggie or that stinking gross thing they had (he devoutly hoped) poured into her coffin. Instead he opened his eyes and his mind to the night, to the ghostly silver of dead trees standing lonely in the gleaming grass, to the heart-of-darkness shadows cast by stands of timber, to the full moon riding the heavens like an airy bubble. Once he stopped the car and got out, walked to a wire fence and leaned on its tautness while he breathed in the gums and the bewitching aroma of wildflowers. The land was so beautiful, so pure, so indifferent to the fates of the creatures who presumed to rule it. They might put their hands to it, but in the long run it ruled them. Until they could direct the weather and summon up the rain, it had the upper hand.

  He parked his car some distance behind the house and walked slowly toward it. Every window was full of light; faintly from the housekeeper’s quarters he could hear the sound of Mrs. Smith leading the two Irish maids in a rosary. A shadow moved under the blackness of the wistaria vine; he stopped short, his hackles rising. She had got to him in more ways than one, the old spider. But it was only Meggie, patiently waiting for him to come back. She was in jodhpurs and boots, very much alive.

  “You gave me a fright,” he said abruptly.

  “I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to. But I didn’t want to be inside there with Daddy and the boys, and Mum is still down at our house with the babies. I suppose I ought to be praying with Mrs. Smith and Minnie and Cat, but I don’t feel like praying for her. That’s a sin, isn’t it?”

  He was in no mood to pander to the memory of Mary Carson. “I don’t think it’s a sin, Meggie, whereas hypocrisy is. I don’t feel like praying for her, either. She wasn’t…a very good person.” His smile flashed. “So if you’ve sinned in saying it, so have I, and more seriously at that. I’m supposed to love everyone, a burden which isn’t laid upon you.”

  “Are you all right, Father?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.” He looked up at the house, and sighed. “I don’t want to be in there, that’s all. I don’t want to be where she is until it’s light and the demons of the darkness are driven away. If I saddle the horses, will you ride with me until dawn?”

  Her hand touched his black sleeve, fell. “I don’t want to go inside, either.”

  “Wait a minute while I put my soutane in the car.”

  “I’ll go on to the stables.”

  For the first time she was trying to meet him on his ground, adult ground; he could sense the difference in her as surely as he could smell the roses in Mary Carson’s beautiful gardens. Roses. Ashes of roses. Roses, roses, everywhere. Petals in the grass. Roses of summer, red and white and yellow. Perfume of roses, heavy and sweet in the night. Pink roses, bleached by the moon to ashes. Ashes of roses, ashes of roses. My Meggie, I have forsaken you. But can’t you see, you’ve become a threat? Therefore have I crushed you beneath the heel of my ambition; you have no more substance to me than a bruised rose in the grass. The smell of roses. The smell of Mary Carson. Roses and ashes, ashes of roses.

  “Ashes of roses,” he said, mounting. “Let’s get as far from the smell of roses as the moon. Tomorrow the house will be full of them.”

  He kicked the chestnut mare and cantered ahead of Meggie down the track to the creek, longing to weep; for until he smelled the future adornments of Mary Carson’s coffin it had not actually impinged on his thinking brain as an imminent fact. He would be going away very soon. Too many thoughts, too many emotions, all of them ungovernable. They wouldn’t leave him in Gilly a day after learning the terms of that incredible will; they would recall him to Sydney immediately. Immediately! He fled from his pain, never having known such pain, but it kept pace with him effortlessly. It wasn’t something in a vague sometime; it was going to happen immediately. And he could almost see Paddy’s face, the revulsion, the turning away. After this he wouldn’t be welcome on Drogheda, and he would never see Meggie again.

  The disciplining began then, hammered by hoofs and in a sensation of flying. It was better so, better so, better so. Galloping on and on. Yes, it would surely hurt less then, tucked safely in some cell in a bishop’s pal
ace, hurt less and less, until finally even the ache faded from consciousness. It had to be better so. Better than staying in Gilly to watch her change into a creature he didn’t want, then have to marry her one day to some unknown man. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Then what was he doing with her now, riding through the stand of box and coolibah on the far side of the creek? He couldn’t seem to think why, he only felt the pain. Not the pain of betrayal; there wasn’t room for that. Only for the pain of leaving her.

  “Father, Father! I can’t keep up with you! Slow down, Father, please!”

  It was the call to duty, and reality. Like a man in slow motion he wrenched the mare around, sat it until it had danced out its excitement. And waited for Meggie to catch him up. That was the trouble. Meggie was catching him up.

  Close by them was the roar of the borehead, a great steaming pool smelling of sulphur, with a pipe like a ship’s ventilator jetting boiling water into its depths. All around the perimeter of the little elevated lake like spokes from a wheel’s hub, the bore drains dribbled off across the plain whiskered in incongruously emerald grass. The banks of the pool were slimy grey mud, and the freshwater crayfish called yabbies lived in the mud.

  Father Ralph started to laugh. “It smells like Hell, Meggie, doesn’t it? Sulphur and brimstone, right here on her own property, in her own backyard. She ought to recognize the smell when she gets there decked in roses, oughtn’t she? Oh, Meggie…”

  The horses were trained to stand on a dangling rein; there were no fences nearby, and no trees closer than half a mile away. But there was a log on the side of the pool farthest from the borehead itself, where the water was cooler. It was the seat provided for winter bathers as they dried their feet and legs.

  Father Ralph sat down and Meggie sat some way from him, turned side on to watch him.

  “What’s the matter, Father?”

  It sounded peculiar, his oft-asked question from her lips, to him. He smiled. “I’ve sold you, my Meggie, sold you for thirteen million pieces of silver.”

  “Sold me?”

  “A figure of speech. It doesn’t matter. Come, sit closer to me. There may not be the chance for us to talk together again.”

  “While we’re in mourning for Auntie, you mean?” She wriggled up the log and sat next to him. “What difference will being in mourning make?”

  “I don’t mean that, Meggie.”

  “You mean because I’m growing up, and people might gossip about us?”

  “Not exactly. I mean I’m going away.”

  There it was: the meeting of trouble head on, the acceptance of another load. No outcry, no weeping, no storm of protest. Just a tiny shrinking, as if the burden sat askew, would not distribute itself so she could bear it properly. And a caught breath, not quite like a sigh.

  “When?”

  “A matter of days.”

  “Oh, Father! It will be harder than Frank.”

  “And for me harder than anything in my life. I have no consolation. You at least have your family.”

  “You have your God.”

  “Well said, Meggie! You are growing up!”

  But, tenacious female, her mind had returned to the question she had ridden three miles without a chance to ask. He was leaving, it would be so hard to do without him, but the question had its own importance.

  “Father, in the stables you said ‘ashes of roses.’ Did you mean the color of my dress?”

  “In a way, perhaps. But I think really I meant something else.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing you’d understand, my Meggie. The dying of an idea which had no right to be born, let alone nurtured.”

  “There is nothing which has no right to be born, even an idea.”

  He turned his head to watch her. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Not everything born is good, Meggie.”

  “No. But if it was born at all, it was meant to be.”

  “You argue like a Jesuit. How old are you?”

  “I’ll be seventeen in a month, Father.”

  “And you’ve toiled all seventeen years of it. Well, hard work ages us ahead of our years. What do you think about, Meggie, when you’ve the time to think?”

  “Oh, about Jims and Patsy and the rest of the boys, about Daddy and Mum, about Hal and Auntie Mary. Sometimes about growing babies. I’d like that very much. And riding, the sheep. All the things the men talk about. The weather, the rain, the vegetable garden, the hens, what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

  “Do you dream of having a husband?”

  “No, except I suppose I’ll have to have one if I want to grow babies. It isn’t nice for a baby to have no father.”

  In spite of his pain he smiled; she was such a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. Then he swung sideways, took her chin in his hand and stared down at her. How to do it, what had to be done?

  “Meggie, I realized something not long ago which I ought to have seen sooner. You weren’t being quite truthful when you told me what you thought about, were you?”

  “I…”, she said, and fell silent.

  “You didn’t say you thought about me, did you? If there was no guilt in it, you would have mentioned my name alongside your father’s. I think perhaps it’s a good thing I’m going away, don’t you? You’re a little old to be having schoolgirl crushes, but you’re not a very old almost-seventeen, are you? I like your lack of worldly wisdom, but I know how painful schoolgirl crushes can be; I’ve suffered enough of them.”

  She seemed about to speak, but in the end her lids fell over tear-bright eyes, she shook her head free.

  “Look, Meggie, it’s simply a phase, a marker on the road to being a woman. When you’ve become that woman, you’ll meet the man destined to be your husband and you’ll be far too busy getting on with your life to think of me, except as an old friend who helped you through some of the terrible spasms of growing up. What you mustn’t do is get into the habit of dreaming about me in any sort of romantic fashion. I can never regard you the way a husband will. I don’t think of you in that light at all, Meggie, do you understand me? When I say I love you, I don’t mean I love you as a man. I am a priest, not a man. So don’t fill your head with dreams of me. I’m going away, and I doubt very much that I’ll have time to come back, even on a visit.”

  Her shoulders were bent as if the load was very heavy, but she lifted her head to look directly into his face.

  “I won’t fill my head with dreams of you, don’t worry. I know you’re a priest.”

  “I’m not convinced I chose my vocation wrongly. It fills a need in me no human being ever could, even you.”

  “I know. I can see it when you say Mass. You have a power. I suppose you must feel like Our Lord.”

  “I can feel every suspended breath in the church, Meggie! As each day goes on I die, and in each morning saying Mass I am reborn. But is it because I’m God’s chosen priest, or because I hear those awed breaths, know the power I have over every soul present?”

  “Does it matter? It just is.”

  “It would probably never matter to you, but it does to me. I doubt, I doubt.”

  She switched the subject to what mattered to her. “I don’t know how I shall get on without you, Father. First Frank, now you. Somehow with Hal it’s different; I know he’s dead and can never come back. But you and Frank are alive! I’ll aways be wondering how you are, what you’re doing, if you’re all right, if there’s anything I could do to help you. I’ll even have to wonder if you’re still alive, won’t I?”

  “I’ll be feeling the same, Meggie, and I’m sure that Frank does, too.”

  “No. Frank’s forgotten us…. You will, too.”

  “I could never forget you, Meggie, not as long as I live. And for my punishment I’m going to live a long, long time.” He got up and pulled her to her feet, put his arms about her loosely and affectionately. “I think this is goodbye, Meggie. We can’t be al
one again.”

  “If you hadn’t been a priest, Father, would you have married me?”

  The title jarred. “Don’t call me that all the time! My name is Ralph.” Which didn’t answer her question.

  Though he held her, he did not have any intention of kissing her. The face raised to his was nearly invisible, for the moon had set and it was very dark. He could feel her small, pointed breasts low down on his chest; a curious sensation, disturbing. Even more so was the fact that as naturally as if she came into a man’s arms every day of her life, her arms had gone up around his neck, and linked tightly.

  He had never kissed anyone as a lover, did not want to now; nor, he thought, did Meggie. A warm salute on the cheek, a quick hug, as she would demand of her father were he to go away. She was sensitive and proud; he must have hurt her deeply when he held up her precious dreams to dispassionate inspection. Undoubtedly she was as eager to be done with the farewell as he was. Would it comfort her to know his pain was far worse than hers? As he bent his head to come at her cheek she raised herself on tiptoe, and more by luck than good management touched his lips with her own. He jerked back as if he tasted the spider’s poison, then he tipped his head forward before he could lose her, tried to say something against the sweet shut mouth, and in trying to answer she parted it. Her body seemed to lose all its bones, become fluid, a warm melting darkness; one of his arms was clamped round her waist, the other across her back with its hand on her skull, in her hair, holding her face up to his as if frightened she would go from him in that very moment, before he could grasp and catalogue this unbelievable presence who was Meggie. Meggie, and not Meggie, too alien to be familiar, for his Meggie wasn’t a woman, didn’t feel like a woman, could never be a woman to him. Just as he couldn’t be a man to her.

  The thought overcame his drowning senses; he wrenched her arms from about his neck, thrust her away and tried to see her face in the darkness. But her head was down, she wouldn’t look at him.

  “It’s time we were going, Meggie,” he said.