‘But, Apricot, you can’t speak like that about your mother. Anyway she didn’t desert you. She came back as a ghost.’
‘I’ll have no talk of ghosts in this house,’ said Bernard, ‘that’s for sure.’
She liked him to be masterful. She liked to be frugal: to have money and carefully dole it out. She would never be feckless; not like Wendy, not like Rhoda, not like Ken. She listened to Bernard’s account of his faith with increasing mystification. She liked Bernard. She liked the way his mind went back and back in layers: how he tried to justify emotion with reason. She enjoyed figuring it out. She liked his torments, his inability to be happy, his sense that he must be busy saving the world. Where Ken wanted to jolly the world along, Bernard wanted to push it and shove it for its own good. He knew, or thought he did, what was right and what was wrong, and she was glad he did, or thought he did. She knew otherwise. He was taking a degree in sociology. He had a government grant to do so. As a married student he received extra money. She wondered if he had married her to get the better grant. As she had married him to get away from home, she could scarcely complain if he had. She thought his Catholicism, the emotion he mistook for faith, was a pity. As soon as she had recovered from the months of Rhoda’s illness, and come to terms with her death, and adjusted to the sudden change in her circumstances, she would do something about it.
They slept in twin beds in the front bedroom of 93 Mafeking Street. There was lino on the floor and lace curtains at the window. There was no bathroom, but a bath in the kitchen covered by a shelf. Bernard would lie awake for hours waging his nightly battle with carnality, slapping it down, groaning. Ellen just went to sleep.
‘You’re unnatural,’ he would complain.
‘I expect I am,’ she would say. Then one day she said, ‘Please, Bernard, I want to become a Catholic.’
‘It’s not possible. You have no religious instincts. I’m not blaming you. You were brought up in a hotbed of superstition and anarchy: you can’t help it but it’s hopeless.’
‘But I do believe; I do have faith: I have recovered from my childhood. Honestly, Bernard. I believe what you believe, that God came down to Mary, who was a virgin, in the form of a dove—or was that to her mother, so that Mary could get pregnant and be an immaculate conception, which had to happen on account of how sex is so polluting, and give birth to Jesus? That way everyone born after that particular time would have their sins forgiven so long as they believed in Jesus. I don’t want to go to hell because I don’t believe in Jesus. I wouldn’t even go to limbo, Bernard, because I know about Him and haven’t converted: I’ll have to go to hell. Please, Bernard, let me be converted or we’ll be separated after death and I couldn’t bear that.’
‘You’re not sincere!’
‘I am, I am! I’m your wife. If you don’t let me be converted, then you’re sinning. You’re depriving God of a soul.’
Night after night she’d nag, and in the morning would peck his cheek affectionately if he walked by the cooker where she was frying up his bacon and eggs for breakfast. She dressed trimly for work; neat white blouse, tight black skirt, bright seventeen-year-old eyes: no ladders in her tights now she was settled and happy. He didn’t like her going out looking so smart and cheerful. Who might she not meet? He didn’t trust her. ‘You aren’t serious,’ was all he could say.
‘But I am, I am. Isn’t this what you believe? Haven’t I got it right? Well, I believe it too.’
‘Not put the way you put it.’
‘That’s why I have to have instruction, Bernard. So I’ll put it properly. And then He cursed the fig tree because it was barren: I don’t want to be cursed, Bernard. So I suppose one day sooner or later we’ll have to do this disgusting thing in order for me not to be barren, but I don’t look forward to it. Do you? And then He was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, and at Mass the bread and wine actually turn into flesh and blood, so you shouldn’t have breakfast that morning but take it