on an empty stomach. And when the Virgin Mary died she rose from the dead too; not just her soul went up to heaven, but her body too.’
‘No, Ellen, that is not the case.’
‘It is, Bernard. The Pope declared it in 1954. Transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. And it hasn’t been rescinded. It took them nineteen hundred years to decide, but then God dwells in eternity, and the Church too, so there’s no hurry. Fancy that, Bernard! Isn’t that somehow just neat? Do you think she went up with her arms raised; I kind of see her that way. And were they old arms or young arms? Would they change on the way, or before her body began to rise? I wouldn’t like to rise to heaven except in my prime. Would her wishes be taken into account? I do need instruction, Bernard. Where is heaven, anyway, for her to go to in the flesh? I’d always seen it as in some other dimension. Can flesh move from one dimension to another? I am so ignorant I can’t bear it!’
He locked away his books on Catholic theology but she took the bus to the Westminster Cathedral and bought more from the bookshop there. When he came home from college she’d be reading The Catholic Mind. She read the Catechism in bed at night, occasionally sighing; she would turn towards Bernard and her long hair—she wore it up for work, half-down in the home, fully down in bed—would fall over her face, over her white shoulder.
‘We’re not going to succumb, Bernard,’ she would say if he made a move towards her, and she’d toss her head back in a swift, moving, golden curtain. ‘You and I are going to be strong against temptation. We are going to nurture our souls, not give in to lust. We aren’t animals—God has blessed us with free will. By sacrifice and submission and by the Grace of God I mean to become a truly serious person, fit to make a new beginning and become a Catholic and a proper wife to you. We’ll be married in the Catholic Church, and I’ll teach all our children to be good Catholics. I’ll have eight, I think. After that we’ll stop having sex.’
Bernard’s mother sent a Christmas card and in the name of Catholic family unity Ellen invited her to stay. Bernard cringed. Mrs Parkin smoked. Bernard, who neither smoked nor drank, had to keep opening the windows. She was a widow, fleshy, piggy-eyed, slack-mouthed, with a taste for sweet sherry. She wore a cross around her reddened crinkly neck, wore black as befitted her widowed state, and her hair in tight grey curls between which lines of white, stretched skin showed. She brought as a present a portrait of Mother Mary as she appeared to the children at Fatima, executed by someone of sentimental disposition, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, the mould fashioned by someone of a melancholy and austere frame of mind. Ellen put them in pride of place above the fireplace in the front room downstairs. The fireplace held a gas fire; the walls were a figured cream paper: the three-piece suite of maroon uncut moquette. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cupboard where Ellen insisted on keeping Bernard’s family photographs, which she had found at the bottom of a suitcase. The Parkins had migrated from Dublin when Bernard was eight, young enough to take advantage of an educational system which allowed bright children to climb up and out of their allotted place in society. Bernard’s father had been a builder, his two elder brothers were house painters; his older sister was married to a carpenter: another just left nursing to be married; his two younger sisters were still at school and planned to go to college against their mother’s wishes.
‘They’ll never find husbands,’ complained Mary Parkin, ‘if they’ve too much knowledge in them. It’s unsettling for a girl.’ And she crossed herself. A touch to the forehead, a touch to the left of the chest, the right, and the solar plexus: rapid, never quite touching self: Jesus crucified an inch before the body, forever.
‘It certainly is!’ agreed Ellen. ‘Look how I gave all that up for Bernard! It’s so important for a wife to be able to look up to her husband. It’s because she can’t we get all these divorces.’ And she too crossed herself.
Mrs Parkin would take quick sidelong looks at her new daughter-in-law, hoping to catch her out, but there