Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(101)
It was like being a schoolgirl again, all one’s childhood closing in about one; to be kneeling there in the stuffy, curtained darkness, to see the outlined profile crowned by the black hump of the biretta with its pom-pom atop, leaning against the little iron-work grill that was all that separated them. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost… Yes, my child?’
In the name of the Father; and of the Son… She blurted out: ‘Father—I have the baby Jesus at my place.’
He talked to her quietly and kindly, while waiting penitents shifted restlessly outside and thought, among their Firm Purposes of Amendment that the old girl must be having a right old load of sins to cough up. About chance, he spoke, and about coincidence, about having the Holy Child in one’s heart and not trying to—well, rationalise things… She thanked him, made of old habit the sign of the cross, and left. ‘Them others—they didn’t recognise Him either,’ she said to herself.
And she came to her room and saw the quiet face bent over the sleeping baby lying in its wooden cradle; and surely—surely—there was a light about its head?
On pay day, Jo brought in flowers again. But the vase got knocked over almost at once and the flowers and water spilt—there was no room for even the smallest extras in the close little room, now that Marilyn was up and sitting in the armchair with the wooden box beside her and the increasing paraphernalia of babyhood taking up so much of the scanty space. The car was being used as a sort of storage dump for anything not in daily use. ‘During the week-end,’ said Jo, ‘I’ll find us a place.’
‘A place?’ she said, as though the idea came freshly to her. But she had dreaded it. ‘Marilyn can’t be moved yet.’
‘By the end of the week?’ he said.
‘You’ve been so good,’ said Marilyn. ‘We can’t go on taking up your room. We’ll have to get somewhere.’
But it wasn’t so easy. He spent all his evenings, after that, tramping round, searching; but as soon as he mentioned the baby, hearts and doors closed against him. She protested: ‘But I don’t want you to go. I got none of my own now, I like having you here.’ And she knelt, as she so often did, by the improvised wooden-box cradle and said, worshipping: ‘And I couldn’t lose—Him.’ And she went out and bought a second-hand bed and fixed that up in the shed, brought Marilyn in to her own bed, was happy to sleep on a mattress on the floor, the box-cradle close to her so that if the child stirred in the night, it was she who could hush it and croon to it and soothe it to sleep again. Is He all-knowing? she would wonder to herself, does He understand, even though He’s so small, does the Godhead in Him understand that it’s I who hold Him? Will I one day sit at the right hand of the Father because on this earth I nursed his only begotten Son…? (Well, His—second begotten Son…? It was all so difficult. And she dared not ask.)
She had no close friends these days, but at last, one night, a little in her cups, she whispered it to Nellie down at the Dog. ‘You’ll never guess who I got at my place!’
Nellie knocked back her fifth brown ale and volunteered a bawdy suggestion. ‘A boy and a girl,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, ignoring it. ‘And a Baby.’ And she thought of Him lying there in His wooden bed. ‘His little head,’ she said. ‘Behind His little head, you can see, like—a light. Shining in the darkness—a kind of a ring of light.’
‘You’ll see a ring of light round me,’ said Nellie, robustly, ‘if you put back another of them barley wines.’ And to the landlord she confided, when Mrs. Vaughan, a little bit tottery, had gone off home, ‘I believe she’s going off her rocker, honestly I do.’
‘She looked all right to me,’ said the landlord, who did not care for his regulars going off their rockers.
‘They’re after her stocking,’ said Nellie to the pub at large. ‘You’ll see. Them and their Baby Jesus. They’re after what she’s got.’
And she set a little trap. ‘Hey, Billy, you work on the same site as this Jo of hers. Give him a knock some day about the old girl’s money. Got it in a stocking, saving it up for her funeral. Worried, she is, about being put in the common grave. Well, who isn’t? But she, she’s proper scared of it.’
So Billy strolled up to Jo on the site, next break-time. ‘I hear you’re holed up with old Mother Vaughan, down near the Dog. After her stocking then, are you?’ And he pretended knowledge of its place of concealment. ‘Fill it up with something; she’ll never twig till after you’ve gone. Split me a third to two-thirds if I tell you where it’s hid?’