A Father Before Christmas Read online

  ‘The eastern Orthodox are,’ he insisted. ‘But I agree with you, not the Protestants. To start with, I do not think three quarters of them believe in original sin. And—you will not credit this, mind—it has come to me ears that our Anglican friend the Rev. Percival Probble sometimes baptizes several babies at once. Sprinkles them. Not so much as a cat’s lick. Well, you know how ’tis at the Asperges before High Mass. Not everyone is so fortunate as to get splashed in the eye with Holy Water. No matter. They are Christians already. Deprived of a few hundred days Indulgence they may be, but they can compensate for that by bowing their head at the Holy Name. But baptism, now, that is another kettle of fish altogether.’ His eyes swept over the Thames as though it were the Styx. ‘God alone knows how many innocent babes who die in infancy are deprived of the Beatific Vision because of the negligence of foreign clergymen.’

  I was not deriving any comfort from the conversation. ‘The river’s high today,’ I said.

  Undeterred, he continued, ‘If the water does not reach the body, where is the sacrament, Father Neil?’

  I was too wounded to reply.

  ‘D’you know,’ he went on, ‘I had not long ago a most untypical case.’ He paused to let a noisy barge go by. ‘There was this Spanish lass of seventeen summers came to me to get married. I told her: “Write your parish priest in Barcelona for your baptism and confirmation certificates me darlin.” He sent back word of her confirmation but said all baptismal registers had been burned in the Civil War. I spoke to Bishop O’Reilly about her and he said, “You will have to baptize her again conditionally to be on the safe side, like.”

  ‘Well, God save us, Father Neil, I confides to meself, has not our microdot of a Bishop this time surpassed himself in caution. After all, the Señorita had received Holy Communion every Sunday for a score of years, had she not? But what d’you suppose, Father Neil?’

  I tried without success to keep my mind a blank.

  ‘Her own mother owned up. Her daughter had been born just prior to the Red occupation. She was too terrified to have her baptized before and too negligent after.’

  ‘Baptism of desire,’ I suggested, clutching at a theological wisp too thin to be called a straw.

  He agreed. ‘But think of the many graces and blessings she has been deprived of all her life. And what is more, her Confirmation and all the Holy Communions were invalid because she was not even a baptized Christian.’

  Once more I tried to change the subject but failed.

  ‘Give credit to the Bishop, Father Neil. Had we sailed ahead with the wedding without baptizing the Señorita, ’twould not have counted in the sight of God. Never would she have become a Señora and …’

  I could see him visualizing a great brood of illegitimate Spanish babies filing by under the sad gaze of God the Almighty.

  In the days that followed, my mind was preoccupied with the spiritual state of Paul John Dobbs. Why are souls invisible so you can’t see what is going on in them? If I had failed in my first Christening and if, God forbid, Paul died before the age of reason, he would be consigned to Limbo together with that unfortunate baby who was mowed down by a train.

  Limbo, the Church teaches, is a place of perfect natural felicity. But it’s not the same as Heaven where Paul’s Catholic parents had every right to expect to find him when they eventually arrived. It was no consolation to me to know that my mistake would only be detected ‘on the other side’.

  The nights were terrible. I could not sleep. At manic speed, I went over a song from Iolanthe which, until then, I’d not been aware I knew by heart.

  When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache

  And repose is tabooed by anxiety

  I conceive you may use any language you choose

  To indulge in without impropriety

  For your brain is on fire, the bedclothes conspire

  Of usual slumber to plunder you

  First your counterpane goes and uncovers your toes

  And your sheet slips demurely from under you …

  All the verses. In four seconds flat. At the same time, I kept telling myself that Paul was a perfectly healthy little boy. He was sure to survive to the age of seven and qualify for the baptism of desire. No Limbo for him, only the straight choice set before every grown up soul of Heaven or Hell. On the debit side, I conceded he would be deprived of the Church’s sacraments like Fr Duddleswell’s Señorita. And there would be no intervention of the Bishop in his case to stop him becoming an unmarried husband and father.

  Then came a night which I classified unhesitatingly as the worst of my life.

  About one o’clock I took three sleeping tablets and drifted into a restless sleep. In my dream I saw Paul, handsome and upright in his late teens. Not being a Señorita, he was able to enter a seminary. He was ordained a priest. It was invalid, of course. Due to my negligence he was still a pagan. I pictured him offering daily Mass, dispensing Communion, giving hundreds of absolutions—all of them invalid, too. I saw him anointing the dying. Many of these poor creatures, thinking quite reasonably that Paul was a genuine priest, had not sufficient contrition to merit final forgiveness of their sins. They ended up, surprised and aggrieved, in the wrong place where they cursed me heatedly for ever and ever.

  The irony was that the only sacrament Paul was able to administer validly was the one which a film of Vaseline had deprived him of: baptism. Even laymen can baptize if they take proper care.

  The depths were about to be plumbed. Paul, having been ordained, was consecrated bishop. Looking for all the world like Bishop O’Reilly, he handed on Holy Orders tirelessly, but his ordinations, unbeknown to anyone but God, did not ‘take’. I saw in consequence hundreds of supposed priests dispensing hundreds of supposed sacraments year after year, century after century. In the diocese where Paul reigned there was a kind of huge, spiritual emptiness. No grace, no sacraments, no Christian hope. In that benighted place, the Catholic Church was no better off than the Church of England whose orders Leo XIII had solemnly declared in 1896 to be invalid.

  I awoke in a sweat and with a fiercely pumping head, grateful that Paul had not gone on to become Pope. It was three o’clock. Certain that I would not sleep again that night, I stepped into my slippers and crept downstairs to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I thought I heard a click. In normal circumstances I would have had no difficulty in identifying it but there was so much clamour inside my head I was not bothering about a tiny noise outside.

  I was sitting at table about to sip my tea when I heard a car racing in the direction of the presbytery. It screeched to a halt near the front door. From the hall came the sound of the bolts being hastily drawn and Fr Duddleswell’s conspiratorial voice, ‘In there.’ Fast, heavy footfalls in the street, then in the hall. Next, the whole kitchen seemed suddenly to contract as it filled with uniformed men breathing heavily and mouthing obscenities to keep their spirits up.

  As I sprang up, my right arm was gripped in a vice and pinioned behind my back. My head jerked back in a reflex action and thwacked my assailant somewhere about the face. He cried out in agony and released me. My relief was short-lived. Someone in front of me put the knee in, and I passed out.

  I came round possibly a few seconds later in Mrs Pring’s upholstered rocking chair. My eyes were watering, I felt sick and I had difficulty in breathing.

  Fr Duddleswell was pouring a cup of cold water over my bowed head and slapping my cheek.

  ‘A hundred thousand pardons, Father Neil,’ he said, ‘but a hog would have grunted. How was I to know ’twas yourself pacing restlessly about this house like the Wandering Jew?’

  I was dimly aware that Mrs Pring, cold-creamed, curlered, and in her dressing gown, had joined a misty throng. She was assuring Fr Duddleswell that ‘poor Father Neil has been baptized already without you drenching him in my kitchen’. She took over from him and placed smelling salts under my nose of such potency my head was all but lifted fr
om my shoulders.

  Gradually the haze began to clear. I made out two policemen. One was applying a cold compress to his colleague’s eye. It was puffy and purple. I would have shown sympathy had I not been preoccupied with nausea, and shooting pains in my infernal regions.

  I heard Fr Duddleswell rambling on about new Hoovers and neighbourhood thieves who did wicked things with them, and Mrs Pring’s obdurate tendency to mislay keys and to bolt the back door with a boiled carrot.

  Mrs Pring soon set the room to rights and responded to Fr Duddleswell’s request to ‘wet the tay’ for all. She offered me three steaming cups in her three right hands. ‘You’ll feel all the better, Father Neil, for pouring that down the red lane.’

  P.C. Winkworth, who had nearly bisected me, slowly undid the button of his tunic and took out a notebook. As he came into focus, I saw his cap was off. His straw hair stood on end, topping a brown furrowed face and a small red nose. His head looked like a pineapple with a cherry stuck on. Nodding towards Mrs Pring, he said to Fr Duddleswell, ‘Your Missis I take it, sir.’

  Fr Duddleswell swelled indignantly as he drew in his breath. ‘No, Constable, we only live together.’ He made haste to explain that Mrs Pring was his housekeeper and that while she had a good pair of shoulders underneath her head they did not so much as share an opinion or a tube of toothpaste.

  ‘I see, sir. And your name, please, sir.’

  ‘Duddleswell. Father Duddleswell.’

  ‘Is that prefix some sort of title, sir?’

  My parish priest explained carefully his central role in the community.

  ‘And this young man, I take it, sir,’ the policeman said, indicating me, ‘is an associate of yours?’

  ‘I have not me spectacles on me nose, Officer, but his features bear an uncanny resemblance to me curate.’

  ‘Am I to assume, sir,’ the policeman plodded on, ‘that you are not wanting to prefer charges?’

  Fr Duddleswell looked at me sitting hunched up at the table clad in slippers and pyjamas. He was obviously at a loss to know what he could charge me with except the misfortune of being his assistant. ‘No,’ he said generously. ‘If Father Neil is prepared to forget the incident, so am I.’

  ‘Well,’ went on P.C. Winkworth, ‘that makes it rather difficult for us, sir. You see, sir, Central Control logged your call. They ordered us to proceed here. They will also be able to ascertain from the state of P.C. Richards’s eye that the young gentleman over there assaulted a police officer while resisting arrest.’

  It took my accuser ten minutes to accept that he had no legitimate cause to arrest a curate for sipping tea in his own kitchen even if he was responding to the invitation of the parish priest.

  Eventually the two coppers left. Mrs Pring thereupon started badgering Fr Duddleswell for not letting the curate make himself a cup of tea at night without dialling 999 and summoning the police. ‘Be careful, woman,’ he threatened, ‘for you are busy planting me with a mustard seed of wrath.’

  ‘And you,’ she retorted, ‘are nothing but a little lid on a big pot.’

  I slunk upstairs throbbing in more places than one. I was still miserable and yet, for no reason I could pin down, I found myself repeating the lines, But the darkness has past, And it’s daylight at last. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  I awoke next morning at the usual time with a clear head and buoyant spirits, troubled only by a bruise below. I set about marshalling the facts.

  It was not for me to turn my cranium inside out in front of the faithful. No point, as Fr Duddleswell frequently said, in taking your troubles to the fair.

  I couldn’t go along to Mr and Mrs Dobbs and apologize for failing to baptize their infant. They had seen me do it. I could hardly expect them to appreciate the finer points of theology. Nor could I offer to rebaptize their son. That would be worse than a doctor re-inoculating a child because he had forgotten to put the serum in the first time.

  Poor Father Neil has been baptized already without you drenching him in my kitchen. Mrs Pring’s words echoed in my mind. If I could be ‘re-baptized’ in domestic surroundings, why not Paul John Dobbs? Fr Duddleswell had not scrupled to do that in the case of a little girl in Birmingham with far less justification than I now had. There was one important difference, of course. My baptism would be so private that even the parents themselves wouldn’t know.

  At breakfast, Fr Duddleswell tried to make light of ‘last evening’s entertainment’.

  Mrs Pring brought him to a sharp halt with a special scowl. ‘Father Neil,’ she said, addressing someone else through me, ‘last night I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamed I was’—a stab of her finger—‘his housekeeper.’ And she left.

  ‘When she opens her mouth,’ Fr Duddleswell said, ‘me ear is envious of me chin for being deaf.’

  ‘I seem to have upset the whole household, Father.’

  ‘Never you mind,’ he said mischievously. ‘She will put a fat lip on her for a month of Sundays. But what can you expect of the unfair sex?’ I smiled compliantly. ‘Always remember when arguing with a woman that conclusive evidence does not prove a thing. I was but doing me duty as I saw it, like. No hard feelings?’

  ‘No,’ I said, relieved that my problem was in principle resolved.

  He squeezed my arm in gratitude. ‘May you live as long as a proverb, Father Neil.’

  On Thursday I went to Mrs Pring’s kitchen for a morning cup of tea and to find out how long it takes a kettle of water to boil. I also picked a five inch shrimp paste jar with a screw-on lid out of the dustbin.

  As soon as Fr Duddleswell left for the day, I crept into his study and borrowed the keys to the baptistery.

  In church there was an annoying stream of parishioners praying before the Blessed Sacrament. It was nearly an hour before I could unlock the baptistery gates and the padlock on the font without being seen. Begging the Lord’s pardon, I filled my jar with oily water from the font. After lunch, I remained in my study until 2.30 praying that Mr Dobbs would be at work and Paul conveniently placed for christening.

  ‘Please come in, Father,’ said Mrs Dobbs. ‘Surprised to see you so soon.’

  I was not sure whether this was a welcome or a rebuke for returning before my shadow was dry on the wall.

  Paul was sleeping soundly in his cradle but to my dismay there was a neighbour present. Mrs Ivy Burns, a surly looking creature, had not been invited to the christening. Her hair was tied up in a kerchief so it looked as if she was carrying a workman’s lunch on her head. I got the impression she could jabber on all day.

  To justify my visit I had bought Paul a christening gift. I handed Mrs Dobbs a paper bag with ‘Woolworth’ in red on the outside.

  Mrs Dobbs opened it up and took out a fire-engine. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have, Father.’

  ‘Bit young for it, ain’t he?’ croaked Mrs Burns, who was puffing away at her hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘It’s for when he grows up,’ I said.

  ‘Like a cup of tea, Father?’ asked Mrs Dobbs kindly.

  With Mrs Burns there, my plan had misfired and I was out of pocket for nothing. ‘No thank you. I’ve just had two large cups of coffee.’

  I am not by nature impolite but it occurred to me there was a way to get rid of the intruder. I must keep my mouth shut. Whenever I was addressed by either of the ladies I replied with a nod or a shake of the head while looking Ivy stolidly in the eyes. Something had to give. Mrs Burns surrendered and took her leave. I immediately came to life, wished her a very warm goodbye and expressed the hope that our paths would cross again soon. Then I turned my attention to Paul’s mother.

  ‘Maybe I would, Mrs Dobbs.’

  ‘Would, Father?’

  ‘I would like a cup of tea, after all.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. If she was puzzled by my strange behaviour and sudden thirst she did not show it. ‘I’ll join you. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  I reckoned on having at least a minute
while she was in the kitchen. As I stepped across to Paul’s cradle I could hear Mrs Dobbs drawing water into the kettle. I had unscrewed the shrimp paste jar when Mrs Dobbs returned. I barely had time to thrust the jar into my left trouser pocket.

  Mrs Dobbs, seeing me hovering and now cooing over her sleeping infant, came and stood beside me. In a whisper, she said, ‘Our pride and joy, Father.’

  ‘And rightly so,’ I returned, as I felt cold water streaming down my leg.

  ‘We’ve been married a year now.’

  ‘Is he your first then?’ I asked, not immediately taking in what she had said and shaking my leg uneasily.

  I bent down slightly over Paul’s reclining figure and from there could see my black herring-bone trousers turning all glossy at the crotch and down one leg. I hoped my woollen sock would soak up the water. I didn’t want Mrs Dobbs to have to tell her husband that the curate, besides insulting Ivy Burns, had relieved himself on the dining room floor.

  We stood there side by side gazing at Paul with widely differing emotions until a whistle from the kitchen signalled that the kettle was boiling.

  ‘I’ll make the tea, Father. Won’t be long.’

  ‘Take as long as you like, Mrs Dobbs.’

  ‘Any biscuits?’

  ‘Yes, lots, please.’

  ‘I’ll bring the tin so you can help yourself.’

  My second and last chance. I took out the jar and was delighted to find it was still half full. Bending down, I whiffed the faint baby smell of ammonia. I rubbed a big patch of Paul’s scalp with my handkerchief, then with unsteady hand poured what was left in the shrimp paste jar over it.

  ‘Paule, ego te baptizo …’ I managed to finish the formula but not before the new Christian gave irrefutable evidence that the devil had gone out of him. Never have I seen so much trouble on such a tiny face. So stupendous was the caterwauling he emitted that his mother, though weighed down with a large tea tray, came running in.

  Caught in that downward position I had no choice. I barely had a moment to wipe Paul’s forehead, tuck the shrimp paste jar under the quilt and take him in my arms. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Dobbs,’ I said, ‘I must have disturbed him, so I picked him up.’