The Holy City Read Free Page B

dreambook she was perusing. Before smoothing her hair and leaving down the book, moving sideways to look out at me. Before saying:
    â€” It’s you that I’ll always love the most, not Tristram. Not Little Tristram, C.J.
    I had imagined Little Tristram — of course there was no son in existence named Tristram Thornton, ‘little’ or otherwise.
    But he would always seem so real to me when I stood there thinking about him that at times I could scarcely bear to look through those windows. For I’d see him so vividly — Little Tristram sucking his thumb behind the rain-speckled glass as she whispered them softly into his ear, those beautiful words of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Escape at Bedtime’, taken from
A Child’s Garden of Verses:
    The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
    Dr Thornton’s works were all available in the local library. He was a commentator, historian, literary critic and essayist: there was no end to his intellectual talents. One of his workswas on the cultural antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants. And in which he attested, again baldly and confidently, that Catholics were by far the weaker species and that Protestants were innately superior. Always remaining impartial and neutral, self-controlled, dignified at all times.
    I would think of them at evening gathered around the fire in the drawing room of Thornton Manor, arranged in a circle with their hymnals open, Little Tristram’s voice soaring like a lark’s above all the others, lovingly appreciated by all:
    â€” Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
    As the soothing shadows of the evening fire flickered.
    â€” The Protestant mind is indifferent, I would hear the good doctor say, self-controlled and sober. Judicious and equable, it tends towards abstinence. The Catholic temperament, however, is quite the opposite. It is vitiated, debauched, and quite degraded. Essentially of inferior status, I’m afraid.
    Even as a fully grown adult now, seeing myself standing once more on the porch beneath the dripping willow trees, shivering and trembling — outside those blurred high French windows, with rain coursing down my face as I tonelessly repeated, chafing my palm remorselessly with the tractor keys:
    â€” Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

3 Jerusalem
    It was in the late summer of 1969 that I myself was fated to perpetrate my own rather particular and individual transgression. Which is the reason I found myself standing alone at the counter of Bernie’s Bar that evening — ominously regarded by a phalanx of glowering faces.
    â€” Committer of blasphemy, I overheard one of them say, defiler.
    â€” He’s Thornton’s bastard, all right — sure enough. At the end of the day, the Protestant in him came out. The cold-hearted bastard that he is shone through.
    â€” Hell’s not hot enough for him. Not for a bastard that’d do the like of that. Fuck Jerusalem and fuck all niggers.
    â€” Fuck all niggers.
    â€” Whatever he wrote that for.
    â€” And him black himself — the black Protestant cunt. It just shows you, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, they’re all the same.
    I was sure they’d say something about my visit to Ethel’s. I was certain I had been seen going up to her house. But they made no reference to it, and gradually it became apparent that they knew nothing at all about it. Not yet at any rate.Then they got on to the subject of young Evelyn Dooris. Implying darkly that I’d threatened her — which simply wasn’t the case. I had better things to do than go upsetting thirteen-year-old girls. And I didn’t blame Evelyn for any of what had