Read Online An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge - Free Book Online Page B

she mastered the Warsaw Concerto, she’d given it up. Mr Boristan, her teacher, had a shell-shocked leg. His knee jerked up and down to the clacking of the metronome on the piano lid. Uncle Vernon had flown into a paddy on account of the seven lessons left outstanding.
    She was stood in the wings refilling the whisky decanter, picturing herself seated at a concert grand on the platform of the Philharmonic Hall – Meredith was in the front row gazing up at her with adoration – when three men walking one behind the other filed through the pass-door into the auditorium. She ran to the prop room to inform George.
    ‘They’re dressed all in black,’ she said. ‘Like funeral directors.’
    ‘It’ll be the priests,’ he said. ‘Father Julian, Dr Parvin and probably Father Dooley . . . fella with carroty hair same as yours. They’re from Philip Neri’s.’
    ‘That’s at the end of the street opposite our house,’ Stella said. ‘It’s Catholic.’
    ‘What else would it be?’ said George. Strictly speaking, priests weren’t supposed to visit the theatre, but a blind eye had been turned to the attendance of rehearsals. Meredith had started inviting them last season. He was a convert to Rome. According to George, his sort were usually the worst; they were after redemption. Before the cast went home Dr Parvin would give a blessing.
    ‘Mr Potter’s a Catholic!’ asked Stella, shaken.
    ‘They all are,’ said George. ‘Apart from St Ives and that bloke Fairchild. I shouldn’t think he’s anything.’
    Stella had been brought up to believe that Catholicism was a plague rather than a religion. Its contaminated followers were one step removed from the beasts of the field. Angels at the foot of the bed and the devil at their back, they drank like fishes and bred like rabbits. After midnight mass on Christmas Eve the street was desperate with maudlin men with bloodied noses and bruised knuckles singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ as they urinated through the railings. Uncle Vernon had telephoned the police on more than one occasion. ‘I’m the proprietor of the Aber House Hotel,’ he protested. ‘I can’t have mayhem round my premises.’ Lily said he was wasting his money, and he was; they were all papists down at the Bridewell.
    In summer, when the white trash Protestants from the rookeries of the Dock Road marched in honour of King Billy, the police put up barricades to stop the Catholic men from charging the procession. The women stood on the doorsteps with their rumps to the crowd, skirts lifted to flash tattered green knickers. When Uncle Vernon was a boy a Catholic had let off a firework in the path of the brewery dray-horse and it had lumbered sideways, the streamers of orange paper fluttering from its bridle rein and drifting to the kerb. The lad on its back, dolled up as King William, had been crushed to death against the wall. The rattle of the sword he had held aloft echoed across the cobblestones.
    It came as a shock to Stella, learning that educated people like Dotty Blundell and Meredith adhered to such a faith. She asked Geoffrey whether he knew the exact meaning of the word ‘convert’.
    ‘I don’t know about exact ,’ he said. ‘It’s to alter purpose, to change from one thing to another.’
    ‘What sort of thing?’
    ‘In the religious sense,’ he said. ‘From sin to holiness.’
    It wasn’t much help. All the same, when the cast assembled on stage and stood with bowed heads as Dr Parvin gabbled his blessing, fingers raised to sketch that insidious sign of the cross, she found herself shivering. She had the feeling she must either give in to that showy and heady beatification or run for her life. She couldn’t just stand by; it was all or nothing.
    Uncle Vernon had waited up for her. He’d wanted to escort her home but she had threatened to commit arson if he came within a quarter of a mile of the theatre. He’d kept her supper warm in a pot in the oven.
    ‘No,’ she