The Breath of Night (13 page)

‘Is that the only dish available?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘It is correct.’

Dennis swaggered down the stairs ten minutes later, and Lerma ordered Armin to bring the food. She addressed the old man so abruptly that Philip was shocked to learn that he was her father.

‘Is true!’ Dennis said, taking Philip’s scepticism as a personal slight. ‘She tells me is family business like bakery shop. This hotel is belonging to her husband who is away in conference in Cebu.’

‘Let’s hope it’s on hotel management,’ Philip said, at which Dennis looked up from his plate with a scowl. As soon as he finished dessert (a bright purple ice cream which tasted of sweet potato), Philip returned to his room where, reluctant to strain his eyes, he listened to his favourite Doors tracks on his iPod, falling asleep to the sound of Jim Morrison urging him to ‘Ride the Snake to the Lake’, a lyric that sneaked disturbingly into his dreams. After another cold shower he went downstairs, where Dennis was already eating breakfast.

‘This is a first! Did you sleep well?’

‘I do not sleep. I am with woman,’ he announced in the smug tones of the first boy in the class to sprout pubic hair.

‘What woman?’ Philip asked, just as Lerma’s arrival rendered the question superfluous. Their air of sexual complicity left him feeling even more excluded than their conversation. He was gripped by such irrational jealousy that he was grateful the
regulation
cutlery did not include knives. His frustration peaked when Lerma, offering them a dish of
daing na bangus
, translated it as ‘grilled milky fish’, taking him back to the first meal he had shared with Maribel. Wretched, he pushed his plate away.

‘This fish is cold.’

‘Is supposed to be cold.’

‘Then it’s too tough,’ Philip replied, knowing that the bitter taste in his mouth had nothing to do with the food. ‘Besides, we must leave for San Isidro at once. We’re not here to amuse ourselves.’

‘No, you not funny at all.’

Dennis cleared his plate as slowly as he could without openly rebelling and, after an affectionate exchange with Lerma,
followed
Philip to the door.

‘Now we must go. I am ready.’

They drove the few miles to San Isidro which, to Philip’s delight, he recognised from the descriptions in Julian’s letters. As they circled the main square, he pointed out the town hall and the row of crumbling colonial houses to Dennis as confidently as he had pointed out the Ferry Hotel and Bellrope Meadow to Julia on their first ever visit to Cookham. They stopped outside the church, as much the centre of Julian’s world as it had been of Stanley Spencer’s and therefore an essential port of call.

‘Do you want to see inside?’ he asked Dennis.

‘I am feeling very tired,’ he replied resentfully, as if it were work that had kept him awake all night. Pulling down his
baseball
cap, he curled up in his seat.

Philip walked down the path, lifted the rusty latch on the creaking door and entered the church. As he surveyed the simply furnished interior, breathing the stale fumes of incense and watching the motes of dust dancing in the light from the
clerestory
windows, he felt a strong sense of mystery. The crudely painted stone-block walls, the clumsily foreshortened figures on the dome and the tinselly altar offended all his artistic instincts, while reviving religious instincts he had supposed dormant. Satisfied that he was alone, he edged along a row of chairs and fell to his knees.

Discomfort had never struck him as an aid to prayer but, for once, he was willing to endure it since he was not addressing God but trying to reach closer to Julian. Although he had been no more than a temporary custodian, the church was somehow infused with his presence – or at least his priesthood. Philip closed his eyes and tried to picture himself among the awestruck mourners at the murdered basketball player’s requiem. Alerted by a cough, he gazed up and, for one heart-stopping moment, he
wondered if he too might be witnessing a miracle, but the priest looming over him was a fresh-faced Filipino. He jumped to his feet and introduced himself, at which the priest, flushed with excitement, invited him into the sacristy, offering him a cup of tea with such doleful disparagement of the facilities that Philip felt obliged to refuse. Looking relieved, Father Honesto
expatiated
on the parish, to which he had recently been posted after studying in Rome. ‘God is testing me,’ he said, as though he were St Anthony hounded in the desert, rather than the overtaxed priest of a provincial parish. ‘The people here are good people – very good people – but they are so small. They have no
imaginations
in their heads. They take mass like if it was medicine.’

Philip was disturbed to hear someone who could have been no more than two or three years his senior sound so jaded. He compared him with Julian who, in the face of calumny and
persecution,
never lost his faith in the ability of ordinary people to effect change. Was Honesto’s disillusion that of an ambitious priest mouldering in a backwater, or a shrewd judge of human nature?

‘I will show you something very special,’ he said, unlocking a wardrobe and taking out a purple chasuble trimmed with gold brocade. ‘A gift for Advent from the family of Father Julian,’ he explained, holding it up like an auction house porter. ‘His mother and sister made this pattern with their own two hands.’

‘Really? His mother?’

‘This is what his housekeeper has told me. She is very old, but her memory for this is strong. My predecessor could no longer keep wearing it when… look!’ He pointed to a frayed edge. ‘The good people have too much enthusiasm for their new saint. But I will share with you a secret – see, you will hear a priest’s
confession.
Sometimes when the church is locked and I am alone, I put it on to pray and I feel that Father Julian is here beside me. That is why I am so happy to find you have come. The Bishop is a very busy man. He does not always see the whole of the picture; he does not always see people for everything that they
are worth. You are here from England; you will quicken things up. The Holy Father will give us our saint. Clever people –
cultural
people – from all over the world will come on visits to San Isidro and I will write its history.’

‘Great! I didn’t realise that so much had happened here. Apart from Julian, of course.’

‘It will be a history of the spirit which, with much
humbleness,
I will mix together with my own. It will show how a very ordinary man, so very ordinary that his Excellency the Bishop does not remember my name, can also think big thoughts.’ For a moment he appeared to be lost in them. ‘But I am holding you back. You have many people to meet: many ancient friends of Father Julian. And I must visit a farmer in a long-way-off
barangay
. By now he may already be dead.’

‘I’m so sorry; I had no idea. I’ll go at once. But if I may beg one last favour? Would you point me in the direction of the cemetery, that is if it’s within walking distance? I’d like to pay my respects.’

‘Of course. It is on the back side of this wall. We will need to go out through the church.’

Father Honesto led the way through the sanctuary,
genuflecting
casually to the altar. They emerged in a shady courtyard where four young boys were playing football. Catching sight of the priest, they rushed up to kiss his hand. Barely slackening his pace, he made the sign of the cross over each in turn, as he
conducted
Philip into the street and up to the cemetery gate.

‘Here I must leave you,’ he said, ‘but I am hopeful that we will meet again during your stay in San Isidro.’

‘I look forward to it,’ Philip replied. Too shy to shake a hand that had received such reverence, he gently bowed his head.

As he walked through the buckled gate and down the
overgrown
path, he felt an immediate sense of peace. A passion for brass-rubbing in his teens had put paid to the fear of graveyards that had haunted his childhood, but ever since Julia’s death they had held a new appeal. Although he shrank from returning to
the Gaverton churchyard where she lay in a nursery coupling with Greg, he regularly visited them elsewhere. While others lit candles in memory of their loved ones, he sat on a bench or a tomb, if it were sufficiently old and nondescript, and communed with his. It was as though all the graves in the world were
connected
and, like a medium summoning a spirit guide, he could reach through them to Julia.

The connection here was particularly strong, since the grave he sought was that of her uncle. The densely packed rows of snaggled stones were hard to negotiate so, without any map or guide, he made for the largest monument, which stood against the church wall. Long before reaching it, he realised his mistake. Even Hugh, who had overseen the arrangements, would have baulked at burying so unassuming a priest in so grandiose a tomb. Moreover, a cursory glance at the inscription revealed that it was not in fact a tomb but a memorial, erected ten years after Julian’s death by the Knights of Columbus,
In Loving Memory of all the Unborn Children, Victims of Abortion, May God Have Mercy on Us.
A marble tablet by its side was engraved with a letter from
An Unborn Son to his Shameless Mother.
After reading the first three lines, he turned briskly away.

One of his rare quarrels with Julia had been over her
readiness
to defy the Vatican line on birth control while supporting it on abortion. Even so, he was sure that, were she with him today, she would back down. Nowhere was the gap between the
sanctity
of life and the dignity of living wider than in the Philippines where, by the Church’s own reckoning, hundreds of thousands of unwanted children roamed the streets of the major cities. Their short, violent, abused and abusive lives showed that the mercy which the Unborn Children sought for themselves was more urgently needed elsewhere.

He wandered at random through the graves, finding several familiar names among the epitaphs. Bernardo Arriola, one of Julian’s prime antagonists, lay alongside his wife beneath a huge slab of black granite, inscribed only with their dates of birth and
death: the latter revealing that doña Yolanda had survived her husband by a mere nine days. A stark white cross in the next row bore the name of Augustin Herrera, manager of the
neighbouring
Pineda estate, with the phrase
Born 12–4-37 Last Seen 2–8-93,
leaving Philip wondering if it were the local equivalent of
Not Dead, Only Sleeping,
or the pointer to an unsolved crime. Across the path, closer to them in death than he had ever been in life, Gener Jimenez, victim of the fateful basketball match, was buried beneath a small pile of stones.

Mindful of his imminent meeting with Felicitas Clemente, the widow of Julian’s cell mate, Juan, Philip walked back to the gate where he was hit by a powerful fragrance. He swung round, unnerved by the memory of the policemen who had retrieved Julian’s corpse, but saw, to his relief, that it came from a huge stack of freshly cut sampaguitas. Beside it was a simple plaque
Fr Julian Tremayne MHM 11 September 1940 to June 1989.
Requiescat
in Pace.
As he gazed at the grave, Philip felt strangely empty. Willing himself to feel something profound, he fell to his knees, but all that resulted was a slight stitch and considerable
frustration
that the writing on the various petitions and prayers dotted among the flowers was either smudged or faded. Standing up, he took four quick photographs and walked back to the car, where he was amused and touched to see Dennis giving mock driving lessons to three boys whose hands barely reached the wheel.

The boys scampered away so fast on his approach that he dreaded to think how Dennis had described him, but when questioned Dennis simply replied: ‘Peasants! They are having fears of everything.’ He evinced a similar contempt when Philip insisted on changing his T-shirt in preparation for his visits. ‘Why you bother for these sweaty people?’ he asked, as if a few squirts of deodorant were all it took to obliterate any trace of his own rustic past. Philip, conscious that in Dennis’s world respect was confined to those higher up the social scale, said nothing as he took out Felicitas’s letter, with directions that seemed to have come straight from a
Boy’s Own
story: ‘Turn right at the
house with the green shutters, carry on down the road until you reach the shrine to Santa Barbara, turn right again and drive on until you pass the broken-down jeepney. Don’t worry, it has been there for years. Follow the path past a row of houses, and mine is the last but one with the two mango trees in the front.’

Despite his own lack of botanical expertise and Dennis’s belief that to admit to ever having seen a mango tree would damage his metropolitan image, they found the house without difficulty. Felicitas, a raw-boned septuagenarian with a long neck, closely cropped white hair and sparkling eyes, was waiting for them in the garden where, after a brief exchange of greetings, Dennis chose to remain, listening to his Walkman, stretched out against one of the mango trees. Philip, meanwhile, followed Felicitas indoors. He had never knowingly met anyone who had been
tortured
and, although he found it hard to view Felicitas’s ordeal in the same light as those of her fellow victims, he had a sickening suspicion that her bow legs were not solely the result of old age. Despite his protests, she insisted on offering him the one
armchair,
so he perched on the edge of the tattered cushion, while she hobbled around the room fetching the obligatory snack.

The absence of a fridge at least spared him any further
concerns
about ice, but as he sipped a warm, oversweet Coke alone, they were replaced by concerns about her poverty. The small, dark room was pitifully austere. The walls were made of
unplastered
breeze blocks and woven bamboo, on which were pinned a series of magazine illustrations of orchids and a recycled 2007 calendar cover of the Mount of Olives. The floor was bare
concrete
with two coconut mats, which looked as though they were also used for sleeping. The single window lacked both glass and shutters, and was boarded at the bottom, presumably to deter intruders since there was nothing to interest thieves. The only furniture was a folding table and four mismatched chairs, a non-functioning fan, and a scratched and stained dresser, on which sat a framed photograph of an unsmiling middle-aged man, whom Philip took to be Felicitas’s late husband, alongside
a plaster statue of Christ, His right hand raised in benediction and His left clutching a bible.