thing was put about by St Francis to lure ignorant and simple people into the Church. Mr Donelly had attended St Gall’s secondary school – a stone’s throw from his parents’ house on the Georgetown Road, a slum area, really, now demolished and the rubble used for infill on the ring road. His teacher of religious instruction at the school was a former priest, a bitter man called Conroy, who was married with a child and who had a mind like a cat’s, and who treated the boys like idiots. If Mr Donelly had ever wanted to date the beginnings of his confusion about the person of God and the mediating role of the priesthood then he could have identified Mr Conroy’s classes: first lesson on a Monday and last lesson on Fridays, back in the 1950s. Mr Conroy’s classes had begun the long slow withdrawing of Mr Donelly’s own personal sea of faith, which seemed to have left him washed up here and now, staring at the crib, looking hard at the figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
He looked hard at Joseph. Mr Donelly had always felt sorry for Joseph. He could identify with Joseph. Joseph was a minor player in the gospel story – he hardly got a look in at Christmas. Joseph’s beard and gown were all chipped, showing the white plaster underneath – he looked unkempt and uncared for. He had blank eyes and a doleful countenance. Mr Donelly tried to imagine what it would be like being Joseph – he must have had a pretty difficult time of it, when you think about it, human nature being what it is, probably having to put up with a lot of snide remarks and ribbing about Mary and the Spirit of God down a back alley. Mr Donelly read a book once, years ago, one of the only books he’d ever read, which had rather put him off – The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, or Chariots of the Gods, or The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, one of those books which he’d picked up at a church jumble sale – which claimed that Jesus was fathered by a Roman legionary called Pipus, or Titus, or Bob, or something. Mr Donelly didn’t want to believe it then and he doesn’t want to believe it now, and he hopes for Joseph’s sake that he never had to hear such ugly rumours and instinctively he leans forward over the crib – checking over his shoulder to make sure no one is watching – and he covers Joseph’s ears, pinching his plaster head between forefinger and thumb. Joseph’s head is tiny.
Then Mr Donelly gazes up at the altar over the top of Joseph’s head and he imagines all the relics tucked away in there. He imagines all the visitors starting to turn up at the inn and pestering poor old Joseph – nutters, most of them, no doubt, and all of them looking for souvenirs.
He looks at the Baby Jesus in the manger – the centrepiece, as it were, the Nativity’s cut-crystal vase on the sideboard. Jesus’s face has been touched up so many times with pink paint that his features are flaking and unrecognisable. And then he looks at Mary, who’s in good condition, hardly a mark on her, although her robes are a little faded, and Mr Donelly suddenly remembers all the other stories he was taught by Sister Hughes at school, about rosemary acquiring its fragrance after Mary supposedly hung out the Christ Child’s clothes on a rosemary bush and all the stuff about the Holy Babe being rocked in His cradle by angels while Mary got on with her needlework. It was all just folklore, of course, but still, staring at the pathetic figurines and remembering the stories, shaking with cold in the vast dry spaces of the church, Mr Donelly can understand why it’s all lasted, the whole Nativity thing, why it’s outdone all the pagan myths and all the other competing mumbo-jumbo. It’s because of the newborn Babe, and because of the poverty of the Holy Family and the slaughter of the Innocents, and all the supposed business in the stable, and the figure of Mary. It is the perfect image of warmth and shelter from what we know to be the cruelty and hatred and sheer indifference of the world, the same now as it was then. If nothing else, the Nativity was a nice idea.*
Mr Donelly is not a man much given to self-reflection and he hasn’t allowed himself to worry too much about the future. But right now he wishes his children were here with him for Christmas. He wonders how many more Christmases they’ll all have together. He sits there for a long time, and for the first time in a long time, like all the children of our town at Christmas, Mr Donelly found himself praying.
Mrs Donelly had long ago given up on prayer and she had just two wishes now before she died: she would have liked to have seen her daughter Jackie married; and she’d have liked to prevent Frank Gilbey from destroying any more of the town. The first of these wishes had yet to be fulfilled. But in the second she might just have succeeded.
As chairman of the Planning Committee it was Mrs Donelly’s responsibility to examine all planning applications and she had taken great pleasure this evening in being able to turn down an application by Frank Gilbey for a change of use for the Quality Hotel, one of his companies’ recent acquisitions. In her opinion, and in the opinion of her committee, and even in the opinion of the town centre manager, the weak-jawed and usually pusillanimous Alan Burnside, a man with pure clear jelly for a spine and cream-thickened porridge for brains, the town did not need more luxury apartment blocks. What it needed was a meeting place and town centre space accessible to the public, where the public would want to gather as a community. What it needed, in other words, was what it had with the old Quality Hotel.
Frank had already heard rumours from friends on the committee that this was going to be the decision, so he wasn’t shocked, and he’d already spoken to his partners, to Bob Savory and to the people who needed to know, and he had instructed his solicitor, Martin Phillips, to begin preparing the appeal, but on Christmas Eve, as Mr Donelly knelt up from his prayers and Mrs Donelly got into her Austin Allegro and looked up into the sky, and thanked her lucky stars, it felt to her, for a moment, like victory, if not a miracle.
It would have been nice if I could tell you now that there’d been some snow, just to finish things off, but I cannot tell a lie, and God and the weather are not always answerable to our needs and desires, and I’m afraid sometimes sleet is as good as it gets. There was sleet.
* Bobbie Dylan at the People’s Fellowship has been encouraging Francie McGinn to do some discussions with Can Teen, the young people’s group, on the question of whether texting can be Christian – a question that has troubled thinkers, in one way or another, as Barry McClean would be able to tell you, for many years. Plato addresses a similar problem, for example, in his Phaedrus, in the story of wise King Thamus of Egypt and the inventions of the god Theuth. Francie, however, has not read widely outside the Bible and devotional literature, so he is not familiar with what Barry in Philosophy for Beginners (Lecture 6: ‘Epistemology’) calls the ‘obvious connection between Phaedrus, commodity fetishism, and our symbolic lives and psychic habits’. Francie simply calls his discussions ‘FDFX?’ (Fully Devoted Followers of Christ), and is encouraging more prayerful texting.
* See Bob Savory’s Speedy Bap!, chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches à la Turque’.
* Victor Russell, a supercilious man with a Hitler moustache, who was the owner-manager of the Troxy and who wore a white tuxedo every day of his working life, was convicted in 1989 of arson and fraud: he’d torched the Troxy, trying to cash in on a £25,000 insurance policy. He died in disgrace, in prison up in the city, his moustache intact but his tuxedo long since gone. His wife, Doreen, and daughter, Olivia, now live abroad, near Nîmes, in France, where Olivia is a dealer in art deco antiques. Doreen tells her story in a moving interview with Minnie Mitchell in the Impartial Recorder, 22 August 2001.
* She missed musicals, though – musicals seemed to have gone out of fashion. Hello, Dolly! she’d enjoyed, back in the old days, with Barbra Streisand, and Sweet Charity even, with Shirley MacLaine, although that was a bit weird. And Liza Minnelli, Cabaret, of course. They were classics. But you couldn’t get to see a good musical in our town these days for love nor money, unless you counted Colette Bradley’s amateur youth theatre productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver!
