Therapy

shine. During the Sunday-night socials he was to be seen in deep conference with Father Jerome, or frowning over the club’s catering accounts, or sitting alone on a tilted chair, with his hands in his pockets and his long legs stretched out, surveying the shuffling, rotating throng with a faint, superior smile, like a schoolmaster indulging the childish pastimes of his charges. There was a wistful longing in his eyes, though, and it sometimes seemed to me that they lingered with particular covetousness on Maureen, as she swayed in my arms to the music.
    The Nativity play was a typical piece of Bede Harrington self-promotion. Not only did he write the script himself; he directed it, acted in it, designed it, selected the recorded music for it, and did almost everything else to do with it except sew the costumes, a task delegated to his adoring mother and hapless sisters. The play was to be performed in the Infants’ school on three evenings in the week before Christmas, and again at a local old people’s home run by nuns, for one night only, on January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany — “Twelfth Night”, as he pedantically informed us at the first auditions.
    These took place on a Wednesday club night early in November. I went along to keep a proprietorial eye on Maureen. Bede Harrington had taken her aside the previous Sunday evening while I was dancing with somebody else, and extracted a promise from her to read for the part of the Virgin Mary. She was flattered and excited at the prospect, and since I was unable to persuade her to withdraw, I thought I had better join her. Bede looked surprised and not very pleased to see me at the auditions. “I didn’t think this was your sort of thing,” he said. “And, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure it would be quite right to have a non-Catholic in the parish Nativity play. I’d have to ask Father Jerome.”
    It came as no surprise that Bede had reserved the part of Joseph for himself. I daresay he would have doubled as the Angel Gabriel, and played all three Kings as well, if it had been practicable. Maureen was quickly confirmed in the part of Mary. I flipped through a copy of the cyclostyled script in search of a suitable part for myself. “What about Herod?” I said. “Surely you don’t have to be a Catholic to play him?’
    “You can have a go if you like,” Bede said grudgingly.
    I did the scene where Herod realizes that the Three Kings are not going to return to tell him where they found the infant Messiah, as he had hypocritically asked them to do, pretending he wanted to pay homage himself, and ruthlessly orders the massacre of every male child under two in the region of Bethlehem. As I mentioned earlier, acting was about the only thing I was any good at, at school. I gave a terrific audition. I out-Heroded Herod, to coin a phrase. When I finished the other aspirant actors spontaneously applauded, and Bede could hardly avoid giving me the part. Maureen looked at me adoringly: not only was I the best dancer and top scorer in the club, I was also obviously the star actor too. She herself was not, to be honest, much of an actress. Her voice was too small, her body-language too timid, to communicate across the footlights. (A figure of speech, of course: we had no footlights. All we had in the way of stage lighting was a battery of desk lamps with coloured bulbs.) But her part mainly required her to look meek and serenely beautiful, which she was able to do without speaking or moving about much.
    I quite enjoyed the first weeks of rehearsals. I particularly enjoyed teasing Bede Harrington and undermining his authority. I quarrelled with his direction, offered suggestions for improving his script, continually improvised new business, and blinded him with theatrical science, throwing around technical terms I had picked up from work, and with which he was unfamiliar, like “block”, “dry” and “upstage”. I said the tide of his play, The Fruit of the Womb (an allusion to the “Hail Mary”) reminded me of “Fruit of the Loom” on the label inside my vests, provoking such mirth that he was obliged to change it to The Story of Christmas. I clowned outrageously, reading the part of Herod in a variety of funny voices, impersonations of Tony Hancock and Bluebottle and Father Jerome, and causing the rest of the cast to collapse in hysterics. Bede, needless to say, responded to these antics with ill grace, and threatened to expel me at one point,