Therapy

and New Year’s Eve, inclusive. Maureen shook her head. “Don’t,” she murmured, “Please don’t bargain with me.” “Well, when then?” I insisted brutally. “How soon after the last performance are we going to get back to normal?” “I don’t know,” she said, “I’m not sure it was normal.” “Are you trying to tell me we’re never going to?” I demanded. Then she burst into tears, and I sighed and apologized and we made it up, for a while, until I couldn’t resist nagging her again.
    All this time the play was in the throes of final rehearsals, so we were forced constantly into each other’s company. But tempers were short and nerves frayed all round, so I don’t think anyone in the cast noticed that Maureen and I were going through a sticky patch except perhaps Josie, who had a small part as the Innkeeper’s wife. I had long been aware that Josie fancied me from the regularity with which she asked me to dance in Ladies’ Invitations, and I was aware, too, that she was jealous of Maureen’s starring role in The Story of Christmas. Apart from Herod, Josie’s was the only really unsympathetic character in the play; we were drawn together in rehearsals by this circumstance, and by a shared indifference to the religiosity which had overtaken the production, and deprived it of most of its fun. When the rest of the cast solemnly recited the rosary at the beginning of every rehearsal, led by Father Jerome or Bede Harrington, I would catch her eye and try to make her giggle. I flattered her performance at rehearsals and coached her in her lines. At the Sunday-night socials I asked her to dance more frequently than before.
    Maureen observed all this, of course. The dumb pain I saw in her eyes gave me an occasional pang of remorse, but didn’t alter my cruel design, to bring pressure on her virtue by arousing her jealousy. Perhaps subconsciously I wanted our relationship to end. I was trying to crush something in myself as well as in her. I called it childishness, stupidity, naivety, in my own mind, but I might have called it innocence. The world of the parish youth club, which had seemed so enchanting when Maureen first introduced me to it, now seemed... well, parochial, especially in comparison with the world I encountered at work. From office gossip about affairs between actors and actresses, casting-couches and theatrical parties, I picked up a lurid and exciting notion of adult sexual behaviour against which Maureen’s convent-girl scruples about letting me fondle her tits (as they were coarsely referred to in the office) seemed simply absurd. I ached to lose my virginity, and it obviously wasn’t going to be with Maureen, unless and until I married her, a possibility as remote as flying to the moon. In any case, I had observed what married life on a low income was like in my own home, and it didn’t appeal to me. I aspired to a freer, more expansive lifestyle, though I had no idea what form it might take.
     
    The crisis came on the night of the last performance of the Nativity play before Christmas. It was a full house. The show had enjoyed great word-of-mouth in the parish, and there had even been a review, short but favourable, in the local newspaper. The review was unsigned and I would have suspected Bede Harrington of having written it himself if the writer hadn’t been particularly complimentary about my own performance. I think the backstage struggle of wills between myself and Maureen actually imparted a special intensity to our performances. My Herod was more muted than in the early days of rehearsals, but more authentically cruel. I felt a thrilling frisson, a kind of collective shudder, run through the audience as I gave orders for the Massacre of the Innocents. And there was a tragic quality in Maureen’s Virgin Mary, even in the Annunciation scene — “as if,” said the anonymous reviewer, “she saw prophetically the Seven Swords of Sorrow that would pierce her heart in the years to come.” (Come to think of it, perhaps Father Jerome wrote that review.)
    We didn’t have a cast party, exactly, at the end of the three-night run, but there was a sort of celebration with cocoa and chocolate biscuits and crisps organized by Peter Marello’s girlfriend Anne, our stage manager, when we had taken off our costumes and washed off our make-up and dismantled the set and stored it away for the final performance at Epiphany. Father Jerome blessed and congratulated us and