Crow

Crow

19 May 1954

B RIDIE

B RENNAN is

nineteen years old and standing on the steps of a church dedicated to St Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastination.

St Expeditus is dressed like a Roman soldier, with a metal breastplate and a pleated skirt. He has a red cloak wrapped around his shoulders, a quill in his hand and a halo of gold around his head. Beneath his foot is a dead crow, the form the devil took to convince him to delay his conversion to Christianity. But delay he did not. And look where it got him. Murdered.

The crow is waving a flag in its dead mouth that says ‘ cras

’. If Bridie could read Latin, which she cannot, she would know that the inscription means ‘tomorrow’, but she enjoys the crow’s act of defiance all the same and likes to imagine he has written ‘fuck you’ to Expeditus for squashing him.

Bridie is dressed like a bride. Which is fitting, given the circumstances. In a floor-length ivory satin gown that is too tight at the hips. A bouquet of wilting cream roses in her left

hand, she carries an upturned horseshoe threaded with blue ribbon for luck in her right. She has a garter made of matching blue ribbon on her thigh and it is making the flesh bulge at either side. Her mother’s short veil of white lace with a yellow stain she couldn’t get off is circling her wild brown hair and her feet are squished into heels that are pinching at the toes. She feels absurd to be dressed like this while waiting for a painted saint to send her a sign.

Bridie looks at St Expeditus, rendered with care on the church sign, his dark hair waving in a breeze only the painter knew about. St Expeditus does not look back at Bridie. He is staring into the middle distance, cross of Christ held high.

Beyond where the church railings would be had they not been stripped to make stretchers during the war, a red bus sails past. If she took the bus to Acton, she could sit on the top deck and rip the bottom half of her dress off, turn it into a tea-length dress, which would attract much less attention. Then she could walk to St Michael’s graveyard and leave her bouquet on her mother’s grave. It would be nice for Bridie to pretend that her mum would have known what to do. Would have known whether to advise her daughter to go inside the church or to run. But Bridie’s mother would not have known what to make of Alistair, with his handsomeness and his cleverness and his somewhat surprising interest in her dumpy daughter, any more than Bridie does. Not that her mother would have said that Bridie was dumpy; she would have told her she was beautiful. But Bridie fears that the truth is that she is dumpy even on her very best day, and even in her very best dress.

If you were going to run away, you would have run

already

. The thought arrives as though it has come from outside herself.

But if she were going to go in, wouldn’t she already be inside?

Inside. They’re all waiting for her. The organist has cycled through the list of hymns. They are back to the Magnificat. Bridie’s favourite. She had to battle the organist to have it, and now she’s had to play it twice.

A bike bell rings from far away. Focus, Bridie. You said you would marry him

. Alistair Bennett. Tall, good-looking, charming. Exempt from fighting for the shape of his foot. Exempt from the rules of society for the shape of his handsome face. Exempt from her questions for his pinpoint intelligence. He doesn’t want to wear a wedding ring when they marry. If

they marry. But isn’t it a gift just to be chosen?

After all, it was unlikely at best, unbelievable at worst, that Alistair Bennett should have any interest in Bridie Brennan. Which was why when he started flirting with Bridie as she took his orders, pulled his pints and replenished the crisps at his table of rowdy academics, she did not believe it herself. Alistair approached finding a wife in the way that one might approach hiring a maid, assessing her suitability from her amenability to his needs. Would she mind moving to Birmingham, if he were to secure his first lectureship position there? he had asked over a drink, and when her answer was no, she felt that she had pleased him. Did she ever want a dog? No, again. Was her heart set on children? And when No came her answer, she anticipated judgement, but found only relief in Alistair’s expression. When he proffered an old gold ring from a knee bent in the frosty grass of the local

park, Bridie realized that the assessment was over and she had been found suitable. They would move to Birmingham and have neither dogs nor children.

The Magnificat plays on. As St Expeditus is silent on the matter, she supposes she must ask God. She closes her eyes. Lord, what should I do?

A breeze blows, making the roses in her hand shiver and jiggle to keep warm.

The church door opens and, for a moment, Bridie thinks it is a sign from God telling her to go within, but then out comes Father Rawlings. He is a whiskery man. Dark, tufty eyebrows growing too long from his face, and stubble on his cheek and chin that betrays a razor that needs replacing. There’s a sour note of a heavy tea drinker on his breath. He is new. Came to conduct the funeral for the previous priest and then never left.

‘Bridget?’ he asks. ‘Are we ready to get married?’

We?

she thinks.

For a moment, it seems like an absurd marriage proposal. But Father Rawlings got off easy: he married Jesus, who probably asks for very little on a day-to-day basis. Doesn’t need his food cooked or his clothes cleaned, would never dream of making snide comments about how your hips look in your Sunday dress. Doesn’t look handsome and ugly all at once when he is laughing. Doesn’t embarrass you down the pub by calling you piglet

when you’ve asked him not to. Doesn’t touch you on the knee and erase all the unpleasantness with the way he runs it up your thigh and makes your breathing stop. Doesn’t make you tingle in places an unmarried woman ought not tingle. Though perhaps, Jesus does

make Father Rawlings tingle and that’s why he married him.

‘Now then,’ Father Rawlings says when she does not speak, ‘shall we go inside?’ He asks it in the tone one might use to coax a child or a goat into doing something it didn’t want to do.

A deep and sad thought settles in Bridie’s mind.

It is already too late

.

The priest beckons her closer and smelling his breath on her face as he tucks her hair behind her ears makes her feel sick. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Pretty as a picture.’

This is not actually the case, and the way he has tucked Bridie’s hair behind her ears looks lumpy and strange. Several years from this day, she will throw away all the photographs that were taken until her hair fell back into its usual place.

‘He looks very handsome,’ Father Rawlings says.

Bridie twists the locket around her neck back and forth. Her mother gave her the locket just before she died. It is gold, filigree and has ‘B.B.’ engraved upon the back. It is fortunate that her initials will remain unchanged when Miss Bridie Brennan becomes Mrs Bridie Bennett, even if all else about her will. Bridie wanted to put a photograph of her mother in the locket for today, to keep her close, but she doesn’t have any photographs small enough of her mother to fit in her heart and she doesn’t dare cut one up.

Bridie wishes she had the courage to run. She wishes Alistair wasn’t so handsome. She wishes she was that crow, dead under St Expeditus’s Roman sandal but waving a flag from her beak as a final act of defiance. And she wishes she could have chosen a more original song than the ‘Wedding March’ as, flanked by the Father who is not her father, she begins her walk down the aisle.