The Ghent Altarpiece

Standing by the metal cabinet in her office at St Ursula’s Adoption Society, Sr Marion gave the faded index card a final glance. But there was nothing there that wasn’t in the file, nor anything to magically suggest a strategy. With the benefit of two eventful years in charge, Marion liked to think she read the game with perfect fluency; yet here she was, some fifteen minutes to an interview and still at quite a loss. It was true, as her predecessor at St Ursula’s had said, that each case was unique, these family stories being, of necessity, unhappy; but Trevor Healy’s case, she felt, was of a different category, in that it connected, albeit obliquely, to herself.

They’d first spoken by phone two weeks before.

“When can you come in?”

“I live abroad.”

“Zero-zero, three-two – why is that familiar?”

“I’m in Belgium.”

“Of course,” she said, “I spent some time in Louvain, the Irish College.”

She could hear a chamber orchestra rehearsing in the background. He worked at VRT, the Flemish TV station. They chatted about music for a bit. When the call was over, Marion applied herself without delay. She found his card with all the fields complete, so there’d be plenty to go on. It was only when she pulled the file that she saw the connection: his mother had been a pupil.

This was a first. Though not entirely unexpected. Thirty years a teacher in Athlone and always the few girls pregnant every year. Foreseeable there’d be some overlap between the old job and the new. It was coming back to her now. This girl had been so young that the timing positively fell to her advantage. A spring/summer pregnancy meant she’d missed the very start of senior cycle. Not exactly the end of the world. As per the file, the father was a neighbour’s boy. Textbook Romeo and Juliet.

Odd to think she’d, in a funny sense, already ‘met’ this Trevor Healy. He’d been there in her classroom, an embryonic presence. As a veteran teacher, Marion had long experience in loco parentis – some of the responsibilities of parenthood without the animal intensity which, secretly, she found a little vulgar – and now she felt, perhaps, like a grand-aunt might feel on first contact with the child of an estranged and long-forgotten niece.

That evening Marion dug out an old school yearbook from her personal archive. Spent some time glancing through the photographs, scanned the contributions of the budding journalists with interest and nostalgia. Studying the photo of Trevor’s mother’s class (with whom Marion had parted company after junior cycle), she recalled how one of the girls had placed an item on the floor – deliberately, she was sure – which had given Marion a start as she stepped back to feel the crunch beneath her heel: a glass figurine, now just a heap of shards on the parquet. The class had given up a muted little cheer. A jeer, in fact. But girls can certainly be like that – cruel and manipulative saboteurs. It was something to do with their brains at that age.

She found him on the VRT’s “Who Is Who?” page. The portrait showed him prematurely bald. Must have been a shock for him, with no paternal warning. These superficial markers of identity that clients often hanker after – hair, hobbies. He was a “technical director”, with a long list of awards. They’d evidently made the right decision: the placement had worked. For the girl had no discernible talents, as far as Marion could remember. There was a certain physical resemblance, not much.

Three days later a CD arrived in the post, Choral Music from the Lemmensinstituut, Leuven. For a long time Marion had repressed all memory of her Brabantine Sojourn (as a jealous staff-room colleague used to style it). Thinking about Louvain was like fantasising about winning the sweep. She’d never been back. How portable young people’s lives were, these days. Commuting across the continent. In Marion’s time, travel had been a much prized perk of religious life.

Now, from the dreary comfort of her office, the CD playing quietly in the background, Sr Marion retraced, by internet, the steps of her youth: Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Mechelen. Remembering that first time she’d seen Begijnhof cut in stone above a doorway, her sentiment of deep connection to a venerable, perfect tradition. A sense of spiritual adventure. Scrolling through the ancient streets, those short months flashed before her. The little town of Aarschot to the north. On the feast day of St Rochus, the whole place lit with tea-lights after sundown in thanksgiving for having been spared the plague – every footpath, windowsill and shopfront; the impromptu grottos with the household statues of Our Lady; and the townsfolk wending in procession past the medieval chapel where the gentle heat-haze from a thousand candles rose from the tiled floor.

All the more painful of recollection in that Marion had not returned to Ireland willingly. No sooner had she achieved a modest proficiency – just enough to pass on to the girls – than she'd been summoned by a meddling superior. A temporary post, mar dhea.

Whatever his motivations, it was nice of him to send the CD of choral music. Inadvertently or not, he had put her in touch with her own past; so might she not return the favour? No identifying details, mind, but she could let him know she’d known his mother: a small, quiet, serious girl, who’d been resilient enough to go back to school – something Trevor Healy might be gratified to learn of.

It was now past two and the man was officially late. Marion checked her email. [RE: HANDOVER OF FILES: The Health Services Executive would be grateful if St Ursula’s could indicate a time-frame ... ]

Nothing new. Again, she opened the “Who Is Who?” page on the VRT site. Trevor Healy looking out at her expectantly. Almost as though she were flirting with some unclassifiable sin.

Marion went to the window. She watched the rain falling on the weeds in their little cobbled yard. Then she closed her eyes. Spent some moments in silent prayer.

It worked. As it always worked.

Great stillness.

Marion turned back into the room just as the PC reverted to its new screensaver, The Ghent Altarpiece. Something about it, she now conceded, had been unsettling her. Details now visible she'd completely missed in person in those distant years. The Adoration of the Lamb – arterial blood spurting from the bunghole in its chest – il pleut des cordes – to be collected in the chalice underneath. And closer in, blood splashing scarlet on the marble altar. All so strangely pagan. She wondered was the fault with her – that she could not appreciate its devotional message? Was it that she was unworthy?

Again she closed her eyes. Tried to recall the silence in St Baff’s cathedral, the cool grey flags, the vaulted roof; outside, sunlight blinding the canals.

Her desk phone rang. Trevor Healy was here.

Even before she’d fully swung open the heavy front door he’d hopped in backwards out of the rain, seeming to file Marion as some class of a housekeeper.

“Not much use in this wind,” she said, as he stood splashing his umbrella on the wooden floor and then, when he’d recognised her voice, quite clumsily into the brass umbrella stand.

She showed him through to the reception room. Three tall armchairs stood by a coffee table and, in one corner, a sideboard empty but for a box of man-sized tissues.

“Did you get a chance to listen to the CD?”

“Thank you. A very thoughtful gift.”

“No trouble. They were in with us last year.”

He wore a well-cut suit, tan leather shoes. With male clients, Marion often imagined the suit some kind of pre-emptive defence. Perhaps all this was emasculating, somehow.

He took a seat, depositing a smart-phone on the coffee table.

“So,” she said. “You’re thirty-five. Why now?”

And out it came: a frank précis of his dilemma. These days, it seemed, people had no hesitation sharing the most intimate details with strangers. Nienke, his partner, wished to get married. Trevor found himself reluctant, which Nienke blamed on the fact that he was adopted.

“Your partner thinks there is some quick fix” – and, here, a metaphor occurred to Marion, who always liked to reference a client’s line of work, “some technical solution allowing you rewind to the beginning. Reintegrate your personality like the old trick photography. Humpty Dumpty’s shell flying back up through the air.”

He smiled broadly in appreciation.

“Possibly so,” he said. “Plus, it’s been in the news – about the agency.”

Something quite undignified about this modern mania for topicality. Each time a story hit the media, a spike in their enquiries. And the number of that helpline for anyone affected by the issues …

“This was your partner’s idea. And what about you?”

He shrugged politely.

So the goal was to show he’d left no stone unturned.

His phone rang. “I do apologise.”

She nodded her assent but already he was starting for the hall. Leaning back against the wall, he cocked his leg up casually, the sole of his shoe also against the wall. As though this place were not St Ursula’s, rather the corridor of some anonymous institution. An expectant father putting in a quick call to the office. And there. That sense of male clients being tainted with the guilt of their own fathers. That shadowy young man from Athlone. Half the age back then his son was now.

She knew it was unfair to think like that, but that was how she felt.

Trevor Healy was standing facing the open office door when his inattentive gaze became a sudden squint. He had spotted The Ghent Altarpiece. He glanced back to the reception room, meeting Marion’s eye for an instant. Were the screensaver to drop out unexpectedly, she realised, he would be confronted by his image from the “Who is Who?” page.

“Sorry about that,” – he was back – “I’ve another meeting later.”

How foolish, now, that Marion felt let down that he was “fitting her in”. She’d wanted to be of special help to him – to be seen as one endowed with a certain discretion in the matter.

The sin she had been guilty of was vanity.

She said, “I sense your heart might not be fully in this.”

“I’m changing,” he said. “I want to be open to things.”

He’d been there in her classroom, a tiny figurine. Been there the day she’d stepped back on the glass. Had they actually shouted Mazel-Tov? – or was that just her imagination?

She said, “You understand the truth can be unpalatable?”

“Of course,” he said. “Sleeping dogs, and so on.”

“The shock for some people when they do discover –”

She wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true.

Acknowledging the implication, he said, “People have no sense of perspective.”

Water off a duck’s back.

She said, “No sense of perspective, and a much romanticised idea of the past.”

“Right,” he said. And then he actually laughed. “We’re talking nature here – which is never romantic.”

Nature.

She would change it as soon as he was gone. God the Father, Asiatic on His throne, detached, was perfectly acceptable. But that other pair, the rudely realistic Eve and Adam in the wings?

That they would actually put that on an altar.

“A beastly business,” Trevor Healy said, as though reading her mind.

She’d never understand it. How this was called creation.

How they were in His image.

Perhaps she was leaving this fellow with the wrong impression. Where once it had been a neutral blank, now his blank would be ominous. And yet she felt no urge to disabuse him of any misapprehension. He seemed not to care one way or the other. And quite right, in a way, she thought. Best not think too much about it.

Born in 1971, Anthony McGuinness studied arts at UCD. He is married with two children and lives in Dublin. This is his first published work.