The Rebel Angels

"I wish I were a diamond ring
Upon my lady's hand,
Upon my lady's hand;
So every time she wiped her arse
I'd see the Promised Land
I'd see the Promised Land!"

"Come on; time for us to go now."

"Don't be so prim! Do you think I haven't seen through you? You buy my story with a cheap meal and you sit there with a face like a hanging judge. And now you fuss and want to run away as if you'd never heard a dirty song in your whole life. And I bet you haven't! I bet you don't know a single dirty song, you stone-faced bitch –"

I don't know why I did it. No, that's wrong – I do know. My ancestry forbids me to resist a challenge. Ancestry on both sides of my family. I was suddenly furious and disgusted with Parlabane. I threw back my head and in a loud voice – and I have a really loud voice, when I need it – I sang:

"There's a nigger in the alley with a hard-on,
'Cause a woman in the window has her pants down –"

and so on.

That caused a sensation. When Parlabane sang, the people at the other tables, most of whom were students, took care not to look. Shouting a rowdy song was within their range of what was permissible. But I had been really dirty. I had used an inexcusable racist word. "Nigger" brought immediate hisses and shushes, and one young man rose to his feet, as though to address a grievance meeting. In no time the proprietor was at my elbow, lifting, urging, bustling me towards the door; he only permitted me time to pay the bill as we passed the cash-desk.

"Not come back – not come back – not you nor priest," he said, in an angry mumble, because he hated trouble.

So there we were, thrown out of The Rude Plenty, and as I was not drunk, though I was aroused, I thought I ought to see Parlabane back to Spook.

"My God, Molly," he said, as we stumbled along the street, "where did you learn a song like that?"

"Where did Ophelia learn her dirty song?" I said; "overheard it, probably. Soldiers singing it in the courtyard as she sat at her window, knitting bedsocks for Polonius."

This put Shakespeare into his mind and he began to bellow, "Sing me a bawdy song! Sing me a bawdy song to make my eyes red," and kept it up, as I struggled to keep him up.

A car passed with two of the University police in it; they hurried by with averted gaze, because trouble of any kind was the last thing they wanted to be involved in. But what had they seen? Parlabane in his robe, and me in a longish cloak, because it was a chilly autumn night, must have looked like a couple of drunken women brawling on the pavement. Suddenly he took a dislike to me, and beat me with his fists, but I have had a little experience in fighting and gave him a sobering wipe or two. At last I pushed him through the main gate of Spook, and put him in the hands of the porter, who looked as if these goings-on were becoming too much of a good thing.

As indeed they were.

2

Next morning I felt shaky and repentant. Not hung-over, because I never drink much, but aware of having behaved like a fool. I shouldn't have sung that song about the nigger. Where had I picked it up? At my convent school, where girls sang songs they had learned from their brothers. I have a capacious memory for what I have heard, and dirty songs and limericks never leave me, when sometimes I have to grope for sober facts I have read. But I would not be bounced by Parlabane, and I have never hesitated to take a dare; neither my Mother nor my Father, very different as they were, would have wanted me to back down in the face of a challenge.

I got rid of the diamond ring – miserable object of female vanity and, much worse, of an unstudentlike affluence – and didn't drive my little car to the University. Watch your step, Maria! Parlabane had done something that had a little unhinged me; he had awakened the Maenad in me, that spirit which any woman of any character keeps well suppressed, but shakes men badly when it is revealed. The Maenads, who tore Pentheus to bloody scraps and ate him, are not dead, just sleeping. But I don't want to join the Political Maenads, the Women's Lib sisterhood; I avoid them just as Parlabane said he avoided the Political Gays; they make a public cause of something too deep, too important, for political, group action. My personal Maenad had escaped control, and I had wasted her terrible energy simply to get the better of a bullying, spoiled monk. Repent, Maria, and watch your step!

When I entered Hollier's rooms, Parlabane was not there, but Hollier was.

"I hear that you and Brother John had a gaudy night together," said he.

I could not think of anything to say, so I nodded my head, feeling not more than sixteen, and as if I were being rebuked again by Tadeusz.