Forbidden Fruit by Annie Murphy, Peter de Rosa Page B

to a public place where I could tend him.
    I walked nonchalantly out of my room and ran into Mary.
    “The Bishop’s ill, Annie. I’m making him a cup of tea.”
    I went into the living room and, in spite of the loving appeal in his eyes, I was shocked at his appearance.
    He held out his hand to me. I kissed it briefly and took his racing pulse. His pupils also told me something was badly wrong
     with him.
    “Eamonn, I’m going to ask Mary to call a doctor.”
    He shook his head. He said he had caught amoebic dysentery on a trip to Africa the year before and it kept recurring in the
     form of colitis. He had just had a bad bout of it in Germany and been hospitalized. He only needed rest.
    “No, no, no,” I said.
    With all that liquid gone from him and the loss of potassium salts, I feared he might go into shock. I raced to the kitchen
     and, while Mary called a doctor, I carried in the tray with the pot of tea. By the time the doctor arrived, Eamonn was in
     bed.
    Mary told me afterward that he had been given an injection and further medication. The doctor said that in two or three days
     he should be as right as rain.
    I thought of only him for forty-eight hours. I longed to go and sit by his bed. For two days, Mary said, he slept practically
     without waking. For a man who prided himself on making do with four or five hours a night, that was a new experience.
    I was in bed when a storm blew up. The sea dashed against the rocks. The trees in the garden creaked and the bushes brushed
     eerily against my window. The wild wind made all the indoor shutters bang and rattle in their boxes. I tried to free my shutters
     and draw them across, but they were nailed down. Then came rain, hissing against the glass.
    I switched on my bedside lamp and read a few pages from
You Can’t Go Home Again
, but my mind refused to focus. I switched off the light and went to sleep about one o’clock. But only for a few minutes,
     because I woke with a start to what I thought was my door banging closed in the wind.
    I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but I was aware I was not alone in the room.
    I switched the light on and there he was.
    I was too shaken to utter a word.
    His clericals were smart and new, always the crease in the pants and polished black leather shoes. But his nightclothes were
     old and worn. Over his pajamas he had on a frayed blue bathrobe. His unshaven face was flushed from a long sleep, and his
     eyes were narrowed owing to drugs.
    His presence at once took away my fear of the storm. I expected him to sit beside me or at the foot of my bed, but he stood
     shaky and in a kind of daze in the middle of the floor.
    Out of clerical garb, he was different, less in command.
    “Eamonn,” I squeezed out, “you shouldn’t have got up.”
    His answer was to kick off his old brown flip-flop leather slippers, untie the cord round his robe, and slip it off his shoulders.
    I pitied him from my heart, he was so vulnerable. I did not want things to be like this. He was fragile. His glassy eyes suggested he did not fully know what he was doing.
    “You’re ill, Eamonn,” I whispered.
    “I know what I’m doing,” he muttered. “Know what I want. Know why I’m here.”
    “But the doctor —”
    He took off his faded blue pajama top with the white piping and let it fall behind his back. With fumbling fingers, he dropped
     and stepped shakily out of his pajama pants.
    There stood the Bishop, my love, without clerical collar or crucifix or ring, without covering of any kind. The great showman
     had unwrapped himself. Christmas of all Christmases.
    This was for me more of a wonder than all the mountains, lark-song, and heather-scents of Ireland. He stood before me, his
     only uniform the common flesh of humanity. There were black hairs on his lower arms and in a band across his chest. His legs
     were sturdy but shapely; on and around his left knee was a big faint birthmark like a coffee stain.
    He looked forlorn, almost