The Collar (11 page)

She had also illustrated to perfection the Achilles' heel of Catholicism, because, though Dr Gallogly would probably have had a heart attack if he had known the contents of her letter, no layman could be quite sure of this, and the Minister and his staff were left with a vague impression that, somehow or other, the Bishop of Moyle was now the ringleader of a smuggling gang. Being all of them good Catholics, they took the charitable view that the Bishop was no longer responsible for his actions and had taken to smuggling the way some old men take to other peculiar pursuits, but all the same it was a nasty situation. Whatever happened, you could not raid the palace for contraband. The very thought of what the newspapers would say about this made the Minister sick. The
Irish Times
would report it in full, with a smug suggestion that Protestant bishops never did things like that; the
Irish Independent
would assert that instructions for the raid had come direct from Moscow, through the local Communist cell; while the
Irish Press
would say, without fear of contradiction, that it was another British plot against the good name of Irishmen.

‘Jesus, Joe!' the Minister said, with a moan, to his secretary. ‘Forget it! Forget it, if you can!'

But the local customs officers could not forget it. Nellie didn't allow them. Scared by Tim Leary and the Minister's letter, she worked openly and feverishly to get rid of all the contraband in her possession, and the professional pride of the customs officers was mortified. Then, one day, a man was caught trying to cross the border into the North with a keg of whiskey under the seat of his car, and he swore by God and the Twelve Apostles that he had no notion how it had got there. But Tim Leary, who knew the man's friendship with Nellie, knew damn well how it had got there, and went to Paddy Clancy's liquor store in Moyle, from which it had originally come. Paddy, a crushed and quivering poor man, had to admit that the keg had been sold to the Bishop.

‘Get me the Bishop's account, Paddy,' Tim said stiffly, and poor Paddy produced the ledger. It was an ugly moment, because Paddy was a man who made a point of never interfering with any man's business but he knew of old that the Bishop's liquor account was most peculiar. Tim Leary studied it in stupefaction.

‘Honour of God!' he said angrily. ‘Are you trying to tell me that the Bishop drinks all that?'

‘Bishops have a lot of entertaining to do, Tim,' Paddy said meekly.

‘Bishops don't have to have a bloody bonded store to entertain in!' shouted Tim.

‘Well, Tim, 'tis a delicate matter,' Paddy said, sweating with anxiety. ‘If a man is to have customers in this country, he cannot afford to ask questions.'

‘Well, begod, I'm going to ask a few questions,' cried Tim, ‘and I'm going to do it this very morning, what's more. Give me that ledger!'

Then, with the ledger under his arm, he went straight up to the palace. Nellie tried to head him off. First she said the Bishop was out; then she said the Bishop was ill; finally she said that the Bishop had given orders that Tim was not to be admitted.

‘You try to stop me, Nellie, and I'll damn soon show you whether I'm going to be admitted or not,' said Tim, pushing past her, and at that moment the study door opened and the Bishop came out. It was no coincidence, and at that moment Nellie knew she was lost, for along with the appetite of a child, the Bishop had the curiosity of a child, and a beggar's voice at the door would be sufficient for him to get up and leave the door of his study ajar so that he could listen in comfort to the conversation.

‘That will do, Nellie,' he said, and then came up to Tim with a menacing air – a handsome old man of six foot two, with a baby complexion and fierce blue eyes.

‘What do you want?' he asked sternly, but on his own ground Tim could be as infallible as any bishop.

‘I'm investigating the smuggling that's going on in this locality, and I want to ask you a few questions, my lord,' he replied grimly.

‘So I heard,' said the Bishop. ‘I told the Minister already I couldn't see why you had to do your investigating in my house.'

‘I'm a public servant, my lord,' Tim said, his voice rising, ‘and I'm entitled to make my investigations wherever I have to.'

‘You're a very independent young man,' the Bishop said dryly but without rancour. ‘Tell me, are you John Leary's son from Clooneavullen?'

‘I'm nothing of the sort. Who said I was John Leary's son? My father was from Manister.'

‘For God's sake!' the Bishop said softly. ‘You're not Jim Leary's boy, by any chance?'

‘I am, then,' said Tim with a shrug.

‘Come on in,' the Bishop said, holding out his hand to Tim, while his eyes searched away into the distance beyond the front door. ‘Your father was headmaster there when I was a canon. I must have seen you when you were a little fellow. Come in, anyway. No son of Jim Leary's is going to leave this house without a drink.'

‘But I'm on duty, my lord,' said Tim, following him in.

‘Aren't we all?' the Bishop asked mildly as he went to the sideboard. ‘I'm as much a bishop now as I'll ever be.' With shaky hands he produced two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He gave one tiny glass to Tim and took another himself. It was obviously a duty rather than a pleasure. The Bishop did not go in for drinking, because it seemed to ruin his appetite and that was bad enough already.

‘Now, tell me what all this is about,' he said comfortably.

Tim was beginning to realise that he really liked the man – an old weakness of his, which, combined with his violent temper, made him a bad investigator. He sometimes thought the bad temper and the good nature were only two aspects of the same thing.

‘A man was caught trying to cross the Border a few days ago with a keg of your whiskey in his car,' he said as firmly as he could.

‘A keg of my whiskey?' the Bishop repeated with real interest and apparent enjoyment. ‘But what would I be doing with a keg of whiskey?'

‘That's what I came to ask you,' replied Tim. ‘You seem to have bought enough of them in the past year.'

‘I never bought a keg of whiskey in my whole life, boy,' said the Bishop with amusement. ‘Sure, if I take a drop of punch before I go to bed, that's all the whiskey I ever see. It's bad for a man of my age,' he added earnestly. ‘I haven't the constitution.'

‘If you'll take one look at your account in Clancy's ledger, you'll see you're supposed to have an iron constitution,' said Tim and, as he opened the book, there was a knock and Nellie came in modestly with a bundle of receipted bills in her hand. ‘Or maybe this is the one with the iron constitution,' Tim added fiercely. He still had not forgotten his unmannerly reception.

‘You need say no more,' she said briskly. ‘I admit it, whatever little harm I did to anyone. 'Twas only to keep my unfortunate angashore of a brother out of the workhouse. Between drinking and politics, he was never much head to his poor wife, God rest her. Not one penny did I ever make out of it, and not one penny of His Lordship's money ever went astray. I'll go if I have to, but I will not leave this house without a character.'

‘I'll give you the character,' Tim said savagely. ‘And furthermore I'll see you have a place to go. You can do all the smuggling you like there – if you're able.'

‘That will do!' the Bishop said sternly. ‘Go away, Nellie!' he added over his shoulder, in the tone he used when he asked for his pen to suspend Father Tom.

Nellie looked at him for a moment in stupefaction and then burst into a howl of grief and went out, sobbing to herself about ‘the fifteen good years of my life that I wasted on him and there's his gratitude'. The Bishop waited imperturbably till her sobs had subsided in the kitchen before he spoke again.

‘How many people know about this?'

‘Begod, my lord, by this time I think you might say 'twas common property,' said Tom with a laugh.

The Bishop did not laugh. ‘I was afraid of that,' he said. ‘What do they think of it?'

‘Well, of course, they all have a great regard for you,' Tim replied, in some embarrassment.

‘I'm sure of that,' the Bishop said without a hint of irony. ‘They have so much regard for me that they don't care if I turn my house into a smuggler's den. They didn't suggest what I might be doing with the Cathedral?'

Tim saw that the Bishop was more cut up than he affected to be.

‘Ah, I wouldn't worry about that,' he said anxiously.

‘I'm not worrying. What will they do to Nellie?'

‘Oh, she'll get the jail,' said Tim. ‘As well as a bloody big fine that'll be worse to her.'

‘A fine? What sort of a fine?'

‘That will be calculated on the value of the contraband,' said Tim. ‘But if you ask me quietly, 'twill run well into the thousands.'

‘Into the thousands?' the Bishop asked in alarm. ‘But where would either of us get that sort of money, boy?'

‘You may be damn full sure she has it,' Tim said grimly.

‘Nellie?'

‘Aye, and more along with it,' said Tim.

‘For God's sake!' the Bishop exclaimed softly. He had put away his glass, and his long, fine fingers were intertwined. Then he gave a little snort that might have passed for laughter. ‘And me thinking she was an old fool! Which of us was the fool? I wonder. After this, they'll be saying I'm not able to look after myself. They'll be putting in a coadjutor over me, as sure as you're there!'

‘They wouldn't do that?' Tim asked in astonishment. It had never occurred to him before that there might be anybody who could interfere with a bishop.

‘Oh, indeed they would,' the Bishop said, almost with enjoyment. ‘And I wouldn't mind that itself if only they'd leave me my housekeeper. The jail won't take much out of her, but ‘twill kill me. At my age I'm not going to be able to find another woman to look after me the way she does. Unless they'd let me go to jail along with her.'

Tim was an emotional young man, and he could hardly contemplate the personal problems that the Bishop set up in that casual way of his.

‘There's nobody in this place would do anything to upset you,' he said, growing red. ‘I'm sure they'll be well satisfied if she paid the fine, without sending her to jail. The only thing is, from my point of view, could you control her?'

‘I could do nothing of the kind,' the Bishop replied in his blank way. ‘If I was to give you my oath to control her for the future, would you believe me? You would not, I couldn't control her. You might be able to do it.'

‘I'd damn soon do it if I had a free hand,' Tim said loyally.

‘I'd give you all the hand you want,' the Bishop said placidly. ‘I'd give you quarters here if you wanted them. You see, 'tis more in my interest than yours to stop the scandal, before they have me married to her.' From the dryness of his tone, the Bishop, an unemotional man, seemed to be suffering. ‘I wouldn't forget it for you,' he added anxiously. ‘Anyway, I'll have a talk to Butcher, and see if he can't do something for you. Not that that poor fool knows what he's doing, most of the time.'

That afternoon, the Bishop sat on by his window and watched as a lorry drove up before his palace and Tim Leary loaded it with commodities the Bishop had thought long gone from the world – chests of tea, bags of sugar, boxes of butter. There seemed to be no end to them. He felt crushed and humbled. Like all bishops, he was addicted to power, but he saw now that a bishop's power, like a bishop's knowledge, was little better than a shadow. He was just a lonely old man who was dependent on women, exactly as when they had changed his napkin and he had crowed and kicked his heels. There was no escape.

Mercifully, Nellie herself didn't put in an appearance as the premises were gone through. That evening, when she opened the door and said meekly, ‘Dinner is served, my lord', the Bishop went in to a royal spread – the juiciest of roast beef, with roast potatoes and tender young peas drowned in butter. The Bishop ate stolidly through it, reading the book in front of his plate and never addressing a word to her. He was too bitter. He went to his study and took down the history of the diocese, which had so often consoled him in earlier griefs, but that night there was no consolation in it. It seemed that none of the men who had held the see before him was of the sort to be dominated by an old housekeeper, except for an eighteenth-century bishop who, in order to inherit a legacy, had become a Protestant. The door opened, and Nellie looked shyly in.

‘What are you feeling now?' she whispered.

‘Let me alone,' he said in a dry voice, without looking at her. ‘My heart is broken!'

‘'Tisn't your heart at all,' she said shamefastly. ‘'Tis that beef. 'Twasn't hung long enough, that's all. There isn't a butcher in this town will be bothered to hang beef. Would I get you a couple of scrambled eggs?'

‘Go away, I said.'

‘You're right, my lord. There's nothing in eggs. Would I fry you a couple of rashers?'

‘I don't want anything, woman!' he said, almost shouting at her.

‘The dear knows, the rashers aren't worth it,' she admitted with a heavy sigh. ‘Nothing only old bones, and the hair still sprouting on them. What you want is a nice little juicy bit of Limerick ham with a couple of mashed potatoes and milk sauce with parsley. That'll make a new man of you.'

‘All right, all right,' he said angrily. ‘But go away and let me alone.'

His mouth was already watering, but he knew that there was no ham in Limerick or out of it that could lift his sorrow; that whenever a woman says something will make a new man of you, all she means is that, like the rest of her crooked devices, it will make an old man of you before your time.

T
HE
S
HEPHERDS