Three Cheers For The Paraclete (11 page)

‘I suppose so, yes.’ But all Egan’s mind was on veering the car away from a white Jaguar from whose high windows Nora could probably be seen. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘All I was saying was that if you’re going to make your living by rousing basic lusts, you shouldn’t floodlight all the doorways. A dark doorway’s basic enough for basic lusts. It may well be a crime above all others chief to set up lusts in one place and send them into another for the performance. You make people travel all that way thinking that they’re onto the essence of things.’

‘Oh,’ Egan suggested without interest, ‘they probably have facilities elsewhere on the premises, upstairs.’ He had no doubt read of such things in the books-of-the-film Maitland had seen in his room.

There came a break in the five-ways traffic.

Egan’s yellow-stained face triumphed and the car jolted away downhill. Below them, furled yachts lay on the bay, and the unsynthetic stars offered themselves for sightings to the Royal Yacht Club where a quarterly dance raged. Egan continued to coach Maitland.

‘Celia will attempt to pump you, but don’t let her. I believe your best hope is to skip out quick, as they say. I can’t keep on begging your pardon for what I’m asking you to do, James. A person’s desperation makes any fantastic scheme seem possible. I’m afraid this
is
a
fantastic scheme. For one thing, why did I wear my clerical clothes?’

He slowed and began to remove them. He was handicapped by being temperamentally incapable of dragging them off. Even when he had shed his coat, he went on spying sideways at Maitland, who had undertaken to fold it over the back of the seat.

They came into a street where, Maitland thought, it would be easy to be happy. The houses were expensively unimpressive, and from gardens of long standing rose the lean sanity of pines and palms. Beyond parkland that faced the houses and stood utterly free of those white municipal threats about curbing dogs and dumping refuse, the bay was fledged with the quiet shapes of the yachts they had seen from the top of the hill. Egan parked the car.

‘I can’t go any farther, James. Celia’s is that house there.’ He pointed down the street to a stone bungalow with a terraced garden. Its lights shone. ‘I hope you wouldn’t think I was in any sense afraid of the woman.’

‘Of course not.’

With that, kneeling on the driver’s seat, Egan began to wake the girl.

‘Maurice,’ she said. ‘No, it’s James,’ said Maurice. ‘He’s going to take you home. Sit up, will you, Nora?’

She came halfway upright. Her hair swung in a sheath in front of her eyes, in the fashion of the movie queens of the forties. Fingering the seams of the upholstery, she was saying, ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned … It is umpteen years since my last confession, and since then I have been sick once in a priest’s car.’ She found this funny and adopted a solemn father-confessor voice. ‘That’s a very gravyous sin, my daughter. Don’t you know a priest’s car has to operate on all six celibates?’

Maitland got out and opened the woman’s door.

‘Maurice?’ she said again.

‘It’s James,’ Egan insisted. ‘You’ll have to give her your hand, James. Poor dear thing.’

‘Here you are, Nora,’ said Maitland, probing his open fist towards the reek. Her hand lighted in his gently and very cold. Feeling acutely estranged from himself, he began inexpertly to pull her to her feet. Yet she seemed to rise out of the car with little effort. He helped her to take a few steps along the footpath, and felt her legs give way alternately.

Egan, considering that Maitland and Nora had been properly launched, called, ‘Rest well, Nora.’

They hadn’t gone far when Nora began to chatter. ‘When I used to board in the convent at W———’ She said some indistinguishable native name that brought to Maitland’s mind white eucalypts awash in red dust – ‘we used to make up silly riddles, Maurice …’

‘James,’ Maitland grunted.

‘James. The parish priest of W——— always had a good car and he always told us what it had – you know, gears and ratios and diffs and so on. And I made up this riddle. I was very proud of it. I’ll tell you.’ Maitland looked as attentive as he could with his face averted from her fouled dress. ‘When is a biretta not a biretta?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When it’s a car-biretta.’ She giggled. ‘I’m quite lucid now. Just a bit nauseated.’

In fact she was at once sick again, making a shocking barking noise. Maitland tried to hold her by the shoulders. Finished, she remained bent forward; she breathed with an obvious sense of the goodness of breathing. Maitland’s stomach began to leap as it had in the car, finding her closeness hardly bearable. So, after a few seconds, did she. In a flash, she forwent the ease of
leaning forward against Maitland’s bony hands. When Egan came up she had left to go and prop herself against one of her neighbours’ fences.

She said, ‘What have I been doing, Maurice?’

‘Don’t worry. James was going to take you inside. But I think I should now.’

Both the girl and, to his own mystification, Maitland protested.

Egan allowed himself to see reason. ‘It isn’t that I don’t want to face her,’ he said. ‘But she can be so nasty – to you, I mean.’

‘I’m not a prize tenant. I’ll let myself in. What a dirty mess I’m in!’

She yelped and began to cry and search for a handkerchief. Her rifled handbag hung gaping on her left elbow. Maitland watched her for some seconds before remembering his own vast institutional handkerchief and pressing it on her.

‘James your name is?’ she asked in a stifled voice.

‘Yes.’

‘You go back to the car, Maurice. And you, James, you just help me to the door. Maurice, you know that I have a long and close experience of shame, don’t you? I mean the court and all the rest of it. I
have
a long experience of shame, don’t I?’

The ovoid blue moon of Egan’s face nodded. ‘Yes. It seems to be the woman’s lot in these matters. I wish it wasn’t, Nora.’

‘Well, I’ve never been more ashamed than I am now. You must forgive me …’

Egan answered gently. ‘What I sometimes think is that you must forgive us.’ His white priest’s hand included Maitland in the guilt.

She began to walk away saying, ‘No, no, I can’t have that.’

Maitland turned Egan, who seemed dazed, back to the car and then followed the woman, getting to her side in time to open the gate. Red-tiled steps climbed the two terraces of her sister’s garden; and once Maitland had pushed her up them, what looked like a lion but was probably a golden labrador burst on them from the blind side of wisterias.

‘Sit down, Brian,’ Nora told it sadly, in tone that accused it of insincere ferocity. ‘I’m so tired.’

In a way that was still drunken, she searched for her key over her left elbow into her handbag. The porch light flashed on and discovered her at it. Then the front door opened and the fly-screen flew wide. A woman dark, bitter and tall stood inviting explanations. She was, in terms of form and composition, a vulnerable figure. Her long hair had been combed out into ropes, and this and a short quilted house-coat above thin legs and feathery slippers made her look top-heavy. Also, she carried in one dark hand a cheap novel whose cover showed a young man with paramount shoulders receding from a thin, badly-used girl. None the less, her effect on Maitland was Medusan. She too gave the impression of having been badly used, but by somebody who had not misused her with impunity.

‘All afternoon and all night, Nora,’ she said, ‘and not even a phone call. Where have you been?’

Nora held her hands out, swayed and shook her head. Her handbag fell with a thud.

‘Excuse me,’ Maitland felt bound to say with however full a knowledge of his ineptitude. ‘My name’s James. I’ve met Nora casually in the past and when I saw in this state – so sick – I felt …’

‘Mr James,’ the woman said heavily, Maitland letting what seemed a happy mistake stand. ‘I’ll get your address before you go.’

He blushed within his dubious combination of clothes. His one reasonable impulse was to bolt for the sake of discretion, leap down both terraces, vault the fence and hope that Egan was fast on the ignition. ‘Perhaps,’ he said simply.

‘No one is going to bring my sister home half-covered with sick and get away without explaining himself. Come inside, Nora.’

As Nora obeyed, Maitland swept up her bag and pressed it into her hands. She began to move – not at all pretty by the porch light. Her stockings hung so baggily on her legs that she seemed to have wasted since pulling them on earlier in the day. She smelt badly, and her clothes were draggled and soiled. All this she knew and was willing to be ashamed at anyone’s beck, especially her sister’s.

‘Say good night to the
kind
gentleman,’ Celia told Nora, and Maitland saw that Egan had been largely right in predicting the woman’s drift as the point of ‘
kind
gentleman’ was aimed at him alone. On the other hand, he began to wonder whether Egan might not just as well have delivered the girl when, a second later, drawing in her breath to let Nora go inside, Celia hissed, ‘You’ve wet yourself, you fool!’

Then Maitland and the sister stood in silence listening to Nora plod around the interior of the house, sobbing so peculiarly that when she went into the bathroom they could tell by the tiled echo. Hearing the bathroom door close, they were both immediately ready to speak.

‘I felt so sorry for her,’ Maitland said, and not for effect.

‘Are you a friend of Dr Maurice Egan?’

‘That’s the fellow who’s on the Couraigne prize committee?’

Celia flourished the book in her hands. The gesture said, ‘Look, save your prevarications. I’ve studied you people in fact and in literature, and I can tell a prevarication from some distance.’ The book was one of those that feature, as well as a dust jacket, an extra ration of promises printed on a belt of white paper. Maitland, who habitually stared at books, got a glimpse of the words, ‘Classic story of the emotional exploitation of a young girl …’

‘He’s a priest,’ she said. ‘He’s a bumptious little priest.’

She put such classic hatred into her plosives that Maitland hung his head.

‘I know him,’ he conceded. ‘I thought he might have been bumptious when I first met him. In fact, he’s very unsure and much humbler than most,’

Celia came out with a remarkably whole-hearted laugh. ‘Where did you find Nora then?’ she asked, willing to extend to Maitland’s story the same suspicion she applied to his claim about Egan’s humility.

Maitland told her none the less. For embroidery he said, ‘The taxi-driver got very angry about it. He wanted us to clean up.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ she decided, while patently disbelieving in both cab and driver. ‘How much do we owe you in fares?’

‘You don’t owe me anything. I was very pleased. Listen, pardon me for saying so, but I think she should be allowed to sleep and then see a doctor. She seemed beyond herself with …’ But he didn’t know what. ‘Some sort of unhappiness,’ he temporized.

‘Now, that
is
perception! Don’t think I won’t consider your advice, Mr James. You see, I
do
have some concern for her.’

‘I’m sure you do. I’ll have to go. It’s so late.’

She laughed and stared up and down his length, her eyes fixing on his black trousers.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, still staring. ‘No doubt you have to rise early to say Mass, father.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘By their black trousers you shall know them. Anyhow, I heard you preach a few weeks ago. It was very pleasant. It shed no light, but at least it didn’t bore. Speaking of boredom, have you ever heard a sermon from Father Egan? No. They should make you listen to each other. That would be only fair.’

‘I don’t think we’ll gain by –’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You fellows never do think anything will be gained by any argument where you hold the thorny end of the stick.’

‘What’s the use? You have me red-handed.’

‘Do I, indeed?’ She felt a mole on the left cheek of her ravaged-looking face. ‘What’s your name, father?’

‘James.’

‘James? That wasn’t the name … Oh, I see. We’re on to Christian names, are we? Call me Celia, James.’

‘I would. But I have to go.’

Celia smoothed down the soft floral gown as if it were a uniform. ‘Oh yes, you’re all so busy. It took the church courts a mere four and a half years to decide that Nora’s husband was impotent as a paling fence. The pace must be deadly.’

‘I know very little about church courts, Celia. I’m not a canon lawyer. But I know they’re slow. I suppose all courts are slow.’

‘Nearly five years to discover that a man is impotent! It must be a record. Of a kind.’

‘I suspect that you wouldn’t find it was a record. The Church is accustomed to take its time. We boast about that. But it has its bad aspects, I know.’

‘Indeed. It gives a girl, Nora, time to develop a taste for the judge.’

Knowing that he was playing the game Celia’s way, Maitland could still not prevent himself from saying, ‘Judge?’

‘In the second case. No, he wasn’t judge. He was usher of the black rod or defender of the seal or something. Egan.’

‘He’s defender of the bond.’

‘That’s it. Now, isn’t that a title? Straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.’

‘Let me assure you, Celia. Egan had nothing to do with Nora’s state tonight.’

‘I know what you mean. He wouldn’t have the gumption to liquor her up. He wouldn’t have the gumption to sleep with her and go on being a sacrilegious priest. Damn it, it’s happened to better men than he is. Virtue through lack of initiative, that’s Chubby Egan for you. As if he would ever be likely to do any good to anyone, sacrilegiously or otherwise.’

Maitland said, ‘He has to be of use to himself first of all. But you know that.’

Boyishness had died in him by now; this vigilant and bitter woman had given it its final discharge. He was beginning to take glances over his shoulder, niggled by the awareness of Egan’s disquiet assailing him from a distance of a hundred yards or more and through a series of hedgerows. Then Nora’s hollow voice could be heard, calling, ‘Celie, Celie!’