Three Cheers For The Paraclete (19 page)

‘My God!’ Maitland called out sincerely, seeing that a dilemma of classic proportions had overtaken this far-from-classic little priest.

‘Perhaps my intentions were bad. I don’t know. But it seemed to me – not that there was anything I could do – however, it seemed that I must come back and keep track, more or less, of her return to health.’

‘Yes,’ Maitland said, ‘that seems an honest decision to me. And I’m the one wearing the stole.’

‘But we get so used from childhood to making our decisions seem honest. I can remember how in my last year at high school we had a teacher who taught us
literature. He was an enthusiast, but somehow he seemed to bore the boys. At the end of the year he told us that he was very sorry and that it was his own fault, but we were going to fail the literature section in great numbers. He said that each time he thought of giving us a critical exercise, he remembered how little we knew and decided that he would wait until he had given us another two or three essential ideas. And he would give us the two or three essential ideas, during which we would doze or do our mathematics.’

‘You doze? I can’t imagine little Maurice Egan dozing in class.’

‘Little Maurice Egan was destined to become
defensor vinculi
,’ said Egan in seemly but unmistakable self-hatred. ‘I speak of the class as a whole. In any case the teacher was right, and more than not failed, because he couldn’t release their minds long enough to let them have their own say, however clumsy. It has been exactly the same case with myself and Nora. The time when I could say good-bye to Nora was always two or three weeks away.’

He came to an end of eloquence, lowered his head and said, ‘Advise me, James.’

Maitland protested. ‘Come on now, Maurice. You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Especially at this kind of lark.’

‘Don’t say that. You’re the confessor. Don’t you believe that the grace of the sacrament could make you wiser than yourself?’

The question made Maitland self-conscious and betrayed him into a silence that couldn’t help but be sceptical.

For his part, Egan was betrayed into peevishness. ‘Sometimes,’ he announced, ‘one can sense a particularly annoying quality about you, James – in the way you
consistently refuse to be impressed by old ways, old habits of thought. In case you didn’t know, that is precisely why Nolan and Costello always expect the worst of you.’

‘It must be very annoying. However, where would they be without someone to expect the worst of?’

‘Don’t waste your time turning the other cheek,’ Egan began, but slapped the top of his own head in mid-petulance, causing the hair to rise in brilliantined spikes. ‘Forgive me, James. I must seem laughable enough to you, a middle-aged priest seeking marriage.’

So, holding in his lap his consecrated hands, cupped as if damaged, he began to stare at them in a secretive manner, and saw the irony of his thirty-six holy years and of his not having dozed in the literature classes and failed like the honest majority. Maitland chanced putting a long, inept hand on his friend’s shoulder. He said, ‘I’m sure some solution can be found,’ forgetting that a solution had been found, that Nora was due to cross the world within days and leave Egan inviolate.

Then, still wearing the confessional-stole, but failing to recollect that the sacrament was still in progress, he went to the volumes of Migne and absently switched on the electric jug. He felt repelled by that Egan who sat benumbed, too much like a shocked child. So hard he stared at the harmless, yellow jug that he might have been able to see the murderous watts moving in it like sharks in an aquarium.

‘Well, James, what do you think?’

Harried, Maitland demanded, ‘How do you mean?’

‘About my guilt.’

‘Are you seriously asking me to –’

‘Yes. You are priest and judge.’

Maitland weaved his head. ‘Oh hell, Maurice …’

‘You must want to ask me questions.’

Maitland snorted. ‘All right. An obvious question. Did you ever try to stop seeing Nora?’

‘I was always telling her she seemed so much better and that this would be the last time we would meet. When I say always telling her, I mean about half a dozen times in the last year. Each time I meant it. Or at least I thought I meant it.’

‘What happened then?’ Maitland said almost brutally.

‘You must remember, James, that Nora was not a melodramatic woman. But each time, she’d say, “I don’t know whether I could stand it!”’

‘Your departure?’

‘Yes. She wasn’t the sort of woman to make such claims lightly. I learnt that much from her encounter with the
periti
.’

‘So you think she wouldn’t have been able to stand a breaking of the ties.’

Maitland’s hostility had begun to wash off on the penitent, who said, ‘Is that a question I had a right to ask myself, James? I mean to say, one would not risk the mental balance of one’s worst enemy.’

All desire to probe Egan’s blind side died now, leaving Maitland both ashamed and very grateful that the girl was having recourse, not to novenas, but to international airlines.

The two of them were unaccountably tired, as if they had wrestled with each other – a spiritual round or two for a pound or two which had not done anyone any good.

‘If she said she couldn’t stand it,’ Egan murmured, ‘it was the truth.’

‘The whole blame is yours?’

‘Practically.’

‘It’s a bit Asian, friend Egan, to assume that someone is to blame for every human situation.’

Egan sighed. ‘This isn’t a bit like a confession. You owe me a judgment.’

‘Well I don’t damn-well want to give one. Do you want me to say “not guilty” just for the sake of comforting you? I said it at the start and I still say it.
Not Guilty.
And now I think you should let the subject lie.’

There was an absolution, which Egan accepted with disconsolate bowed head.

A minute or so later, nibbling a biscuit, he said, ‘Anyhow, perhaps Nora will meet someone on her – journey.’ He laid the word down like lead on the brittle hope. ‘Some businessman or grazier from this side of things. They say London’s full of them.’ He could have been talking of forests full of tigers.

Just as Maitland’s contest with Allied Projects began, he had been following an absorbing line of research at the public library. He was suddenly exalted to find that much of the material he had gathered demanded to be treated in some extended form; in fact, in a dangerous form for any priest – the novel. So his working-day became a short creative fever in the reading-room, encompassed by those waste levels of time in which he occupied a place at table, taught, timed his meditations, and had the Egan conscience forced on him.

‘We just have time, James,’ Egan said on a crucial morning. ‘Please. It seems indecent not to be there for this.’

‘But I have a class at eleven.’

‘We’ll be there no more than ten minutes.’

‘But listen, Maurice. What if the thing is held up and we have to leave before it goes? That would be worse than inconclusive.’

‘Please, James,’ was all that Egan said.

Maitland drove Egan’s small car. Within half a mile
of the airport, creeping among tankers and busfuls of travellers, assailed by hoardings offering foreign cities and the wine and girls of foreign cities, Maitland began to suffer the sick sense of being alien to his native city. What he was especially grateful for was that he did not dress well – his badly worn shoes did not look like those of a man who could afford a ticket to London; his old coat at least gave him some specious claim to representing eternal values. He would otherwise not be able to move in the terminal building without being challenged by eyes.

Transitory then, but compelling gazes as much as any eternal value, stood the London-bound jet.

‘We mustn’t meet them,’ Egan said. ‘There’s some sort of veranda upstairs.’

Maitland laughed, and said in a voice like a municipal alderman’s. ‘In this day and age, we call them observation decks.’

‘Very well,’ hissed Egan, and pounced at the staircase as if fleeing loreleis in the lounge.

Upstairs, the wind tugging at their forlorn black hats, Maitland had some advice for his friend. ‘Anyone who has ever said good-bye to someone –’

‘I am not
saying
good-bye,’ Egan insisted.

‘Anyhow, they say this is the most difficult to accept. These jets climb into the sun and vanish within a minute. People feel it’s improper to have friends taken so quickly. I thought I should warn you.’

‘Thank you,’ Egan said.

He made Maitland hide behind a family of wealthy Italians as the passengers appeared from the terminal doorway. There was Nora in a rich check coat, long-and full-legged in claret-coloured stockings. She turned once to wave cursorily in the direction from which she had come. It was a gesture like a blessing given by a
priest who is sick of his priesthood. As she entered the plane, Egan said, ‘She could see us from a window, James. I’m sorry. We must go back downstairs.’

They sheltered in a bus bay, listened to the machine snarl, felt its exhaust heat their faces like an indefinable reproach, saw it trundle away, turn and, gathering all its inevitable knots per hour compactly behind its wings, rise and vanish. Maitland had been right; decency demanded more ceremony: the streamers, say, that are strung between wharf and inching liner.

Egan said desperately, ‘It’s amazing how they can get those monstrous things up.’

The incompleteness of the good-bye kept them waiting in silence in the bay for two or three minutes. As they looked down the vacant runway shining with a light that was nearly crystalline, Maitland sensed that his friend’s composure was so cliff-edge that even a pat on the shoulder would disturb it. At last Egan sniffed drily.

‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything else happening.’

But, of course, Celia also had waited, absorbed in an empty sky. Convinced at the same time as Egan that, however expansive, it would produce nothing, she emerged at the terminal front door when the two priests were twenty yards away. On seeing them, she mopped tears off her cheeks with two fast swipes of a tissue.

‘It’s beloved Maurice,’ she said in full voice. She wore the enamel, corsets-are-killing-me smile of the professional entertainer. Both priests cringed. Both wondered whether her high-calibre tongue had their retreat to the parking-area covered; both decided that, as with pythons and tigers, the best chance was utter immobility. ‘And James, the friend of the alcoholic.’ Other bon-voyagers, coming out of doors chewing over their inadequate farewells, caught the suggestion of a scene
in her voice, glimpsed the two Roman collars, and bolted. ‘She whom thou seekest is not here,’ said Celia in a venomous parody. ‘She is risen,
Alleluia
. She is gone before you into Chelsea where dwelleth her pub-owning aunt, Mrs Beatrice Flanigan.’

Egan said, ‘She hasn’t gone before me. She’s simply gone.’

‘Surely you can get a discount trip out of some pious wop airline.’

‘I wouldn’t want to. She’s far better off without the two of us.’

Maitland ventured to say, ‘I think this is only going to cause pain to both of you. Perhaps if you –’

‘Not in mufti today, father?’ Celia observed cursorily, and then, ‘Maurice, did you happen to see the wave my grateful sister gave me? You would have thought she was brushing scurf off her shoulder. That bloody dry-wife of yours … A flap of the hand. I think we’ve both been used by that sweet child. One day, when she’s sitting in her flat with some extreme form of male – she’s got a talent for extreme forms – priest and eunuch so far – when she’s sitting there with her next freak, she’ll mention off-handedly that she once was involved with a
defensor vinculi
. She’ll say, “Do you know what a
defensor vinculi
is, darling?” And he, out of the special insight given him by his having only one leg or one eye or a really elegant hare-lip, will say –’

What, Maitland did not hear, because Egan, with a bunched fist, struck her on the cheek. It was more, even, than she had hoped for.

Having to lead her away and soothe her, having to lead an Egan who hid his face in his hands three hundred yards to the car, Maitland became even more intensely grateful for his unworldly shoes.

While Maitland drove, Egan sat solving the simul
taneous equations:
A man who strikes a woman is an utter coward
and
Maurice Egan, not thought to be an utter coward, has yet struck a woman
. By the time they parked in the stone bay behind the House he was still limp and far from a solution; and, behind any solution, lay the untouched mass of his grief.

D
ISTRUST OF
M
AITLAND
characterized Hurst over the following week. Three days after he had been due to visit the doctor, Maitland had still not heard if he had kept the appointment. Maitland, approaching, would see him flit into doorways and up staircases. It was when you wanted to speak to somebody who didn’t want to speak to you that you realized how some Victorian architect, of talents stolid as plum-duff, had constructed without trying a house fit for the chase sequence of a Marx Brothers’ comedy.

Maitland ran him down by accident. It was a weekday morning and a High Mass was, for some liturgical reason, being intoned in the chapel. James, on his way upstairs from saying his own Mass, stopped by in the downstairs toilet and found Hurst, stock-still in surplice, soutane and biretta, staring at his own anguish in the mirror above the basins. Seeing Maitland, he jumped back and stood at bay.

‘Good morning,’ called Maitland, breezing up to a urinal.

‘Good morning, doctor.’

‘Go to the doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. What did he say?’

‘He said I was letting myself be bluffed by this – you know – compulsion.’

‘Yes, but that’s easily said, isn’t it? Although they say he knows a lot about priests and religious, that doctor.’

‘Yes. He doesn’t like the way we’re trained. He thinks it’s anti-human.’

‘Well, of course,’ Maitland said, buttoning his fly, ‘that’s no secret.’

‘He agrees with you about the will,’ Hurst announced, opting for academic questions so that personal ones should not be raised. ‘He says that we are taught that the will can conquer anything and that we wear our will out by trying not to – in my case – maim people.’

‘But he doesn’t exactly believe that one should give in, does he?’ Maitland asked sunnily. ‘Give in and cut away?’

Hurst winced. ‘No. He thinks that other methods should be used. Utter serenity.’

‘My God! If you were capable of utter serenity you wouldn’t have troubled him.’

‘He gave me some pills and I’m to go back in a week.’

Hurst wanted, with every pore of his unsunned flesh, that that should be the end of the interview.

‘Are you any better?’ Maitland asked him.

‘Yes. I have these pills.’

‘What about the letter he gave you?’ It had to be asked bluntly. ‘Surely he gave you a letter for me?’

‘Oh, no.’ Hurst began to comb the tassels of the biretta with his fingers. It was the type of gesture that goes with not-too-artful lying or, on the other hand, with complete guilelessness. ‘He didn’t seem to think that I was any sort of serious case. Only bluffed, as I said.’

‘Could I do anything?’

‘No. It’s very kind of you to have taken this much interest.’

Maitland laughed as kindly as he could and patted
the boy’s shoulder. ‘You’re not mad, Hurst, but you have to take yourself seriously. I actually found you burying the cutlery. Polite terms like “very kind of you to take this much interest” don’t enter into it. Now, did he give you a letter?’

‘No,’ Hurst said, hardly friendly, and gripped the three-peaked hat in both fists.

Maitland already felt disgusted by the tone of annoyance that seemed native to his dealing with Hurst. He said, ‘Please trust me. If I sound angry, it’s because futile sicknesses
do
make one angry.’

‘Of course, doctor.’ Hurst was still a gentleman; he woefully lacked the desperation that brings man to a cure. ‘And I
will
keep you informed of the treatment.’

At the same time Egan too was using every facility the house offered for the avoidance of Maitland. They seemed to meet only in places where silence or near-silence was the rule – noticeably, as before, in the passageway behind the high altar. Each nodded to the other over the chalice he bore; two liturgical denizens in green or white or scarlet chasubles. No doubt Egan suspected Maitland of thinking along juridical lines: here is a man who punched a woman; what right has he to don a chasuble over that atrocity? Maitland, whose atrocity was that he belonged to nothing and agonized for no one, could have boxed Egan’s blunt little ears.

Meanwhile, loss, guilt and regeneration brought to that bland face the delayed puberty of a frown.

One eleven o’clock, returning from the classroom, Maitland caught sight of Egan’s boyish coat-tails making the short dash from the end stairs to the back door. Maitland ran after him, cassock whooping like bellows. The quarry was still palely fiddling with car keys when James caught him among the vehicles.

‘Heard from Celia or Nora, Maurice?’ Maitland asked, invoking Celia’s name purely as a reprisal.

‘The plane arrived safely.’

‘They mainly do these days.’

He thought: One thing about being vengeful; you know you’re alive. It’s wine. It’s a drug.

‘James,’ said Egan, ‘James, I’d prefer it if we both forgot those two names.’

‘Oh. Now you’re back to the stable life, you want to forget your old friends?’

‘Never, James. I’ll never forget what you’ve done. But …’

‘Never forget what I’ve done? You sound as if you’re going away.’

‘No. No.’ He raised his elbows as if under suspicion of carrying a change of clothing beneath the armpits.

Maitland said, ‘Listen, Maurice, if you want to be quit of me because I’m associated in your mind with given acts of valour of yours, such as clocking a certain fishwife, hereinafter anonymous, to her own and my intense delight – if you want to be quit of me because I’m some sort of living emblem of your sins, or what you consider to be sins, then just tell me.’

Egan turned over his keys one by one as if they carried apt quotations from Ecclesiastes or St Augustine.

‘Well,’ Maitland insisted, ‘tell me!’

‘That’s not the problem. What sort of man do you think I am?’

‘If you think when we pass in that bloody dismal tunnel behind the altar that I wonder whether you’re saying Mass “in the state of sin”’ – he gestured two handfuls of inverted commas either side of the time-worn expression – ‘then you’re a great damned fool offering the worst damned insult that ever I’ve suffered.’

‘That’s not the problem either.’

‘My God,’ called Maitland, with a further gesture which the books of piety would have described as inordinate. ‘You
are
a tortuous bastard!’

‘You’re a young priest, Maitland. How old are you?’

‘Full twenty-nine years have I,’ Maitland said, still petulant.

‘Full thirty-seven have I,’ Egan announced without enthusiasm. ‘Like all older priests, I owe you an example. I owe you some edification. In fact, I have given you not a thing other than certain cynical insights –’

‘Oh God. Now I can’t even take the credit for my own cynicism!’

‘You’re right to be angry.’

‘Oh, stop pretending to humility. It resolves itself down to this. Either you do me the credit of letting me decide for myself whether you’re such an old reprobate that I shouldn’t mix with you, or else we stop all pretence at acquaintanceship. One more curt nod at table and you can get someone else to dole out your secrets to.’

Then, under the influence of a strange spasm, the desire to top Egan’s guilt, Maitland went on, ‘If you think you’re the only one with a sizeable shame, let me tell you about mine.’

And although it was no sort of enormity to him that he had published without ecclesiastical permission, it was and always would be a genuine enormity to Egan, being for him part of that inalienable citadel of the conscience which even murderers have, the things one would never do. So Maitland told him about
The Meanings of God
, and watched him.

‘My goodness!’

‘Go on, then. Treat me as a leper.’

‘Don’t talk rot.’

‘Ah!’ said Maitland. ‘That is my very point. Either we take the rot as read, or else.’

‘That book,’ said Egan. ‘James, that’s a superb book. And it was written by a priest, as the publisher claimed.’

Maitland laughed. ‘You mean that if a Catholic wrote it there may be some truth in it?’

‘I mean that it’s superb book. You really are a very bright young fellow for twenty-nine.’

‘Jump at yourself, Reverend Egan.’

Maurice, on the brunt of Maitland’s information, had managed to open the door of his small car. Then he stood up straight and put out his hand. ‘Rot as read?’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘We’ll take the rot as read?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Really, a marvellous book, James. Do you intend doing anything about it?’

‘My opus?’ Maitland asked. ‘Let it die without recriminations.’

When Joe Quinlan telephoned him, Maitland – for the first time since the blonde reporter had come visiting – suffered a momentary sense of betrayal. He said into the receiver, ‘Want another loan, Joe?’ So, with abject ease, he made a mock of any forbearance he might have practised in the past or might practise in the future. Not that forbearance itself hadn’t been abjectly easy. He had awarded the money to someone who meant nothing to him, who was, by conventional standards, totally undeserving. These were the conditions he had set himself, and by its nature, the very giving was an insult and deserved traducing.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Joe said painfully. ‘I wanted to apologize.’

And if Maitland now felt a panic rush to reassure Joe, and if he said nothing, it was because his brand of reassurance was likely to be taken for sarcasm.

‘If you could come tonight, father?’ wondered Joe. ‘You won’t be able to come home because they’re trying their best to get us out of the place, but I could meet you at the bus-stop. We could have a talk. You know.’

The electronic mysteries of a telephone exchange crackled in the pause, while Maitland weighed the tensions of creation, demanding release, at the back of his brain. For though he had not yet attacked that rampantly gentile beast called the novel, he had yet begun taking notes (upstairs, only seven yards distant from the nearest Couraigne painting, only fifteen yards from the nearest moral theologian) which were nearly the real thing. Balancing their claims against Joe’s, he heard Joe say, ‘By Jesus, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not that, Joe. It’s just that you live so far away.’

‘Not any more,’ Joe said. The Quinlans lived in a new place, only
they
were trying to get them out of it. Joe’s
they
was that terrible pronoun of the working class, embracing the cabinet, the insurance companies, organized Christianity, the price-control board, the breweries. Maitland suffered a second’s fluorescent vision of his own father waiting grey with loss outside a casualty ward, telling the skinny theological student who Maitland once was, ‘
They
won’t let us have her.
They
say there’s got to be an autopsy.’

He flinched. ‘I suppose,’ he decided, full of proletarian tenderness, ‘I could catch the bus.’

An hour later he found Joe hunched against a locked and blazing appliance store. They were both cold and, without overcoats, seemed outdated in the glare of that new shopping-centre. Still, it was Maitland’s business not to blend into the landscape of
new suburbs. All the rebuke of the lit galleries was on Joe’s tweedy shoulders.

As Maitland came up, Joe let his shivers run mad so that he would not be forced to notice the mockery or other-cheekness of Maitland’s extended hand. They asked after each other’s health, while the wind stropped itself on acres of plate glass and filleted the two of them in their corner.

‘Shout you a cup of coffee?’ suggested Maitland. He blushed for being in the right, and found it impossible to look at Joe’s face, which was trying to cope with its own problems. He stared therefore at the display window behind them, and read the chrome badge of an automatic washing-machine, read its labelled buttons, its citation of red cardboard, its blue arrow indicating the spinner that was ‘Tarzan-tough and Galahad-tender’. The influence of G. M. Hopkins on advertising, Maitland thought. If Costello were a woman, he – she – would own that machine.

‘I just left the table,’ Joe said. Morna’s table, stew and one pumpkin-stained little boy.

‘Come on,’ Maitland commanded.

The Hungarian-proprietor was glad to have a reverend client, or any client, this raw night. Both cousins felt a shy access of cheerfulness as they sat down under his smile and the insinuating smells of his coffee machine.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t take you home,’ Joe said again, as he had on the telephone. ‘But they call sometimes of a night, and if they called while you were there, Morna’d throw a fit.’

‘Who are
they
?’

‘The people from Allied Projects. They say that Clark had no right to offer us the house.’

‘Clark?’

‘That manager bloke.’

‘Clark offered you a house?’ Maitland could not stop smiling sideways. Paris is worth a Mass, he thought, Maitland is worth a three-bedroom brick cottage with shingle roof.

‘Rent-free like.’

‘A good house?’

Joe put his face in his hands. ‘I wish to Christ it was ours,’ he said.

‘They’re trying to break their promise?’

‘They say he had no right. When I telephoned him he said it was out of his hands, that he’s retiring in September.’

‘Typical of
them
,’ James murmured, aligning himself with his dead father and with Joe.

Joe said, ‘It was hard enough to say them things about you …’

‘I know.’ Maitland quashed the melodrama by slapping his right knee a number of times. Then he said softly, ‘I know. Bad enough, without all this.’

‘Don’t you mind what I said?’

Maitland smiled gingerly while the proprietor himself, and not his acned cashier, laid down two coffees as tenderly as kittens before them.

‘Thank you,’ Maitland said to the man’s departing and gratified buttocks; and to Joe, ‘I know you’ll always take a serious view of the affair, Joe. But you see, I’m not a career priest, so I can’t be hurt in that way. They aren’t sweating on me to turn forty just so that they can give me a cardinal’s hat.’

They both laughed, still very shy. But Joe went sombre without warning. ‘We really needed a place of our own. You know.’