Three Cheers For The Paraclete (24 page)

‘Books live as long as cicadas, Your Grace. I thought – conscientiously – that it was best to let mine die. The pseudonym I used was a matter of … well, bashfulness. If Dr Costello wants a word he can laugh at.’

‘I’ll laugh at it, certainly. And I’ll also say that if ignorance were a defence against the law, etiquette should still have bound you.’

‘Yes,’ Maitland said. Though there were higher interests than etiquette. Throwing a grenade was not etiquette, but it was possible to think of occasions when it might be necessary. He wisely kept that image to himself.

Nolan said, ‘But we must return to the central controversy. Of course, your book
is
a book of theology.’

‘No.’

‘Does it or doesn’t it put forward a
logos
about
Theos
, ideas about God?’ Costello asked.

‘Not about God in himself. It puts forward ideas about the ideas men have about God.’ Even to Maitland it sounded a little specious.

‘James, if I ordered you to recant same specified ideas from your book,’ His Grace proposed, ‘would you?’

Maitland said nothing. Costello didn’t mind admitting, ‘Nolan and I both believe that your book runs counter to a number of Papal decrees on the nature of God. I am not afraid of confessing that I raised the question to His Grace.’

‘The recantation would never be made public, of course,’ the archbishop explained. ‘It would be secret to the three of us and to yourself. And to my successor as well.’

After some time Maitland said, ‘Not that this has anything to do with it, but what would be the penalty if I didn’t.’

‘I won’t speak about penalties. Not at this stage.’

‘Your Grace, I could recant if I came to hold different opinions. But a man can’t decide in five minutes to hold different opinions.’

Costello suggested, ‘Give it a try.’

‘None of the book’s reviewers thought it heretical.’

‘Do you have copies of reviews, James? By Catholic scholars, I mean.’

‘Yes.’

Another long, conscientious silence fell. At last Maitland said, ‘I’m no enemy of doctrine. But if you want to get rid of me, the book will serve.’

‘The implication is an insult, James.’

‘I ask you not to make me recant.’

Costello made a wry nasal noise. ‘Please don’t punish me, judge. It could make me an enemy of society.’

Someone, proving to be the Irish spinster who had solaced Maitland with cocoa some weeks before, then knocked at the door. She announced a trunk call for His Grace, who left to take it in his office. This was the unkindest ruse that events could manage – to leave judges with nothing to do but chat with the accused. Nolan and Costello at first tried to elude speaking with Maitland and spoke in whispers. But Maitland’s apparent equality with them, his closeness to the hearth, the easiness of his easy chair, all incited them to give him unofficial advice, peer to peer.

Nolan said, ‘Pride or Church now, James, pride or Church.’ And, more cryptically, ‘Remember the night of the Couraigne prize?’

Costello said, ‘James, if I’ve been baiting you it’s because you’re a provocative young man. But you must make the humble decision, not the resentful one. Resentment can only harm yourself. The Church can’t lose either way.’

Suddenly Maitland became, if not acutely resentful, acutely angry.

‘The Church!’ he called out. ‘You think of the Church as Christ’s young bride already come into the
fullness of beauty. I think of her as a scruffy old eyesore with half her tats drawn who’s whored around too much with politicians.’

‘That is a sustaining vision, that is!’ Costello hooted.

‘And I don’t mean to be driven out to satisfy your sense of fitness.’

‘Dr Costello will be archbishop of this diocese one day,’ Nolan claimed. ‘His sense of fitness will bind you then.’

‘I may die, he may die, we both may. He may even fail to make it.’

Costello was jovial about the odds against him. ‘Indeed, indeed,’ he laughed. ‘All I say is, don’t jump the wrong way because you resent Nolan and myself. We are inadequate grounds.’

‘You really mean to be kind, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then don’t plant this recantation idea in his head.’

‘That is a matter of conscience with us,’ Nolan explained.

No one was ungrateful when His Grace returned; all three stood with hearty reverence. But the prelate stayed in the doorway, holding the door ajar.

He said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, everything has been said. Except this: James, when you say the Credo during the Mass, can you say it with an honest heart?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait in the front parlour on your left.’

‘I won’t recant, Your Grace.’

‘And I won’t be bullied, James.’

‘I wasn’t bullying. I was pleading.’

‘Molly will bring you some supper.’

An hour passed in that front parlour. He was emotionally languorous but mentally aware of being under a
more pervasive danger than ever before. He was, as he had told Edmonds, an institutional being. He must develop, however achingly, within the structure; and he had an intuitive certainty that unseen development was proceeding. Random death – at an intersection say, in Costello’s car – could render this growth inconsequent. But being cast out would make it void and leave him a nomad.

Yet his alarm was of the cooler, mental variety. He had leisure to regret the absence of books. He learnt the family tree of the Benedictine order, framed on one wall, and achieved a working grasp of the map on the other; of the red arrows (migrations of priests) emanating from Ireland and spearing into the heart of the Americas, of Eurasia, of Oceania.

Then there was the life of St Kevin in the stained-glass window, with a summary in Gothic-print Latin at the bottom. An untranslatable gerundive in this inscription kept him busy for ten minutes.

At a quarter to eleven the baffled Molly called for him.

‘You sitting for an exam, father?’ she asked.

‘You could say that, Molly.’

‘Then God bless. That Joseph of Cupertino is the feller for exams. Look, I have him in the kitchen, and I’ll say the prayer while you’re in there.’

‘You’re very kind.’

But she said no, she had a pledge to spread the devotion.

Dirtied cups and fouled ashtrays occupied the judicial end of the table.

Maitland took comfort from its looking like a decision-makers’ mess: as if some arduous soul-searching had taken place. But he got little time to gather omens. The
archbishop told him to sit. The big plush chair attempted to coddle him as no accused about to hear sentence would ever want to be.

‘First,’ His Grace said, ‘you assure me that you can say the Credo with honesty?’

Maitland said he could.

‘Now it’s hard to
make
you recant. No one knows you wrote the thing. We don’t
want
anyone to know you wrote the thing. You understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve decided to suspend you for three months. You will neither say the Mass and administer sacraments under my jurisdiction, nor seek to do so under any other bishop’s. You will write to me at length during each week of your suspension. You will occupy the first month with a period of recollection in a monastery I shall name to you later.’

A month’s quiet would, in itself, be a delight. But Maitland knew that there would be some attempt to read daily the level of his rivers of perversity.

Sure enough: ‘You will confess regularly, follow out the life of the community as best you can, and speak for at least half an hour daily with a spiritual director whom, once again, I shall name to you later.’

‘I could have hoped for more freedom, Your Grace,’

‘This
is
a penance, James. You’ve already exploited all the freedom you’re likely to get. Do you submit?’

‘Yes.’ He had begun to colour. He said through tight lips, ‘But I believe my book was a valid book. Even a good book.’

His Grace sighed. ‘We’ll come to that. You submit, though, without argument?’

‘Yes.’

Costello said gently, ‘Our prayers shall keep pace. Neck and neck.’

Maitland came close to blushing, and all three judges bowed their heads imperceptibly for the pious thought.

His Grace said, ‘I would have suspended you for much longer, James, but we have a grave shortage of priests. Just the same, I trust that this first part of your penalty is a greater blow to you than the second. Because you are a priest, you exist for that, and now you cannot be a priest, in any active sense, for some time. Secondary to that, then, you will publish nothing in my lifetime, James, although
you are free to ask
me to relax this ruling in individual cases. But unless the individual case has exceptional validity, you will not publish.’

Maitland felt a vacancy half an inch from his heart, in the small and incandescent space filled, up to the moment, by the notion of his novel. But terms such as ‘exceptional validity’ were vague and could be argued in their time.

‘Do you accept this, James?’ His Grace wanted to know.

E
GAN HAD BECOME
very possessive about his hospital. Stark-eyed, he led Maitland through the ground-plan, displaying the stucco and the monstrosities in the incurables’ section with equal pride. Sixty years past, the house had belonged to a pastoralist, had begun its life as one family’s stone bungalow, with tower. It had suited the departed sheep king’s swank; and it suited the present dwellers, all suffering classically named diseases, that Jason striving should hold up the balustrade, that lumpy girls labelled Hebe and Nike should stand in the stained-glass windows, or Apollo and Daphne languish asexually above the main door. The humble brothers of a Hospitaller order passed with bed-pans and white mixture.

‘There’s a priest here who never speaks,’ Egan boasted. ‘Never. Not for months. And they can’t let him say Mass because he’s liable to fling something, even the chalice, at his altar-server. It’s happened.’

The small priest, sedated to a level where he could rejoice even in chalice-hurling, chattered on as he and Maitland emerged on a veranda of red tiles with an inlaid Celtic snake swallowing his tail in the porch. It was impossible to believe in the serpent’s elegant distress, but the grounds crawled with credibly morose patients.

Egan chattered on. ‘Well, my second day here, I woke for an hour or two, and I saw this priest in the ward and
asked him how he was. He glared at me as if I’d called him a foul name, and then they gave me some more drugs and I slept for three days or so.’

They sat on a garden seat, Maitland remembering just in time to remove a new paperback from his hip pocket. Before them was a conservatory, and beyond it orange orchards ran downhill to mudflats possessed by grazing cows. The river ran quietly, but flicked its thighs in the sun to cross a sandbank.

‘When I woke, the priest was beside me. I thought that he’d been there all the time, while I slept, but that wasn’t possible. Anyhow, he looked at me, full of hate. I thought he might murder me. All he said was, “Mind your own bloody business!” Imagine!’ Egan giggled. ‘It isn’t funny, of course, but the man in the bed next to mine told me that the poor fellow had visited me each morning while I was drugged and waited for me to wake up, and when I didn’t, said, “Mind your own bloody business!” with plenty of venom, and then marched away.’ In the same hard-pressed breath, he asked, ‘How are things with you, James?’

‘Very well. I’m boarding in a friary, theoretically under supervision, but the friars are better sports than Nolan. I have a good monastic breakfast, spend no less than five hours a day in the archives at the public library, chant the evening office with the community. I sleep like a just man.’ After thought, he admitted, ‘I miss the Mass. I miss it very acutely. It’s a surprise.’

How deep a one he didn’t say; but the rite he had learnt at twenty-two out of a yellow book, with a chalice made of half a jam-tin, he fretted for now with a trenchancy he had thought himself beyond.

He said, ‘It’s a matter of what you’ve been bred to.’

‘I suppose if my mad letter had succeeded, I’d have missed the Mass, too.’

Maitland’s eyes slewed away towards the blue distances of the river, but he said in the end, ‘You’re sure to have, Maurice.’

Egan wept feverishly, like an unhappy drunk. Maitland ignored him.

‘Listen, Maurice, I’ve taken a cottage at a little beach town along the coast for the last month of my suspension. Some of the paperback royalties on my infamous book will pay for the rent. It isn’t a very luxurious place. Outside toilets. Cans.’

‘Well, they were good enough for Duns Scotus and Aquinas and Peter Abelard,’ Egan said, rubbing his eyes.

‘So they were,’ Maitland said. ‘I was wondering, would you like to come with me? You can see the beach from the cottage and there’s a whopping cone-shaped headland. We can run over it every morning. Like a couple of Legion of Mary boys trying to sublimate our lower urges.’

Egan chuckled and kept shedding tears, though happily.

‘Then we’ll go for a swim and have lunch. Then you can have a rest and I’ll work on my new book …’

‘New book?’ Egan asked like the old Egan, the
defensor vinculi
.

‘It’s a novel. But there’s little chance of its being published. Not while His Grace rules.’

‘They’re going to make bishops retire in their seventies. So I won’t have you saying there’s no hope.’

‘How old is His Grace?’

‘Sixty-one.’ For the first time since infancy, on the face of things and before another human, Egan, fallen cherub, leered. ‘Coronary age,’ he hissed.

They took the cottage. Each morning Maitland bullied Egan across the conical headland and taught him to
catch small fish in the surf. Tired himself, he worked four hours each afternoon and wrote up to fifteen hundred words on most days. Egan napped and read, waking to find Maitland half-satisfied at dusk with his day’s work.

‘How’s the conscienceless man?’ Egan would ask, for Maitland’s novel was the record of an obscure Edwardian who had entirely lacked moral imagination.

While the novelist said his office, Egan made the evening meal. At the town pub, they had the snooker table booked for a quarter past eight every night, and if no one had booked it for nine they would play on till closing-time – Egan squinting toutishly at hard lies and letting his beer go flat on the mantelpiece. Every first morning, he slept until nine because of the pills. Every second morning, they drove in his car to the main town, and he said a Mass which Maitland served. The ceremony had its poignancies for both of them; but neither gave a hint, except that, climbing back into the car one day, Egan said, ‘You say your office and I say Mass every second morning. Between us, we are nearly one whole priest.’

They were sent a few letters. The graduate society for whom he had said Mass on a headland one autumn Saturday wrote to Maitland and asked if he would say Mass for them in three weeks’ time, the very day he would be given his faculties back by the archbishop. He replied pleasantly, accepting.

There was a letter from his publisher with a cheque for the American edition of
The Meanings of God
. Since the contract had been signed ten months previously, Maitland had no choice but to accept the money. That night they drank liqueurs over their snooker.

What did the most damage was the letters from the chancery.

‘I didn’t know you two gentlemen were doctors,’ the lady at the post-office told Maitland. ‘It’s handy to have a doctor here. A girl who was mauled by a shark here three years back had to be taken thirteen miles to the doctor.’

‘Oh, but we’re doctors of minerology,’ Maitland said.

Egan had already gone outside and opened the formal envelope in the shade of the telephone booth, as if it must be kept secret from the few strolling housewives. As Maitland came up, the old pallor returned to Egan, who handed the letter across rather than speak of it. So Maitland read it before reading his own. It consigned Egan to an industrial parish and said that the work load was light there. Maitland imagined the little man among the factories: the schoolboy face and the prim body and the set diction. He clicked his tongue but could not afford to be angry, for Egan’s sake. Instead he dealt with his own letter truculently, read it quickly, and rammed it into the pocket of his shorts. He was to go as a curate to a parish in the mountains. His lot was sleet and sodalities. He told Egan.

‘They say that the parish system is dead, a relic in an age of technology,’ he said. ‘Let’s be two jolly maggots.’

They dawdled home. For Egan, reality had drained out of the conical mountain, the sea and the fish in the sea. He dreaded the iron realities of a priesthood which three out of four men did not believe in, but which he could not forbear believing in. He was the unwise virgin of the modern advertisement, bound to the use of the non-majority soap.

‘I suppose we could arrange to take this cottage again next year,’ he proposed, and the small mouth set when Maitland said yes. But it did little good.

On a Saturday, Maitland was received by His Grace. That same evening he said Mass on a cliff-top above a flooded
valley. Mist nudged the ragged plateau across the gorge, and a wind made his chasuble fly. Somebody again placed a truck to the weather side of the altar. Maitland, unsure for the moment, did not preach.