Three Cheers For The Paraclete (4 page)

Costello and the attendant mounted to the ambulance. He said, ‘James, your poor head. Mind if I sit here?’

The doors were closed.

‘Isn’t that woman coming to the hospital?’ Maitland asked.

‘Stupid bitch. She’s going by taxi. All this black cloth would make her hysterical or something.’

Costello raised his voice to a picnic-bus level and asked of the population of the ambulance, ‘Who remembered to give absolution while we were all sitting there upside down?’

Nolan said pitifully, ‘I tried to give one as we rolled over.’ He shuddered and sucked his blue lips. ‘But everything was so incoherent.’

‘Never mind. I got you all with a general and conditional absolution just after we landed. And no doubt James here did something similar.’

But Maitland’s priesthood had never been as reflex to him as that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Good God, that means you would all have died shriven except me. You’d all have been absolved except me, the absolver. In our next disaster you can all go hang.’

Nolan, Mrs Lamotte, even the attendant, all laughed dutifully. Outside, the city was going home in its first two gears and the simper of brakes. No doubt there were cursing and impasses at traffic lights. But in that capsule of satin glass it all sounded homogeneous and very sweet, and sharpened one’s sense of having survived.

Monsignor Nolan became ardent without warning, saying, ‘We could all have died. At least some of the doors should have flown open and thrown us on the pavement. The petrol could have ignited. I am convinced of a divine intervention.’

Even concussed, Maitland blushed for the attendant.

‘Of how direct a nature?’ Costello asked.

‘Of as direct a nature as is needed to keep four doors shut when some at least should have opened. As direct as is needed to bring us safe out of such wreckage.’

‘Our old mother was looking over us,’ Mrs Lamotte told Nolan. But he frowned: ancestor-worship was not among his crimes. He was a strict theologian, and he knew that Aquinas cast doubt on the idea that the departed have any knowledge of our affairs.

‘It was almost like a parable,’ said Nolan. He laid his chin for some seconds on his purple stock, while Maitland sat pressing his fists into his cheeks, trying to soothe the scalp from a distance; Mrs Lamotte rested; the attendant was an outsider. Only Costello was capable of presiding and looked chairmanly.

‘It happened because James was with us,’ Nolan proclaimed, unspeakably certain.

Given Costello’s off-hand driving, Maitland blinked.

Costello laughed. ‘I’ll tell the insurance company.’

‘It is exactly like the Jonah story,’ the monsignor told them all, beginning again to shudder. ‘The point is, James, that a Jonah has ultimately more chance of life and a sublime destiny than the rest of us. That is why he is always a source of storm, because he is in flight from God, he is a fugitive. As you are, James.’

‘Quieten him down,’ Maitland told Costello bluntly.

‘It is exactly as if the traffic cast him off in the same way that the ship’s crew cast Jonah off,’ Nolan said to the others. ‘The organ where he has been hurt is very significant.’

‘It’s hard to agree altogether,’ said Costello.

The president raised his head and extended his cock-robin ecclesiastical breast towards Maitland. ‘James, I shall not rest until I have done what can be done to make you the priest you should be.’

‘I think you have had a bad shock,’ Maitland was able to say.

‘You have been saved to serve, James. Your head has been gashed and bled to signify that up to the moment you have been headstrong and in contempt of authority –’

‘To signify that Dr Costello,’ Maitland insisted, ‘was driving too fast. To signify that I was so crushed in the back that I was closer to the roof than the rest of you to begin with –’

‘Calm down,’ Costello said.

Nolan stood up, crouched but anxious for dominance. ‘The archbishop will descend like a hawk on all those who do not enforce the traditional –’

But Maitland was continuing, his head whirring so hard he had to shout to surmount it.

‘– to signify that I had work to do this afternoon and that when I want to be taken to an exemplary death I’ll ask to be and that –’

‘Don’t worry, James,’ Nolan promised him. ‘We’ll forgive you whenever you wish to make your apologies.’

‘He’s sick,’ Costello said in extenuation.

Monsignor Nolan nodded like a judge in a dream.

Half an hour later, when he lay half-etherized in a hospital cubicle, they forgave him without apologies, as he forgave Nolan. Costello said, ‘It was all the result of shock,’ and all parties voted for the proposition.

O
NE NIGHT EARLY
in the following week a plump-hipped, sandy-haired priest visited Maitland. This was Dr Egan, Nolan’s assistant in the teaching of moral theology,
defensor vinculi
– defender of the bond – in the archbishop’s marriage court. A capeless student soutane gave him a defined, self-contained look that matched what Maitland took to be his impregnability.

The dumpling figure moved fastidiously through the province of dust that was Maitland’s ante-room and book depot. The bedroom-study had disarranged itself that night with particular malice.

‘First time I’ve been visited by a
defensor vinculi
,’ said Maitland. ‘In fact, first time I’ve been visited by anyone on the staff. Except Costello and Nolan. And I suppose it’s
their
duty.’

‘Well, it
is
time we got to know each other,’ Egan asserted. He, like Costello, had been to an elocution teacher, but it had done him more permanent harm.

‘I thought I mustn’t be using the right soap or something.’ Maitland’s eyes sought the second chair, finding it by the wash-basin. He removed some suds-stained memoirs from it and placed it for Egan. ‘I suppose you’ve all been very busy.’

‘It’s been a very busy season in the marriage courts. Mainly –’ Egan swallowed – ‘mainly impotency cases. An
interesting Petrine privilege case, too. That has to go to Rome, of course, but Costello and I have to do all the spade-work. And my job is to make sure that the court takes as much time as possible. I’m the nigger in the woodheap.’ He chuckled like an insurance man. He must often have used this piece of whimsy on star-crossed spouses who wanted their marriages annulled. ‘In any case, we’re very busy.’

‘Fascinating stuff, canon law. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of mine.’ Picking the
defensor
for a teetotaller, Maitland said, ‘Like some whisky, doctor?’

‘No thank you, doctor.’

The little priest looked as if he knew he’d be given the drink in a glass streaked with toothpaste. This Maitland was very glad to decide. ‘James,’ he insisted.

‘James. It’s very kind of you, but I’m a teetotaller.’

‘I would never have picked you for one.’

‘Wouldn’t you, doctor? James, I mean. Please feel free …’

‘You’re sure you won’t?’

Egan was. On his knees, Maitland enjoyed hunting down some White Horse under the bed.

Egan continued, ‘People get so resentful about our work. You know, one night a gentleman whose plea failed tried to assault me.’

Maitland, finding the bottle, groaned.

‘Make unto yourself friends of the mammon of iniquity,’ he said.

‘Oh, of course,’ Egan agreed, thinking that Maitland was approving whisky with a text.

‘No, I don’t mean me. I have already more than fulfilled that glorious old saying. I meant the marriage court. From what I can remember of canon law, the court moves in gentle channels. I was thinking that if you employed a detective agency you’d soon scotch half
these pleas for annulment on the grounds of impotency. I don’t suppose His Grace ever considered it.’

Egan became very still. ‘I don’t think anybody has ever been temerarious enough to suggest it.’

Temerarious
, thought Maitland. It was an adjective worthy of conversation in a home for retired civil servants.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think there’s a great future for some temerarious cleric. It would be no different from employing professional fund-raisers. Private eyes are often used by jealous mothers, and I don’t think Mother Church should be outjealoused by any fleshly momma.’

Concluding at the sink, he let a drizzle of water into the whisky. ‘Well,’ he called as he turned, ‘here’s to Dr Egan. May he prove
defensor
of a successful quorum of
vinculorum
.’

Allegory of the mystic courting the divine fires, a brown moth fried itself against the ceiling light. Light fell on the
defensor
’s dark hair kept counting-house sober with coconut oil. Tomorrow’s beard showed faint purple under the white cheeks but had no future in such a neat little man.

Egan said painfully, ‘Are you trying to make fun of me, doctor?’

Maitland threw his untasted whisky down the sink.

‘I’ve been here for two months and have received no more than a hullo from anybody.’

‘Perhaps no one has received more than a hullo from you.’

‘It’s not my place to make the move. I’m the outsider. I’m doubly the outsider because I’ve had too much freedom in Europe and freedom is dangerous in my case and I’m here for some form of rehabilitation. I don’t want to force myself on any of you if I’m likely to become an embarrassment to you. But two months is a
long time for two priests in the same house to be merely nodding acquaintances.’

‘As I explained, I’ve been very busy,’ the blue-white jaws enunciated.

‘I believe that if you meant to speak to me you would have. I’m sure that if I went to your room I would find all your books under proper regimen, a year’s lecture notes in your drawer, a razor in your cabinet that a surgeon could safely operate with. Your pyjamas would be in creditable creases under your pillow and all your dirty socks in a linen-bag. If you had wanted to see me you would have. You would have to leave excuses about being busy to people like me.’

‘You have too high an opinion of my orderliness, Dr Maitland. My lack of organization, like other people’s, calls out to Heaven for vengeance. I should have been to visit you earlier than this. I hope you are happy here and that you won’t find it necessary in future to poke fun at the work of others.’

The little man then risked offering his hand. The way it was done was suddenly a hint of integrity utter within its limits. Maitland shook the hand and sat down.

‘Thank you. But I’m under a style of house arrest.’

‘That’s a bit exorbitant.’

‘I suppose so. But what I mean is that the monsignor is taking trouble with me. I suppose you know that he dragged me away the other day to attend an exemplary death and we nearly died an exemplary death together coming home from it.’

‘Monsignor Cairns,’ Egan said like a judgment.

‘Yes, I shouldn’t be flippant. I’m not a busy priest at all, in any real sense. But I’m getting my thesis together for publication. For once, I couldn’t afford the time or the split skull.’

‘Of course not.’

They exchanged names, Maurice for James. Maitland was suddenly very willing that over the rubble of scholarship on his table an improbable friendship should grow. Only now that it began to lift did Maitland feel the full oppression of the Grete-and-Brendan business, of the Manichean quality of Nolan’s injunctions on hygiene at that time, of the veiled accusation before the accident that he peddled oral contraceptives in the confessional, of the accusation afterwards that he was spiritual kin to Jonah.

Before friendship formed, however, and while there was still time to deal unscrupulously with the little canon lawyer, Maitland got in the question, ‘I wonder could you tell me how long before the Sunday do you have to submit the text of a cathedral sermon to Dr Nolan?’

And like a practised canon lawyer to whom time-limits are the expected thing, Egan speculated with some assurance, and the lips trembled on a number – but did not say it. He frowned.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I thought cathedral sermons had to be scrutinized by the monsignor.’

‘No,’ Egan said, putting an explanatory hand on the table. ‘It would be a sad day when they weren’t able to trust the preaching of a member of this staff. Even one under house arrest.’

Maitland saw that until then his guest had kept both hands clasped on the left hip and that now, as a pernicious silence grew, they fled back there defenceless as sheep. This disposed Maitland to suspect a number of things, among them that Egan might sometimes find his quarters immaculate with the same dismay as Maitland found his own to be a shambles.

Egan chirped suddenly, ‘Speaking of censorship, James, have you ever heard of a book called
The Meanings of God
? Its author is a man called Quinlan, a Catholic priest, according to the publishers.’

‘You
are
the complete canon lawyer,’ Maitland said after a silence. He stood again. ‘
The Meanings of God
. So they’ve found out about that?’

He could remember meeting a cerebral young English publisher nearly three years before in Ghent. As people do to friendly publishers, he had shown the man a very ragged manuscript. He had said, ‘It’s a history of the idea of God since the eighteenth century. If Tillich speaks of a God beyond God, this is a history of the God who is somewhat this side of the unknown God. It is a history of the God of the institutions, pulpits, political parties and wreath-laying generals. It is a history of the abuse of the notion of God and of its place in the motives of modern man.’ He could remember the publisher arriving in Louvain by Volkswagen and running up the stairs to his, Maitland’s room, shouting praise and royalty percentages. He had wanted to publish under a pseudonym, using his mother’s maiden name. His motive was stage-fright, not fear of a dimly remembered Church law by which priests were meant to submit whatever they published to censorship by their superiors. Just the same, he thought that the spirit of the law would be satisfied by a pseudonym. Apart from that, his was intended to be a historical study, even if it did not permit the same type of ordered treatment as would a life of Garibaldi or Lola Montez. If there was a difference between what God was and what man, at this or that stage, thought God was, then this was a work of history and not of theology.

He published it. It went into two editions. Historians were diverted by it although, as they all said, it was not, could not hope to be, definitive. Most theologians enjoyed it. The young publisher had not been able to afford a third edition, but he had sold it into paperbacks, and Maitland had received the cheque for this sale a month after coming to the House of Studies.

Now he walked without anger to the balcony door. Like every writer who ever published, he said, ‘What else can a person expect in a country like this?’ He added, ‘In a Church like this?’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Did Nolan send you to see me?’

‘Monsignor Nolan is not my keeper.’

‘You found out yourself.’

‘No. The Grand President of the Knights of Saint Patrick drew my attention to it, and we thought you might be willing to study the book. Being a historian, you see.’

From the balcony door Maitland watched car lights blink and shift behind the beach in pin-points and beams and smudged radiances that brought the message home to him. Egan was not exposing him, but merely talking about books.

He turned back to the
defensor
.

‘Forgive me, doctor. I misunderstood you … I don’t think we’re speaking about the same thing.’

‘I’ll show you.’

Egan offered Maitland a page of Sunday paper which had come from his pocket. Maitland saw Miss Associated Canneries abundant in a two-piece and ‘90 Year Old Sires Twins’.

‘The other page.’

The other page asked ‘God: Is He A Political Hoax?’ Among the normal Sabbath melange of misquotes, Maitland saw the names
Mark Quinlan
and
The Meanings of God
honoured in italics. A publisher’s agent had seen that the book, filleted for the press, had that same appeal which, at first sight, only Miss Associated Canneries and potent ancients possessed.

‘The secretary of the Knights,’ Egan explained, ‘who fancies himself as an apologist, bought a copy of this book, took some of his sick-leave, read it in two days, and then wrote a letter to the morning papers. Now it appears he used the name of the Knights without authorization. The next day a ferocious letter appeared in the press, written by a university man who admired the book.’ Maitland raised his eyebrows. ‘This man cited the letter from the Knight as an example of the general anti-humanist tendencies of the Church. It was at that stage that the president of the Knights telephoned and asked for help in the dialogue between the Knights and the scholar. You see, the secretary was silly enough to reply to the scholar on the third day.’

‘Armed with quotes from such high sources as the
Sacred Heart Recorder
, no doubt.’

‘Perhaps. Now it’s a very scholarly book and a dangerous one, mainly because the public won’t be able to see that when Quinlan says God he doesn’t mean exactly God in any pure sense.’

Maitland smiled, too proprietorily. On one level, it was impossible not to be as gratified as a schoolboy.

‘What did you have in mind for me to do?’

‘The Knights have voted to print a pamphlet refuting both the don and, if possible, the book. I want to know whether you would consider reading the book, as an expert, and advising the Knights?’

Maitland became immediately afraid of the farcical possibilities of the affair. ‘But I have already read it, Maurice,’ he said, and eliminated from the words all irony of the type that comes home to roost. ‘I own a copy, in fact. The hard-cover edition.’ His eyes hunted the shelves, and he could have been simply looking for yet another book worth keeping. Not that he did know exactly where it stood; still, it held the essence of the
freest years of his life, it was a young man’s book written happily, and the memory of having produced it was a vintage one. ‘I can’t find it,’ he said. ‘But I have to be honest, I suppose. Maurice, I found very little to challenge in it on the level of history; and on the level of theology, well, it simply doesn’t make direct judgments. Perhaps it is a dangerous book for the general public, but it was not written for them, and if they buy it, they won’t read it. As for the Knights, I’d advise them to lick their wounds and forget the business. I think Miss –’ he squinted at the paper – ‘Associated Canneries is a far more meet matter for the secretary to take his sick-leave over.’

‘You wouldn’t consider re-reading it? I know it’s an imposition. But the Knights do so much good. And I feel a responsibility. I’m their chaplain, you see.’

‘You do move in powerful circles, Maurice.’