Three Cheers For The Paraclete (5 page)

Maurice shielded his eyes from the irrelevancy.

Maitland repented. ‘I’ll read it again, certainly.’

‘Only if you have the time.’

‘I have.’

‘If there’s anything I could do in return …’ Egan glanced shyly around at Maitland’s pylons of books with the look of noncommittal pain peculiar to his plump cheeks. And though he
might
have meant that he would be willing to put Maitland’s suite in order, it was more likely this implication was an accident arising from a discomfort that remained no matter how easy their talk became.

‘That’s very kind of you. I’m fairly well settled in now.’

‘It’s a good place to live,’ Egan told him, a man reciting a creed quickly as a substitute for belief. ‘So close to other priests.’

Outside, the big loveless corridors creaked and headed for that deep midnight when even those
nominal lights now shining would be out. Every hour or so, a priest or a student walked down the waste of hallway under those myopic bulbs that give each figure in black a meaning close to symbolic.
So close to other priests …

Maitland told Egan, ‘I hope you’ll call in whenever you’d like a talk. I
mean
the invitation.’

Egan seemed very pleased for a moment. His bright man-of-commerce face made Maitland think of commercial analogies, this time of a records clerk with a chance of burning the invoice file.

‘That would be pleasant some evenings,’ he said humbly. ‘There’s very little of that sort of thing, here.’

Outside, bound for his room, Egan passed a student called Hurst who was returning from another absolution. They said good night. The corridors being so allegorical, and the mean light pretending to possess dimensions not its own, the passing of these two pale men was like the passing of the
Rachel
and the
Pequod
. Within a second Hurst had Egan quartered with a panic-stricken glance, then shrugged on his customary pelts of guilt and went upstairs to take a tablet Costello had given him.

An hour or so after Egan left, Maitland came to the end of redrafting the second-last chapter of his thesis. The idea of the last chapter lay idle and pliant in the bottom of his mind. Five thousand words were implicit in it, two or three days’ work if he were allowed to do it. The task of writing a cathedral sermon frightened him more, and he would not be able to begin it until the Thursday at the earliest. He knew what was required. In his case in particular, something fit, grammatic and vapid would be the ticket, something to assure the citizen, chancing an
eye towards the sermon section of Monday’s paper, that God, like Jupiter and Mars, like abstract art, the United Nations and bank interest, had not swung loose from His established path. He was brooding on rhythmic boredom and how well it went in cathedral sermons, and was promising himself aggressively that it was the one thing of which he was incapable, when he remembered his night meditation and came to the prie-dieu.

His rule was an hour’s meditation each night, his aim the scalding sight of God which disrupts the network of senses and rearranges them on a higher level. His chances were small, this proved by his having to time himself. One could no more travel the distances involved by making oneself available for an hour, timed by travelling-clock on the mantelpiece, than one could write a sonnet taking sixty-divided-by-fourteen minutes for each line. Sometimes by emptying himself of impressions, seeing himself an island eroded by a black surf of nothing, he became aware of the underlying astringency of an
Other’s
existence, you could call it. At your peril. Words were the trap, for the same words that fakers used of psychic indigestion, fakirs used of God.

The Other’s sting was never strong enough to clear his resentments or even to keep him from dozing. Often he was distracted by vanity at some of the better passages in
The Meanings of God
. He no more remembered these word for word than the salmon knows the fall drop for drop. But he remembered with pleasure the colour of its ideas, the contours of its language. They recurred of their own accord, as if their place were threatened by the Other, as it may have been.

This night he fell asleep, and Egan and Nolan, the publisher and God-as-a-trolley moved like crayfish in the shallow doze. When he woke, it was past the hour. His token siege of the citadel had ended.

M
AITLAND ENTERED THE
refectory five or ten minutes after the beginning of breakfast. The students ate at long tables either side of the aisle. They were silent and appeared to be listening to a reader on a rostrum above the steaming teapots. At the top table Nolan ate and
did
listen to the reading, taking that funny care that worried over broad vowels and misreadings yet allowed Hurst, watching demons flicker down the quicksilver length of a bread-knife, to go to hell unsupervised. Costello ate, Egan merely sat. There was no other priest at table. As Maitland sat down, Egan rose and said a Grace to himself. His small white flippers worked throughout the prayer to rid the front of his soutane of suspected crumbs. Then Maitland could hear him breathing fervidly at his elbow.

‘More letters in this morning’s paper. About the Quinlan book. Some nasty things about the Knights and about the Church, by implication.’

Egan stopped, for the reader had lost his place and was too new to the House of Studies to know that he could safely have begun again anywhere in the book. When he did find his place and began again, so did Egan.

‘
They’ve
had all the scholarship so far, all the scholarly jargon. If you
could
see your way, you’d be the man to alter that.’

Before Maitland a breakfast of devilled kidneys waited, the same breakfast that stood that morning before most commercial travellers and resident schoolmasters throughout the land. Yet, in his discomfort, he stared at it with a notable air of discovery.

He said at length, ‘It’s very difficult.’

Egan inhaled in a way that left the floor still open.

‘It’s no use fault-finding just for the sake of fault-finding,’ Maitland explained. ‘The Knights would do better to forget it.’

‘The Knights may, but no one else is willing to. The book and the dilemma of the Knights and the rantings of the history department of the university are all given extensive treatment in this week’s issue of
Forum
.’

Despite years of practice in the confessional, Egan reached such a pitch on this last whisper that Nolan threw a glance of warning down the table.

Maitland turned his listless fork in the kidney gravy. ‘I’ll come to your room in about ten minutes.’

He found little Egan behind a cedar door in the same corridor that held Costello’s suite.

Within, the study had just been visited by the nun who did the bed-making and dusting. Pines shone beyond the windows as if someone’s solicitude extended to them also. All was properly aloof from all else – the bed moored in the corner by a sheepskin mat; the prie-dieu hung with purple stole; the desk on an isle of carpet in the mists of polished floorboards; the bookcases with a crucifix, centrally placed, consecrating all the dull suburbs of Egan’s learning; in one corner, a Latin Quarter of paperbacks with scenes from the recent film on their covers.

Egan came to the door carrying
Forum
.

‘Did you know that this Mark Quinlan unequivocally
claims to be a priest. Or rather, the publisher claims it.’ Egan was all elation and no anger.

‘So you told me. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be, Maurice. He’s no heretic.’

Egan thrust the journal into Maitland’s hands and conducted him to a chair.

‘But the things he says about Pius the Ninth …’

‘He says nothing against Pius as a man of good faith. But there have been such things as disastrous papacies.’

‘Yes, but poor old Pius the Ninth!’

The
defensor
sat at the desk, which seemed too big for him. He may have been five and a half feet tall, but his schoolboy build seemed to take inches off him.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘the book carries no bishop’s imprimatur and that means that if Quinlan is a priest the book was published without his bishop’s approval. And it’s not likely that even the most radical priest would do that. I’m more than toying with the idea, James, of writing to the editor of
Forum
and outlining the canons regarding permission to publish and, then, censorship – canons which every priest in union with his bishop knows and respects.’

Maitland had not read beyond the first line of the article. He had been frowning at the line drawings that decorated it, a rusty knight bearing a standard with a triple-tiara and poking a mailed fist towards a ferocious young humanist. Now he transferred to Egan some of his chagrin at them.

‘I wouldn’t do that, Maurice. You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that all priests remember their canon law. There may even be places where restrictive canons like that are treated as a dead letter.’

‘Never without perilous results, James.
Vide
Father Mark Quinlan, if he
is
Father Mark Quinlan.’

‘
Perilous results
,’ Maitland said, condemning the term.

There was a small hiss of embarrassed laughter from Egan. ‘Yes, perilous results,’ he contended. ‘Where is the sense in maintaining purity of doctrine for all these centuries, keeping a strict watch on heresy, if we let the entire system slip in these latter days for the sake of the Quinlans?’

‘But Quinlan’s book does nothing to anyone’s ancient purity. As I told you last night, it’s an historical study, using historical methods.’

Egan’s hand advanced for the journal. There was an incisiveness about him arising from his affinity to the law, the Pope’s law that had once made emperors truckle. He kept eyes on Maitland that were going to make a point. They made Maitland very angry.

Egan read from the article, ‘“While the book deals directly with the crucial meanings God has had for some of the most prominent men and institutions of the past two hundred years, it raises by implication the question of whether God can be known in any of the traditional ways.” Even the heathen hack can see it.’

‘Then the heathen hack is bloody-well up a tree.’ Yet he was shaken. He said, ‘Look, Maurice, maybe the book does of necessity make a few theological judgments, but they aren’t the point of the thing.’

Downstairs a bell was rung, the type still rung in schools that cannot afford an electric one.

‘Twenty to,’ Egan said as it lulled.

‘Court this morning?’

‘Some paperwork. Also, I intend to recommend to His Grace –’

‘If you recommend anything to do with this
Meanings of God
affair, well, you put me in a position of extreme embarrassment to begin with. I’d prefer not to have to argue it out with a prelate, thank you.’

Egan’s face formed itself in invincible areas of
plumpness around a tiny tight mouth. Somehow Maitland felt vindicated, thinking, ‘As soon as I saw him I knew he had it in him to look like that.’

‘Extreme embarrassment,’ the
defensor
quoted. ‘Because you agree with Quinlan? I find it hard to see how you could.’

‘A person isn’t necessarily brought into the world to be seen through by canon lawyers.’

Maitland excused himself and went. Ten minutes later, dressed in street clothes, Egan knocked on Maitland’s door. He stood improperly childlike, his contrite hands held before him. This, anyhow, was the way he was discovered by Maitland. A second later he coughed, and veils of adult and discrete flesh seemed to overlay the child’s face.

He said, ‘James, controversy provokes me. Please forgive me for insulting your honestly held view of the matter.’

Maitland said that, as a matter of fact, it was his own arrogance that required forgiving …

‘I keep on forgetting,’ Egan protested, ‘how unfit I am to judge, to judge anything. As for mentioning it to His Grace, which I might have done in good faith, well, the older I get, James, the more I begin to see that friendship is a primary duty and …’

‘That’s very gracious, Maurice.’ Maitland was half-amused by this duologue as mannered as Nolan’s haircut.

‘Well, I must go,’ the little priest said, and bared his wrist. A navigator’s watch sat there tocking with utmost dedication and no sense of unfitness at ferrying Egan across seas deadly but allegorical. So he was off, on the way to defend the bond, carrying a pork-pie hat so spotless and an ox-blood valise so lambent that nobody would ever have suspected he wasn’t arrogant.

I
T HAPPENED THAT
Costello and Egan were the archbishop’s representatives on the judging panel of the Couraigne prize for religious art. Their work was to prevent the blasphemous or obscene from winning, for Mrs Couraigne had been devout, a painter of saintly apotheoses, most of them now distemper-coloured and hanging in the corridors of the House of Studies. Knowing that all talents but one in a million date and become distemper-coloured, Maitland was saved from resentment of Mrs Couraigne, though her work heightened the spiritual flatulence of life in Nolan’s house.

The prize-winners were named in a bank foyer on a Friday evening. Here Mrs Couraigne’s latter-day sisters, in body-stockings and zebra trousers, had taken the hanging area and the catering arrangements by storm. Tediously messianic men in net-singlets and jeans recurred every few yards. Of course, there were artists who had found favour with judging panels or who taught technique and, become respectable, did not need to dress aberrantly or rampage through platefuls of savouries. And then, the public servants of art, gallery people, trustees, entrepreneurs; and the press running down notables in the corners, running down Egan and Costello who, as comptrollers of the distasteful, were said to have vetoed a number of entries. And as guests of
Egan and Costello, Nolan and Maitland sat on the fringe of the excitement, holding sticky sherries.

It was almost impossible for a painting to win the Couraigne prize if the archbishop’s two delegates debarred it, but they could not debar a painting from being hung. Costello had meant to be vocal about a number of those hung, about a St Paul who looked like Benito Mussolini, about a Senator McCarthy Moses moving in on the Golden Calfers, about a gentle Judas quavering before a feral Christ. So he and Egan were soon chivvied loose from their chairs and washed on strong tides of controversy down the length of the room.

Maitland and Nolan sat alone.

‘Strange crowd, James,’ said Nolan. ‘Aren’t they?’

‘Yes. Black predominates. I wonder why.’

Nolan couldn’t say. He forwent the second half of his sherry and pushed his glass to the far rim of an occasional table. ‘I knew Mrs Couraigne, you know. She was a daily communicant. I don’t think she would recognize this.’ He pointed to the hanging area. ‘Look,’ he went on, counting through his programme, ‘there are four, five, seven –
seven
of those messes called “Epiphany”, and one, two, three, four called “Nativity”, and you could label all the Nativities “Epiphany” and all the Epiphanies “Nativity”, and they’d still mean as much or as little. My heaven, look at that.’

Across the room, a vegetable prophet, growing out of rock and blossoming into flowers sable and gold, affronted him.

‘That mess, James, is actually called “Isaiah after the Rain”. And they’ve got clean away with hanging it.’

‘Perhaps the flowers are symbols of spiritual growth.’

‘That’s the trouble. They get away with blasphemy under the name of symbolism. By the way, when am I going to see your sermon, James?’

Maitland maintained the even rhythm of chat. ‘I didn’t intend showing it to you,’ he said. ‘It seems that you don’t ask to be shown the sermons of other members of the staff. I think that if you distrust my orthodoxy, it would be better to take me off the preaching list.’

‘It must be obvious that you are not exactly in the same position as most of the other members of the staff.’

The young priest stared at the gloss of the new shoes he had remembered to buy. ‘But don’t you want us to test you for a fractional fit, father?’ the appalled salesman had asked him. ‘No thanks,’ he’d said. ‘My feet have no responsibilities, except to themselves.’

Now he admitted, ‘I realize that. Most of you have managed to convey the idea that my position is different.’

‘Don’t blame the others. You haven’t sought them out. They are, taken all round, as fine a body of priests as it could be any other priest’s privilege to share his life with.’

As evidence, Costello’s robust laughter rose at the far end of the lobby.

‘Not everyone has it in him to establish himself with others from a position of disadvantage. It’s a matter of temperament.’

‘In your case it’s a matter of self-pity. I honestly believe that, James.’

‘You’re right, monsignor. But self-pity is a matter of temperament, isn’t it? I feel that all your priests are established men, with niches on committees sacred and profane. It’s not my place to do the approaching. I have no right to make you people welcome in your own house.’

‘This,’ Nolan whispered, for a young waiter in cutaway coat and bearing a tray of tiny beers was dancing towards them, ‘is all part of a false judgment you persist
in making between us others and yourself. As far as I’m concerned, James, you are part of the
us
.’

‘The fathers haven’t got anything to drink,’ said the waiter in full voice, and fluttered his eyelids, knowing an impropriety when he saw one, the impropriety being that priests-forever-according-to-the-order-of-Melchizedek should go without sherry when the body-stockings were nearly reeling with it. He was, very likely, a satiric gent and a rampant anti-clerical.

Both fathers shook their heads at him. Maitland lied, ‘A priest always finds wine too evocative to be enjoyed.’ He wanted to hurt Nolan, for, as he knew, Nolan felt a spouse-like identity with the Mass, whereas he himself felt only a custodian, performer of someone else’s fantasy.

Maitland succeeded too well. Nolan would be as angry as an old wife within ten seconds and use all the old-wife’s sharp practice, but for the moment the mouth opened, an old man’s head of pallid teeth could be seen, and the point of the bottom lip rose to cover them. It was a glimpse of age and its vulnerability and it made Maitland properly ashamed. The cutaway coat cut away, tittering.

‘So this is the way your resentment works,’ the monsignor decided. ‘To pretend to those who have nothing to be proud of that we are of the same ilk as them.’

‘I’m sorry. But let’s have no more cant about my belonging in your house.’

‘And you wonder why you don’t belong in my house. After that.’

‘I’m not an outsider because I used a waiter in argument. I used a waiter because I’m an outsider. Give a dog a bad name …’

‘A priest is a man of lonely trials. If you didn’t like
that idea, you should never have let yourself be ordained.’

Maitland repeated this adage about lonely trials beneath his breath as a form of capitulation. Axioms paralysed him; he could not prevail against them. Rather than try, he watched the room. Even on such miserly liquor, the crowd had begun to blend. Egan was making his points to the creator of McCarthy-Moses, and a gallery trustee laughed and patted the skin-tight back of a bone-tight girl.

As if to himself, Maitland said, ‘Apart from a mis-begotten account of some young matron’s confession, had from your sisters, I wonder just what it is that you find substandard in me.’

Spittle was flying from the perfect teeth and fury of the painter of Senator Moses. Before these forces little Egan stood, patience entrenched, ticking off his arguments on the plump fingers of his left hand. That degree of patience was a provocation, Maitland thought, and one of the panel thought so too, and moved in to soothe the artist.

Nolan was explaining coldly, ‘I take no cognizance of women, not even of my sisters, and I give them no place in the government of the Church when I am in my right mind. I would have thought you had the kindness to believe that I was not in my right mind on the afternoon of our accident.’

Meanwhile, at the passionate end of the foyer, the painter’s girl slurred Egan. It seemed so lively that Maitland regretted Nolan and himself were off after hounds of their own. They could see, though Nolan hadn’t yet, that some notable was protecting the little priest with outspread arms. Then the artist and his girl stood back, chanting, ‘Oh, angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here,’ and so on,
as if they were reciting Egan’s code of art. People faced in upon the priest’s discomfort and wore their humanist half-smiles like the worst sort of cruelty. Maitland was about to excuse himself and perhaps go to his friend’s help, when the incident, too rugged a growth, faded into the synthetic bonhomie of four or five converging officials.

The monsignor had not been distracted. ‘I was alarmed, so was His Grace, by an article of yours in an English review. I don’t want to be offensive, but I have to say that it’s an indication of the Church’s peril that this article was ever published. I say this, James, though I realize what pride scholars take in what they have had published. None the less …’

‘The article on Luther?’ Maitland suggested.

‘That’s the one. Now I know little history, Dr Maitland, but it seemed to me that you were saying Luther and Aquinas were in agreement, that the Supreme Pontiff fell into a trap in condemning Luther. Is this a correct reading?’

‘Not exactly. I claimed that they were in agreement on the basic question, which was the nature of the Redemption. As people like to say these days, it was a question of semantics.’

Nolan’s hands began to shake in a small way. They savaged the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes.

‘And you still believe this?’

‘I believe that the gulf between Luther and the traditional doctrine was not such as to warrant excommunication, schism, war and so on.’

‘A question of semantics.’ Nolan struck a light to his cigarette in a near-frenzy of rightness. He smoked it held between his middle fingers, as many women who learnt to smoke in the twenties do. His reason was different to theirs – he saved the index and thumb for the
usages of the altar. Yet he did look like an angry refugee from an age of du Maurier and post-impressionism. ‘Luther’s denial of tradition a matter of semantics? Luther’s attack on the doctrine of the Incarnation and on the Sacraments?’

‘Yes. Of course, the rift became greater once Rome and Luther had divorced each other, but there was nothing in Luther’s early teaching that need have caused the schism. However, all those qualifications are made in the article itself. If you didn’t accept its drift in print, it won’t do us any good if I detail it here.’

‘I never thought I would hear such hogwash from a priest trained in our House of Studies,’ Nolan said and crushed out his cigarette.

Confused by anger, Maitland took out his handkerchief and was constrained, seeing it in his hand, to blow his nose unecessarily and with adenoidal caution. ‘Oh, orthodoxy,’ he muttered then. Nothing more necessary, nothing more inconsequential. The world keeps to its stale or knowing ways, no matter what. Pride of the eyes prevails as surely on most canvases, pride of life holds up the walls of banks and puts the pillars in and the loveless furniture from Scandinavia. Just as surely, hands of influential men feign fatherly interest on the waists of artists’ molls who breakfast, come rain, hail, predestination or signs in the heavens, just as surely on methedrine and cornflakes.

‘How do I know what you might say from a cathedral pulpit?’ Nolan wondered.

Maitland said, ‘If you wished, I could give you some sort of promise.’ He had lost interest in Nolan’s demands and in what the programme described as ‘one of the art events of the cultural year in this country’. It was apter than Nolan suspected that the president of a House of Studies for priests should be here on the
outskirts of the event. For the priests pursued their orthodoxy and the artists theirs, orthodoxies alien to each other, orthodoxies in conflict with society at large, orthodoxies prolific in closed minds. Of which his was one, but could not challenge Nolan’s.

A woman of dark, gangling and slightly speckled beauty was speaking now to Egan. She had a long, very special neck rising from a cowled dress of the same colour as the monsignor’s stock, and she bent to Egan who was three inches shorter and whose lips were, at that moment, compressed toutishly as if he were giving the inside story on something.

Orthodoxies prolific in closed minds.

‘You could ruin your career with a rash sermon. I’ll preach myself if there is any doubt about yours. His Grace and I both consider it necessary to know
exactly
what you intend to say. The main danger of our not knowing is to yourself, James, and it’s no small danger.’

Now that drinks had been had and the crowd were familiar with the form and colour and even the texture of all the visions hung there, a general listlessness seemed to have come down on the occasion. This and Nolan’s speech were both broken in upon by some dutiful hand-clapping. Like a master-stroke of ennui, a vice-regal party made an entrance and speeches began. Under this cover, Maitland excused himself from Nolan and crept across the room. When he was obscured from the monsignor by thickets of art-lovers, he stood on his own, applauding the awards.

As soon as the speeches ended, a very elegant young man assailed him from the side.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘you’ve seen that fierce-looking Christ over there?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Don’t you think it improper, honestly, that an inter
pretation like that should be actually hung in an exhibition of religious paintings?’

The young man squinted at the painting and turned a geometrically barbered neck on Maitland. He seemed to be possessed by a strong sectarian anger.

‘It’s sad,’ Maitland was willing to say. ‘Christian mystics are overwhelmed by the very opposite of that.’ He nodded at the picture. ‘They’re impressed to gasping point by his – what? – elected defencelessness, you could say. That sort of thing over there hurts. On the other hand, it should make us wonder what we’ve done to earn him so much hate.’

‘What we’ve done?’ the boy echoed. ‘By
we
, do you mean priests, father?’

‘Priests among others, perhaps.’

‘You wouldn’t see that painting then as the work of the forces of darkness?’

‘Not altogether. We’ve done a lot to make Christ seem anti-human. And anything that’s anti-human ends up hated by people who can’t be said to be the utter dregs.’

‘There seems to be a strong element of hatred right through the exhibition,’ the young man ventured, and spent some minutes depressing Maitland with an interpretation of some of the dingiest paintings in the hanging area. At length Costello loomed and made signs with his eyes.